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It was not only my right, but my duty, as a critic to point out the important part which M. Heger had played in the development of Charlotte Bronte's genius, and there was most assuredly nothing in what I said that touched in the slightest degree the purity of her exalted character.
The girl's repulsion had been obvious -that instinctive repulsion, as poor Dickie's too acute sympathies assured him, of the whole for the maimed, of the free for the bound, of the artist for some jarring colour or sound which mars an otherwise entrancing harmony. And the smart of all this was, to him, doubly salted by the fact that he, after all, was a man, his critic merely a woman.
It was the birthright of every native of the parish to be a critic, and certain were allowed to be experts in special departments Lachlan Campbell in doctrine and Jamie Soutar in logic but as an old round practitioner Mrs. Macfadyen had a solitary reputation.
He was thoroughly a bon vivant; an accomplished judge of wine, though he never drank to excess; and a most inexorable critic in all affairs touching the kitchen. He had had much to forgive in his own family, since a family had grown up around him, and had forgiven everything except inattention to his dinner. His weakness in that respect was now fully understood, and his temper but seldom tried.
"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now they dabble in all things; are weakly æsthetic, weakly scientific, weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible."
To us there is nothing incongruous in the supposition that Lydia Blood was "ready to become an ornament to society the moment she lands in Venice." But we lack the missionary spirit necessary to the exertion to make our interested critic comprehend such a social condition, and we prefer to leave ourselves to his charity, in the hope of the continuance of which we rest in serenity.
What advantage, then, it will be said, has the skilful critic over the illiterate hearer? A great and very important advantage; if it is indeed a matter of any consequence, to be able to discover by what means that which is the true and real end of speaking, is either obtained or lost.
At fifty years of age, he had probably read more books than any man in Europe since Gibbon and Niebuhr; he literally devoured everything he could put his hands upon, without cramming for a special object, especially the Greek and Latin Classics, which he read over and over again, not so much for knowledge as for the pleasure it gave him as a literary critic and a student of artistic excellence.
Loyola, in his "Spiritual Exercises," commanded the novice to preserve his freedom of mind, but it is difficult for the fairest critic to conceive of such a possibility in the light of Loyola's rule of obedience, which reads: "I ought not to be my own, but His who created me, and his too by whose means God governs me, yielding myself to be moulded in his hands like so much wax.... I ought to be like a corpse, which has neither will nor understanding, or like a small crucifix, which is turned about at the will of him who holds it, or like a staff in the hands of an old man, who uses it as may best assist or please him."
"The unfailing wonder of it is," writes an American critic in a magazine article, "that a boy of seventeen could have written it; not merely that he could have made verse of such structural beauty and dignity, but that the thoughts of which it is compacted could have been a boy's thoughts.
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