Читать книгу Writers on... Death (A Book of Quotes, Poems and Literary Reflections) - Amelia Carruthers - Страница 8
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great writers can help us, providing a voice for emotions otherwise inexpressible. Take Mark Twain's simple elegy to his daughter (who died from meningitis at the age of twenty-four) as an example:
Love came at eve, and when the day was done,When heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed;Love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun,And whispered, 'I am rest.'
The feelings behind Twain's simple words are so bleak, and so sorrowful, it is difficult to see how they found expression at all. Yet there is something different to the heartfelt emotions expressed above, and the sentimental nature of much writing on death. The over-romanticisation of the maudlin found its apogee in the Victorian era. Oscar Wilde once famously said of the death of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop that 'one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without Laughing!' The demise of Beth in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, rings a similar tone in the character's final sentiments that 'the hard part now is the leaving you all. I'm not afraid, but it seems as if I should be homesick for you even in heaven.' The word 'sentimental' only appeared in the early-eighteenth century, coming from 'sentire in mente', literally meaning feeling in idea. As Oscar Wiled again quipped, 'a sentimentalist is simply one
