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:[379]
“She had cultivated a great deal of theoretical romance—in taste, not in feeling—an important distinction—which enabled her to be most liberally sentimental in words, without at all influencing her actions.”
Mrs. Shaw represents those who so appreciate the value of romantic affliction that, lacking a grief, they manufacture a grievance to cover the deficiencies of a too roseate existence. On a certain melancholy occasion to be sure she orders “those extra delicacies of the season which are always supposed to be efficacious against immoderate grief at farewell dinners.” But her usual manner—[380]
“* * * had always something plaintive in it, arising from the long habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. Now that, the General being gone, she had every good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had, however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired,—a winter in Italy.”
It is Mrs. Kirkpatrick, however, who takes the prize in “pink sentimentalism,” and holds it until the arrival of the Countess de Saldar, and the Pole sisters. Behind the “sweet perpetuity of her smile” is carried on an equally perpetual manœvering, which ministers, under the auspices of refinement and the proprieties, to a small and selfish tyranny. If by any chance she is detected or foiled, she is deeply wounded, for if she hates anything, “it is the slightest concealment and reserve.” Moreover, she never thinks of herself, and is “really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights.” She is overcome by the spring weather,—[381]
“Primavera, I think the Italians call it. * * * It makes me sigh perpetually; but then I am so sensitive. Dear Lady Cumnor used to say I was like a thermometer.”
But it is in her association with Lady Harriet that her sincerity and candor shine forth. Apprised, on one occasion, of the intention of that personage—an aristocrat in character as well as social station—to honor her with a morning call, she dispatches to a neighbor her stepdaughter Molly, of whose friendship with Lady Harriet she is jealous, and keeps at home her own daughter Cynthia, to prepare the especially delicious luncheon to which the guest is to be invited as an impromptu bit of pot-luck. During this visit Lady Harriet brings up the question of white lies, confessing to an occasional indulgence, and asking her hostess if she never yielded to the temptation. She is answered:[382]
“I should have been miserable if I ever had. I should have died of self-reproach. ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,’ has always seemed to me such a fine passage. But then I have so much that is unbending in my nature.”
Dickens and Thackeray, like Lytton, Reade, and Kingsley, have too much of this trait in their own temperaments to be able to view it with complete detachment, but they present a few samples. Besides Mrs. Wititterly, Harold Skimpole, and the ever illustrative Mr. Dorrit, Dickens is most successful with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, and Mrs. Chick.
When Mr. Micawber, stimulated by the prospect of something being about to turn up, presents poor Traddles, with great éclat and ceremony, his personal note for the exact amount of his indebtedness, David, a witness, reflects:[383]