Satire's View of Sentimentalism 169 satire for some of the literary abnormalities of their poetry. Southey was a frequent victim, and with him suffered at times both Coleridge and Wordsworth. Ill Satire's view of sentimentalism is less tenuous and of more historical value than satire's view of romanticism in its more typical aspects. Though the affectation of fine feeling was in the case of many an author not merely an accompaniment but a part of romanticism, yet it is possible to find, in the critical passages of English verse-satires between Churchill and Byron, a distinct body of rebuke for sentimentalism. Much of this comment is thoroughly ethical in nature, as in the case of Ireland's couplet concerning La Nouvelle Heloise and French novels in general: Nay, still the dear illusion to enhance, Indecency is coupled with romance. 81 But more of it is quite straightforward condemnation of emo- tional irregularities in literature, observation upon a not utterly insignificant body of writings to which few contemporary judgments have drawn the attention of scholars. Since the dividing line between sentimentalism and romanticism is at least as imaginary as the tropic of Capricorn, it becomes, perhaps, permissible to classify as sentimental whatever the satirists thought sentimental, as one might call a region temper- ate or torrid according to the quality of his sensations there. Macpherson is a case in point, a romantic whom satirists not of his political party ridiculed for his sentimentality. More distinct is the sentimentalism which satire perceived and derided in the plays of Kelly and Cumberland of 1770 and the romantic Kotzebue comedies of 1800, in the Bath-easton rhymes of 1775 and the Delia Cruscan ditties of 1790. The moral Sensibility of the Bluestockings likewise roused some- thing of mirth and more of wrath in the minds of several writers of verse-satire. And in all these phases, sentimentalism, because of its historical influence, was worth criticising. The following
31 Stultifera Navis, 3.
