In addition to these instances, and such casual phrases as, “that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other peoples’ hardships picturesque,” and “that pleasure of guessing which active minds notoriously prefer to ready-made knowledge,” George Eliot defines sentimentality indirectly in the words of Mary Garth, an observant young woman and something of a humorist in her own right:[389]

The sentimentalist is rampant in Meredith’s novels, depicted in all his aspects. The keynote is that the sentimental spirit may be arbitrarily hospitable, not obliged to keep open house whither all truths may turn for shelter. “Bear in mind,” he admonishes, “that we are sentimentalists. The eye is our servant, not our master; and so are the senses generally. We are not bound to accept more than we choose from them.”[390]

It is in Sandra Belloni that Meredith is most expository on the subject, and in connection with the Pole sisters. He says of them,—[391]

Here, however, the sentimental fallacy is shown to be the reverse side of the refusal to see what is, and to consist in the assertion of what is not. This is a logical corollary, since merely to disregard the unpleasant is a passive state until reinforced by the active process of manufacturing the desirable. Actually to manufacture the desirable is a constructive work, and the occupation of the enterprising idealist. The sentimentalist manufactures only in fancy, and, being a sentimentalist, does not know the difference. His imagination, that marvelous power of visualizing the absent or non-existent, is perverted by being turned inward and forced to rest content with its hollow fabrication, instead of being directed outward upon a plastic world waiting its formative touch. As the urge to an ideal of excellence is the most hopeful quality of human nature, so the satisfied repose on the fictitious supposition of such excellence is the most hopeless. Being, as Meredith adds, “a perfectly natural growth of a fat soil,” it lacks the stimulus of a rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough, and perceives no necessity for striving or daring.

On this assertive side sentimentality is related to egoism. But the relation is difficult to express, for egoism is another complexity that baffles analysis. Self-respect and attention to one’s own affairs are basic and indispensable virtues; while conversely, altruism is often but egoism in disguise and of all things the most sentimental. We may conclude, however, that it is egoism pushed to its two extremes, vanity on the one side and selfishness on the other, that is the satirizible sort. It is to the vanity wing that sentimentality is more closely connected, as the assumption it makes is usually that of our own superiority in possession and attainment, our own sincerity of motive, and our own immunity from ordinary consequences. Such is the attitude of the sentimental egoists, of which Meredith gives us a full complement.

The Countess de Saldar is abused by the exposure of her schemes, but resolute:[392]

Wilfred Pole, by Wilming Weir in the moonlight, vows his love for Emilia:[393]

Edward Blancove is visited by the facile compunction that attacks Arthur Donnithorne and others of the kind:[394]

Outside of Eliot and Meredith, the best examples of the youthful sentimental egoist are Thackeray’s George Osborne, and Trollope’s Crosbie. The latter argues himself into a state of innocence over his desertion of Lily Dale by soliloquizing that he did not deserve her, could not make her happy, and was bound to tell the truth, which, however painful, was always best.[395]

A word might be vouchsafed for this trait in low life, usually brushed lightly by the novelist. Dale of Allington is a great man in the market town, “laying down the law as to barley and oxen among men who usually knew more about barley and oxen than he did.” Squire Cass, a person of some importance, “had a tenant or two, who complained of the game to him quite as if he had been a lord.” Craig looks to Mrs. Poyser “like a cock as thinks the sun’s rose o’ purpose to hear him crow.”[396] And Robert Armstrong says of Master Gammon,—“There’s nothing to do, which is his busiest occupation, when he’s not interrupted at it.”

Then there are the unsentimental egoists, attached to the selfish and domineering wing of egoism. They are less amenable to satire, being less deceptive by nature, and more prone to tyranny and cruelty, thereby deserving rebuke without humor. This class is represented by Paul Dombey, Barnes Newcome, Tom Tulliver, and others from the author of the last. This is another favorite type with Eliot, the self-willed sharing honors with the self-indulgent. Grandcourt “meant to be master of a woman who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have been capable of mastering another man.” Tito Melema “felt that Romola was a more unforgiving woman than he had imagined; her love was not that sweet, clinging instinct, stronger than all judgments, which, he began to see now, made the great charm of a wife.” Harold Transome, who “had a padded yoke ready for the neck of every man, woman, and child that depended on him,” makes the alarming discovery about Esther that a lightning “shot out of her now and then, which seemed the sign of a dangerous judgment; as if she inwardly saw something more admirable than Harold Transome. Now, to be perfectly charming, a woman should not see this.” Meredith portrays this irresponsible selfishness in Roy Richmond, Lord Ormont, and Lord Fleetwood; and defines it in Sir Austin’s Pilgrim’s Scrip, which says that sentimentalists “are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.”[397]

Another and more passive type of the egoist is the epicurean. He asks only to have his tastes gratified, and, being devoted to material comfort, demands little of the world but material supplies. Epicurianism is marked by an indulgent good-humor so long as it is itself indulged, and when not gratified sinks into nothing worse than peevishness. Though it may be a deplorable trait, it is not a ridiculous one in itself, and is therefore satirized only when in conjunction with something that produces an incongruity. The constant stream of satire directed against the epicurean clergy, for instance, is due to the sense of an incompatibility between a profession which inculcates simplicity at least, if not actual asceticism, and a régime of sensuous indulgence. Those who are legitimately worldly, as for example the patrician triad depicted by Thackeray,—Miss Crawley, the Countess of Kew, and Madam Bernstein,—may not be admirable, but neither are they absurd.

In Adrian Harley we have the egoistic epicure in all his plump perfection. Meredith hastens, however, to exculpate the founder of the hedonistic philosophy:[398]

The combination in him of cynic, self-pamperer, and Sir Oracle forms a type which Meredith especially delights to dishonor, because its own smugness puts a splash of color, as it were, on the bull’s-eye and renders it more conspicuous. Not only is the epicure pierced with many an ironic shaft, but the Wise Youth is made the veritable error incarnate of the Feverel tragedy. For it was his Fabian policy, dictated and obeyed, that knotted still more the sad tangle, just as it was Austin Wentworth’s simple manly directness that proved the knot could be cut easily by prompt and silent action. Indeed, in these two characters we see exemplified throughout the story the false Florimell of vanity and the true Florimell of pride,—the pride that is too proud to do an unworthy or debasing deed, and the vanity that can counterfeit successfully until confronted by the genuine reality.

Egoism within bounds is a perfectly sane and rational thing, but to keep it within bounds is exceedingly difficult. When given over to an irrational rule it grows into fanaticism. For the fanatic owes his monomania to the force of a strong personality, which engenders the unmitigated assurance of being right, plus the perverted reasoning that characterizes the sentimentalist. He is always foolish, but seldom a hypocrite, as his deception usually extends to himself. His selfishness is of the opposite sort from the epicure’s. What he seeks is not a soft berth and personal acquisitions, but a chance to impose his opinions on a misguided world, and to dominate over converts or subjects. In his milder moods he only dreams of happy schemes and far-reaching reforms, but when charged with energy his proselyting zeal tends to make him tyrannical.

In some form or other he appears on the pages of almost every Victorian novelist. That the faddist is a favorite subject with Peacock is well known. Lytton gives a delightful contribution in the Uncle Jack of The Caxtons, whose “bewitching enthusiasm and convincing calculation” led him into alluring speculations that invariably proved disastrous to the members of his family. Not financial but missionary and philanthropic zeal animate the souls immortalized by Dickens,—Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, Reverend Honeythunder, and the Snagsbys. Brontë and Kingsley specialize in the religious bigot. The former satirizes the Jesuit in Villette, but not St. John Rivers, who is drawn seriously. The latter gives a vivid picture in his Mrs. Locke and the Calvinistic preachers, and another, of the opposite type, done with more partisanship and less sympathy, in the vicar and Argemone in Yeast. Trollope is more interested in the sociological zealot. He introduces him as the author, Mr. Popular Sentiment; the “Barchester Brutus,” Mr. John Bold; the demagogue, Ontario Moggs, son of a capitalist, and advocate of labor unions; and some characters in the Parliamentary Series. A sample from a harangue of Moggs will serve to illustrate the fair-mindedness that accompanies Trollope’s love of parody. He quotes and then comments:[399]

Mrs. Proudie herself is above all a politician, and justifies her existence by turning her religious bigotry into the channel of ecclesiastical polity, a procedure that well might cause the gentle bishop to quake:[400]

She rejoices in an opportunity to condone with a member of the Clerical Opposition over a disappointment she has done her best to bring upon it:[401]

George Eliot’s zealots,—Dinah Morris, Savonarola, Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, are not ridiculed, except for some sarcastic repartee put into the mouths of Mrs. Poyser and Esther Lyon. Nor is the pseudo-scholar Casaubon, though he is described as having a soul that “went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying,” and on a certain occasion, as slipping “again into the library, to chew a cud of erudite mistake about Cush and Mizraim.”

Of all fanatics, those who are obsessed by an educational theory are perhaps the most dangerous, as they impose their systems on flexible youth, the result being often an orchard of lamentably bent twigs. Two exponents of opposite divisions of this type are Gradgrind, who aimed at the elimination of the imagination, and Feverel, who proposed to circumvent the element of original sin in human composition, by the policy of watchful waiting and absolute dictation. Both come to grief through the failure of facts to support their philosophies; but Dickens in his optimism makes Gradgrind a wiser man through being a sadder, while Meredith in his realism keeps Feverel blandly unconscious and untaught by a lesson that would have pierced any heart protected by a less impervious pericardium.

All the materials that go into the warp and woof of human nature are thus seen to be so commingled and interwoven that even the degree of separation necessary for examination is almost impossible. And when this dissection is after a fashion accomplished, it is the less useful, in that the same strand is discovered to change its color and texture from one section to another. Deception is here a vice and there a virtue. Folly is here amusing and there horrifying. Egoism is here absorbent and there encroaching. There are sentimental epicures and unsentimental epicures and ascetic sentimentalists. There are vulgar snobs and refined snobs and a vulgarity that is not snobbish. All of these are criticizably absurd at times, and yet the same things may at others be admirable or pathetic or tragic. Frequently the sublime and the ridiculous advance on the one step that separates them, and merge their diverse identities.

A peculiarly good illustration of the qualified nature of human traits, in view of which we are wise to discard nouns in favor of adjectives for identifying purposes, is furnished by Trollope’s Lady Carbury. She is hypocritical in her wire-pulling intrigues, but not a hypocrite, for her pretenses are not utterly hollow; her sincerity is about on the average level, and her industry much above it. She is sentimentally foolish in her maternal devotion to a son who has no possible claim on toleration, much less on a patient and sacrificing indulgence, but not a fool, for her cleverness is indisputable. She is as tyrannic to her daughter as lenient to her son, but not a selfish egoist, for she refuses to take advantage of Mr. Broune’s offer of marriage, especially tempting to her harassed soul, on the altruistic grounds that she and her family would be more of a burden than a comfort to Mr. Broune. She is not a vulgar snob, but her respect for aristocratic connections is not always marked by refinement of method in her pursuit of them. Much of all this is unconsciously betrayed in the series of three letters to editors and critics, bespeaking their good offices for her new book, Criminal Queens. The epistles are tactfully adjusted to their respective recipients. To Mr. Broune, of The Morning Breakfast Table, she is intimately confiding and begs frankly for a lift, while pointing out the attractive features of her volume:[402]

To Mr. Booker, of The Literary Chronicle, she is gently menacing, reminding him that she has engaged to review his New Tale of a Tub for The Morning Breakfast Table;[403]

To Mr. Alf, of The Evening Pulpit, of whom she has reason to be afraid, her candor assumes a more impersonal and business-like air. She alludes to a recent caustic criticism in the Pulpit of some poor poetic wretch who well deserved it:

As for herself, she expects ruthless severity, but trusts that her work has some merits. In any case, no amount of editorial flagellating can discount her personal admiration for this particular editor. Truly, she is all things to all men,—a policy, however, for which she might claim a certain Scriptural precedent of high authority.