simple preference or inclination to strong emotion. But whereas formerly this element was accepted without further analysis, it came later to be accounted for in its relation to the intellect. Emotion is an excellent driver but an untrustworthy leader. It is when it assumes leadership, when action is not only impelled but guided by feeling, that the ensuing motion is in danger of being erratic, unprogressive, perhaps calamitous. This more or less wilful blindness, which is the essence of sentimentality, is of course a very natural human trait. Since it is the function of emotion to supply heat, and of intellect to furnish light, and since warmth is as a rule more grateful than illumination, particularly if the prospect does not please, we are much more likely to be warmed in our passage through life than illumined. To refuse to see the disagreeable is as instinctive as to seek the delightful. Nor could one be regarded as more of a fault than the other until the love of truth for its own sake became an ideal, accompanying the dominance of the scientific spirit.
This accounts for the fact that, while Meredith did not invent the sentimentalist any more than Dickens the hypocrite or Thackeray the snob, he is the first to take a deep and conscious interest in this species; being especially fitted for it by his own incisive, highly rationalized nature as well as by the spirit of his time. His predecessors in this field are Peacock, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, although the last is rather a contemporary.
From Squire Headlong, the would-be savant, to Mr. Falconer, the would-be Platonist and devotee of Saint Cecilia, Peacock traces a vein of rather innocuous sentimentality, but of Miss Damaretta Pinmoney he gives a definite account, followed by several examples:[1]
- ↑ Melincourt, 23.
