a meaningless rodomontade—­these are the by-ways to be travelled by the style that is a willing slave to its audience.  The like is true of those documents—­petitions, resolutions, congratulatory addresses, and so forth—­that are written to be signed by a multitude of names.  Public occasions of this kind, where all and sundry are to be satisfied, have given rise to a new parliamentary dialect, which has nothing of the freshness of individual emotion, is powerless to deal with realities, and lacks all resonance, vitality, and nerve.  There is no cure for this, where the feelings and opinions of a crowd are to be expressed.  But where indecision is the ruling passion of the individual, he may cease to write.  Popularity was never yet the prize of those whose only care is to avoid offence.

For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances to popular favour are by the twin gates of laughter and tears.  Pathos knits the soul and braces the nerves, humour purges the eyesight and vivifies the sympathies; the counterfeits of these qualities work the opposite effects.  It is comparatively easy to appeal to passive emotions, to play upon the melting mood of a diffuse sensibility, or to encourage the narrow mind to dispense a patron’s laughter from the vantage-ground of its own small preconceptions.  Our annual crop of sentimentalists and mirth-makers supplies the reading public with food.  Tragedy, which brings the naked soul face to face with the austere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns the light inward and dissipates the mists of self-affection and self-esteem, have long since given way on the public stage to the flattery of Melodrama, under many names.  In the books he reads and in the plays he sees the average man recognises himself in the hero, and vociferates his approbation.

The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart.  It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief.  The real Princess of Hans Andersen’s story, who passed a miserable night because there was a small bean concealed beneath the twenty eider-down beds on which she slept, might stand for a type of the aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in these ridiculous susceptibilities.  The modern sentimentalist works in a coarser material.  That ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among the emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before now been made the ally of the unpurified passions, is parodied by him in a simpler and more useful device.  By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled to gratify the prurience of his public and to raise them in their own muddy conceit at one and the same time.  The plea serves well with those artless readers who have been accustomed to consider the moral of a story as something separable from imagination, expression, and style—­a quality, it may be, inherent in the plot, or a kind of appendix, exercising a retrospective power of jurisdiction and absolution over the extravagances of the piece to which it is affixed.  Let virtue be rewarded, and they are content though it should never be vitally imagined or portrayed.  If their eyes were opened they might cry with Brutus—­“O miserable Virtue!  Thou art but a phrase, and I have followed thee as though thou wert a reality.”