This permanent element is Sentimentality .sx There is a value in thin sentiment and in bad literature ; for pure emotion is a rare and exhausting experience , which might kill the sufferer , or itself die , if it could not relax into the sentimental state , which preserves " emotion " without demanding the least spiritual labour .sx Literary sentimentalism offers rich fields to the investigator , and if their wildness is at present rather baffling , they present certain constant aspects for definition .sx The most helpful of these is the fact that the structure and development of the story is invariably the same , and the sentimentalism is inherent in it .sx Little acquaintance with fiction is required to convince one that plots are strictly limited in number .sx The limitation is inherent in the actual structure of abstract plot , which , without any help from Aristotle , can be seen to develop in one single way .sx A situation is enunciated , a complication ensues , and finally the denouement ends the story .sx From this primary statement we can advance to the definition that a plot consists simply in the righting of something which has gone wrong .sx Round this original structure a writer builds his various themes .sx Comedy offers a conventional righting of the wrong which provides a complete and immediate satisfaction of our lighter moralities .sx In Tragedy the righting of the wrong is achieved only with a great expense of pain on the part of the hero which culminates in his death .sx It is his death which rights the wrong , and this justification , coming too late , exists solely in the mind of the spectator which has been stimulated by poetry and conflict to a high state of receptivity .sx The pleasure which we have in Tragedy , and the spiritual exaltation which follows from it , are due to the fact that we have been made vessels of justification , that we have been drawn into a transcendent sympathy with the sufferer , and that more clearly than the men who immediately surrounded him we know that the Hero was right .sx The satisfaction of Comedy is actual , that of Tragedy imaginative .sx Sentimentalism is the product of an irregular alliance between Tragedy and Comedy .sx For there is an intermediate class which blends the actions of Tragedy with the comic satisfaction of our lighter moralities .sx A Winter's Tale provides an obvious example , where the horrific complications of Othello are resolved in a happy ending .sx Sentimentalism is the doctrine " that Truth and Virtue shall succeed at " , a doctrine which might be pernicious did not its inherent futility render it harmless .sx Truth and Virtue are self-sufficient , and their success or failure does not concern them .sx To tempt Truth with the prospect of success , like a carrot suspended in front of a donkey , merely renders the tempter ridiculous .sx And there is something peculiarly ridiculous about the sentimentalism which is the subject of this Essay - a sentimentalism which was constant from the time of Dryden's Heroick Tragedies until the Romantic Revival .sx Such is its nature ; and there is a cause for its appearances .sx There are periods when literary sickness becomes so settled as not to contain in itself the seed of its own recovery , but must turn , for its cure , to some extraneous remedy .sx The immediate result of the new foreign element is that literature becomes exotic , sentimental , and hectic - periods of luxuriance which we term Baroque or Gothic - and then gradually it moves towards acclimatisation and passes into a period of pure art .sx A prophet is not without honour save in his own country , but that is because his own country knows too much about him .sx Familiarity , above all with prophets , breeds contempt .sx But when he has crossed the sea and become a strange object in a foreign land , unintimate , inscrutable , romantic , exotic , then there is no man who will not fall prostrate before him .sx This worship is entirely sentimental .sx He draws a wonderful attention to himself , not for what he is - for that no man can tell , not knowing him - but for the accidental strangeness attaching to him .sx And he himself , acutely self-conscious because of his unfamiliar surroundings , frightened like a small boy at a new school , turns his sentimental thoughts to the comforts of his home .sx But gradually every one forgets his strangeness and he becomes assimilated to the new background .sx The prophecy is accomplished .sx So it is with the movements of literature .sx The frantic behaviourisms of Dryden's Heroick Tragedies , introduced from France as a result of Charles's French exile , quietened down into the cold art of Pope .sx The fashionable Gothic which accompanied the arrival of the German Georges developed into the pure Romance of the Revival .sx But although Augustanism represents an art exalted above the common level , the consistent trend through the whole period is sentimentalism , which finally developed into , though it was rudely rejected by , Wordsworth .sx It is not necessary to speak at any length of Dryden's Heroicks .sx Their extravagances are so colossal , the richness of their absurdities is so infinite , that we can return many times and always make new discoveries .sx The Conquest of Granada is conceived on a scale almost as gigantic as that of Tamburlaine .sx Steadily the ten acts plod on , each contributing its full quota of corpses to the story , and through unrelieved gloom of subject , and pompous brilliance of verbiage , we come at last to the final oppression of a happy ending .sx This would serve to describe all the Bad Art which is the subject of this Essay .sx For the tragic characteristic of everything from Dryden to Mrs. Radcliffe is the immense , fantastic conceptions in the minds of the writers , and their hopeless failure to convey to us anything but a top-heavy fabric which collapses every time we laugh .sx Judged by absolute aesthetic standards their works by no means lack merit , and though it must remain a mystery to us that their own generations could have acclaimed them as they did , it is still just possible for us to surrender ourselves to the tide of emotions .sx We become giddy ( to change the metaphor ) at such a height , the profusion of ornament deprives us of the full use of our faculties .sx It is perfect Baroque .sx The bad taste , the lack of integrity , are carried to such a pitch of perfection as to convince us of their validity .sx Perhaps it was just the inconceivable strangeness of the subject , the Englished version of Frenchified Spain , that so won the hearts of London .sx For the exotic is a password anywhere ; even our food is more palatable under a French name .sx However that may be , their popularity did not last long .sx Dryden himself sickened of them , and what is most interesting , in 1695 referred to them as " Gothic" .sx Unfortunately , Dryden condemns the Shakespearean blend of laughter and tears which we now consider the highest accomplishment of dramatic power , and which perhaps only Tchekov has repeated ; but the words " unnatural mingle " exactly describe the blend of tragic action and sentimental conclusion which is the ruling element of Baroque and Gothic .sx The years moved on , and soon the new French element became acclimatised .sx The florid facility of Dryden quietened into the chaste severity of Pope .sx Dryden's Baroque profusion contains the least meaning in the largest space ; Pope's cold classicism contains the most meaning in the smallest space .sx There was no happy mean ; and though in some ways Pope may be found a great artist , and for the purpose of this theory of the exotic , a pure one , yet to the writer there seems to be no absolute artist between Marvell and Wordsworth .sx For epigrams are like sensual pleasures :sx they last only for a moment and leave nothing behind them .sx Further , when Sentimentality is considered , not as a relaxation , but as something of absolute value , literature is impotent to lift itself to a spiritual utterance , and Cato stands as the paragon of morality and aesthetics .sx For this very reason Pope is not quite unsentimental .sx Only Addison ( Cato excepted ) can be held the perfect Augustan , who made no compromise to the fashion of the times .sx Pope's grotto at Twickenham , far removed as it is , was not without its influence on the Romantic Revival .sx Even at this early date Nature of a sort was fashionable .sx Eighteenth-century thought is a vastly complex affair .sx Augustanism only held undisputed sway from 1700 till 1720 .sx Its influence was dying when in 1756 Warton boldly declared that Pope was not a poet ; and it only survived into the next century as a result of its posthumous revival in Samuel Johnson .sx In the meantime Sentimentality made its way ; indeed during the century the taste for the exotic was carried to such exquisite niceties that it is impossible for us now to trace its variations .sx The Constant Lovers in 1722 marks the new feeling ; and by the 'forties Sentimentality had invaded even poetry in the works of Young , Blair , and especially Shenstone , and next in prose in the novels of Richardson and Sterne .sx But we cannot pause over the eloquent sleeplessness of Young ; nor how round the midnight churchyard which is only too easy of access ; nor fathom the gloom of Akenside , whose poetry is not always easy to understand , partly because there is not always anything to be understood .sx We have but to read Johnson's Lives to realize that Melancholy was more than a fashion during the eighteenth century :sx it was a permanent experience .sx By 1770 the Gothic Novel had won the day .sx That " elegant " , Mackenzie , in 1771 wrote The Man of Feeling - " The author has given him extreme sensibility , but of that timid and melancholy cast which nearly incapacitates a man for the duties of life and the energies of " - while Hayley , friend of Cowper , Romney , Southey , and Blake , was living the part with a thoroughness that no mere writer of fiction could have invented .sx Among innumerable others , Mrs. Robinson was beginning to discover " the progressive evils of a too acute " .sx Sensibility was , in fact , " all the " .sx Some men were born with it , others achieved it , and others had it thrust upon them .sx " The world , " said Mackenzie , " in the eye of a philosopher , may be said to be a large madhouse .sx " Sickening as the spectacle was , Sensibility nevertheless melted the ice of the Augustans and released the streams for the passion of the Lake Poets .sx Yet the beginning of it all was , as we said , the spirit contained in Pope's grotto at Twickenham .sx The cult of the Precious was the inevitable accompaniment of the art of Precision .sx When thought was of such limitations that it could be confined in an epigram , Nature could be represented selectively and in miniature .sx It was desired of Nature not to be a subject for Art , but to be herself already artistic .sx Thus there arose the cult which has never ceased , of landscape-gardening , ubiquitously set going by " Capability " Brown , of grottoes , and waterfalls , and stone ornaments , which are an intrinsic part both of the eighteenth century in fact and of the Gothic Revival in prospect .sx The pride which Pope took in his grotto was extraordinary , and indeed it must have been an extraordinary place .sx But when we read the account of it we are bound to feel that all the precious stones which composed it afforded him pleasure not for what they were but for the strange places from which they came ; for Pope's love of the exotic was an illness with him .sx In 1745 Dodsley published a pamphlet giving A Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden , as it was left at his Death , with a Plan and Perspective View of the Grotto .sx All taken by J. Serle , his gardener .sx With an account of all the Gems , Minerals , Spars , and Ores of which it is composed , and from whom and whence they were sent .sx The list is extraordinary , and includes stones sent from places so far distant as Mount Vesuvius , the Hartz Mountains , Mexico , and Old Spain , the West Indies , Italian marble quarries , Cornish mines , and even from the stalactite caves of Wookey Hole , where the guide now speaks in half pride and half contempt of " the depredations of Alexander Pope , the famous English " .sx The garden itself also included a Shell Temple , a Vineyard , an Obelisk in memory of his Mother , a Bowling-green , a Grove , an Orangery , and a Kitchen-garden .sx