UNCTUOUS SENTIMENT.
THERE is a curious analogy between the vulgarity of physical manners and the vulgarity of moral sentiments. Every one knows Mr. Dickens's many marvellous and truthful descriptions of the horrid rapture with which a certain class of people, whose delight is in eating and drinking, contemplate the luscious, fruity, or generally oily and unpleasant sides of human aliment. There is Mr. Wackford Squeers, who takes a paternal pride in nourishing little Wackford on all those substances which cause the secretion of animal oil, so as to give a rich and highly-fed appearance to his skin. There is Noah Claypole's mistress, Charlotte, whose unctuous eloge on the fat and bearded oysters with which she fed her beloved, has destroyed, we suppose, in not a few persons, who can scarcely be called ultra- sensitive, all taste for that species of supper for weeks after perusing the scene. There is, again, that vivid description of Mrs. Todgers's of the delight of her gentlemen boarders iu gravy, which has a tendency to turn ordinary stomachs against that nutritious fluid for ever. "Presiding over an establishment like this makes hrivoc with the features, my dear Miss Pecksniff," said Mrs. Todgers ; " the gravy alone is enough to add twenty years to one's age, I do assure you." "Lor! " cried the two Miss Pecksniffs. "The anxiety of that one item, my dears," said Mrs. Todgers, " keeps the mind continually upon the stretch. There is no such passion in human nature as the passion for gravy amongst "commercial gentlemen. It's nothing to say a joint won't yield,— a' whole animal wouldn't yield,—the amount of gravy they expect each day at dinner." And a hundred thrilling quotations of the same general drift might be made from Mr. Dickens's humorous and graphic writings.
But, as if by a kind of fatality, there is no writer who has enriched his moral observations with so much of an analogous kind of unctuous and savoury sentiment as Mr. Dickens. Before you have done laughing (not without something of a rebellion of the stomach) at the dreadfully depicted appetites of Mrs. Gamp and the denizens of Todgers's and the rest, we generally come upon some layer of sentiment meant to be most serious and to proceed from the depths of Mr. Dickens's own moral nature, that is at least as obviously adipose in its nature as anything in the physical tastes of these vulgar heroes and heroines. For example, in the tale to which we have referred—Martin Chuzzlewit—there are some five or six most painful bursts of sentiment in which Mr. Dickens's feelings evidently gurgle with a rich sense of moral fatness that makes one's blood almost run cold. The passion for gravy, which Ile delineates with so much force among the inmates of Todgers's appears to be— shall we say idealised, or rather transferred into a still more inappro- priate sphere ?—in his delineation of the sentimental side of human nature. Remember, for instance, how dreadfully, how ogreishly in a moral sense, Mr. Dickens gloats over Ruth Pinch's love scenes. It is, as it were, the melted butter, or the moral gravy of his book. How he sips it, and dwells upon it, and thinks how he may thicken it, and- give it a richer flavour; and then tastes it again, nodding approvingly ! For instance, horrescimus references, but it is essential to illustrate our meaning—when John Westlock is declaring himself to Ruth : " He sat down by her side, and very near her ; very, very near her. Oh rapid, swelling, bursting little heart, you knew that it would come to this, and hoped it would. Why beat so wildly, heart 2" and so on, through much more glutinous matter, dreadful even to glance at, which reminds one only too vividly of that insatiability of the gentleman at Todgers's before referred to ;—" it's nothing to say a joint won't yield, a whole animal wouldn't yield" the required amount. And so again not only in such scenes as these, but on topics meant to be purely pathetic : how Mr. Dickens feeds his hearers of poor little Paul Dombey's early death ! How juicily he treats the sadness of the subject; how luscious and fruity even does the theme of immortality become in his hands ! It almost gives us the sensation of absolute gluttony to enter into the appetizing spirit with which he spoons and stirs the subject of grief and death.
In all this Mr. Dickens does but represent the times ;—with the humour indeed of one who sees the low and ludicrous element in them so far as he caricatures the clumsy voluptuousness of vulgar appetites, but also with the blindness of one who does not see the moral vulgarity that is invading our literature from the same side. In the old days all the instructive and didactic books written for children and young people, for young wives on their marriage, and young mothers in pursuit of a theory of education, were of the driest and most shrivelled sort of morality—prim and priggish to the last degree, but wholly free from this vulgar sort of richness of tone. But now the demand for the unctuous has ascended into this didactic region, and you can open few books of the old advising sort without discovering a vehement effort to add interest by the introduc- tion of savoury feelings. Here, for example, are " Hints to Young Mothers," by a popular authoress. We open the work, and find almost at the first page that babies are used, as they very often are, to give richness to the style :
" My Dear Mrs. Johnson,—You have waited long for baby-love to claim you as a mother; • but now that you are known, and the little hands are held out, and the little feet run to meet you, and the smile greets your smile, and the mother's name is lisped, you have your first relvard"
—a very strong analogy to the receipt which will be found at another page of the " Hints" called
"TO THICKEN GRAVIES.
" Rub one piece of butter the size of a walnut in a teaspoon of flour, gradually add a cup of boiling water to it, then some gravy, pouring it to and fro to prevent its lumping; boil up with the remainder. The butter and flour depend on the thickness required."
Advice and morality are similarly " thickened".now-a-days by unc- tuous materials.
Now, what is the origin of all this demand for excruciating senti- ment? Why do people think it "nice" to regard a baby thus:— "Sleeping perhaps its first sleep on earth, lies that little one nestling in the downy bed, looking so calm and sweetly as though the light folds of the little curtains were angels' wings casting their loving shade around to guard the gift from this contaminating breath of the world on which it has just been launched ?" We take it that the origin of this vulgar sort of sentiment is, in fact, the love of mixing up a kind of exciting physical sensation with what is, or is supposed to be, be- nevolent feeling. Just as Todgers's thought more of the palate than they did of the appetite in those unlimited demands which so much disturbed their hostess,—so people who dwell on " baby-love," and that kind of thing, mix up a sort of physical self-consciousness of the soft white sensation produced by a baby with the sentiment it is supposed to inspire,—and this physical self-consciousness which dis-
turbs the pure sentiment, is the vulgar element in it. So in Mr. Dickens's dreadfully physical way of gloating over Ruth Pinch's " little heart," and those emotions from gazing into which in another any cultivated mind would shrink with a kind of horror naturalis,—the vulgarity consists both in the prying and in the physical way in which it is described. If Ruth Pinch had herself felt in that way it would have been vulgar; for another to gaze into her, and describe her in that way, is still more so. There is in moral sentiments and emotions, as well as in the physical system, a certain litheness and spareness which implies both health and strength, and the absence of which always denotes some inferiority or degeneration like what the physiologists call " fatty degeneration of the tissues." The lite-
rature of the day, while it has become less dry and wooden, has also certainly become much more in danger of this kind of degenera- tion than either the ostentatiously prim or ostentatiously lax litera- ture of the last century. There was little then, little even in the pul- pit, which excited that peculiar kind of disgust to which the vulgar sentimentalism of modern days gives rise.
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