Man darf das nicht vor keuschen Ohren nennen,
Was keusche Herzen nicht entbehren konnen.
(Chaste ears find nothing but the devil in
What nicest fancies love to revel in.)
The same astute critic might have added:
And eyes demure that look away when seen,
Lose ne'er a chance to peep behind the screen.
It is all of a piece. We have heard of the parlour-maid who
fainted because the dining-table had 'ceder legs,' but never
before that a 'switching' was 'obscene.' We do not envy the
unwholesomeness of a mind so watchful for obscenity.
Be that as it may, so far as humanity is concerned, this
hypersensitive effeminacy has but a noxious influence; and
all the more for the twofold reason that it is sometimes
sincere, though more often mere cant and hypocrisy. At the
best, it is a perversion of the truth; for emotion combined
with ignorance, as it is in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases out of a thousand, is a serious obstacle in the path of
rational judgment.
Is sentimentalism on the increase? It seems to be so, if we
are to judge by a certain portion of the Press, and by
speeches in Parliament. But then, this may only mean that
the propensity finds easier means of expression than it did
in the days of dearer paper and fewer newspapers, and also
that speakers find sentimental humanity an inexhaustible fund
for political capital. The excess of emotional attributes in
man over his reasoning powers must, one would think, have
been at least as great in times past as it is now. Yet it is
doubtful whether it showed itself then so conspicuously as it
does at present. Compare the Elizabethan age with our own.
What would be said now of the piratical deeds of such men as
Frobisher, Raleigh, Gilbert, and Richard Greville? Suppose
Lord Roberts had sent word to President Kruger that if four
English soldiers, imprisoned at Pretoria, were molested, he
would execute 2,000 Boers and send him their heads? The
clap-trap cry of 'Barbaric Methods' would have gone forth to
some purpose; it would have carried every constituency in the
country. Yet this is what Drake did when four English
sailors were captured by the Spaniards, and imprisoned by the
Spanish Viceroy in Mexico.
Take the Elizabethan drama, and compare it with ours. What
should we think of our best dramatist if, in one of his
tragedies, a man's eyes were plucked out on the stage, and if
he that did it exclaimed as he trampled on them, 'Out, vile
jelly! where is thy lustre now?' or of a Titus Andronicus
cutting two throats, while his daughter ''tween her stumps
doth hold a basin to receive their blood'?
