Now if there is one creature more than a saint whom I fear and distrust it is the Sentimentalist, whom Hawthorne pungently characterizes as "that steel machine of the Devil's own make." The ruthless heartlessness of the Sentimentalist would be unbelievable if one had not seen it with one's own eyes. Take, for example, the Abolitionists. To gratify their own emotions they caused the death of a million men, the infliction of wounds and pain that make the imagination shudder, and all that long succeeding anguish of a people--the grief, the poverty, humiliation, and despair that burned itself indelibly upon the hearts of those who shared it.
Stevenson--that misunderstood moralist now chiefly remembered as a story teller!--put his finger upon the enigma of the Sentimentalist's cruelty:
"Everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought or carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:--Ah, if I could show you these! if I could show you these men and women all the world over ... clinging in the brothel and on the scaffold to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!... They may seek to escape and yet they cannot ... they are condemned to some nobility, all their lives the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.... To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God."
The Sentimentalist, along with all his kind, is hunted by that implacable need of virtue. To satisfy it he seizes upon the wrongs done by others, and in his hot denunciation of another's sin, in his clamour for its punishment, he experiences the warm ennobling glow of personal merit.
The pietist will meticulously perform rites and ceremonies in this same need to soothe the imperious call within him for some justification of his life. Having washed and bowed and recited, his sins of practice trouble him but little--those genuflections have made his balance good in the book of virtue. But the Sentimentalist cannot content himself with pale ceremonies. He is by instinct devouring and bloody, but his soul cringes before his inward monitor. By fierce denunciation of the sins he has no mind to he can soothe his desire to inflict pain in perfect content, upborne by a consciousness of his own righteousness. Torquemada was a type, John Brown of Ossawatamie another; both were criminal paranoics tortured by desire for blood and for self-justification. Real goodness does not stimulate the Sentimentalist's emotions--it gives no opportunity for the outcries that warm his heart with a consciousness of rectitude.