Personality in Literature

by R. A. Scott-James

Hippolyta. It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.

Shakespeare is commenting on the sentimentality which is generally pleasing to Quince, Snug, Bottom, and the like. If he is mistaken it is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of carpenters and bellows-menders, and is not equally to be found among those of the high estate of Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta herself. But it would never have done to admit so much before an audience of tinkers and tailors, splendidly patronised by a few young bloods of noble birth. Sentiment is distinguished from sentimentality precisely as Shakespeare suggests. The one is concerned with real emotions, the other with shadows. The first is informed by the imagination, the second is devoid of it, and is divorced alike from intellect and common sense. To touch the chord of sentiment justly and truly is one of the most difficult things in literature. Shakespeare himself by no means always succeeded. There is often an affectation in his lighter love-scenes which destroys the impression of sincerity. Even in life one may see how at any time the note of sentiment may be turned to absurdity by the least discordant element. The lover whose tender expressions are wholly pleasing to his lady may become an object of ridicule before an uninvited audience. Everyone can remember some occasion when a whole company of persons, wistfully alluding to a recent death, has suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter, betraying, not lack of respect for the dead, but ridicule at some falsity of expression.

Sentiment is one of the everyday emotions, fine and light in its texture, requiring the tenderest and most delicate treatment, and often it must pass off in laughter. It is something less than passion. It is not concerned with tragedies or crises, but the subtlest apprehensions of what comes and goes at every moment of life. It must never be treated as if it were passion, or the slender threads of which it consists will snap, and ridicule will justly reveal the unbalanced judgment of the sentimentalist. Nor must it ever be far from laughter, or it will collapse under its own strain, and we may be betrayed into thinking that the cynic is the best judge of life. It is the imagination exercising itself among things real, but not of the first order of importance. If you attribute to them that importance, you are guilty of false sentiment. The facts of life convict you.

See how delicately Charles Lamb could hold the balance in such an essay as Dream Children. Great-grandmother Field is just in her place, upright, graceful, and the best of dancers; and Alice's little right foot plays its involuntary movement in the nick of time; and when Uncle John died, the "children fell a-crying" at the narrative and asked about the mourning which they were wearing. It is all just important enough, just trivial enough, to carry its fragile burden of sentiment—so much, and no more. The charm is complete. Conceive what Dickens would have made of the story if he had been writing it! How sickly a fantasy of Paul Dombeys and Little Nells and garrulous "wild waves" he would have conjured up for his dream children! His dream children—the good ones, at any rate—were little old people, monstrosities, freaks. Reality rejects monstrosities, and what reality rejects is no subject for literature—strictly speaking, is no subject at all—save when, like goblins and fairies, it assumes the quasi-reality of fantasy and dreams.

I remember a story by a popular modern writer, Mr. E. Temple Thurston. It appeared in a volume entitled Thirteen. The author arranged his story with skill. He led up to his dénouement with admirable stage-management. The story was about a little boy who understood that his father wanted a shop and fifty pounds to buy it with. This amiable child sallies forth from his poor quarter of the city and tramps to the distant regions where rich people live. Nothing doubting, he asks for fifty pounds. He receives sixpence. He exchanges it for a pair of braces and an insurance ticket. He drowns himself with exquisite deliberation, and on the merits of his death and the insurance ticket the fifty pounds are forthcoming.

The defects of the story are obvious. The little boy has no proper place in this world, and his drowning, so far from being pathetic, was the best thing that could happen to him. For he was a freak, a monstrosity. Even those who may not accept this view must at least agree that he ought to have known better, and deserved a whipping rather than the reward of martyrdom and sentimental praise. But even if we assume that the boy is a possible creature, and that his act in begging for the money was beautiful and moving, we cannot escape the objection that the fatal ending is pitched in a discordant note of tragedy. The tragic conclusion is appropriate to a tale of passion, or to a tale which arouses a sense of the most urgent things in life. But to turn a slender sentiment into a thing of tragedy is to pass the limits of sentiment; it cannot carry the burden. The conclusion is not true enough to be even shocking. It is merely disgusting.

How is it that this mimicry of sentiment proves effective in moving the multitude, when the real thing so often fails to please? The answer, I think, is, that the artistic imagination can neither express itself through distorted objects, nor can it confuse in one blurred series of images the trivial and the urgent; its business being to see life with such sense of proportion as the concentrated artistic vision of the artist ensures. But careless readers do not see objects until they are exaggerated out of resemblance to life; the adjustments of the artistic vision are too delicate to reach their perceptions. Mr. Thurston's little boy is seen to be very good, and to the sentimentalist his mere goodness is "beautiful." When he tramps across London his fatigue is sad, and the sadness of it is beautiful. When the rich gentleman gives him sixpence instead of fifty pounds, the reader sheds happy, thoughtless tears, and his beautiful death at the end is all that he requires as the final "assault upon his feelings." The phrase, of course, is Stevenson's, and it can hardly be avoided. Popularity rewards the writer who can assault the feelings of his readers, and anyone who uses a more delicate method must be content with a smaller circle of readers.

It is in this manner, amiably enough, that Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox can conquer America with sentimental poems, as Ian Maclaren once conquered England with sentimental stories. They touch us where the intellect and the common sense are in abeyance, and the moral sense is steeped in false sentiment. Thus it was that when a sort of torpor came upon the intellect and the common sense of Mr. A.C. Benson, he, who had been formerly a scholar and a friend of literature, became merely a sentimentalist. The author of The Sick-a-bed Lady (Eleanor Halliwell Abbott) is for the same reason esteemed as highly in America as the author of Letters to My Son is esteemed in England. The trowel is the instrument with which these honours—and these fortunes—are won.

III. It might seem that the popular literature of love ought to have been treated under the same head as that of sentimental literature. But it will become clear not only that there can be a popular erotic literature of a quite different order, but that I might have subdivided this class into two: one concerned with the popular literature of passion, the other with that of sensualism. There is, of course, a sentiment of love which is sufficiently considered in the last section. But I have made a distinction between sentiment and passion, which for my view is important; and I must add the further and more obvious distinction between the love passion, which is an intense emotional experience affecting the imagination no less than the senses, and that sex feeling, which in essence is merely sensual. Leaving out of count, then, the "sentiment" of love, we have an obvious distinction between the literature which deals with the love passion and the literature which deals with sensual desire. But I do not propose any grandmotherly legislation which permits one subject to the artist and relegates the other to the pornographer. For it is clear that an author may deal well or ill with a subject intended to yield genuine passion (though in the latter case the popular interest will attach to the sensational character of the incidents rather than to the treatment of passion as such, and a book of this kind may be considered as I have already considered the "novel of incident"). And, again, an author may deal well or ill with the sensations of sex; those sensations can provide material for fine art. It is a matter of treatment. Upon feelings of this sort Maupassant based some of his most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding, for whom they were of less special significance on their own account, they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of delight in energetic life for its own sake.

It has already become obvious that the tendency of the most popular literature is to substitute the cruder sensations for the higher emotions and sentiments. We have seen how incident is liked for the mere sensation it can afford; how sentiment is turned into sentimentality. As a rule, in discussing inferior literature the higher emotions need be taken little into account. But in the case of love it is different. The average man, by reason of his pre-occupation and his averageness, is little affected by a variety of fine emotions; the hard facts of life smother them. But everyone can observe that the emotion of love is not only an emotion to which most men at a certain age are susceptible, but that it seems to present itself, at some time or another, in a form finer than that of any other feeling entertained by average men. I believe that all observers would agree that innumerable men and women who cannot be touched in a subtle way by any other emotion—unless we except, especially in primitive men, the emotion of war; and then it is rather intense than subtle—can be and are so touched by the emotion of love.