theoryofliteratu00inwell

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Theory of Literature
French Religious Sentiment in the Seventeenth Century draws
much of its material from literature} and Monglond and Trahard
have written very fine studies of sentimentalism, the pre-
romantic feeling for nature, and the curious sensibility displayed
by the French Revolutionaries. 19
If one surveys Unger's list, one must recognize that some of
the problems he enumerates are simply philosophical, ideological
problems for which the poet has been only, in Sidney's phrase,
the "right popular philosopher," while other problems belong
rather to a history of sensibility and sentiment than to a history
of thought. Sometimes the ideological intermingles with the
purely emotional. In his attitude to nature man is profoundly in-
fluenced by cosmological and religious speculations but also di-
rectly by aesthetic considerations, literary conventions, and possibly
even physiological changes in his manner of seeing. 20 Landscape
feeling, though also determined by travelers, painters, and
garden designers, has been profoundly influenced by poets such
as Milton or Thomson and writers like Ruskin.
A history of sentiment will make considerable difficulties, since
sentiment is elusive and, at the same time, uniform. The Germans
have certainly exaggerated the changes in human attitudes
and have constructed schemes of their development which are
suspiciously neat. Still, there is little doubt that sentiment
changes^ has at the very least its conventions and fashions. Balzac
amusingly comments on M. Hulot's frivolous eighteenth-cen-
tury attitude to love as different from that of Madame Marneffe,
who has the new Restoration conventions of the poor feeble
woman, the "sister of charity." 21 The torrents of tears of the
eighteenth-century reader and writer are a commonplace of lit-
erary history. Gellert, a German poet of intellectual and social
standing, cried over the parting of Grandison and Clementine
till his handkerchief, his book, his table, and even the floor got
wet, and boasted of it in a letter} 22 and even Dr. Johnson, not
renowned for softheartedness, indulged in tears and sentimental
effusions far more unrestrainedly than our contemporaries, at
least those of the intellectual classes. 23
In the study of the individual writer, Unger's less intellectual-
ist point of view also has its advantages, since it tries to define