"Sentimentalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... need be, return to the "beneficent whip." "On the side of the oppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism," maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh to scorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and "philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them. This is the substance of Thomas Carlyle's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which are done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw there and unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where people cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very different vein of thought, there cannot be ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... happiness, all the while He is leading us on to a spiritual blessedness—unfathomably deep. This is the life of faith. We live by faith, and not by sight. We do not preach that all is disappointment—the dreary creed of sentimentalism; but we preach that nothing here is disappointment, if rightly understood. We do not comfort the poor man, by saying that the riches that he has not now he will have hereafter—the difference between himself ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... of the chest had fully aroused him by this time; and he was ready for action, whether it was in a fight, or in the service of the fair maiden, though there was hardly a fibre of sentimentalism in his composition. When he reached the road, Sergeant Fronklyn had mounted his horse, and was waiting for orders from ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... of truth. In other words they accepted Traditionalism, while Protestants, equally suspicious of reason, proclaimed that in judging the value of revelation the human will and sentiment must be heeded as well as the intellect, that is to say they accepted Sentimentalism. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so susceptible of religious impressions that he blended mere earthly passions with a sort of religious sentimentalism, and who took for his device the mulberry-tree—symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... the eighteenth century did not stay to consider whether the foregoing was, or was not, a genuine antique: it suited their taste admirably. Rousseau had brought sentimentalism into favour; the "return to nature" was a kind of creed with the French philosophers: these facts aided greatly in causing the epidemic ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the evocation of sensibility in himself and his guests. There used to be one such turret near the summit of Campden Hill; but that familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one protesting. Fuit the frantic factitious sentimentalism for ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as ever it was. Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually tighten ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Tartar sage and poet, proved himself no contemptible critic of these foreign productions. Not once could he be induced to tolerate a poem whose only merit was the beauty and melody of its language in the original, nor to swallow the mere sentimentalism which plays so great a part in German poetry especially. This sentimentalism, says Bodenstedt, is as unknown as it is unintelligible to the Oriental poet. He aims always at a real and tangible object, and in gaining it puts heaven and earth in motion. No image is ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... true in connection with our minds. We all see the fallacy of the old-fashioned hustlers' cry, "Make your work your hobby; think of nothing else; let every moment be subordinated to the dominating idea of your career; put aside all sentimentalism, all laziness and self-will, all enthusiasm about things not in ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... many people, of course, wanted and want revolution and the International. I don't, and never did. I hate red-flaggery, and all other flaggery. The sentimentalism of Bob Smillie is as bad as the sentimentalism of the Pinkerton press; as untruthful, as greedy, as muddle-headed. Smillie's lot are out to get, and the Potterites out to keep. The under-dog is more excusable in its aims, but its methods ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... aphorisms of the Goethe period was Klinger, a playwriter, who led a curious and varied life in camps and cities, who began with a vehement enthusiasm for the sentimentalism of Rousseau, and ended, as such men often end, with a hard and stubborn cynicism. He wrote Thoughts on different Subjects of the World and Literature, which are intelligent and masculine, if they are not particularly pungent in expression. One of them runs—"He ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... creed of Al-Islam freely allows anthropophagy when it saves life; a contrast to the sentimentalism of the West which brings a "charge of cannibalism" against unfortunate expeditionists. I particularly allude to the scandalous pulings of the English Press over the gallant and unfortunate Greely voyage. (The ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of sentimentalism. The soul ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... doubts had surged back upon me. Was this mere sentimentalism, a four-in-the-morning tribute to the pathos of the flying years, or did she really fill my soul and stand guard over it so that no successor could enter in and ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... rest, there was only a monotonous succession of religious poems, repeating the old formulas, dry bones of habit and tradition, no longer informed with true poetic, religious spirit. Yet the source of love and humor in Jewish poetry had not run dry. It must be admitted that the sentimentalism of the minneservice, peculiar to the middle ages, never took root in Jewish soil. Pale resignation, morbid despair, longing for death, unmanly indulgence in regret, all the paraphernalia of chivalrous love, extolled ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... to combat this perversity, though the indulgence with which men are disposed to receive the parodies of these elegiac caricatures—that are very little better themselves—the complaisance shown to bad wit, to heartless satire and spiritless mirth, show clearly enough that this zeal against false sentimentalism does not issue from quite a pure source. In the balance of true taste one cannot weigh more than the other, considering that both here and there is wanting that which forms the aesthetic value of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Sentimentalism dropped from her like a garment worn for play. It was the spiritual woman only I was seeing, one who faced these real and awful facts of life with the calm, blissful assurance of knowing the truth, of giving her life for humanity because ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... Steno deceived, he collected his startled sensibilities before meeting Alba, and, pausing, he scribbled in a note-book which he drew from his pocket, with a pencil always within reach of his fingers, in a firm hand, precise and clear, this note savoring somewhat of sentimentalism: ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... views by saying that we abhor their institutions. But these northern men will not listen to reason. They keep on making eloquent speeches—their pulpits thunder against the sin of slaveholding. All grades of speech and thought are made use of, and the sickening sentimentalism of some of them is disgusting. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... the sergeant was out of breath; that being one disadvantage of the primitive hand-processes of torture to which American police-officials have been reduced by political sentimentalism. The torturer lost his temper, and began to shake and twist at Jimmie's arms, so that Connor had to warn him—he didn't want ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... no greater or more profound reality than love. Why that reality should be obscured by mere sentimentalism, with all its train of absurdities is incomprehensible. There is no nobler possession than the love of another. There is no higher gift from one human being to another than love. The gift and the possession are true sanctifiers of life, and should be ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... color to his mood. Dickens's sentiment seldom rings perfectly true; too often it is sharped to flippancy, or flatted to mawkishness. The tone of Irving, in sentiment or in humor, is the clear and even utterance of a healthy nature. It was a period of sickly sentimentalism in which he began to write; men drew tears frequently and mechanically then, as they drew corks. The sentimentalist passed easily from broad mirth to unwinking pathos. Fortunately that weakest mood of sentiment ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... no sentimentalism nor moralizing; spoke not to any man of his "sins," but gave something good to eat, a buoying [Footnote: Buoying: enlivening, cheering.] word, or trifling gift and a look. He appeared with ruddy face, clean dress, with a flower ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Antonio da Ponte, in 1597, more than a century after the death of Francesco Foscari. "It is," says Mr. Ruskin, "a work of no merit and of a late period, owing the interest it possesses chiefly to its pretty name, and to the ignorant sentimentalism of Byron" (Stones of Venice, 1853, ii. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... shy and elusive, and will not, like a monkey, perform on demand; therefore our plan abjures all these poetic organizations, which have a great deal of cant and very little good companionship; it has no sentimentalism to offer, proposing an association of purses rather than of persons,—a household on the base of protection rather than of society,—a mere combining for privileges and against prices. It is resolved into a simple matter of business; and the only help women need ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and we were most cordially received. Ottilie justified Kestner's praises. Pretty, but not strikingly so—clever, but not obtrusively so; her soft dark eyes were frank and winning; her manner was gentle and retiring, with that dash of sentimentalism which seems native to all German girls, but without any of the ridiculous extravagance too often seen in them. I liked her all the more because I was perfectly at my ease with her, and this was rarely the case in my relations to young women. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... ethical tone higher and sterner than Campbell's, offers in other features a marked contrast to him. He is careless in details, and indulges no poetical reveries; he scorns sentimentalism, and throws off rapid sketches of human action with great pomp of imagery, but he seldom touches the key of the pathetic. In much of this he is the man of his age, but in other respects he is above ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... rhetoric he establishes a very clear verdict of acquittal. One has always the impression that the rationalist in him is deliberately repressing the mystic, lest his case be weakened by a suspicion of sentimentalism. For it must be obvious that not a cold, still less a squalid, but a generous purpose alone could inspire the fervour that flashes between the reasoned lines. When Mr. ANGELL pleads that policy is directed towards ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... 1813, at Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends, who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this cottage he himself writes,—"It was a poor place, little better than a barn; but we at once took it and set about making ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... accessible to certain moral considerations, and more anxious to promote the greatest happiness of the greater number. But it might also show how the weakness of the ignorant and untrained mind produces the characteristic evils of sentimentalism and impatience, of a belief in the omnipotence of legislation, and an excessive jealousy of all superiorities; and might possibly, too, exhibit certain merits which are impressed upon the aristocrat by his sense of the obligations of nobility. I do not in the least mean to express any ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... is once firmly fix'd, leaving no hope or chance at all, the surgeon abandons the patient. If it is a case where stimulus is any relief, the nurse gives milk-punch or brandy, or whatever is wanted, ad libitum. There is no fuss made. Not a bit of sentimentalism or whining have I seen about a single death-bed in hospital or on the field, but generally impassive indifference. All is over, as far as any efforts can avail; it is useless to expend emotions or labors. While there is a prospect ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... reconciliation. The reconciliation must not come in ignoring Hell or believing in a kindly, good-natured God who does not judge severely about moral character and who only cares that His child should stop crying and be happy. We are having too much of this sentimentalism nowadays. It is a miserable misconception of that awful holiness which is "of purer eyes than to behold iniquity." It would never explain the need of Christ dying on the cross to put ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... new hymns secure also such new intercessions and new thanksgivings as the needs of to-day suggest? The reference in the resolution to the approaching completion of the century has since been playfully characterized as a bit of "sentimentalism."[7] The criticism would be entirely just if the mere recurrence of the centennial anniversary were the point chiefly emphasized. But when a century closes as this one of ours has done with a great social revolution whereby "all estates of men" ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... while adopting the form of the sonnet, kept quite clear of the Petrarchist's mannerism. His language is simple and direct: there is no subtilising upon far-fetched conceits, no wire-drawing of exquisite sentimentalism, although he celebrates in this, as in his other sonnets, a lady for whom he appears to have entertained no more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was a great experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced into England ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... et Cacolet is the satire of the hysterical sentimentality and of the forced emotions born of luxury and idleness. The parody of the amorous intrigue which is the staple of so many French plays is as wholesome as it is exhilarating. Absurdity is a deadly shower-bath to sentimentalism. The method of Meilhac and Halevy in sketching this couple is not unlike that employed by Mr. W.S. Gilbert in H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Especially to be noted is the same perfectly serious pushing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... partisan politics was no small factor in bringing about civil service reform. They established German newspapers by the hundreds and maintained many German schools and German colleges. They freely indulged their love for German customs. But while their sentimentalism was German, their realism was American. They considered it an honor to become American citizens. Their leaders became American leaders. Carl Schurz was not an isolated example. He was associated with a host of ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... the other appealing to the few who, partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true beauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made through a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion of earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very largely through what Dante calls the “use of ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... through them all, hanging whiningly on the nasal notes in the fashion of the untrained singer. Instead of being a performance typical of the strange woods genius, it was merely an atrocious bit of cheap sentimentalism, badly rendered. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Joe Wynbrook's sentimentalism, albeit only argumentative and half serious, had unwittingly touched a chord of simple history, and the flush which had risen to his cheek was not entirely bashfulness. The home and relationship of ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he and Moss had fallen. "I don't believe in helping people to study art. I don't believe in charity. This interfering with the laws of the universe that kill off the crippled and the weakly is pure sentimentalism that will fill the world with deformed, diseased, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... be seen to be organically related, but rather will appear as two aspects of the same fact, the concave and the convex of life. For the justly ordered life brings the identification of life, a continuous orderly intake and output of wholesome energy. This judgment, not of "sentimentalism" but of science, finds powerful but literally accurate expression in the saying of a great living thinker, "Life without work is guilt, work without art is brutality." Just in proportion as the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... and by good, all things English. 'The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English neighbours. An Eisteddfod is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of civilisation and prosperity. If it is desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... during every waking hour, for presents of the most expensive description. And, at the end of a week, she just quietly kicked him out. He hung about in Antibes for three days. He was cured of the idea that he had any duties towards La Dolciquita—feudal or otherwise. But his sentimentalism required of him an attitude of Byronic gloom—as if his court had gone into half-mourning. Then his appetite suddenly returned, and he remembered Leonora. He found at his hotel at Monte Carlo a telegram from Leonora, dispatched from London, saying; "Please return as soon as convenient." ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least with regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which he wrote after Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried, somewhat awkwardly, to bring ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... French bourgeoisie accepted it at once as a true picture of its vices and its virtues. The novel might, it is true, savor a little of Parisian cockneyism. Fastidious critics might discover in it some mixture of weak sentimentalism, or a few traces of Dickensian affectation and cheap tricks in story-telling. Young men of the new social school might take exception to that old-fashioned democracy which had its apotheosis in Risler senior. Despite all those objections, it was pronounced ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... of this feeling. I remember meeting one day, at that period, a man who had risen by hard work from simple beginnings to the head of an immense business, and had made himself a multi- millionaire. He was a hard, determined, shrewd man of affairs, the last man in the world to show anything like sentimentalism, and as he said something advising an investment in the newly created National debt, I answered, "You are not, then, one of those who believe that our new debt will be repudiated?'' He answered: "Repudia- tion ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... during the meal, the idea crossed Molly's mind that her father disliked his position as a middle-aged lover being made so evident to the men in waiting as it was by Mrs. Kirkpatrick's affectionate speeches and innuendos. He tried to banish every tint of pink sentimentalism from the conversation, and to confine it to matter of fact; and when Mrs. Kirkpatrick would persevere in dwelling upon such facts as had a bearing upon the future relationship of the parties, he insisted upon viewing them in the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... rests largely upon his historical novels, in imitation of Walter Scott, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Riettza (1835), and Harold (1848), the last being his most ambitious attempt to make the novel the supplement of history. In all his novels Lytton is inclined to sentimentalism and sensationalism, and his works, though generally interesting, seem hardly worthy of a high place in the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... he had ascertained that they were composed of young bees, and had not yet got sufficiently colonized to render a new swarming more than a passing accident. With all this kindness of feeling toward his victims, Boden had nothing of the transcendental folly that usually accompanies the sentimentalism of the exaggerated, but his feelings and impulses were simple and direct, though so often gentle and humane. He knew that the bee, like all the other inferior animals of creation, was placed at the disposition ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... by Mendelssohn, which sets forth as clearly as Shakespeare or Heine could have done in words, deep melancholy or unavoidable suffering expressing itself merrily and gaily in a manner which is both touching and beautiful, or sweet and sad. Without any self- consciousness or display of sentimentalism, I find deep traces of this in many little poems or sketches which I wrote at that time, and which have now been forgotten. I had been in Arcadia; I was now in a very pleasant sunny Philistia; but I could not forget the past. And I never forgot it. Once in Paris, in the opera, I used in jest emphatically ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Their every instinct is for barbarism; they have not one for civilization, nor can any be planted whose roots will not trail over the surface. The good Lord intended them to be savages, nothing more; and it is mistaken sentimentalism—However, it is not for me to criticise, and I beg, Don Roldan, that you will not ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... the incontestable merit of Stirner consists in his having openly and energetically combated the sickly sentimentalism of the bourgeois reformers and of many of the Utopian Socialists, according to which the emancipation of the proletariat would be brought about by the virtuous activity of "devoted" persons of all classes, and especially of those of ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... of naturalism, being a painter and not a photographer. In other words, like all truly great writers he never forgets his ideals; but he is too impartial to his characters and has too fast a grip on life to fall into the unrealities of sentimentalism. It is true that he lacked the spontaneity that characterized his great forerunner, Shakespeare, and his great contemporary, George Sand; but this loss was made up by the inevitable and impersonal character of his work when once his genius was thoroughly aroused to action. His laborious method ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... rhetoric and philosophy of the schools had infected all the departments of literature. Simple narrative no longer suited the pampered taste of the readers or the writers of history. It must be highly seasoned with sentimentalism and moralizing, with romance and poetry. Tacitus, certainly, did not escape the infection. In the language of Macaulay, "He carries his love of effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... that the danger of too emotional a type of religious training comes in. Sentimentalism of all kinds is dangerous and objectionable, especially in the education of girls, whom it excites and debilitates. Boys are more often merely alienated by it. In both cases, the method of presentation which regards the spiritual life ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... a part of our rank sentimentalism. You can pour your nationalities in but they'll no more combine than Tarquin's and Lucretia's blood. No, Jeff. America's gone, the vision, as she was in the beginning. They've throttled ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... sentimental quibble. Punishment ceases to be punishment when it is not felt—one cannot punish a tree or an unconscious soul. But this was the spirit of the age. With the fires out in hell, no wonder we have an age of sugar-candy morality and cheap sentimentalism. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... touching paragraphs as, 'Cursed be Canaan!' Canaan is of course the negro slave of our Southern States. Curse him! then, I say. Let us have no weak and illogical attempts to elevate his condition. Such sentimentalism is rank irreligion. I view the negro as a man permanently upon the rack, who is to be punished just as much as he will bear without diminishing his pecuniary value. And the allotted method of punishment is hard work, hard fare, the liberal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... mean a person of false pity, a person who has not imagination enough to see that great, distant evils may be much worse than those which we can picture to ourselves, because they happen to be immediate and near (for that, I take it, is the essence of sentimentalism)—if Harvey had been a person of that kind, he, being one of the kindest men living, would never have pursued those researches which, as he tells us over and over again, he was obliged to pursue in order to the ascertainment of those facts which have ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... sweeping scythe of censure fell unsparingly. "Her poems," he said, "were very tolerable, and not to be endured;" mediocrity was insufferable in poetry. The tone of them was unhealthy, and would feed the sentimentalism of the age, which was only another name for discontent. If poetesses went on as they were doing now-a-days, and only extracted a wail from life, the sooner they gave up their lays the better. The public wanted healthy, cheerful, breezy poetry, with a touch of humour here ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... many visitors to these parts and has been attributed to "Saracenic" influences. Wrongly, of course; one might as well attribute it to the old Greeks. [Footnote: Whose attitude towards animals, by the way, was as far removed from callousness as from sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic oxen fared who had laboured to draw up heavy blocks for the building of a temple—how, on the completion of their task, they were led into green fields, there to pasture unmolested for the rest of their lives. We ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... important in the American Historical Section, for it shows the work of the men who really emancipated American painting from the old hardness and tightness of technique, and from the old sentimentalism. Wall A is given up to the work of the late Winslow Homer, who has been called "the most American of painters." The seashore scenes alone of the things here are representative of this big man at his best. Wall B has a varied assortment by lesser painters, ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... religious inequality, supremacy of the Catholics in the Church, and supremacy of the Church over the State. The fruits of the forty years' war would have become dust and ashes. It would be mere weak sentimentalism to doubt—after the bloody history which had just closed and the awful tragedy, then reopening—that every spark of religious liberty would have soon been trodden out in the Netherlands. The general onslaught of the League with Ferdinand, Maximilian of Bavaria, and Philip of Spain at its head ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... aware how easily one is transformed into the other, or how soon the noble but fleeting aspiration may return into the nature of the animal, while the lower instinct which is latent always remains. The intermediate sentimentalism, which has exercised so great an influence on the literature of modern Europe, had no place in the classical times of Hellas; the higher love, of which Plato speaks, is the subject, not of poetry or fiction, ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... loutish and degenerate are not of love. You quote instances of the hyperphysical and hysterical. The feeling that I would have you obey for your soul's sake and without which you are but half alive, is not the blind passion of an oversexed sentimentalism. Rousseau was never in love in his life, though to say it were to accuse ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... it sounds bad," she said stoutly; "but in my young days it would have been thought a piece of posing—of sentimentalism—something indecorous and unfitting—if a girl had put herself in such a position. Marcella ought to be absorbed in her marriage; that is the natural thing. How Mrs. Boyce can allow her to mix herself with such things as this murder—to live in that cottage, as I hear she has been ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... present day. It is too lengthy and too melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do better than quote the judgment pronounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism—generated by an epoch thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism—the epoch of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life weary, but by no means weary of talking. "Jacques," she observes, "belonged ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... than society has ever had. By this analysis I prove that the understanding of this most stupendous but NATURAL phenomenon of human life brings us to the scientifical source of ethics and I prove that the so-called "highest ideals of humanity" have nothing of "sentimentalism" or of the "supernatural" in them, but are exclusively the fulfilment of the natural laws for the human class of life. The recognition of the fact that the phenomena of the human mind are natural and as such conform to natural law has the further ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... women love England for the beauty and repose of her social life, and most eloquently base their affection on the assertion that blood is thicker than water, the men of America are sometimes inclined, and not unnaturally, to disapprove of this pleasing sentimentalism. I now begin to perceive that the men of America are not jealous of England's social life, but anxious to put their friendship on ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Fontainebleau, at St. Germain. Nor were they restricted to the realities of the present and the memories of the past; they had that wider world of unreality in which to circulate; they had the Scudery language at the tips of their tongues, the fantastic sentimentalism of that marvellous old maid who invented the seventeenth-century hero and heroine; or who crystallised the vanishing figures of that brilliant age and made them immortal. All that little language of toyshop platonics had become ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... Like thousands of other women, she liked to think that she was loved in return and that it would never end. Like thousands of other women, she believed that what the man had taken, that he would keep, because in the eyes of God and all the other phrases of romantic sentimentalism, they were one. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... the training schools and the teachers' colleges must be the nurseries of craft ideals and standards. The instruction that they offer must be upon a plane that will command respect. The intolerable pedantry and the hypocritical goody-goodyism must be banished forever. The crass sentimentalism by which we attempt to cover our paucity of craft ideals must also be eliminated. Those who are most strongly imbued with ideals are not those who cheapen the value of ideals by constant verbal reiteration. Ideals do not often come through explicitly imparted ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the United States of America champions the rights of the individual as against the state and organized pressure groups, and our faith has been dangerously weakened—watered down by a blind and essentially false and cruel sentimentalism. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... been blasted by them, may be none the less resolved that the natural and healthy instincts of mankind shall alone be tolerated (Greek); and that the lesson of manliness which we have inherited from our fathers shall not degenerate into sentimentalism or effeminacy. The possibility of an honourable connexion of this kind seems to have died out with Greek civilization. Among the Romans, and also among barbarians, such as the Celts and Persians, there is no trace of such attachments ...
— Symposium • Plato
... infrequently stupid; humor in spite of Addison still connoted much coarseness and obtrusive sexuality, and in fiction had to be sought in the novels written for men only. As humor is the deadly foe to sentimentalism and hysterics, the Richardson school were equally averse to it on further grounds. Fanny Burney produced novels fit for women's and family reading, yet full of humor of a masculine vigor—and it must be added, with something of masculine unsensitiveness. There is little fineness ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of his mother. No word of mine and no teaching was to destroy so precious a heritage. He was not goody-goody about it. No boy who did and said and thought the things that Jerry did could be accused of prudery or sentimentalism. But in his quieter moods I knew that he thought deeply of ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... applied. And he had followed it. Circumstance and his own will had determined, twenty years earlier, that he had had enough of women-kind. His dealings with them had been many and various! But at a given moment he had put an end to them forever. And no false sentimentalism should be allowed to tamper with ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by the partisans of short-sighted bigotry, but which is felt by all, and confessed by most of those who are capable of appreciating its reality and importance. The deep Sibylline vaticinations of Coleridge's philosophical mind, the practical working of Arnold's religious sentimentalism, and the open acknowledgment of many divines who are living examples of the spirit of the age, have all, in different ways, foretold the advent of a Church of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... sight he seemed older, from his exceedingly worn and sickly appearance. His lank black hair fell about his thin, sallow face; he wore what we now call the Byron collar and Byron tie—for it was in the Byron era, when sentimentalism and misery-making were all the fashion. Certainly the poor captain looked miserable enough, without any pretense of it; for, besides his thin and unhealthy aspect, his attire was in the lowest depth of genteel shabbiness. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... his head high, in his old, rather imperious way, put out his candle, and looked through the small, dusty panes of his window. It was day—early dawn. He was jaded and weary, but he would try no longer to sleep. He must act, and shake off sentimentalism. Yes, he must act. He bathed and dressed with care, and then in haste, as if life depended on hurry, he packed the portmanteau and stepped briskly into the studio, looking all about, noting everything as if taking stock of it all, then sat down with ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... life as it might be, than to reflect on what it has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What made Crabbe a now force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a long oblivion, as the true antidote to Sentimentalism. The reader is not put off with pretty imaginings, but is led up to the object which the poet would show him, and made to feel its horror. If Crabbe is our first great realist in verse, he uses his realism in the cause of a true humanity. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... deserved a large audience. Mr. Jamieson is a pupil of the Hungarian pianist Mr. F. Boscovitz, some prominent features of whose style he closely imitates. His playing shows him to be a careful, conscientious student, possessed of real musical sensibility, without any of the nauseous sentimentalism so common among young players. His best performance in every respect was Liszt's 'Rigoletto' fantasie, the mechanical difficulties of which he has well conquered, and the passionate meaning of which he interpreted very ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the practical necessity of using the knowledge of the several dialects rather to make known God's truth to the heathen than to inform literati of the process of dialectic variation. Don't mistake me, my dear friend, or suspect me of silly sentimentalism. But you can easily understand what it is to feel "God has given to me only of all Christian men the power of speaking to this or that nation, and, moreover, that is the work He has sent me to do." Often, I don't deny, I should ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sorrowed over the box, and all of them were in deadly earnest. It was wonderful the way these children would work up their compassion for that bedraggled thing I wouldn't have touched with a pair of tongs. I suppose they were exercising and developing their racial sentimentalism by the means of that dummy. I was only surprised that Mrs. Hermann let Lena cherish and hug that bundle of rags to that extent, it was so disreputably and completely unclean. But Mrs. Hermann would raise her fine womanly eyes from her needlework ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... working harder than he ever worked, at the divine drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in seeming, but far less divine in fact. Perhaps comparative success had injured him. Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor, untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome of the fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching to it as a seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the cheap sentimentalism of Byron's life, find the convent all the more entertaining from the fact that he did the Armenian language the favor to study it there, a little. The monks show his autograph, together with those ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... pictures of real life he has never been surpassed; and he has instructed an age, concerning itself, wisely, originally, and usefully. He has the simplicity of Goldsmith, and the truth to nature of Fielding and Smollett, without a spice of sentimentalism or of impurity; he has brought the art of prose fiction to its highest point, and he has left no worthy successor. He lived for years separated from his wife on the ground of incompatibility, and, during ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to have had but one rule of conduct, always that of practical and successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to unpractical minds, which ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... heresy and all the best authority is against it. But then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced unconsciously by disgust at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes that wider point of view. When Lamb—there is no higher authority—writes, 'A happy ending!—as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... seen, something of the remarkable technique of which Poe was a master. The influence of Dickens, especially his sentimentalism, is often apparent in Harte's work. Some have accused him of caricature or exaggeration, but these terms, when applied to his best work, signify little except the use of emphasis and selection, of which Homer and Shakespeare freely availed themselves. The author of The Luck of Roaring ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular criminals. That fashion has gone out, largely. Mark Twain wrote frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this particular instance. "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... but a hundred and thirty years ago, and indeed much nearer to us than that, the key to all nobleness was thought to be found only by cool balancing and prudential calculation. A book like Clarissa Harlowe shows us this prudential and calculating temper underneath a varnish of sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremely displeasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets and circles in that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is that exaltation ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... everything—from the lacy sentimentalism of Myrtle Read to Samuel Butler and translations of Gorky and Flaubert. She nibbled at histories of art, and was confirmed in her economic theology by shallow but earnest manuals of popular radicalism. She got books from a branch public library, or picked them up at second-hand stalls. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... not only not a declaration of war or the prelude to a declaration of war, but a species midway of humanitarian sentimentalism and lawyerlike arguments which can have, at least for the present, but one consequence, that of encouraging Germany in intransigentism—that is, the maintenance of her point of view ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "There is no sentimentalism in this series. It is all downright matter-of-fact boy life, and of course they are deeply interested in reading it. The history of pioneer life is so attractive that one involuntarily wishes to renew those early struggles with adverse circumstances, and join the busy actors ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... in their way, and Chas might easily have married some socially prominent girl with money, instead of bringing a nameless saleslady into the family. It was impossible for Carlisle not to contrast her aunt's flabby sentimentalism with her own and her mother's sane, brilliant ambitiousness. If nothing succeeds like success, how doubly true it was that ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... thunderbolt. It is not a matter of decency, of alteration or improvement in manners. A comedy might be wholly Congrevean without a coarse word from beginning to end. It is a matter of the exclusion (not the stultification), the suspension of moral prepossessions, the absence of sympathetic sentimentalism, the habit of shirking nothing and smiling at all things. These qualities are not characteristic of the average Englishman. Now, satiric comedy did not in its initiation depend upon the average Englishman. It took its cue from the court of Charles the Second, who—with a dash of ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Punch, because it reminds him of the kindred and remarkable speculation on Snooling discussed by him many years ago. The new theory, like the old, deserves to be treated "in no spirit of sedentary sentimentalism, but in its largest and most oleaginous entirety. It is no plan for fixing hat-pegs in a passage, nor is it a mode of treating neuralgia with treacle." How true and appropriate this is. Mutatis mutandis we may add the further statement that it is "the truest and tenderest thesis that ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... then that I wish to urge is that we should take up the pursuit in an entirely practical way; as Emerson said, with a splendid mixture of common sense and idealism, "hitch our waggon to a star." It is easy enough to lose ourselves in a vague sentimentalism, and to believe that only our cramped conditions have hindered us from developing into something very wonderful. It is easy too to drift into helpless materialism, and to believe that dulness is the natural lot of man. But the realm of thought is a very free citizenship, and a hundred doors will ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... grounds for noble emotion, which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854, was poetry. Meanwhile the public and the critic ought to become familiar with the aspects of nature, in order to recognise the difference between the true poetry of painting, and the mere empty sentimentalism which was only the rant ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the cruel liar, and the exultation of the righteous when he falls, in words which do indeed belong to the old covenant of retribution, and yet convey an eternal truth which modern sentimentalism finds very shocking, but which is witnessed over and over again in the relief that fills the heart of nations and of individuals when evil men fade: "When the ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... share in Dramatic Sympathy, whereby the author enters truly into the situations and feelings of any character, whether he personally likes him or not. Largely made up of Emotion are: (1) true Sentiment, which is fine feeling of any sort, and which should not degenerate into Sentimentalism (exaggerated tender feeling); (2) Humor, the instinctive sense for that which is amusing; and (3) the sense for Pathos. Pathos differs from Tragedy in that Tragedy (whether in a drama or elsewhere) is the suffering of persons who are able to struggle ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... pass that he was deceived; because, in accordance with a not uncommon whim of destiny, he, a man of gentle melancholy, and spiritual in love, encountered in the object of his first passion a woman who held in horror all German sentimentalism. The young man, in consequence, distrusted himself, became dreamy, absorbed in his griefs, complaining of not being understood. Then, as we desire all the more violently the things we find difficult to obtain, he continued to adore women with that ingenuous tenderness and feline delicacy the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... preface to "Das Kapital"—a veritable natural history of social evolution. Engels speaks in praise of his friend Marx as having discovered the true mainspring of history hidden under the veil of idealism and sentimentalism, and as having proclaimed in the primum vivere the inevitableness of the struggle for existence. Marx himself, in "Das Kapital", indicated another analogy when he dwelt upon the importance of a general technology for the explanation of this psychology:—a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... bear sentimentalism. In parishes (which are the world) one has to endure it, accept it. It is part of the general ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... that," urged Asako, her English sentimentalism flooding back across her mind. "Don't marry a man whom you don't love. You say you are a new woman. Marry Sekine. Marry the man whom you love. Then you will ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... rest upon his typical childhood: his sculpture bears eloquent witness to the closest observation of all its varying and changeful moods. Others have excelled in this or that interpretation of child-life: Greuze with his sentimentalism, the Dutch painters with their stolidity. In Velasquez every child is the scion of some Royal House, in Murillo they are all beggars. They are too often stupid in Michelozzo: in Andrea della Robbia they are always sweet and winsome; ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... sentence or two) by his sense of the great materials which America could offer for a really American poetry, and by his contempt for the current work of his compatriots—"either the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, at bottom nothing but maudlin puerilities or more or less musical verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and enervation as their result; or else that class of poetry, plays, &c., of which the foundation is feudalism, with its ideas of ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... of the trysting-place, I fancy. You hold up your hands in horror at this, not because you disagree, but because of my audacity in applying general modernisms to myself. Well, I am tired of people who pose as advanced thinkers and remain as conventional as ever. We have outgrown so much of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. The keynote of everything worthy in modern life and art and philosophy is—restraint. I decline to regard ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan ranted well, and I decline also to accept the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... complain that it is a gloomy religion; others go to the opposite extreme and accuse it of pointing to a state of perpetual chocolate cream; yet again it is attacked on grounds of effeminancy, it is upbraided as being fond of a sickly sentimentalism. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... that this antagonism be brought to an end, have erred in mistaking its source, and in seeing in it only a mental oversight, capable of rectification by a legal decree. Hence this lamentable outbreak of sentimentalism, which has rendered socialism so insipid to positive minds, and which, spreading the absurdest delusions, makes so many fresh dupes every day. My complaint of socialism is not that it has appeared among ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to catch the first copies, and laid bets as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to despise the work of both. The fact therefore that from an early period the men themselves knew each other as ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... These Memoirs constitute a more thorough and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs. Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... pocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in the palm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved, denied, trampled upon for years,—with this result! Smiling half-scornfully at his new-found sentimentalism, he put the pieces into an empty cigarette tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table. As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps, he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at him for ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... later developed to be Miss Etta; and I had at once a feeling of suffocation and closeness, due not alone, I believe, to the barred windows and the steaming radiator. The family resemblance that Mr. Lin Darton bore to Old Con threw into relief the former's honesty, and made more bearable his heavy sentimentalism, upon which Con had played as surely as on a bagpipe, sounding its narrow range ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... appointment. The mind revolts at the idea that he really never came down, quite never! But then, when the starving man is on at the Aquarium, we—that is to say, the humane public—are apt to give way to mere maudlin sentimentalism, and hope he is cheating. And when a person at a Music Hall folds backwards and looks through his legs at us forwards, we always hope he feels no strain—nothing but a great and justifiable professional pride. It is not a pleasant feeling that any of these good people are suffering on our ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... through which MacRae had beaten him. But had he beaten him? MacRae was not now so sure about that. But it was only a momentary doubt. He struggled a little against the reaction of kindliness, this curious sympathy for Gower which moved him now. He hated sentimentalism, facile yielding to shallow emotions. He wanted to talk and he was dumb. Dumb for appropriate words, because his mind kept turning with ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them. I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Motley and Parkman and a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from 1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it had been growing before, it did not altogether disappear at the time named, and it was so conspicuous that this may properly be called the sentimental era in our literature. The causes of it, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... place, hatred is of the devil, and love is of Christ: the Christian is to love even his enemies. In a time of war, that is to say, whenever actual enemies exist, the natural man discovers in such an ideal only an immoral sentimentalism, and the doctrinaire pacificist occasionally uses language which gives colour to the charge. But Christianity has nothing in common with sentimentalism, and Christian is no merely sentimental affection which ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Arthur, restraining the impulse to reason with his illogical father whose antiquated sentimentalism was as unfitted to the new conditions of American life as were his ideas ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... same impulse overcame Royston which had affected him in his interview with Harry Molyneux. Considering that the age of miracles is past, it was remarkable that twice in one day the Cool Captain should have approached so near to the verge of sentimentalism. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... education, evolved since Dickens's day, has given to our people a queer and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying the raw jests of the Sketches by Boz, but leaves them easily open to that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of Little Dorrit, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not exist when it was written, of Hard Times in the light of the most modern crises of economics, and of The Child's History ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the manful, cheerful view of pain and death, and indeed of the whole creation, which the Psalmist has, because he has faith. There is in him no sentimentalism, no complaining of God, no impious, or at least weak and peevish, cry of "Why hast Thou made things thus?" He sees the mystery of pain and death. He does not attempt to explain it: but he faces it; faces it cheerfully and manfully, in the strength of his faith, saying—This too, mysterious, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley's poem who wept over a box labelled 'This side up,' I will shelter myself behind Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell's Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, 'of whose birth, death, and whole terrestrial ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... destructive guerilla warfare, hopeless on both sides, like that going on in Cuba, when that island was invaded by the American army. But as against American rule the Philippines would cease to be insurgents. The islanders will not be controlled by sentimentalism. Government by the United States would differ from that by Spain, as the two nations are different in character, in the nature of their political institutions, in their progressive movement. America is all active and free, and her freedom would be extended to the islanders. The transformation ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... the last instance quoted the poet substitutes his own impression of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... it is not only writers of romance or sentimental educators (although they may be zealous opponents of sentimentalism), but sometimes even philosophers, nay, even the severest of all, the Stoics, that have brought in moral fanaticism instead of a sober but wise moral discipline, although the fanaticism of the latter was more heroic, that of the former of ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... they become easily enraptured over novels and dress, they like to occupy themselves with feminine pursuits, to dress like girls and to frequent women's societies. They regard women as friends, as persons with whom they have a fellow-feeling. They generally, but not always, have a banal sentimentalism, they are fond of religious forms and ceremonies, they admire fine clothes and luxurious apartments; they dress their hair and "fake" themselves with a coquetry which often exceeds that of women. They are not all like this, but one or other of these traits ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... kind of a man was Stevenson? Whatever may be said about his imitativeness, his good spirits were real. They are at the bottom of his success, the strong note in his work. They account for all that is paradoxical in his effect. He often displays a sentimentalism which has not the ring of reality. And yet we do not reproach him. He has by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest form revealed the scepticism inherent in them. And yet we know that he was not a sceptic; ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... eternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in his eloquence than Rene de Chateaubriand; but his fiction is no longer read, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to this extent a sham—it was false to the nature of normal human beings. "Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both these able authors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look upon us through its ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... drowned what brains she possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said in his jargon—a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... seeking the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the nature of reality, then he is most wise who is most rich in sentiment. The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... may,—who knows?—take his part warmly. They are mad where Droulde is concerned; and we all know that two devoted lovers have ere now found favour with the people of France—a curious remnant of sentimentalism, I suppose—and the popular Citizen-Deputy knows better than anyone else on earth, how to play upon the sentimental feelings of the populace. Now, in the case of a penal offence, mark where the difference would be! ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... wretchedness which no generous heart can contemplate without grief.'[163] It is not surprising that, in Southey's opinion, it is doubtful whether the bulk of the people has gained or lost in the last thousand years.[164] Macaulay takes all this as mere sentimentalism and preference of a picturesque outside to solid comfort. But whatever Southey's errors of fact, they show at least a deeper insight than his opponent into some social evils. His proposed remedies explain his diagnosis of the evil. In the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... illuminating illustration of the sweeping change brought in by the Journey. In the latter critique we find appreciation of Yorick's characteristics, enthusiastic acceptation of his sentiment, fond and familiar allusions to both Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. In the brief space of two years Sterne's sentimentalism had ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... selecting and devouring with eagerness those portions which relate the silly narrative of some love adventure. This kind of literature arouses in children premature fancies and queries, and fosters a sentimentalism which too often occasions most unhappy results. Through their influence, young girls are often led to begin a life of shame long before their parents are aware that a thought of evil ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... that it is a manly thing to be indifferent to pain—not to our own pain only, but to that of all others. To be sorry for a hunted hare, to compassionate the wounded deer, to shrink from torturing the brute creation, has been accounted by us as namby-pamby sentimentalism, not fit for man, fit only for a squeamish woman. To the Burman it is one of the highest of all virtues. He believes that all that is beautiful in life is founded on compassion and kindness and sympathy—that nothing of great value can exist without them. Do you think ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... set upon the lives of those who are not of the slightest interest to us. We seem as though we believe that life is in itself something precious. Yet nature teaches us plainly enough that nothing is more worthless and contemptible. In former days people were less besmeared with sentimentalism. Each of us held his own life to be infinitely precious, but he did not profess any respect whatever for the life of others. We were nearer to nature in those days. We were created to devour one another. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... feeling," commented Mrs. Tascher mentally as she entered the room and swept across to the vacant seat beside the doctor, dispelling somehow, with her strong presence, the spirit of sentimentalism that pervaded the atmosphere. "Why, Doctor Ebling, are you here?" she asked: "I supposed you had gone to town. Where is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... realist not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old Wives' Tale," he has gradually taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later books, "Koenigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraeulein Viebig has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an eloquent hymn to patriotism—a ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... sentimentalism of Western politicians was a revelation to French statesmen. France, for all her cosmopolitanism, has always been badly informed as to the life of the people in England and America. Something of the general astonishment was voiced by Clemenceau, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary impressionism and sentimentalism ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... especially in New York, roughly criticised our efforts to prepare Pike for his end, said it was an outrage on society to give a wretch like him so much attention; that, in it, we exhibited a sickly sentimentalism, appeared as though we would raise crime to a saintship, and more in the same line. A few words only on this ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... populists in authority. Thus, within the limits of its formlessness, this party contained not only the inner contradictions of the developing Revolution, but also the prejudices inherent in the backwardness of the peasant masses, and the sentimentalism, instability and career-chasing of the intellectual strata. It was perfectly clear that in that form the party could not last long. With regard to ideas, it proved ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... into present, and of present into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the sporting ...
— Burke • John Morley
... of "Wilhelm Meister" were written in Italy, and after Goethe's return, and the book was published in 1795. Goethe had long since outlived the extravagance of sentimentalism which overflowed in "Werther." He had himself ridiculed it in a little farce, much laughed at at the time. And if "Wilhelm Meister" were taken merely as a story, it would be found quite free from such extravagances. The story, however, is simply the framework for ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... to happiness, and the basis,—as it doubtless is,—of several Christian qualities, who shall deny the sacred title of duty, to the care of the physical system? Whence proceed that morbid sensitiveness, that sickly sentimentalism, and that puny selfishness, which sometimes mark the delicate woman? They spring from ill health; and while no means are employed to remove the root of these moral evils, in vain will the branches of each month or each day ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... magazines, the Literati and sentimentalism, was the true milieu of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Born in Boston, his mother a pleasing English actress and his father a dissipated stage- struck youth of a Baltimore family, left an orphan in childhood, he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... English war, on my first voyage after I was appointed a midshipman. It was in the first days after our Slave-Trade treaty, while the Reigning House, which was still the House of Virginia, had still a sort of sentimentalism about the suppression of the horrors of the Middle Passage, and something was sometimes done that way. We were in the South Atlantic on that business. From the time I joined, I believe I thought Nolan was a sort of lay chaplain—a ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... book once much admired, De 'l'Art Chretien. In a later work entitled Epilogue a l'Art Chretien, but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, M. Rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly are with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a younger race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without either the power—or the wish—to replace it by the forces of the poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the gadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of a fascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... head, there in the turmoil and alarm—there in the terrified, riotous city jammed with refugees, reeking with disease, half frantic from famine and the filthy, rising flood of war—if really it all had been merely romantic impulse, ardour born of overwrought sentimentalism, nevertheless, what he had pledged that day to a little Grand Duchess in rags, he had fulfilled to the ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... intellectual courage impelled her at times almost to the verge of audacity, and was held under restraint only by conscience and good sense. Humor and wit can hardly be said to have been marked traits in her mentality. There was something delphic and oracular often in her familiar conversation. Sentimentalism had no place in her nature, her reading or literary work. A soul full of healthy and noble sentiment left no ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various |
