"Sentimentalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the fact is. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad; if good, he will perceive and respect its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... at the rim of the cliffs, and the place of awe and thunders was slowly filling with shadow. We found a steep trail, inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward in the direction of Benton. It was getting that time of day when even a sentimentalist wants a beefsteak, especially if he has hiked over dusty scorching trails and ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... No doubt the sentimentalist and all whose moral sense has been vigorously trained in the old school will find this rather a dreadful suggestion; it amounts to saying that for the Abyss to become a "hotbed" of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of the ruling class in ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... waterfall in the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name to-day) the "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had called it, because it was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." In fact, your cascade is dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... sentimentalist, yet he, too, felt the tears well in his eyes, even as Beta did, when they locked the door and slowly went down the broad steps to the walk he had ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... September morning at the close of my eleventh year, my Father called me over to him. I climbed up, and was snugly wrapped in the coverlid; and then we held a momentous conversation. It began abruptly by his asking me whether I should like to have a new mamma. I was never a sentimentalist, and I therefore answered, cannily, that that would depend on who she was. He parried this, and announced that, anyway, a new mamma was coming; I was sure to like her. Still in a noncommittal mood, I asked: 'Will she go with me to the back of the lime-kiln?' This question caused my Father a great ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... honest rough heartiness Mr. Lewes will give you; yet in case you have the misfortune to remark that the heartiness might be quite as honest if it were less rough, would you not run the risk of being termed a sentimentalist or a dreamer? ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... TREBELL. The man's a sentimentalist ... like all men who live alone or shut away. [Then surveying his three glum companions, bursts out.] Well...? We can stop thinking of this dead woman, can't we? It's a waste ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... power, sets himself to the direction of that power toward nature's, if not humanity's, ends. At the first he cares nothing for Katherine save that the rumor of her fire and spirit has pleased his wild fancy. And never is there the faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... tree 'fort gros et fort prs'—the sarcasm of a Roman emperor applies, that to miss under such conditions implied an original genius for stupidity, and to hit was no trial of the case. After all, the sentimentalist had youth to plead in apology for this extravagance. He was hypochondriacal; he was in solitude; and he was possessed by gloomy imaginations from the works of a society in the highest public credit. But ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... remarkable; the puzzle was, how could he do it now? Out of all the wreck of his small memory, why was this song, the meaning of which he had never understood, the sole survivor? Was it that his affection for Mr. Pennroyal had kept it alive? So might a sentimentalist have concluded; but the Doctor was a man of sense. Was it that the boy was shamming? Impossible on all accounts. ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... familiar with the process of 'whitewashing' historical characters. We are past being surprised at finding Tiberius portrayed as an austere and melancholy recluse, Henry VIII pictured as a pietistic sentimentalist with a pedantic respect for the letter of the law, and Napoleon depicted as a romantic idealist, seeking to impose the Social Contract on an immature, reluctant Europe. Though the 'whitewashing' method is probably not less paradoxical than the opposite system, it makes a stronger and wider appeal, ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... Symp.)—which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not have been expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them. Yet Plato was not a mystic, nor in any degree affected by the Eastern influences which afterwards overspread the Alexandrian world. He was not an enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired only to see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his language. There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to be found in his writings. And ...
— Symposium • Plato
... only a sentimentalist can fail, in the province of pathos.... There is no trifle, animate or inanimate, he will not bewail, if he be but in the mood; nor does it shame him to dangle before the public gaze those poor shreds of sensibility he calls ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... perfectly clear to all. So far from coming down to the level of the students, the professor expects that the students will make every possible exertion to rise to his level, while he himself can scarcely be said to lend a helping hand. To the sentimentalist, then, he might appear a very selfish mortal. But by going beneath the surface of the relation between professor and student, and examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an eminently healthful relation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... workmanship. It has been said that Byron could only represent himself under various disguises, that Childe Harold and The Corsair, Lara and Manfred and Don Juan, are variants of a single personality, the egotist who is at war with his fellows, the generous but nefarious sentimentalist who sins and suffers and yet is to be pitied for his suffering. None the less, with whatever limitations as artist or moralist, he invented characters and types of characters real enough and distinct enough to leave their mark ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... dream of the sentimentalist? No, more than that; for the German people, after their agony, were ready to respond to generous dealing, pitiful in their need of it, and there is enough sentiment in German hearts—the most sentimental people in Europe—to rise with a surge of emotion to a new ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... profane as well as to sacred history, and persons with deeply rooted prejudices touching the people of Biblical story will be happiest if they can think of some other than the Scriptural Solomon as the prototype of Mosenthal and Goldmark, for in truth they make of him a sorry sentimentalist at best. The local color of the old story has been borrowed from the old story; the dramatic motive comes plainly from "Tannhuser"; Sulamith is Elizabeth, the Queen Venus, Assad Tannhuser, and Solomon Wolfram. Goldmark's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... his shame for them went the violent conviction of the duties of his station—a conviction that was quite unreasonably expensive. I trust I have not, in talking of his liabilities, given the impression that poor Edward was a promiscuous libertine. He was not; he was a sentimentalist. The servant girl in the Kilsyte case had been pretty, but mournful of appearance. I think that, when he had kissed her, he had desired rather to comfort her. And, if she had succumbed to his blandishments I daresay he would have ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... you think me a bad egg, but I'm not; I'm not really," he went on, to add, after a moment's pause, "I believe at heart I'm a sentimentalist." ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... God's blessing, I think." He spoke thoughtfully now. "Stuart is a sentimentalist. He lives largely on dreams and poetry ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... an arm. "You've wrecked my life. Oh, Fannie, I'm no mere sentimentalist. I can say in perfect command of these wild emotions, 'Enchantress, fare ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... Fielding is quite as natural as the other's laughter and contempt at the sentimentalist. I have not learned that these likings and dislikings have ceased in the present day: and every author must lay his account not only to misrepresentation but to honest enmity among critics, and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... button-hole or rolled a pie-crust, despite a gray shimmer at her temples and a significant tracery at the corners of her eyes, has a chamber in her heart marked "private" where she keeps enshrined some tender memory. At the core, every woman is a sentimentalist. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... and Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his amazing influence largely to his cheerful and wholesome this-worldliness. He was a sentimentalist, but obviously different in spirit from the two great English writers of sentiment who were most nearly his contemporaries. Thackeray is sophisticated; fortune's buffets have left him still a tender interest ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... of his own to come home to. He didn't look as if anybody had ever made a fuss of him. I asked him to stay with us for a week, but he wouldn't. I think he thought I was rather mad to ask him, and Pamela laughed at me about it.... She laughs at me a good deal and calls me a 'sentimentalist.' ... ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope; he loves Goldsmith and Steele and Harry Fielding; he has no love for Sterne, great admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for Addison. How could it be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift a misanthrope and Sterne a factitious sentimentalist? He is a man of instincts, not of thoughts: he sees and feels. He would be Shakespeare's call-boy, rather than dine with the Dean of St. Patrick's. He would take a pot of ale with Goldsmith, rather than a glass of burgundy with the "Reverend ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... may astonish you a little. You may have been delighting in Mr. CALTHROP'S fantastic work (as I do myself) and yet have cherished the suspicion that his Columbines and Chelsea fairies and Moonbeam folk generally were the creations of a sentimentalist who would have little taste for handling unsympathetic things. Well, if so, Philippina is the answer to that. Here is the most masterly portraiture of a woman utterly without imagination or heart or anything except a kind of futile and worthless attraction, that I remember to have ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... practical man. Geometry disgusted him, and as for dates, he could not remember one. On holidays he liked to walk by himself through quiet streets; he read poems at the bookstalls, and lingered in the Luxembourg Gardens to see the sun set. Destined to be a dreamer and a sentimentalist—so much the ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... there declared for our instruction and guidance that "the people do ordain and establish this Constitution ... to promote the general welfare." By what right do statesmen now venture to think that they can leave our national interests out of the account? Who and where is the sentimentalist who arraigns us for descending to too sordid a level when we recognize our interest to hold what the discharge of duty has placed in our hand? Since when has it been statesmanship to shut our eyes to the interests of our own country, and patriotism to consider only the interests ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... "I feel guilty, as though it were cowardly not to have lived where I was put. But—have you ever seen a straw, caught on a snag, try to stop a river? To your sentimentalist that straw looks heroic; to anybody that knows the difference between bathos and pathos it simply looks silly. The river of life is bigger than that of any nation. We can't stop it, but we can swell it by going with it. Did you ever see a mule drink ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... forbearing look in them promised that his understanding would not be stiffened by harshness, that it would be accompanied by sympathy so keen that, were it not for the hint of humour which they also held, he might almost have been mawkish, a sentimentalist too easily dissolved in tears. His thick eyebrows clung closely to his eyes, and gave him a look of introspection that mitigated the shrewdness of his pointing nose. There was some weakness, but not much, in the full, projecting lower lip and the slightly receding chin that caused his ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... the most unfortunate of the feathered tribe in his relations to man; for by almost all nations he is regarded with hatred, and every man's hand is against him. He is protected neither by custom nor superstition; the sentimentalist cares nothing for him as an object of poetical regard, and the utilitarian is blind to his services as a scavenger. The farmer considers him as the very ringleader of mischief, and uses all means he can invent for his destruction; the friend of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and He has kept the women in bondage, hasn't He?—in factory bondage, in nursery bondage, in prostitution bondage? Is what I say true, or isn't it true? I ask you, I ask any person who has got such a thing as a clear brain and is not simply a mushy sentimentalist, is what ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... the great building in imagination to the little basilica built by Constantine the sentimentalist, on the site of Nero's circus; built by some other man perhaps, for no one knows surely; but a little church, at best, compared with many of those which Saint Peter's dwarfs to insignificance now. To remind men of him the effigy of that same Constantine sits on a marble charger there, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... these stumps, and making preparations for grading the land. As he watched her active movements, energetic tones, and fresh open face, he fell into a maze of wondering thought. This was no morbid sentimentalist; no pining, heart-broken woman. Except that truthfulness was stamped on every lineament of Hetty's countenance, Father Antoine would have doubted her story; and, except that her every act showed such vigorous common sense, he would have doubted her sanity. As it was, his ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... he snarled. Halfman's whole being flashed into activity again. He was no more a sentimentalist ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is bending the violet eyes of hers upon a piece of Moorish silk, let me clear my mind of humbug. I am no sentimentalist in this matter. I am not certain, yet, that "my lady" of to-day is the sole repository of every virtue; neither am I dogmatic about "necessary vice," the "irreducible minimum," and such-like large viewpoints. I have, indeed, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... honor to this true love, which, with all the reasons for its justification, and all the pathos of its heavenly source, glides stealthily to the royal palace, and hides itself under the shadow of the silent night. My good young sentimentalist, remember I am not a novice like yourself; I am an old fogy, and call things by their right names. Every passion is a true and eternal love, and every loved one is an angel of virtue, beauty, and purity, until we weary of the adventure, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... to differ, you sentimentalist? Can't they respect each other, without echoing each ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... blood, you old sentimentalist. That shot in the dark was a clear miss. We followed the trail by broken bushes and footprints, for half a mile, and then came back to the pond and turned to go down through the edge of ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... was not by nature a sentimentalist—and he was not a fool. He knew how to accept the inevitable things life cruelly brings to men, without futile struggling, without contemptible pretence. Quite calmly, quite serenely, he had accepted the snows of middle age. He had not secretly groaned or cursed, railed ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... than what William Sharp wrote, readier entrance into the magazines, and better pay. If there are those to whom such an explanation seems belittling to William Sharp, I can only say that they cannot have realized that he was a driven man earning his living by his pen. I am not, I confess, a sentimentalist in such matters, and while I do not wholly like his procedure in maintaining the fiction of "Fiona Macleod," it does not seem to me a ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Decoud almost cooed, in a tone of gentle and soothing deference. "Sentimentalist, after the amazing manner of your people. I have been watching El Rey de Sulaco since I came here on a fool's errand, and perhaps impelled by some treason of fate lurking behind the unaccountable turns of a man's life. But I don't matter, I am not a sentimentalist, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... kissed him and then went out. She was moved, but there was nothing to be said. Her father was not a sentimentalist, but he had never failed her and would not do so now. When she sat down in her room, however, her face was grave. Her courage was high, but she felt half afraid. Although she loved Bob Charnock, life with him might be ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... must be yet another meeting, yet another last interview. And from that last interview nothing but pain could come to Shere Ali. Therefore she anticipated it with a great reluctance. Violet Oliver did not live among illusions. She was no sentimentalist. She never made up and rehearsed in imagination little scenes of a melting pathos where eternal adieux were spoken amid tears. She had no appreciation of the woeful luxury of last interviews. On the contrary, ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... wouldn't. That's a stock phrase of the sentimentalist. The sentimentalist is always thinking, that's all he does, and he breaks his heart over it if other people don't act what ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... them isn't losing them, you foolish sentimentalist," returned Gerald, gently unclasping Phebe's arms. "Now go to bed. You ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... not so very old in years. Romance has passed me by, but—I love it still. It still stirs me surprisingly when I see it in other people—young people who are simple and earnest, and who—and who are in love." He laughed gently, still turning the glass in his hand. "I am afraid you will call me a sentimentalist," he said, "and an elderly sentimentalist is, as a rule, a ridiculous person. Ridiculous or not, though, I have rather set my heart on your success in this undertaking. Who knows? You may succeed where we others have failed. Youth has such a way of charging in and carrying ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... earl was scarcely the sentimentalist to give way to such a passion of loyalty for a weaker side. Yet his lordship had spoken, not with the cold calm of the practical man who seeks advantage, but with all the fervor ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... cluster of mud huts ached in the heat of a right angle where the trunk road crossed a native road some seventy miles from Bholat, Bill Brown—swordsman and sergeant and strictest of martinets, as well as sentimentalist—had been set to watch and listen ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... as if her anger had subsided; yet, as if struggling with unusual feelings, she sat silent. Mr. Beaumont continued, "Your son—who is no sentimentalist, no speech-maker—your son, who has hitherto perhaps been too rough, too harsh—now implores you, by these sincere caresses, by all that is tender and true in nature, to believe in the filial affection of your children. Give us, simply give us your confidence; and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... expostulates—begs them not to stain their hands and souls with the blood of the vanquisher who has treated them so magnanimously. They scorn him as a deserter of his own class; they leave, and he swears to save "Irenens Bruder." He has become sentimentalist; but some of the music of the scene has strength. Then the people conveniently flock in; ambassadors come from all corners of the earth to acknowledge Rienzi; Adriano warns him that mischief is breeding, and Rienzi calmly smiles; there is a ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Peter Hope's abomination. Had he not penned articles innumerable pointing out its baneful influence upon the age? Had he not always condemned it, wherever he had come across it in play or book? Now and then the suspicion had crossed Peter's mind that, in spite of all this, he was somewhat of a sentimentalist himself—things had suggested this to him. The fear ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... absolutely a fact all the same. I can't tell you here the romance of my life. I couldn't do it in surroundings like these. We will go on to your rooms presently, and then I will make a clean breast of the whole thing to you. You may be disposed to laugh at me for a sentimentalist, but I should like to stay here a little longer, if it is only now and again to hear a word or two from her lips. If you will push those flowers across between me and the light I shall be quite secure from observation. I ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... of his crabbedness, was a sentimentalist; he also was blind, and his voice was equally ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... From the orthodox sentimentalist he could claim no compassion. He had lost not his heart's love but a very comfortable settlement; he was wounded more in his vanity than in his affections; he had wasted not his life, only one of ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... are aware, my dear Mahony, no sentimentalist. But these rioters of yours seem to me the very type of man the country needs. Could we have a better bedrock on which to build than ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... I am, for one moment, depreciating sentiment. I worship it; I am a sentimentalist myself. But everything has its place, and sentiment of this kind belongs to young unmarried life—to the period when you are engaged, or when you ought to be engaged. The young man whom I have described—the crisp, perfect, insipid, dry-toast man—would only be bored by a wife ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... election. Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-god. He renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... would stick to him. He was not a maudlin sentimentalist, but the memory of her farewell kisses was yet strong with him; and his past experiences of woman's weaknesses and his own strength justified him in thinking that in this one woman he had found his pearl ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... much a matter of mechanism, of show, and of holiday, as the 'grand jet-d'eau.'" He was mistaken. We ended with a parting health to Mariamne, and his promise to attend to my interests at the Horse-guards, on which I was still strongly bent. The Jew was clearly no sentimentalist; but the glass of wine, and the few words of civility and recollection with which I had devoted it to his pretty daughter, evidently touched the father's heart. He lingered on the steps of the hotel, and still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... till the police had set about securing the conviction of one of the possible murderers. Then, when the case of the police against the murderer was revealed, he would come forward and break it down. He had decided that Mr. Manley was a sentimentalist, and he knew well the difficulty of dealing with sentimentalists. Moreover, Mr. Manley was animated by a grudge against the murdered man. Mr. Flexen could quite conceive that he might presently be regarding perjury as a duty; he had had experience of the queer ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... nations, civilized and non-civilized."[8] In these declarations the differences between Marx and Bakounin stand forth vividly. Marx at no time states what he wishes. He expresses no sentiment, but confines himself to a cold statement of the facts as he sees them. Bakounin, the dreamer, the sentimentalist, and the revolution-maker, wants the whole world free. Whether or not Marx wants the same thing is not the question. He rigidly confines himself to what he believes is possible. He says certain conditions must exist before a people can be free and independent. Among ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... life; he published in 1819 "Meditations Poetiques," in 1847 the "Histoire de Girondins," besides other works, including "Voyage en Orient"; he was "of the second order of poets," says Professor Saintsbury, "sweet but not strong, elegant but not full;... a sentimentalist and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.—The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... of love is sentimentality.—The sentimentalist is on hand wherever there is a chance either to mourn or to rejoice. He is never so happy as when he is pouring forth a gush of feeling; and it matters little whether it be laughter or tears, sorrow or joy, to which he is permitted to give vent. On the surface he seems to be overflowing ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... and agreeable. I do not myself believe that anybody invented the mode of feeling; but it is true that Richardson was the first writer who definitely turned it to account for a new literary genus. Sentimentalism, I suppose, means, roughly speaking, indulgence in emotion for its own sake. The sentimentalist does not weep because painful thoughts are forced upon him but because he finds weeping pleasant in itself. He appreciates the 'luxury of grief.' (The phrase is used in Brown's Barbarossa; I don't know who invented it.) Certainly ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... this was for the best. Only the wildest sentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made a good wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for power," the probable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been a constant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... castaway's alarms and fits of despair. Defoe's aims lay another way. His Crusoe is not a man given to the luxury of grieving. If he had begun to pity himself, he would have been undone. Perhaps Defoe's imaginative force was not of a kind that could have done justice to the agonies of a shipwrecked sentimentalist; he has left no proof that it was: but if he had represented Crusoe bemoaning his misfortunes, brooding over his fears, or sighing with Ossianic sorrow over his lost companions and friends, he would have spoiled the consistency of the character. The lonely man had his moments of panic and his ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... beginning of the outbreak Nero had sent one of his trusted generals, Vespasian, and Vespasian's son Titus, to put down the insurrection. Neither of these soldiers was a sentimentalist; both believed as heartily as did Wentworth in later years that the word of the hour was Thorough. They started with their armies from Antioch in March, 67, resolved on sweeping Palestine with the besom of destruction. Cities and villages, one by one, were besieged, captured, destroyed; men, women, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... about the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters and chapels of the Oxford colleges. The amateur of the past cannot here stand at gaze before any single ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... see that it was a natural enough thing for him to have said. It would never have occurred to him, pleasant, harmless sentimentalist that he was, that John's second marriage might be a disturbing factor in his relation with Mary and that the question so cheerfully asked as an escape from the more serious matter that he had been talking about, struck straight into a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... because there was a small bean concealed beneath the twenty eider- down beds on which she slept, might stand for a type of the aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in these ridiculous susceptibilities. The modern sentimentalist works in a coarser material. That ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among the emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before now been made the ally of the unpurified passions, is parodied by him in a simpler and more useful device. By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... Disraeli had something to say, and still more unluckily that something was a mere nothing. It was the creed of Young England; and even greater imaginative power might have failed in the effort to instil the most temporary vitality into that flimsy collection of sham beliefs. A mere sentimentalist might possibly have introduced it in such a way as to impress us at least with his own sincerity. But how is such doctrine to be uttered by lips which are, at the same time, pouring out the shrewdest of sarcasms against politicians who, if more pachydermatous, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... was ailing and needed him? He answered maliciously: "I fancied that your trip might upset your nerves. I am really beginning to believe you care more for your young composer than you do for me. Ellenora Vibert, sentimentalist!—what a joke." ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... people, and also all the monstrous abuses to which his system would inevitably lead, in his desire to see a practical establishment of the most obnoxious and high-toned claims of his church. He is evidently half way between an idealist and a sentimentalist, with hardly an atom of practical sagacity or knowledge of affairs. The cool dogmatism with which he condemns the great statesmen of his country, is particularly offensive as coming from a man utterly ignorant of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... a sentimentalist. He would have liked to live in a world of ideally united couples, himself ideally united to some charming and affectionate girl. But, as a matter of cold fact, he was a bachelor, and most of the couples he knew were veterans ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... usually follows under the law of cause and effect. Overbeck's pictures, as those of others, yield under analysis as their component parts, nature plus tradition, plus individual self. As to the individual man, we have found Overbeck the poet and philosopher, the mystic, somewhat the sentimentalist, and, above all, the devout Catholic. The character is singularly interesting, and the products are unusually complex. He had forerunners and many imitators, yet he stands alone, and were his pencil lost, a blank would be felt in the realm of ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... Some toothless old sentimentalist or other periodically sets up a melancholy howl for "the good old days of comic opera," whatever or whenever they were. Perhaps none of us, once past forty, is guiltless in this respect. Nothing, not even the smell of an apple-blossom from the old homestead, the sight of a daguerreotype ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... ought to be and what ought not, ever to put herself in her father's place and try to understand him. She concerned herself with judging him sorrowfully, exonerating him in part because Helena, that other, was so much more to blame. Frank, as a sentimentalist, wept over the situation, not over the personae. The children were acutely distressed by the harassing behaviour of the elders, and longed for a restoration of equanimity. By common consent no word was spoken of Siegmund. As soon as possible after the funeral Beatrice moved ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... voice squeaked. "I am only sincere. It's not denied that the other was the leading spirit. Well, it would have been better if he had been the one spared to us. More useful. I am not a sentimentalist. Say what ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... on either side, cavil at Europe's policy during that war; calculating, selfish and cruel as it may seem to the sentimentalist. If corporations really have no bowels, governments can not be looked to for nerves. Interest is the life blood of their systems; and interest was doubtless best subserved by the course of the Great Powers. For the rumors of destitution and of disaffection in France and England—caused ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... genial theme. "Poor fallen child of Nature!" said he. "For what is birth or what is looks of virtue like a summer flower! It is to be brought down by hand of man." He was warmed to his text. Habit had long made him so much hypocrite, that he was sentimentalist and hard materialist in one. "Some pend'loque has brought her beauty to this pass, but she must suffer—and also his time will come, the sulphur, the torment, the worm that dieth not—and no Abraham for parched tongue—misery me! They that meet in sin ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Greeks, and never produced any thing original but jurisprudence. They did not even add to the arts and sciences, which they applied to practical purposes. Their literature never produced a sentimentalist; their philosophy never soared into idealism; their art never ventured upon new creations. Their supreme ambition was to rule, and to rule despotically. They gloried in slavery, and degraded women and trod upon the defenseless. They had no pity, no gentleness, no delicacy of feeling. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... figurative possession of her tastes and habits was the one whom she had quietly, reflectively, and understandingly half accepted as her lover, and on whose account she had come to consult Rushbrook. But Somers was not a sentimentalist; in fact, as a young girl, forced by her independent position to somewhat critically scrutinize masculine weaknesses, this had always been a point in his favor; yet even if he had joined with his friend Rushbrook to perpetuate the memory of their first acquaintanceship, his ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... aesthetic grounds—an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was weakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and a rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent for pictorial ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... ideas, a sentimentalist, and a poseur, but he had an eye to the main chance. Whatever cause or dynasty suffered, the Emperor Alexander was still triumphant. Byron's special grudge against him at this time was due to his vacillation with regard ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... passion for being a nuisance, and mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies which carry Radicals and Labour ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the course of the tale that gives its title to The Blower of Bubbles (CHAMBERS) the character who is supposed to relate it denies that he is a sentimentalist. I may as well say at once that, if this denial is intended to apply also to Mr. ARTHUR BEVERLEY BAXTER, who wrote the five stories that make up the volume, a more comprehensive misstatement was never embodied in print. Because, from the picture on the wrapper, representing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... and there can be but the one, that the false in each kind do so exceedingly abound, that none can be taken as genuine without such special certificate. The widespread confusion with the poet of the rhetorician and sentimentalist in verse, and again of the mere rhymer without even rhetoric, not to refer to finer differentiation of error, is also a fruitful source of bewilderment. The misuse of the word has parallels: for instance, the spurious generic use of the word 'man' for 'male,' the substitution of 'artist' for 'painter.' ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compassionate. . . . Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that nature has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog and combines with his theoretical objection to capital punishment a lust to murder all ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... exclaimed. "It's your misfortune that you're a sentimentalist with a habit of exaggerating things; but if you don't indulge in your weakness too much, you'll go a long way. You showed the true Challoner pluck when you smoked out that robbers' nest in the hills, and the pacification of the frontier valley was a smart piece of ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... and an accident may determine the direction of their future development. It is the age when it is possible for fortune to make a dare-devil of a philosopher, a sceptic of a worshipper, a cynic of a sentimentalist. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... too, horrible and cruel." Whether it be vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the same—sentiment which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the private sentiments of the writer. This is Shelley; a sentimentalist pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning; unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the system of 1800—1830, is, I thank God, impossible. Even though men's hearts should fail them, they must onward, they know not whither: though God does know. The bigot, who believes in a system, and not in the living God; the sentimentalist, who shrinks from facts because they are painful to his taste; the sluggard, who hates a change because it disturbs his ease; the simply stupid person, who cannot use his eyes and ears; all these may cry feebly to the world to do what ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... their City Hall,—when we hung out our banners, and clanged our bells, and banged our guns,—when there was Glory to God in the highest steeple, and Peace on Earth in the lowest cellar,—I drifted down the Broadway current of a mighty flood of folk, a morose and miserable sentimentalist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... humanity,—the virtue and flavor of sailors, soldiers, laborers, travelers, or people who live with real things in the open air. His commonness rose into the uncommon, the extraordinary, but without any hint of the exclusive or specially favored. He was indeed "no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... I ask," said Tennant, with a troubled laugh. "I am sentimentalist enough to feel something like gratitude towards those who ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... second first. It is the objection of the sentimentalist; and, ridiculous as the mode of discussion appears when applied to the laws of natural philosophy, the sociologist is constantly met by objections of just that character. Especially when the subject ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... was a congenital sentimentalist, her tendency confirmed by a long course of novel-reading, would have loved a female Fauntleroy, and hoped to find it in each of her brother's children in turn—only to be bitterly disappointed when they came to ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... a sentimentalist turned man of action. When this miracle can be accomplished, you may expect a very decided, even implacable, character—because it is much more difficult to crush one's poetry than to crush one's passions. The passions are more or less physical, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... a feeble sentimentalist, with a deep belief in phrases. He is a better fellow than King, and is only an intolerable goose. Both the men make me wish to burst upon the scene, when they are grossly mishandling some simple situation; but while I want to kick ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... London,—her one aim and object in life now was to return to Weircombe and explain everything to Angus as quickly as possible. And when the train had gone, Sir Francis left the platform in a state of profound abstraction, and was driven home in his brougham feeling more like a sentimentalist than a lawyer. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Miller is herself an expert, she tells us that she has been careful to have the latest and the best authorities for the statements made, and presents a list of them. The author, while never a sentimentalist, constantly teaches kindness to the birds. There are ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold |
