Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/209

 * Satire's View of Sentimentalism 203 ford in The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795). The general ideal of Sensibility, as it was represented by the various activi- ties of the Bluestockings, was early noticed by satirists, but it was not harshly criticized till the closing years of the century. Peter Pindar's criticisms illustrate the change of attitude; in 1778 he attacked Hannah More with pleasant irony; in 1799 he attacked her and all Bluestockings with virulent abuse but still with something of definitely critical point of view. In the drama and in lyric poetry, then, the refinements of Sensibility were but moderately rebuked by satirists in the days of the American Revolution. During the following decade, the attitude of satire toward sentimentalism underwent a decided change. And the dawn of the French Revolution found English satirists violent in their hostility to the affected fine feelings at which, a few years earlier, they had been tolerantly amused. One reason for this change of tone is as much political and moral as literary. In a time of revolutionary notions in politics and religion as in letters, it was natural for satire to rally to the side of the established institutions and conventions. Many satirists evidently looked upon their rebuke of revolution- ary ideas in literature as merely incidental to their rebuke of revolutionary ideas of any and every kind. The few writers of verse-satire who favored any phase of sentimentalism with any degree of consistency (Mathias or Polwhele, for example, in his praise of certain Bluestockings) were pleased by sentimen- tality only when it was most orthodox and conventional. This explanation of a part, certainly not all, of satire's hostility to sentimentalism, is supported by the view of Sensibility pre- sented by Canning in the masterpiece of the Anti- Jacobins, New Morality: Next comes a gentler Virtue. Ah! beware Lest the harsh verse her shrinking softness scare. Visit her not too roughly; the warm sigh Breathes on her lips; the tear-drop gems her eye. Sweet SENSIBILITY, who dwells enshrined In the fine foldings of the feeling mind; With delicate Mimosa's sense endued, Who shrinks instinctive from a hand too rude; Or like the Anagallis, prescient flower, Shuts her soft petals at the approaching shower.