to avert our eyes from facts whenever facts suggest unpleasant contemplations. But it may also be used to mean the sympathy of the good Samaritan for the sick and wounded in the struggle whom the orthodox Pharisee passes by with his official non possumus. It sometimes implies the tendency to substitute a rose-coloured ideal for a faithful portraiture of 4 life; and sometimes the power of detecting the real beauty which is concealed from vulgar observers by their dread of vulgarity.

115. It would be futile to attempt to consider this fluctuating mood as closely correlated to any definite logical process. We may say, in a general way, that the growth of sentimentalism was symptomatic of a social condition daily becoming more unhealthy. In France an intelligent noblesse, having no particular duties to discharge, was beginning to play at philanthropy. In England, though the dissociation of the upper classes from active life was not so wide, there was a daily increasing number of rich and idle persons, who found the cultivation of their finer feelings a very amusing luxury. The virtue called 'sensibility,' which became so popular towards the end of the century, which was petted by the namby-pamby and Rosa-Matilda schools, and which was gently satirised in Miss Austen's novels, is the more colourless form of the sentiment which has recently taken theological masks. The 'man of feeling' of those days would in these days be a ritualist or a neopagan; and 'the tear of sensibility,' which used to bedew the eye of the fine ladies of the time, would be offered before the altar which has succeeded in adorning itself with lighted candles. We may trace the growth of the sentiment far back in the century. Wesleyanism was, in one sense, a development of sentimentalism. Wesley and his followers thought the symbols of the official theism too vague and effete for practical use, and tried to restore the old vivid concrete mythology. The writings of Shaftesbury may exemplify the kind of empty declamation against which they revolted. When we read his Hymn to Nature, we see that the feelings excited by so vague a deity can only give birth to a vague pomposity. Nature does not really excite the keen emotions appropriate to the old God, and it won't do to contemplate the new idol

j

too closely. It must be draped in all the apparatus of oldfashioned classical magniloquence.

116. But, when Wesleyanism came to be adopted by the more refined classes, a kind of compromise had to be effected. The modern imagination cannot feed upon the supernatural alone. The scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone became tiresome in the long run to contemporaries of Hume, however little they might be conscious of his direct influence. And thus, the religious world, naturally affected by the taste of its secular rival, tried to transplant into its own literature some of the faded charms of the Shaftesbury school of eloquence. Hervey's 'Meditations' (1746-7), for example, was one of the most popular books of the century; and it bears to Shaftesbury the same kind of relation which Young bears to Pope. Hervey was an attached disciple of Wesley; and a man of some cultivation and great fluency of speech. He tried to eclipse the worldly writers in their own style of rhetoric. The worship of nature might be combined with the worship of Jehovah. He admires the stupendous orbs,' and the immortal harmonies, but he takes care to remember that we must die, and meditates, in most edifying terms, amongst the tombs. Such works can hardly be judged by the common literary canons. Writings which are meant to sanctify imaginative indulgences by wresting the ordinary language to purposes of religious edification are often, for obvious reasons, popular beyond their merits. Sacred poetry and religious novels belong to a world of their own. To the profane reader, however, the fusion of deistical sentiment and evangelical truth does not seem to have been thoroughly effected. There is the old falsetto note which affects us disagreeably in Shaftesbury's writings. Hervey, after all, lives in the eighteenth century, and though, as his Theron and Aspasia' proves, he could write with sufficient savour upon the true Evangelical dogmas, the imaginative symbolism of his creed is softened by the contemporary currents which blend with it.

117. Hervey's chief book, the 'Meditations,' was according to Southey, not more laudable in its purpose than vicious in its style, and, therefore, one of the most popular ever written. Dipping into its pages at random, we find every

where specimens of that queer eighteenth-century euphuism of which Shaftesbury set, perhaps, the earliest example, mixed with phrases which recall the unction of the popular Evangelical preacher. If Hervey wants to say that certain herbs are useful medicinally, he observes that they 'impart floridity to our circulating fluids, add a more vigorous tone to our active solids, and thereby repair the decay of our enfeebled constitutions.' 'Breathe soft, ye winds!' he exclaims; 'O spare the tender fruitage, ye surly blasts! Let the pear-tree suckle her juicy progeny, till they drop into our hands and dissolve in our mouths! Let the plum hang unmolested upon her boughs till she fatten her delicious flesh, and cloud her polished skin with blue.' It is easy to conceive how this false gallop of rhetoric shades off into unctuous addresses to Christ, and is heightened by descriptions of decaying bodies or of hell-fire. Hervey's magniloquence is precisely of that kind which disgusts a cultivated reader, and passes with the half-educated for true eloquence. Very similar bombast is now manufactured with equal volubility to attract the readers of cheap newspapers; nor is it necessary to give further examples of a kind of rhetoric with which we are only too familiar.

118. Its interest for us consists chiefly in the fact that Hervey represents the blending of two streams of sentiment; of the religious unction of Wesleyanism, which is more explicitly given in his Theron and Aspasia,' and that vaguer enthusiasm for nature represented soon afterwards by Ossian and by Rousseau. His books may be described as a transitional form between the nature-worship of the deists, which was felt to be wanting in fire, and the nature-worship of Wordsworth, which had not yet dawned upon the world; the whole being rendered palatable to the ordinary reader by the admixture of Evangelical theology. Another writer who represents a somewhat analogous attitude is Henry Brooke, whose Fool of Quality' (1760, &c.) admired by Wesley, and republished in later years by Kingsley, is a bewildering mixture of religious mysticism with poetical sentimentalism. Brooke's intellectual genealogy seems to be traceable to Behmen on the one hand and to Rousseau on the other; whilst a curious strain of Irish eccentricity runs through the

1 'Reflections on a Flower-garden.'

whole, tempered by touches of the grace and tenderness of his greater countryman Goldsmith. The book resembles in some respects the friend of our infancy, 'Sandford and Merton,' though in that excellent performance the Rousseau element is not tempered by any theological admixture. Such performances indicate a current of vague feeling in search of some mode of utterance less constrained than that sanctioned by the practice of the Pope school, but equally ready to flow along the channels marked by Wesley or by Rousseau.

119. Another form of sentimentalism may be derived from Richardson. Richardson, as Johnson said, taught the passions to move at the command of virtue. That means that he discovered how a sincere profession of the narrowest code of morality might excuse a systematic dallying with seductive images. Byron held--and Byron was a good, if a partial judge, that there was more danger in such books as Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloïse' than in the open and scoffing vice of Don Juan.' The remark is equally applicable to 'Clarissa Harlowe.' Indeed, it is hardly a new discovery that the casuistical moralist passes easily into the prurient analyser of moral hotbeds; or that Abelard may with the best intentions give rather dangerous lessons to Heloïse. Richardson is never immoral in intention, nor, as a rule, immoral in effect; but he is frequently morbid, and morbid in a significant direction. In fact, the Pamelas and Clarissas of the day were rather tired, we may guess, of the prosaic labours to which they were condemned, and of the prosaic morality preached to them. They, had, as Richardson's word-portraits show, strong passions; they were tired of the old romances, and were taking to books instead of needlework. The Spectator and his followers preached excellent morality to women, but women want something more than excellent morality. The old confessor had been abolished, but not replaced. Richardson himself, the spiritual adviser of a little circle of feminine worshippers, understood their needs, and gave utterance to their vague wants. The skill with which he prolongs through eight volumes his variations upon the one theme of a feminine martyrdom, exhausting every phrase in the pathetic vocabulary, and accumulating misery until our sympathy becomes so pungent that we know not whether it be more delicious or

painful, makes 'Clarissa Harlowe' one of the marvels of literature. That his morality was mawkish and narrow is proved by the jovial contempt which gave a rebuff to Pamela in 'Joseph Andrews.' That his sentiment had the power of original genius is proved by the relation of 'Clarissa Harlowe' to the Nouvelle Heloïse.' Rousseau is the greatest of the sentimentalists, and Rousseau borrowed more than the form of his most passionate work from Richardson. When we think of the patient interest with which our ancestors dwelt upon the long-drawn agonies of Clarissa, the moralising of Pamela, and the virtuous declamation of Sir Charles Grandison, we can believe that a weight of emotion, without adequate vent, was accumulating behind the old dikes and barriers of moral convention. As the Clarissas were allowed to devote less time to needlework, and were able to take advantage of circulating libraries, they might easily develope a taste for literary stimulants.

120. Sentimentalism, pure and simple, needing neither the prefix of a text nor the appendage of a moral application, was represented by a later writer. It came into the world when Sterne discovered the art of tickling his contemporaries' fancies by his inimitable mixture of pathos, humour and sheer buffoonery. No man of equal literary eminence excites less respect or even less genuine sympathy. He showed, as we cannot deny, a corrupt heart and a prurient imagination. He is a literary prostitute. He cultivates his fineness of feeling with a direct view to the market; and when we most admire his books, we most despise the man, He is the most conspicuous example that could be quoted in favour of the dangerous thesis that literary and moral excellence belong to different spheres. The phenomenon, however, is hardly rare in its kind. The propensities to an actual and an ideal gratification of the virtuous instinct do not always accompany each other. Nobody could be more virtuous in imagination than Sterne. Fictitious misery excited his liveliest sympathy, because it need never shock his taste. We can believe that he wept genuine tears when he described Uncle Toby's oath, and the death of Le Fevre. And we weep too, for the moment, till a sense of the profound unreality disenchants us. We feel the insincerity when most cleverly disguised, and