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More "Sentimentality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Rotten sentimentality!" exclaimed Lawrence. "The curse of the age. Oh, there's no doubt she was clever. She played her cards so well that she succeeded in deceiving the principal looker-on ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... rightful influence. After publishing his greatest poem, The Excursion, the tide of generous appreciation set in. In 1843, Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate. His pure and fervent poetry was a protest against the diseased sentimentality of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... is extremely good reading from end to end; it abounds in entertaining and exciting episodes, is wholly void of sentimentality, and enforces in the most unmistakable and wholesome way the duty ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... such provision was necessary for them. He acknowledged that they had a large share of physical suffering to endure, but asserted that Nature, to preserve her balance, must have arranged their minds so as to render them incapable of suffering in any other way. Sentimentality, hysteria, and silliness, he said, were at the bottom of all their mental troubles, which did ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. "Human creatures," says George, borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you aman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... regain the kingdom which belongs alone to inspiration. Science and industry enabled them to galvanize the corpse of art; into this they breathed the breath of the religion a la mode, of fashionable sensuousness and prevalent sentimentality. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... gratifying shelter from the scorching sun. Not a sound was heard but the gentle ripple of a limpid stream, breaking over the boulders on its course towards the ravine below. But it was hardly the moment to ponder on the poetic scene, for fatigue and hunger had almost overcome sentimentality, and I got as quickly as I could to the first resting-place. This I found to be a native cane-grower's plantation bungalow, where quite a number of persons was assembled, the occasion of the meeting ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... companions had been treated in the same way, and according to public opinion in that part of the country there was nothing abnormal in the proceeding. Indeed, it may be said in general that there is very little romance or sentimentality about Russian peasant marriages. In this as in other respects the Russian peasantry are, as a class, extremely practical and matter-of-fact in their conceptions and habits, and are not at all prone to indulge in sublime, ethereal sentiments of any kind. They have little or nothing of what may ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day—an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics—but land! can a body ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... seems still and full of tender sound and colour, and we, like Millet, seem "to hear the bell." This is the only picture he painted which is full of the sentimentality he so much disliked. It is a great picture, but we need to know the title in order to ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints' days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... who begged his mother not to expose herself to such remarks. They then saw each other in the gardens, or in some of the churches; for, like many other women of similar characteristics, she had become devote as she grew old, as much from an overflow of idle sentimentality as from a passion for honors and ceremonies. In these rare and brief interviews Charlotte talked all the time, as was her habit, but with a worn, sad air. She said, however, that she was happy and at peace, and that she had every confidence in M. ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... the Curtain descends upon all that a sympathetic audience can possibly desire to know of what must be once and for all the story of a life-time. "The rest is silence." Throughout the play there is no parade of false sentimentality, no tawdry virtue, no copy-book morality, no vicious silliness; and, so well constructed is the plot, that there is no need of a wearisome extra Act, by way of postscript, to tell us how all the characters met again at the North Pole or Land's End; how everybody explained everything ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... effeminately sensual, playing upon the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentimentality, playing upon their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, Sludge after all is less the wronger than the wronged. Who made him what he is? Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... her eyes, looking very straight out through gold-rimmed spectacles, had a penetrating brightness about them that was a little formidable. It was not what one would call a good-natured face. But good-natured sentimentality was the last thing Rose ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... journeys, and was still as far as ever from any trace of his brother. Purvis had ridden over several times from his own estancia, bringing his little boy with him. His treatment of the boy was affectionate to the point of sentimentality. He looked after him with a woman's carefulness, was over-anxious about his health, and treated him as though he were much younger than his ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... artistically—his invariable wear being light, loose-fitting suits, very fine shirts, and large collars and cuffs. Everything seemed to suit his upright figure and quiet, assured air. He was sensitive to the pitch of sentimentality, and, when reading a pathetic passage, his voice would begin to tremble and the tears to come into his eyes, until he had to lay the book aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang the love songs of his friend A— or gipsy ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action. As we are afraid that, if we handle this part of the argument after our own manner, we shall incur the reproach of sentimentality, a word which, in the sacred language of the Benthamites, is synonymous with idiocy, we will quote what Mr Mill himself says on the subject, in his Treatise ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture—no reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the like, and made ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... the possibility of re-establishing peace instead of everlasting war—is the pernicious sentimentality of phrasemongers. There is a law of evolution by which it follows that I must live and act in an evil way; what is to be done? I am an educated man, I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will act in an evil way. "ENTRONS AU PALAIS DE LA GUERRE." There is the law of evolution, and therefore ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... pity for such a service needs to be earnestly and constantly cultivated. It only follows as the result of spiritual processes in the preacher's own soul. It is not the mere outflowing of a natural kindliness of disposition, of inborn good nature. It is more than mere sloppy sentimentality. That kind of pity, if you may call it by such a name, never tells the truth excepting when it is pleasant, never preaches a sermon of rebuke, never reasons concerning "judgment to come." There is no such word as Hell in its vocabulary; there is no accusation in its programme. The ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... miracle occurred. The Senora threw off the nightmare of selfish sorrow and spiritual sentimentality which had held her in bondage. She took the cigarito from her lips with a scornful air, and repeated ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... sculptor who delights to honor the laborer and the craftsman and has supplied the figures for niches and keystone space and the tympanum and secondary groups in the portal of Varied Industries with evident affection. He treats the subject of labor with dignity, according it respect and not sentimentality. In this secondary or crowning group, a strong young man is taking the burden of labor from the shoulders of the last generation - an old workman, bowed but still hale and vigorous. There is a sense of responsibility and earnestness in ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... another route, so as to pass as many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it came, the effect was of undeniable ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Caught between two fires, without resources or organisation, annihilation was before them. Now the English, for their own security, had the greatest interest in preventing the extermination of white men by natives; and on that ground, apart from all sentimentality, they had never ceased to protest against the methods employed by the Boers, as the surest means of bringing about that result. Theophilus Shepstone, who possessed great influence over the Zulus, was sent to Pretoria. Unable, even with the help of their President, to bring ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... complicated sounds from the fair outside, from which now and again the voices of the Roman ice-venders detached themselves, even the tapping of the heavy boots of the dancers upon the floor of brick—all things in this hour moved him to a certain dreariness of the spirit which was touched with sentimentality. This fair day was coming to an end. He felt as if everything ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thinking of the white figure going up a green slope one summer day; then, as if chiding himself for sentimentality, he set Psyche down with great care and began to talk about a course of ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circumspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the butterfly nature within her is given wing, inward and ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... brought upon society by the free black population, should persist in declaring that duty and humanity call upon us to give the slaves their freedom. It really appears to me that there is entirely too much "namby pamby sentimentality" and affected feeling exhibited respecting the condition of slaves. Do these individuals believe that benevolence and humanity command us to turn loose upon society a set of persons who confessedly only serve to swell the amount of crime, while they add nothing to ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... General having descended to the parterre for a few moments. He was astonished, on entering, to find traces of tears on the young woman's cheeks. Her eyes were even moist. She seemed displeased at being surprised in the very act of sentimentality. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... opened, then closed tightly. She had almost answered, for no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... agitate Pendennis. The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten years his senior,—a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. "The mother has spoiled the young rascal," groaned the Major inwardly, "with her cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a tragedy queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall not dare show my head!" And he thought with an inexpressible pang that he must give up Lord ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... acre of ground in the centre of an artificial lake. The two inscriptions that the prince chose for his sepulchre illustrate, appropriately enough, the sharply contrasting qualities of his strange individuality—his romantic sentimentality, and his callous cynicism. The first inscription was ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the first chord) Please don't put a lot of sentimentality into the opening words. They should ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... were lovely and lovable to the last degree, but cautious and tormentingly self-restrained when it came to loving. At the first intimation of dangerous sentimentality on the part of Old Heck the widow would suddenly and without an instant's warning change the subject. When Skinny had been pensive and silent for half an hour or so and would then start, in a halting and quivering voice, to say something, Carolyn June invariably ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... the day's jaunt has been the absence of the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially since her return from Paris, has been overfond of making. This idle habit of mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested by an intellectual interest. One of her great friends is Willoughby, the economic statistician, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... I suit you," said Polly, devoutly hoping she could succeed in avoiding the sin of teasing on the one hand, and of sentimentality ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... possibility of doubt. With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied, she had that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of the younger Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate. Not thus would she have chosen. She had seen, in imagination, Archie wedded to some tall, powerful, and rosy heroine of the golden locks, made in her own image, for whom she would have ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your account of your fellow-guests at the Moorhead Inn. No, I do not misunderstand your letter; nor do I credit you with any foolish sentimentality, or Susie-like flutterings. Jim Airth stands to you for an abstract thing—uncompromising manhood, in its strength and assurance; very attractive after the loneliness and sense of being cut adrift, which have been your portion lately. Only, remember—where ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... a condition of extreme sentimentality]. I can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it. The magic of this Irish scene, and—I really don't want to be personal, Miss Reilly; but the charm ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... very dear brother she had ever regarded him, for her affection, though intense and profound, was as entirely free from all taint of sentimentality, as that which she entertained for his mother; and her pure young heart had never indulged a feeling that could have coloured her cheek with confusion had the world searched ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... deepened by turns in her cheeks, and the hand that clasped the ivory fan shook as it had never shaken before in the course of a life full of risks and dangers. But then no man had ever looked at her as this man did. She had outstared insolence and snubbed sentimentality. She had never had to face such an honest, pure-hearted worship as this young prince brought and laid silently at her feet. No need for him to tell her that she embodied every virtue and every perfection of which human nature is capable. She knew it, and the knowledge broke the very backbone ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the sentimentality of seeing him off from the station, and Mrs. Gourlay was too feckless to propose it for herself. Janet had offered to convoy him, but when the afternoon came she was down with a racking cold. He was alone as he strolled on the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... nothing more touching than the sight of a nation in search of its great man, nothing more beautiful than its readiness to accept a hero on trust. Nor is this a feeble sentimentality. It is much rather a noble yearning of what is best in us, for it is only in these splendid figures which now and then sum up all the higher attributes of character that the multitude of men can ever hope to find their blind ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sentimentality which is generally pleasing to Quince, Snug, Bottom, and the like. If he is mistaken it is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of carpenters and bellows-menders, and is not equally to be found among those of the high estate of Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta herself. But ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... to the public his own sense of its imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem—the diffuseness of the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of which ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless sentimentality or a ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... not. Henselt was only a German who fell asleep and dreamed of Chopin. To a Thalberg-ian euphony he has added a technical figuration not unlike Chopin's, and a spirit quite Teutonic in its sentimentality. Rubinstein calls Chopin the exhalation of the third epoch in art. He certainly closed one. With a less strong rhythmic impulse and formal sense Chopin's music would have degenerated into mere overperfumed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... temptation of saying to oneself, "Where shall I be in an hour's time?" One gazes with a subtle feeling of affection on one's limbs, and wonders, "Where shall I get it?" Subconsciously one is amused and a little ashamed of such concessions to sentimentality. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to go and check the range-finders' figures, or prepare the headlines ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... scorn for rank and wealth, dreams of immortality with posterity. His greatest successes with the public were secured by "Poor Liza," and "Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter," which served as much-admired models for sentimentalism to succeeding generations. Sentimentality was no novelty in Russia; it had come in with translations from English novels, such as Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," and the like; and imitations of them in Russia. "Sensibility" was held to ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... the notion of a category. Once it had been a mere abstraction; of no possible use except as a convenient cell for referring (as in a nest of boxes), which may perhaps as much degrade the idea as a relative of my own degraded the image of the crescent moon by saying, in his abhorrence of sentimentality, that it reminded him of the segment from his own thumb-nail when clean cut by an instrument called a nail-cutter. This was the Aristotelian notion. But Kant could not content himself with this idea. His own theory (1) as to time and space, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... this exalted sentimentality with the stern logic of fact, and never misdirect or misapply it in any of our charitable work. Imperfect knowledge perverts the noblest sentiments; widened and perfected knowledge strengthens their power. A truly philanthropic sentiment is most potent for good in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... a very convenient plan," Gifford replied dryly. "All the same, if I can retrieve my evening kit, which has gone astray, I hope to enjoy myself at Wynford Place to-night without being troubled with undue sentimentality." ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... dealings in cloth and other goods with the firm of Anselmi di Briata, of Casale, a small city on the Po), "I will give you everything for twenty-eight giliati."[4] It does not appear that Paolo's correspondents were moved in their answer by any feelings of sentimentality or of friendship: on the contrary, the tone of the letter was clearly commercial, they having made an offer of twenty-three giliati less than demanded. Paolo Stradivari in his reply, dated June 4, 1776, says: "Putting ceremony aside, I write ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... were obviously staid business-men, differing widely in character from the street Spaniard, whom I have already copiously described. Some were Germans, thinned by the climate, and sharpened up to the true Yankee point of competition; very little smack of Fatherland was left about them,—no song, no sentimentality, not much quivering of the heart-strings at remembering the old folks at home, whom some of them have not seen in twenty years, and never will see again. To be sure, in such a hard life as theirs, with no social surroundings, and grim death meeting them at every corner, there is nothing for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... young Narcissus, who represented love in such a simple, wholesome guise—or at least so it had seemed to be. Then she would shake off the image, and tell herself it was but seeming, as the result had proved, and so she would accuse herself of weakness and sentimentality. These thoughts were getting to be inconvenient. They haunted her too persistently, and at last she began to wish for the time to come when her days would again be too crowded with engagements for her to indulge in ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... things are at present," Banks hurried on to cover our lapse into an un-British sentimentality, "is like this. We'd meant, as I told ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... extravagant—others may think it sublime, and be right) they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises of style and effusion of wire-drawn sentiment."[93] The same strength of judgment rendered Hazlitt proof against the excessive sentimentality in Beaumont and Fletcher and gave a distinct value to his opinions even when they seemed to be wrong, which was not often. But in writing of Marlowe, of Dekker and of Webster, he spreads out all his sail to make a joyous run among ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... than that, he felt a sudden sense of the absolute sentimentality of his request, and the consciousness that he was about to invite the familiar confidence of this strange woman—whose son had forged his ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... a blessed drink gin must be, seeing it can move a rogue like that to sentimentality—nay, ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. The Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They will not ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... a true and real sense it is God's own doing," and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... flashed across his dark features like a meteor through a cloudy sky and was gone. "I—suspected, mon ami. But—I did not even tell myself." That part of him that was French—a species of volatile sentimentality—sounded in the words like the echo of a laugh in a minor key. "I made a valet of her. I suffered her to clean my boots and brush my clothes. I kept her in ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... as regards other women is too low for him to heap upon you. Believe that the French men are sympathetic because they laugh and cry openly at the theatre. But appeal to their chivalry, and they will rescue you from one discomfort only to offer you a worse. The French have sentimentality, but not sentiment. They have gallantry, but not chivalry. They have vanity, but not pride. They have religion, but not morality. They are a combination of the wildest extravagance and the strictest ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... in our minds, we wonder whether we have ever seen the sea so calm. And how soothing is this Moorish dancing! How, for once, even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious melancholy!—And finally love, love translated back into Nature! Not the love of a "cultured girl!"—no Senta-sentimentality.(7) But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,—and precisely in this way Nature! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the mortal hatred between the sexes!—I know no case in which the tragic irony, which constitutes the ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... not believe me capable of religious sentimentality after what I have said of my religious opinions. Still, in these twenty years I have seen a great deal of the seamy side of the world. I have known its back-stairs, and I have discerned, in the march of events, a Power which you call Providence and I call Chance, and which my companions ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... any religion, of any ethical teaching, of any principle—to be of use to men and women at the present stage of their development—must be incontestable common sense. Ridiculous sentimentality should be ruthlessly crushed, and investigation of the meaning of Nature should be strenuously encouraged. And with clear eyes we should try to see the truth. Let those born fighters who like fighting for ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... themselves for her husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish philanderer with any girl ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... feel comfortable about having deliberately shocked Jill into paying some attention to her own situation instead of staying absorbed in the possible or probable fate of Vale. But for them to get clear was going to call for more than sentimentality on Jill's part. Lockley couldn't carry the ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... is telling on you, Cleary," said Sam. "This is all sickly sentimentality. War is war. The trouble with you is that there has been no regular campaign on to occupy your attention. This lying about doing nothing is a bad thing for everybody. Wait till the Tutonian Emperor comes out and we'll ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... a reverie; but as her expression changed from one of annoyance to something of wistfulness and sentimentality, the question of marriage with the Duke of Marshire had clearly been dismissed for that moment from her heart. At intervals a shy smile gave an almost childish tenderness to her face. Then, on a sudden, her eyelashes ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... no notice of the hungry looks of the company; he was a soldier, and concentrated his mind upon the duties of the moment. Sentimentality was no part of his nature. He was a man, and must eat; he was a soldier, and must perform the work as a ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... tenderness. He wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man introduced la paperasserie into the September massacres. But as emotional tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the victims. There was no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Letters received from often remote parts of the United States had been for many years a detail of his daily experience; and even when they consisted of the request for an autograph, an application to print selections from his works, or a mere expression of schoolboy pertness or schoolgirl sentimentality, they bore witness to his wide reputation in that country, and the high esteem in which he was held there.** The names of Levi and Celia Thaxter of Boston had long, I believe, been conspicuous in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... or weakly sentimentality, which can fail to perceive that the Romans were entirely in earnest with the liberation of Greece; and the reason why the plan so nobly projected resulted in so sorry a structure, is to be sought only in the complete ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of "better things" in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf and Emmy is that at no point does a "nature's gentleman" or a "nature's lady" show through and ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... made Valencia fancy that some feeling for her might still linger: but he evidently had been speaking to himself, forgetful, for the moment, of her presence; for he turned to her with a start and a blush—"But now—I have been troubling you too long with this stupid tete-a-tete sentimentality of mine. I will make my bow, and find the Major. I am afraid, if it be possible for him to forget any one, he has forgotten me in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... to nip all silly sentimentality in the bud. The real thing is never silly," said Joyce out of ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... up, trembling like an old man, which he was, but which he never looked like save at moments of emotion like this, and told me to take the light; then stopped when he had got half-way across the room. "This is a piece of theatrical sentimentality," he said. "No, Phil, I will not go. I will not bring her into any such—Put down the lamp, and, if you will take my advice, ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies Real happiness is a state of dulness Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey) Sham spiritualism She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... handled her material freely, making additions, amplifications, and moral reflections, to the original tale. Her weaving together of incidents is artistic and her style graceful and not unpleasing. It is marked by ornamentation, sumptuousness, and French sentimentality. It shows a lack of naivete resulting from the palace setting given to her tales, making them adapted only to children of high rank. Often her tale is founded on a beautiful tradition. The Blue-Bird, one of the finest of her tales, was found ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... seeking the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace and their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of the whole old world—the Scapia or Figaro of the old world—infinitely able, but with all his ability consecrated to the service of his own base self. The Greekling—as Juvenal has it—in want of a dinner, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... completely the frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably it never entered any German head in the "high commandment" that the prosecution of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first woke to her own mind at the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... shoulders. "German sentimentality," said she. "If you mix sentiment with your cards, we shall lose the game, Count Podstadsky. Hear, then, what I have to say to you. It is true that we stand upon the brow of a precipice; but we must contemplate it fearlessly, and so we shall grow accustomed to our danger, and learn to escape ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... anything when I've been in the place so short a time. All the same, I don't want to pretend to any false modesty. I've been in Polchester long enough to be fond of it, and I'm going to be fonder of it still before I've done. I don't want to pretend to any sentimentality either, but there are broader issues than merely the fortunes of this ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Common Multiple of nearly all pleasant houses. It has the largeness and amplitude of a castle, and the plainness of decent poverty. It has none of that theatricality which it is supposed to have, none of the dreaminess or the sentimentality with which Protestants endow it. He had passed just now through, first, a network of small stairways, archways, vestibules and passages, and then along two immense corridors with windows on one ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... for instance, chief amongst the incidents of Mr. Cleveland's administration, that the oath of office was administered upon his mother's Bible. Many people regarded this as mere sentimentality. To me it meant more than words could express. The best of Bibles is the mother's. It meant that the man who chose to be sworn in on such a book had a grateful remembrance. It was as though he had said, "If it had not been ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... circumstance of their authors adopting the name of some hero. The manners are the modern antique; and the characters are a sort of beings made out of the old epical, the Arcadian pastoral, and the Parisian sentimentality and affectation of the days of Voiture.[120] The Astrea of D'Urfe greatly contributed to their perfection. As this work is founded on several curious circumstances, it shall be the subject of the following article; for it may be considered as a literary curiosity. The Astrea was ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the Southern ideal?" Mark Twain never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal." But in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... during his lifetime, but a small collection of his poems, published after his death, gained him a posthumous recognition as the greatest Danish poet of the 18th century. Stub's style is extremely noble and expressive, devoid of the excessive bombast and sentimentality that many writers then mistook for poetry. He was of a cheerful disposition with a hopeful outlook upon life that only occasionally is darkened by the hardships and disappointments of his own existence. Even the poems of his darker moods are colored by his inborn love ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... incidents interested him, not ideas, nor even characters, and he wanted every incident to be immediately effective. Now cynicism, in France, supplies a sufficient basis for all these requirements; it is the equivalent, for popular purposes, of that appeal to the average which in England is sentimentality. Compare, for instance, the admirable story "Boule de Suif," perhaps the best story which Maupassant ever wrote, with a story of somewhat similar motive—Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Constantinople, where he demanded the total withdrawal of the Turkish forces. This was acceded to, and Turkey thus lost the hold which it had acquired upon the lawless Montenegrins. The idea of Ottoman decay acquired daily fresh strength, and a maudlin sentimentality was excited in behalf of these Christian savages. Taking advantage of this, they made constant forays across the border, stirring up by their example such of the borderers as were disposed to rise, and using force to compel those who would have preferred ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Battifol, in his History of the Roman Breviary (English ed.), writes: "We owe a just debt of gratitude to those who gave us the antiphons of the Blessed Virgin ... four exquisite compositions, though in style enfeebled by sentimentality." ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... Flint. "Your sentimentality spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the other fifty. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time had they to ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... you. I am no trifler, believe me; I love you. I am the man who loves you because he has found in you qualities that are inestimable. You are one of those perfect creatures who have as much brains as sentiment; and the sentimentality that permeates you is not the sickly sentimentality of ordinary women. It is that gloriously beautiful faculty of tenderness which characterizes great souls, and which one never meets elsewhere in the world. And then, you ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... almost careful smartness and conventionality. There was something primitive in her, too, and she became aware of that now. Hitherto she had been inclined to believe that she was essentially complex, cerebral, free from any trace of sentimentality, quiveringly responsive to the appealing voices of the arts, healthily responsive to the joys of athleticism almost in the way of a Greek youth in the early days of the world, but that she was free from all taint of ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... face truth, you should have a surer ideal than we have found. When this comes, there will be less sentimentality but much deeper feeling about marriage. I have tried to show you a different ideal, and picture for you the Jewish home, where the exalted esteem in which women are held is the outcome of their attitude to marriage and the Jewish way of life: it is an ideal ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... she'll have to know sometime! I must say I cannot understand the way you've kept this dreadful thing from her. It's pure sentimentality. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... was notoriously reticent—almost inarticulate; but in song he found self-expression, and all the romance and poetry of the sea are breathed into his shanties, where simple childlike sentimentality alternates with the Rabelaisian humour of the grown man. Whatever landsmen may think about shanty words—with their cheerful inconsequence, or light-hearted coarseness—there can be no two opinions about the tunes, which, as folk-music, are a ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... a moment. He was looking at her and thinking how perfect in every way she was now, as she stood there purged of sentimentality, all aglow with curiosity to know how her nefarious plans had succeeded. It was his Ann who stood there, not the author of "The ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... gradual abandonment of natural form the "angle" school is paralleled by the "curve" school, which also descends wholly from Gauguin. The best known representative is Maurice Denis. But he has become a slave to sentimentality, and has been left behind. Matisse is the most prominent French artist who has followed Gauguin with curves. In Germany a group of young men, who form the Neue Kunstlevereinigung in Munich, work almost entirely in sweeping curves, and have reduced natural objects purely ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... client is an eccentric maiden-lady of sixty-five, with a lot of distant relatives who bother her life out while waiting for her to die. I am her only intimate friend, but even I cannot prevent her from doing all sorts of queer things in her taste for sentimentality. You see, poor woman, when she was very young she had a lover of just about your age (she wears his portrait perpetually in a locket about her neck), who died. He was in business, and doing very well. Several times already, on this account, she has helped young men who ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... against our foe," Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his right hand. "May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his ugly face," Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Teddy that she knew so well? This side of him was the same, and it was a side that pleased her; but this was all she ever saw of him now. Where was his sentimentality—those old, varying moods of impetuous love-making, of fanciful, quixotic devotion, of heart-breaking gloom, of alternating, absurd tenderness and haughty dignity? His nature had been a sensitive one, his temperament bordering closely ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... with religious fervor that he had been saved a second time from a mistake which would have wrecked his whole future. If he had yielded to the momentary weakness of the past night,—the outcome of a sickly sentimentality to which he recognized now, in the light of reflection, that he was entirely too prone,—he would have regretted it soon enough. The black streak would have been sure to come out in some form, sooner or later, if not in the wife, then in her children. He saw clearly enough, in this hour of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the ground for God very ably, and then makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the "Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... procession of the virtues passes by, there are pseudo-virtues that tag on like the small boys who follow the circus. After Goodness come Goodiness and Goody-goodiness; we see Sanctity and Sanctimoniousness, Piety and Pietism, Grandeur and Grandiosity, Sentiment and Sentimentality. When we try to show off we invariably deceive ourselves, but usually we deceive nobody else. Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they give us credit ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and to Republicans. Good as Kings in Exile is, it is not so effective a book as The Nabob, nor such a unique and marvellous work of art as Numa Roumestan, due allowance being made for the intrusion of sentimentality into the latter. Daudet thought Numa the "least incomplete" of his works; it is certainly inclusive enough, since some critics are struck by the tragic relations subsisting between the virtuous discreet Northern wife and the peccable, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... forgive him, but when she has genuinely forgiven him, the glamour of love will usually have disappeared. If she insists upon shutting herself up from other love for his sake, she should question herself as to the part sentimentality and perversity bear in ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... of American poets, while Matthew Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,—the absence of affectation and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,—nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with the wholesome, pleasing sentimentality of the old bachelor who has not turned crusty.... ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... out of patience; and if we did not give utterance aloud to our thoughts, I shrewdly suspect if those thoughts had formed themselves into words, those words would have sounded very much like, "Nonsensical sentimentality!" "strange infatuation!" but nothing could be said with propriety, and the engagement was fully entered into. Some time had necessarily to elapse before its fulfillment, however, for the lover was but twenty; but it ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... is a great outbreak of sentimentality among the callowlings. They have pictures (oh, such caricatures!) to carry in breast-pockets—or locks of hair, like mine. Their hearts are inflammable as those of the flaxen-haired youths I met afterwards in the universities of Germany, only living on oatmeal, without sausages, and less florid ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Blinker tells Florence that he loves her. So accustomed is she to this display of sentimentality in her cavaliers that she merely laughs. He persists, and she indicates a belief that he is just like the rest. Mention of "the rest" awakes question in Blinker. He learns that she meets men indiscriminately. He has a horror of this evidence of what he considers to be moral laxity, and when Florence ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period, Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue to the social history of the time; but the idea which ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... unsatisfactory mood until luncheon. Nothing pleased her. The novels were stupid. She was tired of love tales—why could not people find something else to write about? She was sick of such namby-pamby sentimentality; and then they were so untrue to life. Stories in real life did not always end happily, or there would not be so many old maids in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the application of this. Progress in religion is the slowest, because man is kept back by sentimentality, by the efforts of parents, by old associations. A thousand unseen tendrils are twining about him that he must necessarily break if he advances. In other departments of knowledge inducements are held out ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... there is a constant intrusion of ethical reflections, which will doubtless much edify all young ladies of a tender age. These would be well enough if they appeared to have any base in solid moral principle, but they are somewhat offensive as the mere sentimentality of conscience and religion, introduced for the purposes of fine writing. Suspicion, also, always attaches to the morality which exhibits itself on rhetorical stilts, and the refinement which is always proclaiming itself refined. Since the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... left," said Mr. Wharton angrily, "for soft sentimentality. Well;—she must take her bed as she makes it. It is very hard on me, I know. Considering what she used to be, it is marvellous to me that she should have so little idea left of doing her duty ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... adultery, and for men in abstaining from theft! In short, the first injustice is practised by literature; it has no interest in esthetics, which is only a higher justice. The romantics will have a fine account to render with their immoral sentimentality. Do you recall a bit of Victor Hugo in la Legende des siecles, where a sultan is saved because he had pity on a pig? it is always the story of the penitent thief blessed because he has repented! To repent is good, but not to do evil ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... into Italian poetry, which had been expressed before by Ariosto in his amatory verse, but which cannot be found to any great extent in his more pretentious work, the Orlando Furioso. This new feeling was real sentiment, and not sentimentality, and it denotes the growing conception of the worth and dignity of womanhood which we have already discovered in the poetry of Michael Angelo. Allowing for the infinite contradictions possible in human nature, it may be that these men of the same ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... uncommon to find comparatively young labourers who have had two wives. There is nothing in this to reproach: it is a peculiarity of the cast of mind which I am endeavouring to describe—a cast of mind perhaps not much marked by sentimentality. Something in this practice reminds one of the Mormons. Certainly the wives are not taken together, but they are sealed as fast as circumstances permit. Something in it has a Mormonite aspect to an observer, and perhaps the existence of this cast of mind ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... protested: but, upon reflection, he began to wonder whether there might not be some truth in it. The first lieder written to poems of Goethe were sober and apt: soon Schubert came and infused his romantic sentimentality into them and gave them a twist: Schumann introduced his girlish languor: and, down to Hugo Wolf, the movement had gone on towards more stress in declamation, indecent analysis, a presumptuous endeavor to leave no smallest corner of the soul ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... But he's honest and he's courageous. If you can convince him that your view is right, he'll carry but the conviction in spite of everything. In fact he'll be all the better pleased if it requires fearlessness and defiance of general sentimentality to ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... and drank eagerly of the masculine fare I provided. He had shed a few tears at Miss Redwood's departure and I liked him for them, for they showed his loyalty, but he had no more games of the nursery nor the mawkish sentimentality that I found upon the nursery shelves. I had other plans for Jerry. John Benham should have his wish. I would make Jerry as nearly the Perfect Man as mortal man could make God's handiwork. Spiritually he should grow "from within," directed by me, but guided by his own ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero's Letty. This "epilogue"—so the author calls it—has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier than not to write it—to make the play end with Letty's awakening from her dream, and her ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... sweet, yet never without a sufficient infusion of brisk natural acid and piquancy to keep their sweetness from palling on the taste: they are full of fresh, healthy sentiment, but never at all touched with sentimentality: the soul of romance works mightily within them, yet never betrays them into any lapses from good sense, or any ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... he looked upon as such—into the sentimentality of such a man as Walter Lodloe generally acts as a stiffener to his purposes. He was no more in love with Mrs. Cristie than he had been when he left the Squirrel Inn, but he now determined, if he saw any reason to suppose that ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... rapidly than they rose, till their grace and their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of the whole old world—the Scapia or Figaro of the old world—infinitely able, but with all his ability consecrated to the service of his own base self. The Greekling—as Juvenal has it—in want of a dinner, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... out over the house with an expression of apparent abstraction. Brent—she was conscious—studied her with those seeing eyes—hazel eyes with not a bit of the sentimentality and weakness of brown in them. "You and Palmer ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... pleasurable character, except that peculiar sort of consolation which Lermontov had in view when he said there is pleasure and pain in irritating the sores of old wounds, why not indulge oneself? But one must know where to draw the line. And so I will continue without any sort of sentimentality. ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with romantic colouring. The fascination ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... capable of religious sentimentality after what I have said of my religious opinions. Still, in these twenty years I have seen a great deal of the seamy side of the world. I have known its back-stairs, and I have discerned, in the march of events, a Power which ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... told me a curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan.[100] The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions on him and other hommes marquans, and mine was this:—'Whatever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... here. I've no right to be responsible for anything when I've been in the place so short a time. All the same, I don't want to pretend to any false modesty. I've been in Polchester long enough to be fond of it, and I'm going to be fonder of it still before I've done. I don't want to pretend to any sentimentality either, but there are broader issues than merely the fortunes of this ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... brother she had ever regarded him, for her affection, though intense and profound, was as entirely free from all taint of sentimentality, as that which she entertained for his mother; and her pure young heart had never indulged a feeling that could have coloured her cheek with confusion had the world ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the let-alone policy; every man to look out for number one. This is the age of selfishness. Second: the opposite pole of thinking; every man to do somebody's else work for him. This is the dry rot of sentimentality that feeds tramps and enacts poor laws such as excite the indignation of Herbert Spencer. But the third stage is represented by our formula: every man must render and receive the best possible service, ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... When I was told who you really were, I went to him. But I was only a child, remember that. And he didn't spare you out of sentimentality. He had a purpose." ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... over again. It gets lost, lost in hard and fast rules or sentimentality, then a genius comes along and digs down to the buried city—creation. Art isn't like invention. ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... sun, or something, acting on his nervous frame: since then he has been very ill in bed—doctor, anxiety &c. as you may suppose: they are exactly opposite us, at twelve or fifteen feet distance only. Through sentimentality and economy combined, Isa would have no nurse (an imbecile arrangement), and all has been done by her, with me to help: I have sate up four nights out of the last five, and sometimes been there nearly all day beside....[55] He is much better ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... advancing intellectual movement, which he should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab away at the gelatinous mass of popular indifference, sentimentality, and complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is the ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... you would think, and very likely say—fear of the world's comment too, I suppose. But the cloud being rolled away, I have spoken, and I don't care so much. I can face things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like. It is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement. Since it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it was serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you, and honour you, and would hold you dearest of ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... tears; and poor Scully's hand caused such a rattling and trembling of the glass and the decanter that the Duke of Doldrum—who had been, during the course of this whispered sentimentality, describing a famous run with the Queen's hounds at the top of his voice—stopped at the jingling of the glass, and his tale was lost for ever. Scully hastily drank his wine, and Lady Gorgon turned round to her next neighbour, a little gentleman in ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the wood or the melons of the season. You may remember, too, how perplexing, how fantastic, many of those cries were, making it impossible for you to understand what they meant, or why a wood-huckster, for example, should give vent to such lachrymose sentimentality in vending his fagots. But quite different is the Paris marchand. With a physiognomy of voice—if the expression be pardoned—quite as marked as the cockney's, what he says is yet perfectly clear, often shrewd, gay, cynical, sometimes even spiced with jocularity, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Ah, there we differ! With all my want of enthusiasm, my absence of sentimentality, I shall hold fast to Cyril. I have never yet regarded myself as his wife; I did not wish to so regard myself. But now I shall give myself up in thought wholly to him, and I pray God that this knowledge will give ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... morality of the Vanity of Human Wishes' says Sir Walter Scott, 'has often extracted tears from those whose eyes wander dry over the pages of professed sentimentality.' CROKER. It. drew tears from Johnson himself. 'When,' says Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 50), 'he read his own satire, in which the life of a scholar is painted, he burst into a passion of tears. The family and Mr. Scott only were present, who, in a jocose ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... leads to humor or satire; sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity. The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the other is what is called sickly sentimentality. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... chairs to pieces—in short, they have a good time.—The next morning, having slept himself sober, he dictates his orders for the day, veritable masterpieces in which the silliness, imbecility and credulity of a numskull, the sentimentality of the drunkard, the clap-trap of a mountebank and the tirades of a cheap philosopher form an unique compound, at once sickening and irritating, like the fiery, pungent mixtures of cheap bars, which suit his audience better because they contain the biting, mawkish ingredients ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... peculiar force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which "make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death—they are the great themes with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected whose who knew her like ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... century was published "Fragments in the manner of Sterne,"8vo, Debrett, 1797, which, according to the Monthly Review,[98] caught in large measure the sentimentality, pathos and whimsicality of Sterne's style. The British Museum catalogue suggests J.Brandon as its author. This was reprinted by Nauck in Leipzig in 1800, and a translation was given to the world by the same publisher in the same year, with the added title: "Ein Seitenstck zu Yoricks empfindsamen ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... True, he may not have entirely escaped the strange allure, aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for femininity—even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still femininity, one of the miracles of life, to Kuprin, the lover of life. But, even if he may be said to have used too much of the oil of sentimentality in mixing his colours for the portraits, his portraits are subordinate to the background; and there his eye is true and keen, his hand steady and unflinching, his colours and brushwork unimpeachable. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... avoided it, and this perfectly level treatment irritated him more than any other could have done. It was impossible to advance much in love-making with one who offered no obstacles, had no concealments and no embarrassments, and whom any approach to sentimentality would be quite likely to set into a fit ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... feminine desire for self-surrender, which they projected on a celestial being, either because they did not come into contact with a suitable terrestrial object, or because the impulse was abnormal from the beginning. But their spiritual love never rose above empty sentimentality and hysterical rapture. All of them, and some of them were highly gifted, were thrilled with the love of Jesus, they had visions of the "sweet wounds of the Saviour," and so on; but their emotion did not kindle the smallest spark of creative power. The Queen of Heaven, on the other hand, was a ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... self-assured superiority to us all; one of the Division doctors, Alexei Ivanovitch, a man from Little Russia, beloved of us all, whether in the Otriad or the army, a character possessing it seemed none of the Russian moods and sensibilities, of the kindest heart but no sentimentality, utterly free from self-praise, self-interest, self-assertion, humorous, loving passionately his country and, with all his Russian romance and even mysticism, packed with practical common sense; another Division doctor, a young man, carving for himself ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... expect such sentimentality from you, Chloe. I gathered from your conversation before dinner that you were pretty well disillusioned by this time, and it rather surprises me to hear you pouring out your compassion on a man like Anstice, who certainly doesn't strike me as ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... days she hardly saw him. He had caught the key of the New World symphony at once, and had set forth on the warpath without losing time to get the Job. He succeeded without much difficulty in securing the illustration of Reinhard's new piece of popular sentimentality and also put himself in touch with the editors of a new magazine. Then to work, not his own work, but the world's work,—what it apparently wanted, at least would pay well for. And the first step was to find some sort of abiding-place where his ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... one point on which you touch in your letter that encourages and pleases me greatly. You condemn, as is right, the exaggerated sentimentality, and the tendency to be easily moved and to weep from childish motives, from which I told you that I suffered at times; but, since this disposition of soul, so necessary to combat, exists in me, you rejoice that it does not affect my ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... Siding last Eastertide, on my way to Alexandra. Charles Miller was there in charge of the line, and he offered me a thirty-one mile ride in to within two miles of town if I would only wait for a construction train. I declined in my stupid sentimentality. For one thing I hate breaking up a plan of combined foot-travel; it seems to me hard on one's native fellow-travelers, on whom one is apt to call for big efforts. To ride on ahead, and leave them struggling alone with the sandy monster of a road for ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... The Professor lay at a distance—for the night was warm—smoking on the crisp grass. The Living Skeleton crouched near, embracing his lean knees, staring into the fire, thinking fondly of his absent wife and family, a furtive tear lurking in the hollow of his cheek, for Matty Cann's absurd sentimentality made him a failure as a vagabond. Nickie fussed about gallantly, assisting Madame Marve and little Miss Thunder, who were busy spreading papers for the ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... religion, of any ethical teaching, of any principle—to be of use to men and women at the present stage of their development—must be incontestable common sense. Ridiculous sentimentality should be ruthlessly crushed, and investigation of the meaning of Nature should be strenuously encouraged. And with clear eyes we should try to see the truth. Let those born fighters who like fighting for fighting's sake, and who now wage war against windmills, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... chief amongst the incidents of Mr. Cleveland's administration, that the oath of office was administered upon his mother's Bible. Many people regarded this as mere sentimentality. To me it meant more than words could express. The best of Bibles is the mother's. It meant that the man who chose to be sworn in on such a book had a grateful remembrance. It was as though he had said, "If it had not been for her, this honour would never have come to me." For all there ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... interview, the first of many; and in all he showed the same attractive qualities and defects. His taste for literature was native and unaffected; his sentimentality, although extreme and a thought ridiculous, was plainly genuine. I wondered at my own innocent wonder. I knew that Homer nodded, that Caesar had compiled a jest-book, that Turner lived by preference the life of Puggy Booth, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... both situated in a region well travelled on all sides; while Laon, not far distant, is hardly known at all, except as a way station en route to Switzerland. The cathedrals of mid-France are, it is to be feared, even less known than would on first thoughts seem probable. A certain amount of sentimentality attaches itself to the chateaux of the Loire, and some acquaintance with their undeniable pleasing attributes is the portion of most travellers; but, again, such cathedral cities as Besancon, Nantes, and Langres are off the well-worn road, and their cathedrals might ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... tenderest-hearted, most Christ-like human being, perhaps, who ever trod this earth, who, in his intense longing to save sinners, endured a life of misery and danger, and finished it by martyrdom. But there was no sentimentality, no soft indulgence in him. He knew right from wrong; common sense from cant; duty from public opinion; and divine charity from the mere cowardly dislike of witnessing pain, not so much because it pains the person punished, as because it pains the spectator. He knew that ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... last night and I hated to go.' Tom's hand went to his cheek as if he still felt the rosy little seal Dora had set upon his promise not to forget her, and for the first time in his happy-go-lucky life Tommy Bangs understood the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The feeling recalled Nan, for he had never known that tender thrill when thinking of her, and the old friendship seemed rather a prosaic affair beside this delightful mingling of romance, surprise, love, and fun. 'I declare, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Jeanne. He must henceforward think of Peggy and her sturdy faithfulness as hard as he could. But the more he thought, the more remote did Peggy seem. Of course the publicity of the interview had invested it with a certain constraint, knocked out of it any approach to sentimentality or romance. They had not even kissed. They had spent most of the time arguing from different points of view. They had been near to quarrelling. It was outrageous of him to criticize her; yet how could he help it? The mere fact of striving to exalt ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... but he admired Peggy Stewart more than any girl he had ever known, and the friendship held no element of silly sentimentality. ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... There was little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... two main {414} qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was graceful and elegant—too elegant, perhaps; and in his modesty he attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of Englishmen that an ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatory considerations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be a somewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's words, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way was not ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Year" ringing o'er the Northland. Shortly before Christmas, 1816, Heiberg published his polemical romantic comedy Yule Jests and New Year's Jokes, a brilliant revelation of his superiority as a wit and a satirist. Attacking the excessive sentimentality of Danish literature and taste at that time, it made a sensation and led to the ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... take the right tone," flashed through my mind. "I may not get far with sentimentality." But it was only a momentary thought. I swear she really did interest me. Besides, I was exhausted and moody. And cunning so ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... implies courage certainly. All the men of sentimentality—which is something quite different from sentiment, mind you—have taken to writing melodrama and penny novelettes. You didn't hear much sentimentality on this stage to-night, or any other ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Glogowski calmly, "but because our public has not yet reached the point where it is ready for such a theater and does not feel the need of such a stage. In the meanwhile, give them the farce full of acrobatic stunts and leg-shows, a half-naked ballet, cancan howling, a little, cheap kitchen sentimentality, a heap of empty phrases on the subject of virtue, morality, the family, duty, love, and . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... remembering also the departure of a good-natured, obese, elderly neighbor,—"Then I thpothe Mithter Thimmonth ith a big angel"? So he probably is; but Simmons's two hundred pounds of earthliness did not suit your sentimentality quite as readily as the little fairy who always wore such clean pantalets and never tore her pretty white frocks in a game of romps. Is beatification dependent upon the platform-balance? and what amount of flesh will turn the scale in favor of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... clears the ground for God very ably, and then makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the "Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... Jones, you overcome me with your sentimentality. I don't believe in love. That's what I believe in," said he, as he opened his pocket-book ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Valencia fancy that some feeling for her might still linger: but he evidently had been speaking to himself, forgetful, for the moment, of her presence; for he turned to her with a start and a blush—"But now—I have been troubling you too long with this stupid tete-a-tete sentimentality of mine. I will make my bow, and find the Major. I am afraid, if it be possible for him to forget any one, he has forgotten me in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... on the sufferings of beasts and birds may be in part due to the influence of Sterne, but in the main its origin is not literary but is an expression of a tender heart and a lifelong friendly intercourse. In this relation Burns most often allows his sentiment to come to the edge of sentimentality, yet in fairness it must be said that he seldom crosses the line. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had no need to force the note; it was his instinct both as a farmer and as a lover of animals ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... criticisms were well summed up (I remember the wording but not the writer of it) thus: "An honest woman does not feel the temptations" to which the novelist exposes his heroines. That there is a certain morbid sentimentality about Feuillet's attitude not merely to the "triangle" but even to simple "exchange of fantasies" between man and woman in general, can hardly be denied. He has a most curious and (one might almost say) Judaic idea as to woman as a temptress, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The intelligence was indeed sufficient to agitate Pendennis. The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten years his senior,—a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. "The mother has spoiled the young rascal," groaned the Major inwardly, "with her cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a tragedy queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall not dare show my head!" And he thought with an inexpressible pang that he must give up Lord ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... young matron usually is to a well-bred but hare-brained youth just untethered. Their acquaintance had been for him a combination of charming experiences diluted with gratitude for her interest and a harmless soupcon of sentimentality. In her particular case, however, there was a little something more—a hint of the forbidden—a troubled enjoyment, because he knew, of course, that Mrs. Ruthven was on no footing at all with the Gerards. So in her friendship he savoured a piquancy not at all distasteful to a very ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... humor, are indispensable to the most successful works of fiction. Above all other kinds of writing, fiction must win the heart of the reader. And this requires that the heart of the writer should be tender and sympathetic. Harsh critics call this quality sentiment, and even sentimentality. Dickens had it above all other writers, and it is probable that this popularity has never been surpassed. Scott succeeded by his splendid descriptions, but no one can deny that he was also one ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... can testify who hear Herr Niemann sing the love song in the first act of "Die Walkre," which had previously in America been presented only as a lyrical effusion and given with more or less sweetness and sentimentality. Herr Niemann was the first representative of the character who made this passage an eager, vital, and personal expression of a mood so ecstatic that it resorts to symbolism, as if there was no other language for it. The charm ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to be peculiar to Ratzeburg,) represents the mother as 'weeping aloud for joy'—the old idiot of a father with 'tears running down his face,' &c. &c., and all for what? For a snuff-box, a pencil-case, or some article of jewellery. Now, we English agree with Kant on such maudlin display of stage sentimentality, and are prone to suspect that papa's tears are the product of rum-punch. Tenderness let us have by all means, and the deepest you can imagine, but upon proportionate occasions, and with causes fitted to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... earnestness which demonstrated a keen personal interest. Stanor had many girl friends with whom he had often discussed the subject, but invariably a certain amount of self-consciousness had crept in, which had shown itself alternately in cynicism or sentimentality. ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... all the way in the journey heavenward. I believe that they cannot move very widely out of the sphere which they now occupy, and remain as good as they now are; and I deny that my belief rests upon any sentimentality, or jealousy, or any other weak or unworthy basis. A man who has experienced a mother's devotion, a wife's self-sacrificing love, and a daughter's affection, and is grateful for all, may be weakly sentimental ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... will turn anything to account. My head is sometimes in such a whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our moments, that I can get into no settled strain in my letters. My wig! Burns and sentimentality coming across you and Frank Floodgate in the office. Oh, Scenery, that thou shouldst be crushed between two puns! As for them, I venture the rascalliest in the Scotch region. I hope Brown does not put them in his journal: if he ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... substituted sentiment for common sense, and made enthusiasm, not reason, the guide of conduct. A character was given to political conflict which obtained for years to come. There was, it is true, a certain manliness about it in remarkable contrast with that maudlin sentimentality of our time which is rather inclined to ask pardon of the rebels of the late civil war for having put them to the trouble of getting up a rebellion. It was a conflict, nevertheless, more of party passion than of principle, wherein it is impossible to see that either party was ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... for Mrs. Earle's sentimentality. "Surely," she exclaimed with tragic earnestness, "you wouldn't have me live with him after what occurred? Contrition? He said everything he could think of to get me to stay, but I made my decision then ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... world at peace. Can one picture it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of tender childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea Fenimore. She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern, with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call "open-air"; yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies. I have seen her in the morning tearing away across country by the side of her father, the most passionate and reckless ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... in your account of your fellow-guests at the Moorhead Inn. No, I do not misunderstand your letter; nor do I credit you with any foolish sentimentality, or Susie-like flutterings. Jim Airth stands to you for an abstract thing—uncompromising manhood, in its strength and assurance; very attractive after the loneliness and sense of being cut adrift, which have been your portion lately. Only, remember—where ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... policeman, as you say," he retorted, "but I've got enough sense of my duty, I hope, not to allow sentimentality ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... returned, but her attention wandered from her best beloved, and all that were solid came somehow to be set aside and replaced, the nourishing fact by inflated fiction, reason and logic by rhyme and rhythm, and sense by sentimentality, so far had her strong, simple, earnest mind deteriorated in the unwholesome atmosphere of London drawing rooms. It was only a phase, of course, and she could have been set right at once had there been anybody there to prescribe a strengthening tonic; but failing that, she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... into sentimentality at a tale of woe, has been unjust to its own. Whatever judgment may be passed on the cruel measure of wholesale expatriation, it was not put in execution till every resource of patience and persuasion had been tried in vain. The agents of the French Court, civil, military, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... (Extreme Left): I would earnestly warn you against such pusillanimous sentimentality, which would not win over the foes of the new order, but would only supply them with the means of attacking it, or shall we say allow them to retain those means. If we would exercise justice towards them, we should give to them, as to all ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... which finally reached Jack's ears, who begged his mother not to expose herself to such remarks. They then saw each other in the gardens, or in some of the churches; for, like many other women of similar characteristics, she had become devote as she grew old, as much from an overflow of idle sentimentality as from a passion for honors and ceremonies. In these rare and brief interviews Charlotte talked all the time, as was her habit, but with a worn, sad air. She said, however, that she was happy and at peace, and that she had every confidence ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... intimate an indefinite postponement of a consideration of American demands, and would have rendered Mr. Gallatin's further residence useless as well as unpleasant; but French dignity got the better of what Gallatin termed, "the sickly sentimentality which existed on the subject of personal abuse of the king," and the insignificant incident was not allowed to interfere ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... he sniveled, with lachrymose sentimentality. "I gotta make a living, haven't I? Here's you and me, two pretty decent young fellers, having to live on a fake. Well," he added with solacing philosophy, "if we didn't get it, somebody ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... strategic arms limitations and in other areas will have far greater chance for success if both sides enter them motivated by mutual self-interest rather than naive sentimentality. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... much unconscious sentimentality, and the two old market people silent before him, Ralph Flare's eyes half closed also, and the lull of the wheels, the long lake streaks of the sedative skies, the coming of great shadows like compulsions to slumber, made ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... to appreciate the absolute sincerity of the King's words; the settled belief that the Queen could not possibly have any objection to his taking to himself as many mistresses as he pleased. One is a little surprised at the uncouth sentimentality of the thought that nevertheless it might be a disrespect to her memory if he were to take another wife. What a light all this lets in upon the man, and the Court, and the time! As regards indiscriminate amours and ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... them unmistakably silly—as her father would had they not been hers and she his. Only the poorest part of his poetic equipment had propagated in her, and had he taught her anything, she would not have overvalued it so much. Herself full of mawkish sentimentality, her verses could not fail to be foolish, their whole impulse being the ambition that springs from self-admiration. She had begun to look down on Kirsty, who would so gladly have been a mother to ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... and the Bee, that the school appears in full bloom. This is said to consist mostly of exclamation points, and is written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... caresses indulgently; but at heart she was discontented with Lavretsky, with Varvara Pavlovna, and with the whole scene she had prepared. Very little sentimentality had come of it; Varvara Pavlovna, in her opinion, ought to have flung herself at her ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... many of the ladies were silly, and the gentlemen were either stupid or excited, according to the action of the "invisible spirit of wine" upon their several constitutions—when after many glasses of champagne Mr. Mellen began to effervesce in frothy sentimentality and a style of love-making simply nauseating to one of Christine's nature—she looked around for her father in order to escape from the scenes that ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in shame and pity; it really had such an effect of mawkish sentimentality. But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh; they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... was spoken of in some quarters as a "sentimentalist," a man who might go far but for his "fads." One great pathologist held that the whole idea of pursuing science for mitigation of human ills was nothing but a sentimentality and a fad. A debate between this personage and Dr. Derwent was brought to a close by the latter's inextinguishable mirth. He was, indeed, a man who laughed heartily, and laughter often served him where another would have ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... loves of Augustin were really too fierce to last. They burned up themselves. Augustin did not keep them up long. There was in him, besides, an instinct which counteracted his exuberant, amorous sentimentality—the sense of beauty. That in itself was enough to make him pause on the downhill of riot. The anarchy and commotion of passion was repellent to a mind devoted to clearness and order. But there was still another ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other nations. In this quest no scruples should deter them, no sentimentality hamper, no universal ideals distract. Yet this, after all, was but German romanticism assuming another form. The objects, it is true, were different. "Actuality" had taken the place of ideals, Germany of Humanity. But by the German vision the new objects were ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... sulky way, which fortunately passed for romantic melancholy; this rendered him still more interesting in the eyes of his neighbor on the left, a plump blonde about twenty-five years old, fresh and dimpled, who doted upon Lord Byron, a common pretension among pretty, buxom women who adore false sentimentality. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... also the peculiar combination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens, not so robust, not so over-mastering; but he is far more discreet, far truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry him into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the general drift of Archie's humour, she had passed beyond all possibility of doubt. With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied, she had that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of the younger Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate. Not thus would she have chosen. She had seen, in imagination, Archie wedded to some tall, powerful, and rosy heroine of the golden locks, made in her own image, for whom she would have strewed the bride-bed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality. She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation of all beholders, sat on the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... extinguished. They may flag, or vanish for a time, but their restoration in increased vigor and radiance is certain; for, they bear within themselves the guarantee of a future. Henriette Herz, the apostate daughter of Judaism chewing the cud of Schleiermacher's sentimentality and Schlegel's romanticism, had not yet passed away when England produced Jewish women whose deeds were quickened by the spirit of olden heroism, who walked in the paths of wisdom and faith, and, recoiling from the cowardice that counsels apostasy, would have fought, if need be, suffered, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... N. sensibility, sensibleness, sensitiveness; moral sensibility; impressibility, affectibility[obs3]; susceptibleness, susceptibility, susceptivity[obs3]; mobility; vivacity, vivaciousness; tenderness, softness; sentimental, sentimentality; sentimentalism. excitability &c. 825; fastidiousness &c. 868; physical sensibility &c. 375. sore point, sore place; where the shoe pinches. V. be sensible &c. adj.; have a tender heart, have a warm heart, have a sensitive heart. take to heart, treasure up in the heart; shrink. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the type ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Hyde Park. This knowledge was not confined to car costs and such impersonal items, but included meals, scandals, relationships, finances, love affairs, quarrels, peccadillos. Here Nick often played his harmonica, his lips sweeping the metal length of it in throbbing rendition of such sure-fire sentimentality as The Long, Long Trail, or Mammy, while the others talked, joked, kept time with tapping feet or ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... think that "Bought and Paid For" was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at the very crisis at which experience had taught one to expect a crass sentimentality. The fairy-tale was well told, with some excellent characterization, and very well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering of the incompetent clerk was a masterly and unforgettable piece of comedy. I enjoyed "Bought and Paid For," and it is on ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... treatises I will mention the great tome of Sanchez, De Matrimonio. Here you will find the whole sexual life of men and women analyzed in its relationships to sin. Everything is set forth, as clearly and as concisely as it can be—without morbid prudery on the one hand, or morbid sentimentality on the other—in the coldest scientific language; the right course of action is pointed out for all the cases that may occur, and we are told what is lawful, what a venial sin, what a mortal sin. Now I do not consider that sexual matters concern the theologian alone, and I deny ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... possible that he may have always spoiled her a little; and it will soon be shown in what way her tenderness so often received that special material and encouragement which made it often degenerate into sickly sentimentality. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... argonauts. He was an ordinary man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture—no reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the like, and made as ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... her. That singular union of the balanced intellect with the lively heart arrested even in advocacy the floods pressing for pathos. Her aim was at practical measures of help; she doubted the uses of sentimentality in moving tyrants or multitudes to do the thing needed. Moreover, she distrusted eloquence, Parliamentary, forensic, literary; thinking that the plain facts are the persuasive speakers in a good cause, and that rhetoric is to be suspected as the flourish over a weak ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... do not look so closely. They are easily caught by a birdlime of words, and every time Amaury recites his Credo of Love, you are certain to see all round the drawing-room rows upon rows of little rosy mouths, eagerly opening, ready to swallow the taking bait of mawkish sentimentality. Just fancy! A poet who has such beautiful moustaches and who believes in love as ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... class of any nation, the social health of that nation must inevitably in no small measure depend. Meanwhile, the artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies, likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree. Here the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... coming home, Blinker tells Florence that he loves her. So accustomed is she to this display of sentimentality in her cavaliers that she merely laughs. He persists, and she indicates a belief that he is just like the rest. Mention of "the rest" awakes question in Blinker. He learns that she meets men indiscriminately. He has a horror of this evidence ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... "No, not wasted. You have enjoyed them, you say. Splendid justification. You will continue to enjoy them as the years grow between you and your college days. All men are sentimental about college, and in that sentimentality there ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... And when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps descried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... written by the hand of genius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelation to those who do not know Riders to the Sea or The Well of the Saints. Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgated form, and with sentimentality substituted for the tolerant but Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and originality are obvious enough. The Playboy is a marvellous confection, but it is to Riders to the Sea one turns in search of Synge the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... facts of life, to the necessity of getting hold of concrete advantages in life, and of not letting them go, that it deliberately slackens the bent bow, and plunges itself and relaxes itself in floods of abstractions, and idealisations, and dreams of sentimentality? Assuredly it is because the Russian is so inwardly discontented with his own actions that he is such a keen and incisive critic of everything false and exaggerated, that he despises all French rhetoric and German sentimentalism. And ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... cabin, Miko's sardonic voice made me turn. "Touching sentimentality, Haljan! Get to your post ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... cross-grained; and he was even moved by the pathetic and frank avowal which Barbara made to him on the state of her heart. But, though touched by her tears, he understood them not, treated them but as the natural mawkishness of girlish sentimentality; nor had her assurance that she could never love any one but her cousin John, power to dissuade him from the prosecution of his suit. He was void of all delicacy of feeling, was neither hurt nor ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... shrinking from unpleasantness, and his sentimentality, are illustrated by his version of the woman with the ointment. Matthew and Mark describe it as taking place in the house of Simon the Leper, where it is objected to as a waste of money. In Luke's version the leper becomes a rich Pharisee; the woman becomes a Dame aux Camellias; ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... been remembered that in the New Poems of 1909 Mr. Watson published a poem of Hate some years before the Teutonic hymn became famous. It is worth reading again, because it so exactly expresses the cold reserve of the Anglo-Saxon, in contrast with the sentimentality of the German. There is, of course, no indication that its ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... hardly eats any meat herself. She listens at the back door a moment to make sure no one's out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket. There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten's dead, it's dead, that's all. She doesn't mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do with cats she's got sense and guts. They're her family. I don't know that I could have put that ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... tender ballads, and bon-bons. But some day, the truth will avenge itself, and without the least air of burlesque show us that often narrow and sordid existence, abounding in sensual appetites, coarse or childish pleasures, and paltry aims, and varnished with a weak and extravagant sentimentality,—that social order still so feudally aristocratic and feudally plebeian, in which the poor are little better than vassals, and their women toil in the fields like beasts of burden, and the women of all classes are treated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... distracting desires; (4) a desire to win others' good opinion and sympathy,—therefore he always lavished his money on those whom that kind of "good fellowship" wins and told pathetic stories to those whose sentimentality made them easy victims; (5) a weak kind of egoism, seeking easy ways to pleasure and position, restless under discipline, always repentant after wrong-doing, fluent in speech but lacking the courage to face the difficulties ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... hands with Parnell. He had made his name at the Irish Bar as Crown Prosecutor in the troubled period of Mr. Balfour's Chief Secretaryship, and this experience had bred in him a hearty detestation of the whining sentimentality, the tawdry and exaggerated rhetoric, and the manufactured discontent that found vent in Nationalist politics. A sincere lover of Ireland, he had too much sound sense to credit the notion that either the freedom or the prosperity of the country would be increased ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted. But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... well believe it! He looks like that!" said the beautiful girl, her face flushing and her eyes filling with generous sympathy. But Marian was rather averse to sentimentality, so dashing the sparkling drops from her blushing cheeks, she looked up and said: "Miss Nancy, we are going to have chickens for dinner. How do you like them cooked? It don't matter a bit ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Quinault (1635-88) had given his first comedy as early as 1653; in tragedies and tragi-comedies which followed, he heaped up melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon characters strongly conceived, or passion truly felt. A frigid sentimentality replaces passion, and this is expressed with languorous monotony. Love reigns supreme in his theatre; but love, as interpreted by Quinault, is a kind of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy Astrate (1663) was not the less popular because its sentiment was in the conventional mode. One ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... was in winnowing the souls of men and women bare of the chaff of petty circumstances which covered them. His stories all contain at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of Dickens; his Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... preferred by ambitious youths who are insidiously flattered by his tacit compliments to their knowledge of the world, by the disenchanted who cannot help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and by the less sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in sentimentality. Dickens in his own day bid for the approval of those who liked broad caricature (and were, therefore, pleased with Stiggins and Chadband), of those who fed greedily on plentiful pathos (and were, therefore, delighted with the deathbeds of Smike and Paul Dombey and Little Nell) and ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... returned the letter to Billy Little, and that worthy man, wishing to rob the scene of its sentimentality, said:— ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... fight became a hand-to-hand melee. It certainly seemed, at the first blush, to be rather cowardly to pelt the poor beggars with grape while they were unable to strike a blow in return; but the feeling was, after all, one of very weak, false sentimentality. Every man of them was an outlaw and, even if not yet an actual murderer at least a potential one, and a consorter with cruel, cowardly brutes in human shape who would destroy without mercy if they were not themselves destroyed—who were, in fact, worse than wild beasts; for ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... it is too late, ought to unite and strike together against our foe," Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his right hand. "May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his ugly face," Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger in ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... though small, fortune, and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... confirmation some of the best boys, like Power and Daubeny, were looking forward, not with any exaggerated or romantic sentimentality, but with a deep humility, a manly exultation, an earnest hope. They were ready and even anxious to confirm their baptismal vow, and to be confirmed in the sacred strength which should enable them for the future more unswervingly to fulfil it. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... the world with a battle din which only observant souls hear: Love contending with Impurity; Passion springing mines under the calm entrenchment of Reason; scowling Ignorance thrusting in the dark at holy-eyed Reverence; Romance deathfully encountering Sentimentality on the one side and Commonplace on the other; young Sensibility clanging swords with gigantic maudlin Conventionalities. . . . I have seen no man who did not suffer from the shock of these wars, unless he got help from that One Man whom it is not unmanly ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... sympathetically written as to appeal alike to Legitimists and to Republicans. Good as Kings in Exile is, it is not so effective a book as The Nabob, nor such a unique and marvellous work of art as Numa Roumestan, due allowance being made for the intrusion of sentimentality into the latter. Daudet thought Numa the "least incomplete" of his works; it is certainly inclusive enough, since some critics are struck by the tragic relations subsisting between the virtuous discreet Northern wife and the peccable, expansive ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... vocation—a vocation identical with that of the great artist—the "loving of the unlovely into lovableness." Thus does it participate according to its measure in the work of Divine incarnation. This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other kind of sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply into life, we always leave sentimentality behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... artist's own writing, which has a pure and almost childlike naivete of phrasing, there is a glow, not of rhetoric or language, but of emotion, an almost lover-like attitude towards his friends, which is yet saved from sentimentality by an obvious sincerity of feeling. In this he seems to me to be different from the majority of artistic natures and temperaments. It is impossible not to feel, as a rule, when one is brought into contact with an artistic ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... love you, Eleanor," he replied at length. "Isn't that an admission for a man of my age to make? I know it always, but there are times when I must tell you so. Don't call it weakness, dear, or sentimentality. There is a relief which I could never explain in turning from these battles with men and with events to your companionship, which demanded nothing from me ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
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