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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Fifty years after the modern study of sentimentalism was inaugurated by Ernest Bernbaum, the problem remains whether the term has ever been satisfactorily defined or described. Two recent developments reveal some of the difficulties: Arthur Sherbo in The English Sentimental Drama takes five basic criteria considered by most authorities as typical, and shows that they may all apply to plays demonstrably not sentimental. John Harrington Smith, in the preface to The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (1948), announces that he has completely avoided the term “sentimental” as too vague to be of much value. Yet Ronald Crane, writing fourteen years before, assumed the essential traits of sentimentalism to be fairly clear, and Norman Holland has implied that two criteria borrowed from Bernbaum and Krutch still supply an adequate definition. There is not even agreement whether sentimentality is a positive or negative quality. Krutch and Sherbo feel that it is false and dishonest, therefore bad. Crane concedes that it is somewhat limited intellectually, but emphasizes its humanitarianism and emotional warmth, especially the “self-approving joy” that makes virtue satisfying. Bernbaum vacillates between sympathy and contempt.
1 East Lansing, Mich., 1957, pp. 22–30.
2 Cambridge, Mass., 1948, p. vii.
3 R. S. Crane, “Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’,” ELH, I (1934), 206.
4 Holland, The First Modern Comedies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 113. For Krutch and Bernbaum, see notes 5 and 7 below.
5 Joseph Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (New York, 1949), p. 252; Sherbo, p. 166.
6 Crane, i, 205–230.
7 Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility (Boston, 1915). At times he speaks of a new development in the sentimental genre as an “advance” (p. 103) and observes that Steele in The Tender Husband “failed to use a good opportunity to enlarge the scope of the genre” (p. 101). He means that Steele could have made the subplot sentimental too, and declined. Later the movement is condemned almost without restriction: “True comedy was dead. The comic spirit … sought a mean refuge in farce or lived a slavish existence as the subordinate element in sentimental comedy” (p. 267). But the concluding dialogue between “Master Soft-heart and Sir Hardhead” that immediately follows avoids a definite conclusion (pp. 268–279).
8 Sherbo, p. 6.
9 Richard Steele, ed. G. A. Aitken (London, 1894), p. 187.
10 Tracts and Pamphlets by Richard Steele, ed. Rae Blan-chard (Baltimore, Md., 1944), p. 28.
11 Tracts, p. 47.
12 The Correspondence of Richard Steele, ed. Rae Blanchard (London, 1941), p. 108.
13 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Oxford, 1930), i, xiii–xiv (Shakespeare Head edition).
14 Plays Written by Mr. [Colley] Cibber (London, 1721), i, 30. All volume and page references to Cibber's plays are to this edition.
15 For further illustration, see the passage quoted by Crane, I, 206, and Taller, Nos. 92, 97, and 138.
16 George Lillo, The London Merchant and Fatal Curiosity, ed. A. W. Ward (Boston, 1906), p. 98.
17 Millwood claims that she is fated to ill-fortune (pp. 109–110). But Lillo here seems to be reviving the medieval warning against the dangers of despair. Barnwell's comments in the same scene show that she might be saved if she would only repent; but the awful consequences of sin without repentance (i.e., humiliation before the sentimentalist) have to be shown.
18 Taller, No. 98.
