"Sentimentalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my own person or through my officials. I wish to have only those about me who are willing to contribute to my designs, and with whom I can work in absolute harmony. All my officers are chosen to that end. No doubt a dash of constitutional sentimentalism gives colour to my theories. I get it from a human tract in me that circumstances have obliged me to put ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... under the German heel! The Russian Slav? He challenges the supremacy of Germany and Europe. Hurl your legions at him and massacre him! Britain? She is a constant menace to the predominancy of Germany in the world. Wrest the trident out of her hand! Christianity? Sickly sentimentalism about sacrifice for others! Poor pap for German digestion! We will have a new diet. We will force it upon the world. It will be made in Germany—[Laughter and applause]—a diet of blood and iron. What remains? Treaties have gone. The honor of nations has gone. Liberty has gone. What is left? ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... It's 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 her ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... country-born youth finds himself unable to live in his native land. The tone of public morals follows the prevailing spirit: crime is currently spoken of merely as a fault or a misfortune; the press teams with vicious sentimentalism; the administration of justice becomes more uncertain, perjury more common; the reputation of the colony is formed from the census, and the land becomes ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... 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 ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Never was ruler so absolute as 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 ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods—nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... morbid feeling. It is a false sentimentalism which lives in the past, and lavishes its tenderness on memory. It is difficult to say what is the dividing line between healthy sorrow and morbid sentiment. It seems a natural instinct, which makes the bereaved care lovingly ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... Perhaps the religious 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, if the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... valitudinarians and invalids. Among the patrons of the place was Madame Charles, whose memory Lamartine has immortalized as "Julie" in Raphael and as "Elvire" in the beautiful lines of the Meditations. In drawing the character "Julie," idealism and sentimentalism have full play. The whole story is romantic in the extreme. The influence of Byron is clearly to be seen. The beautiful hills of Savoy, tinged with the melancholy tints of autumn, were a fit setting for the meeting with the fair invalid. Besides physical invalidism, the pair were soul-sick ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the woods was an enemy to every sort of sentimentalism—though a more unromantic being than the pioneer can hardly be imagined—yet his character unquestionably took its hue, from the primitive scenes and events of his solitary existence. He was, in many things, as simple as ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... of keeping the eye on the subject, which is the essence of directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality, sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson's epigram and have discussed the matter elsewhere,[120] I shall pass to diseases which are ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... necessary, and where, though by his good conduct and his industry he may finally attain a decent subsistence, yet where he will be unable to acquire affluence, and which he will be prevented from leaving for a happier or a richer shore: this will be punishment without sentimentalism, and without ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... symbolic. That doubtful and double battle before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman. We connect Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of sentimentalism, with Byron and "The Black Brunswicker." We naturally sympathise with Wellington against Ney. We do not sympathise, and even then we did not really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon. Germany has complained that we passed over lightly ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... 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, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... escaping and running back to the mountains. 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 repeat ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... and looked fresh. Harry was always careful about his clothing, and the example of St. Clair inspired him to greater efforts. Besides, there was a society in Winchester, including many handsome young women of the old Virginia families, and even a budding youth who was yet too young for serious sentimentalism, could not ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... found this book interesting and suggestive. It is disgraced by none of the flippant and irreverent sentimentalism which characterizes M. Renan. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... work is an overwhelming love for mankind, a plea for solidarity which too often degenerates into sickly sentimentalism. He imitated Dickens, George Sand, and Victor Hugo—the Hugo of Les Miserables. He hated Turgenieff and caricatured him in The Possessed. It is true that in dialogue he has had few superiors; his men and women talk as they would talk in life ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... to move heaven and earth to rescue the woman he loves, the mob of Paris 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! The woman Juliette Marny, ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time, that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. Pamela was translated into French and German, and fell in with that current {207} of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, 1759, and Goethe's Leiden des ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and solemn an institution as the large public house, the Valencourt Arms. It was named after some splendid family that had long gone bankrupt, and whose seat was occupied by a man who had invented a hygienic bootjack; but the unfathomable sentimentalism of the English people insisted in regarding the Inn, the seat and the sitter in it, as alike parts of a pure and marmoreal antiquity. And in the Valencourt Arms festivity itself had some solemnity and decorum; and beer was drunk with reverence, as it ought ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the withholding of help by one brother from another, then away with scientific charity and its talked-of diminution of pauperism; and if the lending of a helping hand even to the unworthy be the result of sentimentalism, then ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... 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
... from scenes where the beauty and glory of her nature may be so nobly displayed! Can it be that an affected sensibility shall shut one of this sex from the chamber of sickness? Lives there the man, who commends this wretched sentimentalism? If there be one such in this land, we devoutly hope that our soil may soon cease to be polluted by his steps. Let him take refuge among the nobility of man's fabrication; for God hath denied him a ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... claim to have constructed—as Marx does in his 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 ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... was writing out of his personal experience, he contrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to put sentimentalism and rhetoric in its place. We have an instance of this in the story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse. Swinburne, at the age of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon, the pathologist. "She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he conceived ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... considerable success, and was shortly to be produced in London; his latest songs, 'The Light of Home', and 'Where the Willow Dips', had caught the ear of the multitude. Alma ridiculed these compositions, mocking at the sentimentalism of the words, and declaring that the airs were mere popular tinkle; but people not inferior to her in judgment liked the music, which certainly had a sweetness and pathos not easy to resist. The wonder was how such a man as Felix Dymes ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... 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 ignores ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Beechwood in four days, chiefly of the machinery of modern wealth. There were the elaborate meals, the drinking, the card-playing, the motors, the innumerable servants, and the sickening atmosphere of inane sentimentalism between the sexes. Everybody seemed to be having "an affair," and the talk was redolent of innuendo. Adelle had occasion to observe the potency of her lamp in this society. She worked it first upon the waiting-woman assigned to her, to whom she gave a large fee and who coached ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... to you? Jonathan Pindar? I wish to God he'd never come to Foxon Falls! I might have known what his opinions would be, with his inheritance. (Reproachfully.) I didn't suppose you could be so easily influenced by sentimentalism, George, I'd hoped ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... 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 a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... among them 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 or a green sprig in the lapel ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... this time it was with resentment. "What! you talk about making me think? Young man, you don't know what it is to think. You are confounded with the difference between sentimentalism and thought. You go ahead and print your newspaper and don't worry about the workingwoman. Her class will be larger and worse off, probably, a hundred years ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... forbidden by the reigning spirit and circumstances of the age to escape, either through the vent of sensual indulgence, or through that of mere dreaming sentimentalism, was forced to flow forth in the only remaining channel, that of self-consecration to perilous adventures, glorious services, feats of toil and penance. When arms and knight-errantry fell out of fashion, in a more ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism, and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between him and Marat. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... German sergeant in a flower plot alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump of tall red geraniums. That he could find time in the midst of that hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically German bit of sentimentalism. Just then, though, he stood erect and we were better informed. He had been talking over a military telephone, the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter snuggling beneath the geraniums. ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... even respect. It was always at least fifteen minutes before they would settle down for "work" and meanwhile they chattered about their common interests, but always with the air of relating long-delayed information and a frank desire to give of their best. He could have understood "gush," and sentimentalism, but this attitude of which he had neither heard nor read bothered him until one day he had a sudden, flash ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... rather than hopefulness gives 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 without humor came seldom to Irving; he wrote only one "History ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... characterizes the "moral" parts of most of these books, and skim lightly over them, 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 has ever ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... forth into a panegyric on the moral influence of woman which certainly demonstrated that if sentimentalism were a bar to voting, as Senators Vest and Reagan had insisted it should be, the senator from Alabama would have to be disfranchised. Part of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... 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 worn ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... man shouldn't be ashamed of buying what he has to eat, and needn't blush if he has to carry home what he wants to digest. His sermons in both manner and matter are essentially Haworthian. There is no gilt, no mock modesty in his style; there is to vapid sentimentalism in the ideas he expounds. A broad, unshaven, every-day Lancashire vigour pervades both; and what he can't make out he guesses at. In the pulpit he seems earnest but uneasy— honest, but fidgetty about his eyes, and legs. Watch him: he preaches extemporaneously, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... had much to do with him. He was in my watch. A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no chums. Yet James Wait, afraid of death and making her his accomplice was an impostor of some character—mastering our compassion, scornful of our sentimentalism, triumphing ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... sentiments, a world of admirable sayings and foul practices, of good maxims and bad deeds; whose darker passions are not only restrained by custom and ceremony, but hidden even from itself by a veil of beautiful sentiments. This terrible solecism has existed in all ages. Romish sentimentalism has often covered infidelity and vice; Protestant straightness often lauds spirituality and faith, and neglects homely truth, candor, and generosity; and ultra-liberal Rationalistic refinement sometimes soars to heaven in ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... have their worth as signs of aesthetic vitality and intimations of future possible accomplishment; but in themselves they are abortive, and mark the impotence of the imagination. Sentimentalism in the observer and romanticism in the artist are examples of this aesthetic incapacity. Whenever beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the eye has precision, the work has style, and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... with another spirit will be ushered in. What is to be the spirit of that age? Are we to find the forebodings in the dreamy sentimentalism, which boasts so much its flights beyond common material ideas? I trow rather, we may trace the character of the coming age in an increasing estimation of health, knowledge, mental cultivation, intellectual life, and the flow of the social affections, ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... the rather vapid sentimentalism and abstract theorizing of many of the periodicals controlled by the Sinn Feiners was his own sheet, the Irish Volunteer. It was the most practical of all the periodicals, and, beyond ordinary editorials and topical articles, always contained "Orders for the Week," which included ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... theory appeals with especial force to 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 ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... a better idea of the sentimentalism that more or less influences the tables of this country, however, if I tell you that the ladies of the coterie, in which the remarks on the amorous sister were made, once gravely discussed in ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... broken turret, for 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 their ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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 his later years at Gadshill, twenty miles ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism. That dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make respectable. As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson's Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... professes to accept both. But the Bible is interpreted in a manner that is pleasing to the unrenewed heart, while its solemn and vital truths are made of no effect. Love is dwelt upon as the chief attribute of God, but it is degraded to a weak sentimentalism, making little distinction between good and evil. God's justice, His denunciations of sin, the requirements of His holy law, are all kept out of sight. The people are taught to regard the decalogue as a dead letter. Pleasing, bewitching fables captivate the senses, and lead ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... of 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 ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... I shall go down to the dust without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's usefulness consists in being useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism. But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden any more than that this grass is green? If ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... I wondered how many of those brave young hearts in the crowded hall, now on "the long, long trail," would ever see again the land of their dreams. I took good care not to let the men know that I was ever moved by such sentimentalism. We were out to fight the Germans, and on that one object we had to concentrate all our thoughts to the obliteration ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... 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 a natural ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... 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 and the man of wealth being only this, that the one has ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... Chopin with sledge-hammer fingers will deaden all sense of his poetry, charm and grace. Whoever approaches him with weak sentimentalism will miss altogether his dignity and strength. It has been said of him that he was Woman in his tenderness and realization of the beautiful; and Man in his energy and force of mind. The highest ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... woman thoroughly like her name, it was Agatha Bowen. She was good, in the first place—right good at heart, though with a slight external roughness (like the sound of the g in her name), which took away all sentimentalism. Then the vowels—the three broad rich a's—which no one can pronounce with nimini-pimini closed lips—how thoroughly they answered to her character!—a character in the which was nothing small, mean, cramped, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... 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 ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom joined hands with one another? In making such a reflection we are not opposing physical considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are seeking to make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense. The late Dr. Combe is said by his biographer to have resisted the temptation to marriage, because he knew that he was subject to hereditary consumption. One who deserved to be called a man of genius, a friend of my youth, was in the habit of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... question of the novel's style, which is turgid because the lyric note intrudes, the most legitimate objection to the book is the sentimentalism which pervades it throughout, and palls on the reader before he reaches the conclusion. Like Richardson in his Pamela, but far to a greater extent than Richardson, Balzac has placed the struggle on the physical plane. Madame de Mortsauf ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... its waters and its trees—a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... The 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 a masterpiece ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... without too great a strain. He was young enough and ignorant enough of life in Paris to feel no necessity to be upon his guard, no need to keep a watch over his lightest words and glances. The religious sentimentalism, which finds a broadly humorous commentary in the after-thoughts of either speaker, puts the old-world French chat of men and women, with its pleasant familiarity, its lively ease, quite out of the question; they make love in ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... compendious explanation of their meaning—any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description—must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? Definitio est negatio. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism off from everything else—tell in a clause what it is not; but to add a positive content to the definition—to ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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
... with the Giaour, the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge ran races 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 they ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... 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, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... established, along with Professor Barrett, Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the Society for Psychical Research. These men hoped that if the material were treated rigorously, and, as far as possible experimentally, objective truth would be elicited, and the subject rescued from sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing ignorance on the other. Like all founders, Sidgwick hoped for a certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty years he would be in the same identical ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... way he was an adventurer—or rather an adventurous scientist. He was often called cynical but that was not true—he was far too dispassionate, too little of a sentimentalist to be tempted by inverted sentimentalism. Above all things he was a collector—a collector of impressions. His psychological bibelots were not for everyone. Some, indeed, lay open in the vitime of his everyday conversation but many more lay hidden in drawers opened only ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... by 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, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... entirely too soft about her," Miss Standish answered. "It is sickly sentimentalism like yours which is filling the hospitals with hysterical patients. Let 'em alone and they'll come ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the mud they have walked into. Charity for human weakness is all very well in its place, but it is precisely one of the virtues that you must not teach. You have to set an example of the sterner qualities—to discourage anything that resembles sentimentalism. And think if you illustrate in your own behaviour a sympathy for the very vice of character we are trying ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... destruction of 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 wicked perish, there ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... resemblant to the real, but far different in tone, must be created by the obedient writer in order to satisfy him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which he shares with other modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of sentimentalism, the refusal ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... judgment. In the main, however, the Transcendentalists are persons who hold that man has the power to perceive intuitively truths which transcend the reach of the senses; but they divide, some taking the unction of Sentimentalism, and ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... languishing air. She liked to have boys snuggle down by her; and so Thyrsis spent the whole of one evening, sitting in a summer-house with an arm about her waist, dissolved in a sort of moon-calf sentimentalism. And then he passed the rest of the night wandering about in the forest cursing himself, with tears of shame and vexation in ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... challenges the supremacy of Germany and Europe. Hurl your legions at him and massacre him. Britain? She is a constant menace to the predominancy of Germany in the world. Wrest the trident out of her hands. Ah! more than that. The new philosophy of Germany is to destroy Christianity. Sickly sentimentalism about sacrifice for others—poor pap for German digestion. We will have a new diet. We will force it on the world. It will be made in Germany. A diet of blood and iron. What remains? Treaties have gone; the honour of nations gone; liberty gone. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... patronage of Kheraskoff, belonged, by education and his comprehension of elegance and of poetry, to a later epoch—on the borderland between pseudo-classicism and the succeeding period, which was ruled by sentimentalism. His well-known poem, "Dushenka" ("Dear Little Soul"), was the first light epic Russian poem, with simple, intelligible language, and with a jesting treatment of a gay, playful subject. This subject Bogdanovitch borrowed from La Fontaine's novel, "The Loves of Psyche and Cupid," ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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 ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... epoch, dared not write an entirely honest novel! Nor a man either! Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England. The fear of the public, the lust of popularity, feminine prudery, sentimentalism, Victorian niceness—one or other of ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... uncle, is a form of sentimentalism, and all sentimentalism is despicable. This is a practical world. Determine the value of what you are after and count the cost. And wherever you can, reduce all items to dollars and cents. "Aha!" cry the hostile critics ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... The day was past for insurrections, and a real revolution could only arrive as a result of economic forces and class antagonisms. And it is quite obvious that he was becoming more and more irritated by the sentimentalism and dress-parade revolutionism of the socialist sects. He looked upon their projects as childish and theatrical, that gave as little promise of changing the world's history as battles between tin soldiers ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... as intense, noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle, and therefore original. I would especially insist on its manliness, because our present literature abounds in so-called passion which is but half-sincere or wholly insincere sentimentalism, if it be not thinly disguised prurient lust, and in so-called pathos which is maudlin to nauseousness. The great unappreciated poet last cited {George Meredith} has defined passion as 'noble strength on fire'; and this is the true passion of great natures ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition—though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth—soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. And to-day, the very people who, from the "impartiality" of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... The Brother often reproved him for his devotion to the Virgin, which he declared was veritable robbery of devotion due to God. In the Brother's opinion it enervated the soul, put religion into petticoats, created and fostered a state of sentimentalism quite unworthy of the strong. He bore the Virgin a grudge for her womanhood, her beauty, her maternity; he was ever on his guard against her, possessed by a covert fear of feeling tempted by her gracious mien, of succumbing to her seductive sweetness. ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... branded for life. His self-esteem was permanently maimed, and he rarely held up his head or did his best again. Besides which, - and this is true of all punishment - any sense of injustice destroys respect for the punisher. Still I am no sentimentalist; I have a contempt for, and even a dread of, sentimentalism. For boy housebreakers, and for ruffians who commit criminal assaults, the rod or the lash ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy. According to that ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... before long have been 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that a minister is to maintain some ethereal, unearthly station, where, wrapt in divine contemplation, he is to regard with indifference the actual struggles and realities of life, is a sickly species of sentimentalism, the growth of modern refinement, and altogether too moonshiny to have been comprehended by our stout-hearted and very practical fathers. With all their excellences, they had nothing sentimental about them; they were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... client he was jovially minded to do his best. The young fellow had taken a strong hold upon his liking. Moreover, the judge was a confirmed romantic, though he would have resented being thus catalogued. He chose to consider his inner stirrings of sentimentalism in the present case as due to a fancy for minor diplomacies and delicate negotiations. One thing he was sure of: that he was enjoying himself unusually, and that the Tyro was like to get very ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... opposite; the elder, Manuel, was of a frivolous, slothful, indolent disposition, and would neither study nor go to school. He was fond of romping about the fields and engaging in bold, dangerous escapades. The characteristic trait of Juan, the younger brother, was a morbid sentimentalism that would overflow in tears upon ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... argument was not by any means a complete or unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked out what little remained of the brains of the early Victorian rationalists. It is entirely nonsensical to speak of Ruskin as a lounging aesthete, who strolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact, Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when he was talking about economics. He constantly talked the most glorious nonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his business to understand. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... have been saying is not by way of depreciation. But it seems to me that the Valley is wonderful enough to stand by itself in men's appreciation without the unreality of sickly sentimentalism in regard to imaginary dangers, or the histrionics of playing wilderness where no ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... on a 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
... which to thousands of readers have seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they are soft—soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... and fervent about fashionable gossip,—of who is who, and what does what; she was alive to equipages, to dress, to sightseeing, to dancing, to any thing of which the whole stimulus and excitement was earthly and physical. At times, too, he remembered that she had talked a sort of pensive sentimentalism, of a slightly religious nature; but the least idea of a moral purpose in life—of self-denial, and devotion to something higher than immediate self-gratification—seemed never to have entered her head. ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... his weakness, whereby he had fallen, 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 passionate ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mr. Bryan's opinions and attitudes as a joke: to him they were a serious matter and, in his eyes, Bryan was most interesting as a national menace. He regarded the Secretary as the extreme expression of an irrational sentimentalism that was in danger of undermining the American character, especially as the kind of thought he represented was manifest in many phases of American life. In a moment of exasperation, Page gave expression to this feeling in a ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick |
