SENTIMENTALISM

SENTIMENTALISM
SENTIMENTALISM
ON some sort of love for the nature of life rests, then, all sound romance, all sound realism. There are many kinds of love. The novelist may love life as a mistress "uncertain, coy, and hard to please, " but worth the knowing and the serving for all that, and on her own terms; he may be in two minds whether to idealize her at a distance or to defy disenchantment in the nearest intimacy, like Meredith's lover who
"Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free";
or he may trust and give himself completely up to her, in the sure knowledge that, though she may both "bruise and bless, " he can have the full blessing only as he accepts the bruises. There are many kinds of love: but, for the novelist, only this one mistress. And his fundamental loyalty to life is the same whether he tend to interpret life realistically or to exalt it romantically. 
Now, it happens, as I have just hinted, that the romantic novelist is the more subject to a certain grave temptation or danger: the danger of substituting self- love for love of life, and of interpreting the world exclusively as a ministry to self-delight. Professor Irving Babbitt characterizes the romantic lover in poetry by comparing him, in the terms of a not too celebrated mot, to the domestic cat which
rubs its body against your leg: the cat does not love you, it "loves itself on you. " So the romantic lover may prize his mistress, not for what she is, but for her reflection of him, her subtle and unanalysable appeal to his own vanity—or to his own humility, which may be only his vanity inverted. And so the novelist may, if there be too little of the impersonal in his fiber, love himself on life, and give us, for all his and our pains, not so much a reading of what life is or may be as an exhibition of his own private needs and greeds, predilections and aversions, prides and shames. He may part company with the realist, who says : "This is beauty, because it is truth, " and with the romancer, who says : "This is truth, because it is beauty ";—he may part company with both, and say tacitly no more than "This is what I enjoy. " In short, he may let himself be animated by that shallow, vain, and egoistic spirit which we call sentimentalism; the spirit which produces a counterfeit idealism, a spurious realism, compound of self plus emotion. Because the romancer has a freer hand with the circumstances, and is less rigidly bound by what he sees before his eyes, he is the more likely to stumble into this pitfall of self; and that is why we may call the spirit of sentimentalism an underbred country cousin of romance. 
Sentimentalism, a sickly and corrosive thing, is enormously important in the history of literature, and especially of British literature; so important that almost any episode of the development of our fiction might be recounted as a struggle of sentimentalism
against its counter-agents. He who should undertake to tell the history of sentimentalism in the novel would stand committed to a complete history of the novel; for in each generation the sentimental spirit is so enlaced with the general evolution of fiction that there is no story left to tell except that of the sentimental spirit in its struggle to survive against strong opposition. Everything that is not for sentimentalism is against it, and has been so ever since, in the tremendous decade, which gave the English novel its modern shape, Richardson sentimentalized his way into the popular heart and Fielding took up the pen of satire to drive him out. The clash between Pamela and Joseph Andrews recurs, in one way or another, from decade to decade—not so spectacularly perhaps, because hardly ever again with so near an approach to equality between the contenders, but nevertheless demonstrably and implacably. The man of feeling and the man of reflection have their truces ; hardly, as yet, a permanent peace. 
Sentimentalism is, however, somewhat more than feeling. If it had to do merely with displays of sensibility, the exhibition of tender and often neurotic emotions inadequately grounded in ideas, the story of it might be a long one, but it could hardly be a very subtle one. The anatomist of the sentimental cultus beholds his real difficulty when he notes that sentimentalism is interpenetrated with other substances, many of them the most respectable, and that some of its manifestations are of a sort to counterfeit whatever we most prize in motive and conduct. Sentimentalism is, indeed, to begin with, a saturation with sensibility, the very dew-point of the emotional. But that is only the beginning of it. After we have taken sufficient account of sentimentalism as hyperesthesia, we find other expressions of it past numbering. 
Of these others, I may single out four, as being perhaps the most important here, through their prevalence in literature. —
First, the spirit of self-righteousness. The self- righteous man may indeed love good conduct; but it is his own good conduct that he loves, and more because it is his own than because it is good. This is the spirit that pities the sinful because they are so far beneath us who pity them—we think how wretched we should be in their place. It is also the spirit that philanthropizes and confers benefits through self- love. To give material succor is to bask in the glow of one's own goodness—and it is so easy to purchase merit thus!
Secondly, the spirit of vanity or grandiloquence or bombast. Mr. Chesterton has arraigned one of its modern tricks in a little essay called Demagogues and Mystagogues. 1 This is the spirit that identifies one's self in a proprietary way with one's profession or one's special interests. Pielding's doctors quarrel learnedly together about how the arm should be set, while the patient lies in torture, and dispute over the corpse to settle which killed him, because their own dignity must be upheld whatever becomes of the Mience of medicine; lawyers deliver their paid opinions in a jargon which none can understand, because their own majesty comes above that of the law; the schoolmaster talks about education as though he were its patron saint, the dilettante about art as though it were a helpless orphan committed to his care, and the clergyman about God as though he were a benevolent and rather more responsible elderly relative of God— say, a maiden aunt. An inflated, puffed-up spirit this, that tries to dignify itself by ownership of that which is beyond any personal ownership. 
Thirdly, the self-deception which we call hypocrisy. For probably any consistent hypocrite is essentially a self- deceiver. No man can dispense in the long run with belief in himself; and hence he misreads his own motives, forgets whatever would confute him if he remembered it, and invents the most plausibly unselfish motives for his self-seeking. The young lady continues to enjoy her roast lamb and be horrified at the trade of butchering, and thinks quite well of herself in both connections; Theo bald and Christina—I am referring here to Samuel Butler's posthumous classic The Way of All Flesh—continue to torture their son, out of a dubious mixture of self-righteousness, innate love of cruelty, and the sense of their own power and authority, and persuade themselves that they are doing it all for the good of the son. 
Fourthly, the spirit of shallow optimism, that sees everything in a beautiful mist of "rose-pink" (Meredith's word) ; that is always talking about "the sorkl id things of life" (meaning things which are not pretty) ;
that creates all the scores of sugar-plum-angel men, women, and children—especially children, the Sand- fords and Little Evas and Pollyannas of sentimental fiction, precocious infants with a diseased passion for making you cheerful and good :—the spirit that says tacitly, "This is the world / made: see how much nicer it is than that dismal real world of obstinate facts and problems without solutions! If you don't like my world better than that, it must be that you have an evil, sordid mind. "
These four spirits—self-righteousness, vanity, hypocrisy, and the fashionable optimism—are all sentimental: they all set up the first person singular as above the impersonal law of life, and studyithe world, if they study it at all, only to project themkelveg. jpto it for the self-satisfied thrill of rediscovering themselves there. The sentimentalist will actually inflict pain on himself for the pleasure of seeing himself bear it heroically ; he will tempt others into despitefully using and persecuting him, in order to anoint himself with the soothing oils of righteous indignation and self-pity. The peculiar insidiousness of this sentimentalism is, in fact, that it nearly always concerns itself with well- meaning and well-doing, and by its fruits it is at times well-nigh indistinguishable from the most self- disciplined and impersonal rule of life. 
II
It will be seen that these subtler manifestations of sentimentalism are here defined as simply effects of
the egoism inherent in man, and with little or no reference to the goodness or badness of the actual) ". 2 conduct involved or advocated. And the definition will, I think, do all that may be asked of it. Sentimentalism is primarily not a sort of conduct, but a sort of spirit behind conduct; and the same acts may be prompted now by a sentimental attitude, again by a really humane or social spirit. Emerson's precept, "Love and you shall be loved: all love is as mathematically just as the two sides of an algebraic equation, " is a most unsentimental argument for loving much, but a most whiningly sentimental argument for demanding to be loved. The shilling may be dropped into a beggar's hat to afford the giver enjoyment of his own munificence, or to do penance for a previous sin of greed, or to avoid the self- accusation of stinginess (all sentimental motives), or to express one's understanding sympathy for another life that thus becomes, if only for an instant and a shilling's worth, one's coin. It is the same shilling in any case—but it does not mean the same thing. And of course fiction is bound to be concerned above all with what it means. 
At this point some close analyst of motive takes the floor to ask whether there is not, behind all these distinctions, a fundamental sameness. Whatever we do, and why ever we do it, does not every motive originate in self, and does not every act proceed out of the individual's instinct for self- fulfillment? One man despoils the poor to increase his own wealth : another gives out of what he has, ostensibly to help the poor:
but is not this merely a more refined and sensitive selfishness, the very quintessence in fact of self- gratification? To which we must return, for all answer: "Yes, we do indeed at every turn that which we have the most and the strongest reasons for wanting to do. There is no unselfishness in the sense of acts which profit us nothing, materially or morally. But that fact does not abolish the infinite gradations in the rewards of our conduct. It is precisely of those gradations that the novelist, if he be worthy, must take most account. All conduct does originate in self; but it does not all end there. Let the novelist look to it that he express his own will in conduct which takes the self outward into other lives; which identifies the ego with other egos, and reaches across the barriers of selfhood to some sort of community. " In short, there is a self that expresses itself in terms of self, with reference always inward; there is another self that has the outward reference, expressing itself by instinct and habit in terms of other things—and this second self is an entity much better worth expressing. It is the non- sentimental ego. Let the novelist understand it, and be it, we say; else his appeal to us is of the shallowest. A. murders B. ; C. gives his life trying to save B. from A. Call both acts self-fulfillment, as ultimately they are: all we need point out is that it makes a great deal of difference what kind of self you have to fulfill, and that the novelist does well to choose discriminatingly which he shall hold up to our esteem. 
Or, to illustrate the same matter in historical terms:—
Richardson was the sentimentalist incarnate. Fielding was the satirist. In Pamela Richardson portrayed a somewhat prudish servant girl resisting the attempts of her libertine master to seduce her, and at last, by having the good sense to keep herself inaccessible, winning his hand in marriage. Her conduct is right; her motive a rather low expediency—the virtue, not of brave and thoughtful idealism, but of convention added to fear. That the element of expediency figures largely in her conduct is proved by her slavish adulation of Mr. B. when he offers her marriage. He has behaved monstrously to her, made himself loathsome to the sense of decency—and yet when his offers cease to be "illicit" Pamela can only cry out in melting gratitude at his angelic condescension. One is reminded of John Tanner's sarcastic retort to OctaVius: "So we are to marry your sister to a damned scoundrel by way of reforming her character!"—both Octavius and Richardson being victims of the old sentimental confusion of "character" with "reputation. " Pamela shares with them a tawdry superstition that it is vile for a coward and sneak to possess a noble woman in one way, but eminently praiseworthy and satisfactory for him to possess her in another. John Tanner and Fielding share the somewhat different notion that it is detestable for a coward and sneak to possess a noble woman at all, and that if she is really noble she will see him for
what he is, and despise him as much when he grovels before her as when he tries to dominate her by trickery or force. Fielding took Richardson's theme and turned it into ridicule by inversion. He portrayed a young serving- man who resists the advances of his wanton mistress—not in order to advocate laxity of conduct against Richardson's narrow rigidity, but to extinguish with burlesque a moralist who advocated the narrowest rigidity for the most dubious reasons. Both novelists would have Pamela guard herself well: but one of them would have her do it for reasons which prove her a sensible creature with a taint of canny self- righteousness, the other for reasons which prove her a noble woman of some capacity to think for herself. The really dramatic crux of living is not in conduct but in motive. 
Now, it is true that Fielding savors his own satire just as much as Richardson does his own sentimentalism, and that both are equally far from philosophical disinterestedness. But one finds his, delight in a philosophy which makes human nature out a pretty small and mean affair, even when it is doing right; the other, in a philosophy which shows human nature as having an infinite capacity for constructive good, even when it is doing wrong. Pamela is "Virtue Rewarded, " with the insistence on the reward; Joseph Andrews is "Virtue Rewarded, " with the insistence on the virtue. If the conventional code is to recommend itself to the most humane minds, it must do so on some such basis as Fielding's, not on egoistic, self-seeking, and sentimental grounds. Safety and
profit are sentimental motives for behaving well: good behavior finds its true level only in a defiant rightness of the mind to which self-violation is the unbearable wrong. 
This difference of motive—the difference, let us call it, between sentimentalism and fine taste—is, I repeat, all- important to the worker in fiction. lie will have expressed, when all the words are written down and all the situations resolved, only himself: let him not think he can escape himself utterly, for all the words and all the situations will be of his choice, charged with the meanings which he alone has given them, indicative of his purposes and ideals. But let him express himself in terms of other things, of ideals which touch more than his self-interest; let him be like the bank-note that changes hands only to reappear as its own worth of food or clothing or firewood, not like the coin in a miser's hoard, which can only draw to itself more and more other precisely similar coins, endless vain repetitions of itself, to be gloated over in moments of sterile ecstasy. 
III
Of course I should not wish to be understood as trying to read Samuel Richardson, by bell and book, out of his importance to the history of the novel. If I undertook that, I should expect no better reward than laughter. The literature which makes up the whole body of a tradition and an art, and which is
therefore greater than individuals and their books, has never required that flawlessness which the most exactingly critical readers think it well to demand of their book before they will consent to be much interested in it. No: literature has never been above teaching itself by poor beginnings, the half-suggestion of merit here, even the downright failure there ; and in the long run the worth of most things is found to survive, or at least to be rediscovered, in order that art may learn every important lesson that exists to be learned. Richardson is very far indeed from such feeble and half- profitless beginnings, matter merely for instruction to the form of the novel after his actual substance has been found wanting and cast away. Indeed, be stands much nearer to the full success, the triumphant achievement of his own kind of greatness. 
That greatness lies, so far as a sentence will describe it, in his having done for the inner world of the heart what Defoe did for the outer world of material circumstance: subjected it to the analysis of a minute and painstaking realism, anatomized it at once more truly and more vividly than any before him had done. Richardson is the first in the novel to prove that moral or mental history can be truly dramatic, and that any life, even the most commonplace, can be made, if only it is understood, to yield the reader finer thrills than had hitherto come from even the most exciting stories of event. 
There is a sense too in which Richardson is impersonal like the dramatist, 'and therefore escapes direct responsibility for the opinions which his characters
hold and express; for his stories are told in letters exchanged by the characters participating in them, and no one questions that in the main the letters express genuine and natural reactions of folk who are real, permanent, and very much themselves. But the novelist and the dramatist cannot escape indirect responsibility: after all, they are undertaking to represent life for us, and if their characters represent it only, or primarily, at and below a certain moral altitude, we shall properly say that their conception of life is insufficient. The artist chooses his puppets because they are interesting to him: and we have the right to say, if we find it so, that he is relatively too much interested in the wrong ones, the ones who are beneath the best that we know. Richardson speaks in the long run through Pamela just as intelligibly as though she were empowered to speak directly for him ; and we hardly need the various prefaces and conclusions by the "Editor" to tell us that he was exactly the sentimentalist his choice and treatment of Pamela as a heroine would imply. It was a tremendous achievement, and an influential one, to have read the hearts of others, and those not of his sex, so minutely as Richardson did: nevertheless, we cannot acquit him of having sentimentally taken those hearts at more than their true relative worth, or of having sentimentally preached a dubious ethic—superior conduct for inferior reasons. 
How certainly the novel can be trusted in the end to perpetuate its best and discard its worst is shown by an odd fact in the history of appreciation of Richardson. His reputation waxed and waned and waxed again, and has now, it seems to me as I gather the consensus of recent judgments, all but regained its old prestige—and that in spite of our unanimous hatred of his sentimentalism. First he was valued for this quality, then he was despised for it, and now he is valued in spite of it, and because of his sympathetic and minute analysis. Our least sentimental age has vindicated Richardson, one of the most sentimental of novelists, thus proving abundantly that there is more in him than the sentimentalism, and that the composite intelligence of criticism over any great stretch of time has a sure and single eye for merit, with whatever defects that merit is accompanied. 
But it was the sentimentalism that came uppermost at the beginning; and if the author of Clarissa had a beneficial effect on the novel as an instrument of constantly increasing scope, I do not see how we can blink the fact that he had a disastrous effect on it as a revelation and criticism of the true values of life. I cannot give up my distrust of sentimentalism merely because Richardson, the chief of sentimentalists, happened also to be an incomparable anatomist of motive and feeling; and I see him as one of the chief impulses in the debilitating 18th century cult of "sensibility. "
As we have noted before, half of the esthetic history of the two generations after Richardson is implied in the word "Gothic" and the changes its meaning underwent. The other half is contained in this
other word "sensibility, " which points to whatever in emotion is overwrought, hypertesthetic, neurasthenic, and at the same time super-refined and faddling. The School of Terror is simply Gothicism plus sensibility; and Richardson, a realist of the realists, is thus, through his emotionalism, a powerful impulse toward one of the most extravagant romantic traditions ever evolved. The cult of sensibility means always the maximum of feeling for the minimum of cause; and when we see the Terrorists displaying the last extremities of feeling for no cause that we can do better than laugh at, we see them reaping the natural harvest of Richardson the specialist in self-pity and tears. He set a whole age weeping, not for sorrow, not even for romantic Weltschmerz, but for simple enjoyment of its own shallow and rather maudlin wretchedness. It was an age comparable in this respect to the boarding-school miss who feels herself cheated and taken advantage of if she is not made to cry at the matinee. She goes in order to cry ; and the latter 18th century sometimes strikes us as having existed primarily in order to feel, over anything or nothing, the extremes of emotion. 
Not since that time, happily, have we seen sentimentalism in anything like the same repute. The prolonged battle between the man of feeling and the man of reflection seems at last on the verge of decision in favor of the man of reflection. One of the greatest of living novelists, himself anything but a disciple of Richardson and sensibility, alludes quite naturally to "the unofficial sentimentalism, which, like the poor, 
Iv
The official death of sentimentalism is of course very different from its extermination—which is even
now only a possibility. If one had to fix a date for its official death, I suppose that date might well be 1814, the year of Waverley. But the edict of execution had been already signed, in the work of an inconspicuous young woman of twenty-three—the most precocious genius in our fiction, for she had written at twenty- one a novel all but perfect in both the form and the substance of its contribution to the human comedy. In 1798, the year of the Lyrical Poems and Ballads and a great milestone in romanticism, Jane Austen was writing her third novel, Northanger Abbey, in which she took the spurious romanticism of the School of Terror and made it ridiculous. For her sunny common sense, perhaps neither public nor publisher was ready: at all events Northanger Abbey lay neglected for twenty years, wasting its diffusion of light on the proverbial bottom drawer, like priceless radium in the heart of the earth waiting to be discovered. Written sixteen years before the publication of Waverley, it appeared four years after, and two after Jane Austen's death—the first of her stories to bear her name on its title-page. 
In all six of those stories Miss Austen made merry with sentimentalism ; witness the title Sense and Sensibility (i. e. , Sense versus Sensibility). But nowhere is her kindly and indulgent ridicule more telling than in an early episode of Northanger Abbey. The heroine, a girl potentially sensible but saturated with romances of the School of Radcliffe, goes in a properly sentimental mood to visit friends at North- anger Abbey. She is eager in her anticipation of the
ghostly, the grisly; her visit will be a complete fiasco unless she is treated to at least an apparition or two. Everything goes promisingly. She is shown on the first night to a room in a wing of the Abbey; her imagination makes it baronial large, gloomy; the wind howling at the casements and down the chimney does what it can to make up for the footsteps of the ancient servitor which should reverberate down the long corridor; and—yes, actually there is the one indispensable appurtenance of such situations, a dark and formidable cabinet of immemorial age. It is there, of course, that she is to find the time-yellowed manuscript which is to unlock some horrifying secret of the past. And, tucked away in a recess, is indeed the roll of papers. She seizes it with tremors of expectancy; in another instant she will have begun to unravel the secret. Then, a clumsy attempt to snuff her candle puts it out and leaves her in utter darkness. Better and better! She lies shivering in the great bed, a prey to nameless delicious terrors until sleep comes. With the morning light that awakens her, she is up to consummate her discovery. Let Jane Austen tell it :—
"Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats faced her in each. Two others, penned by the same hand, marked an expenditure scarcely more interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and breeches- ball. And the larger sheet, which had enclosed the rest, seemed by its first cramp line, 'To poultice chestnut mare, ' a farrier 'a bill! Such was the collection of papers (left, perhaps, as she could then suppose, by the negligence of a servant in the place whence she had taken them), which had filled her with expectation and alarm, and robbed her of half her night's rest! She felt humbled to the dust. Could not the adventure of the chest have taught her wisdom? A corner of it catching her eye as she lay, seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing could now be clearer than the absurdity of her recent fancies. To suppose that a manuscript of many generations back could have remained undiscovered in a room such as that, so modern, so habitable ! or that she should be the first to possess the skill of unlocking a cabinet, the key of which was open to all!" I
No example could show more clearly the war between sensibility and the sense of humor. Comedy is in fact the chief weapon against sentimentalism, and the one against which sentimentalism is least likely to prevail. There is more than accidental fitness in this simple fact: that Richardson, the most sentimental of all the great English writers of fiction, is the only one of them who is not a humorist. Name them over: Defoe, a master of both rough
farce and droll characterization ; Fielding and Thackeray, master ironists ; Dickens, a supreme creator of comic individuals—a master capable indeed of maudlin sentimentality, but only in moments of conspicuous lapse; Scott, George Eliot, and Hardy, masters of regional humor, the deep unconscious drollery of peasant folk; Smollett, a dealer in coarse rough rollicking fun; Meredith, who looked on the face of the Truly Comic Muse, seen of few men ;—all belong in the list, except Richardson the lugubrious. Sentimentalism cannot stand in the presence of "clean mirth. "
Neither, if we are to judge by Sterne, can it stand in the presence of mirth sometimes unclean. For the invariable process of Sterne, as I understand it, is to take the materials of sensibility and turn them, by a subtle infusion of burlesque, into infectious and sometimes obscene drollery. The very familiar episode of Uncle Toby and the fly is sometimes seriously quoted as a piece of sensibility expressive of the age and identifying Sterne with the Richardsonian cult in its reduction to absurdity. But surely with Sterne it was a conscious reduction to absurdity: surely, in this very passage, he deliberately burlesques, making sensibility poke fun at itself :—
"My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries;— not from want of courage, —I have told you in a former chapter, 'that he was a man of courage':— And will add here, that where just occasion presented, or called it forth, —I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter ;—nor did this arise
from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellectual parts;—for he felt this insult of my father's as feelingly as a man could do ;—but he was of a peaceful, placid nature, —no jarring element in it, — all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly. 
"—Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time, —and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him ;—I'll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand, —I'll not hurt a hair of thy head :— Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let 'it escape ;—go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee ?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me. 
"I was but ten years old when this happened: but whether it was, that the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation ;—or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards it ;—or in what degree, or by what secret magic, —a tone of voice and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart, I know not ;—this I know, that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out. of my mind: And tho' I would not depreciate. what the study of the Literce humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect, or
discredit the other helps of an expensive education bestowed upon me, both at home and abroad since; —yet I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression. 
"165P This is to serve for parents and governors instead of a whole volume upon the subject. " '
Here, as throughout Tristram Shandy and, for that matter, A Sentimental Journey, one sees the spirit of comedy as the great infallible corrective of hysteria, the dismally emotional side of that sentimentalism which takes itself so seriously. It needs but to be taken with a grain of mirth, to dissolve away into the empty pretentiousness it is. 
V
These few sketchy data will serve well enough to show what sentimentalism is, and how its arch-enemy the spirit of laughter puts it out of countenance. Sentimentalism is a solemn spirit, and flourishes only in places not reached by the light of mirth. So much at least is clear if we speak in terms of the sharpest contrast available: that between the obvious 18th century sentimentalism of extreme sensibility and the equally obvious forms of comedy which undertook to destroy it. The sensibility is as abnormal and perverted as the laughter is hearty, genuine, sidesplitting, or gross. One is like the odor of musk, the other like the sound of a drinking song. 
But there remain the more subtle and complicated manifestations of sentimentalism: and for these, only a more subtle weapon of Comedy will serve. Because it fell to Meredith to create in English that subtler instrument and its first triumphant applications in story, and because he made the first nice and permanent definition of such Comedy, our doctrine here can best be reproduced from his Essay on the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit. 
Comedy means to Meredith the "laughter of the mind. " "The laughter of Comedy is impersonal and unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile [i. e. , than Satire, which is "a blow in the back or the face"] ; often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called the humor of the mind. " Meredith draws his distinctions with the greatest possible nicety among Satire, Irony, humor, and Comedy—overlapping elements, of course, but differently centered. And of Comedy he makes two most important generalizations :—
First, it is inherently and essentially social. "The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the society he depicts ; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men's intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world upon their characters. He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or surroundings, but with what you are now weaving. To understand his work and value it, you must have a sober liking of your own kind and a sober estimate of our civilized qualities. " One remembers at this point that the self-righteousness, the vanity, the
hypocrisy, and the frivolous optimism which I named as belonging in the calendar of sentimentalism, are all intensely egoistic or anti-social failings. Thus this Comedy of Meredith is just the heaven-inspired scourge for them. 
Second, since Comedy is a social implement, it is practicable only in some approximation of a real society. Only the rougher tools of irony and satire will do where a society is struggling into existence, or going through the period of muddle. "There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition ; and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and the perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity. "
This second prerequisite of true Comedy, a real society, explains several traits in the Meredith who formulates it. It explains, first, his tendency toward feminism, his faith in the illimitable capacity of woman to take her place as equal of the greatest—a belief which he constantly enforces in his novels by showing the triumph of noble womanhood over what is weakest, most sentimental in man. "Where the veil is thrown over women's faces, you cannot have society, without which the senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is
driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst" —as, for example, in our excellent and indispensable 18th century. It is for "cultivated women to recognize that the Comic Muse is one of their best friends. They are blind to their interests in swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. "
Also, does not this same prerequisite of an urbane and matured society explain the smallness of Meredith's public, and the more and more specialized narrowness of the scenes in which he elected to work? It is pretty clear from his general doctrine that be had visions of a time, perhaps remote, when comedy should have become a national institution, as accessible and as democratic as any form of national art has ever been ; a time when the reciprocity of comic poet and audience should become all that the most sanguine imagination could conceive, using Aristophanes, Congreve, Moliêre, and their several publics as points of departure. We misconceive Meredith entirely if we doubt that in such a state of reciprocity he would have been most at home, ideally self-fulfilled. His idea of creativeness was not to be eccentric, mannered, aristocratic: it was to work in a democratic tradition, a school, and what he most laments is the unreadiness of the existing public for a democratic tradition that should be at the same time fine, stimulating, and bracing as well as democratic. As it was, the conditions gave him neither the society for audience nor the society for subject. He believed sufficiently in his vision to write for the few readers who had something of his own comic intuition—not because he prized his
own rarity, but because he wanted to help leaven the whole mass. He wrote about the few small social groups which met his definition of real intercourse, not because he wanted to idealize an aristocracy, but because he wanted to democratize an ideal. Presently he realized, at first with dismay, the smallness of his public. . It was then that his style became so specialized: only a few could follow him, but those few could follow him anywhere, and he saw it as his peculiar office to do the most that he could for them. Better the success of perfect intimacy with a few than the flat failure to win the many—as he could only have done by setting the clock of social evolution far ahead, farther than anyone man can, even a major prophet. If Meredith had not chosen the fullest possible possession of his own public, he would probably have fallen between two publics, missing both. His actual choice is what he tacitly expresses to us as we see him moving most often in the restricted area of a single ancient house, a single aristocratic family and its connections, choosing a background so remote and person ie so specially bred that our own democratic experience may fail to furnish their counterparts. 
These points are worth jotting here, against the popular conception of Meredith as one who framed a cult of exclusiveness for an esthetic inner circle. He believes in Comedy as democratizer and sweetener of civilization ; but finding no audience and, on the necessary democratic scale, no subject, he turns where he can. This resignation he saw as his personal part, the only one possible to him, toward the fulfillment of
his ideal in the future. He is never more truly himself, more Meredithian, than when he says: "I think that all right use of life, and the one secret of life, is to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us; as to my works, I know them faulty, think them of worth only when they point and aid to that end. " 1
Category:Emotional qualities of a story