The Value of Sentiment

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

‘No one can fail to see,’ writes Miss Repplier, in an article on ’The Cost of Modern Sentiment,’ in the May Atlantic, ‘that sentiment is the motorpower which drives us to intemperate words and actions.’ This is true, and no one can fail to see, who reads history and psychology understandingly, that emotion, or sentiment, is the motor-power which drives us to most of our words and to all of our actions, and hence to our foolish as well as to our wise ones.

It seems as impertinent to quote a classic to Miss Repplier as to the ghost of the scholarly Tomlinson, and yet it was ‘writ in a book’ that ‘the chief component of the mind is feeling ; that ‘no movement is made but what is preceded by a prompting feeling, as well as a prompting thought’; that in all of our actions ‘the emotions are the masters, the intellect is the servant.' William James says, ‘Every pulse of feeling which we have is the co-relate of some neural activity that is on the way to instigate a movement.’

To-day the dominant world-movement that is being instigated by emotion is the new religion of social reform. Like all religions in their early stage of active eruption, it is so hot and vehement that some weak minds are swept from their moorings by excess of feeling. But even the extremest manifestations of this new fervor are calm and rational compared with the excesses of the religionists who were flagellants, penitents and crusaders — when whole nations gave up their lives in the hope of seeing the walls of Jerusalem. In spite of our wonder at the trances and scourgings of frenetic piety, we still must realize what tremendous actualities were instigated by the wills set in action by that emotion. Out of those unparalleled raptures of the past, that stamped the stigmata upon ecstatic palms, grew the most substantial monuments, in governments and in stone, ever raised by the hands of man; just as from the passionate desire for liberty and fraternity, of the maddest revolution of modern times, has come the inspiration of those governments which have, at least for their ideal, the rights of man.

From our new religion, with its heightened sense of shame and responsibility, — its anguished sense of failure as a brother’s keeper, — have come inevitable exaggerations: a self-accusatory pity for the prostitute, an unreasoned compassion for the criminal, a brooding over the unmerited sufferings of animals; the old, familiar prost rations of the spirit before the symbols of sorrow, but grown how gentle with the lapse of time! We knew stronger, stranger raptures when the world was young, in the auto-da-fé, in the torturing of the Jews, in trances and genuflexions before the handkerchief of St. Veronica, in foot-washings of beggars, embracings of lepers, in the hair shirt and the scourge. To-day’s excesses contrast soberly with all that, and make us ask ourselves if we have grown a feeble folk, that we take our new revival so sanely.

When we have fully realized that it is only under super-heated human emotion that the big lump of selfish humanity becomes malleable to great and disinterested ideas, that the ‘cake of custom’ can only be melted at white heat, we no longer cry out that certain mutable parts of the mass splash over and form into fantastic shapes.

History shows, a hundred times over, that the inevitable order of social growth is, first, passion with the conception of the new ideal, then its birth and modification. If enthusiasm and moderation could be produced together, enthusiasm would be stillborn, and with this loss the world would lose its power to create new horizons and new moralities. Each ‘Thou shalt not’ that has been written in man’s actual code — not in his decalogue of prophetic vision — has been written with a finger of fire. If excitement were absent from the making of this new mandate, we should be justified in fearing that we are having only one more sterile, intellectual vision, and not the stuff of which realities are made. From the fervor of the present movement we have reason to hope that the emotions of the whole people are becoming involved, and that the great mass is warming toward its next remoulding.

All that was said for sixty years in Congress, with what Miss Repplier would commend as ‘good taste and judgment,’ was less influential in arousing public sentiment, and therefore public action, against slave-owning, than the emotional and inexact pictures of plantation life —so hotly resented by the South — in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And if, to-day, the factoryslave, in turn, has raised to her defense the trembling voices of impassioned advocates, we may be sure that they will do more toward building up for her substantial justice, than the measured utterances of impeccable debaters. The value of this type of fiction is not in exact scientific statement, its value is in its personal and emotional appeal, because in such wise, and no other, is man brought to a conviction of sin, and his will prepared for the sacrifice of his selfish interest, to the larger interest of society. It was not abstract considerations of justice that shaped Lincoln’s convictions about human slavery into the purpose that set itself when he cried out, ‘If I ever get a chance to hit this thing, I’ll hit it hard’; it was seeing just one Negro girl standing on the auctioneer’s block and facing a crowd of leering dealers in human flesh. If sentimentality will do harm, as Miss Repplier points out, it is equally true that without emotion we shall do nothing. It is not so much that ‘a campaign cannot be directed by a debating society,’ in Macaulay’s muchworn phrase, as that it will not be directed by a debating society.

Perhaps the real difference of opinion lies in whether or not we want to see things changed so much that we are willing to accept the full cost of change. Miss Repplier speaks of our ‘safety,’ and she says that we cannot ‘even afford errors of taste and judgment’ to-day. This talk of our safely has always had within it the lurking element of humor. The same grim humor that the prudence of the man in the life-boat has for the man in the open sea. But there are many besides the drowning who are questioning this safety. Is it, they ask, the safety of children in factories, or of their fathers, who cannot earn enough to keep them? Or is it the safety of segregated prostitutes, or of widows who cannot hold their families together?

None of these are new things to the intelligence, but men and women are feeling them differently, hotly. Anew, emotional ethic is forming in their hearts and consciences, the ‘cold and neutral state of intellectual perception’ is past. They, too, have seen things as they are, but they are not like the ageing Fontenelle, they do not ask to die; they are full of the hot blood of youth that will gladly spend itself in labor, drop by drop, to make this world a fit habitation for the children of men.