@George,
Which might only mean that you share with Mr Frost a definition of "love" and "need". It's sentimental to me. It is conditioned by Mr Frost's position in life and his sense of self-esteem. It might be said to be mystical in the sense of producing the "oceanic" feeling in those who I tried to describe earlier. His fans. The dinner-gong going off breaks the spell. The dinner gong would not break the spell of Haggard's advice to avoid funny performances if laughing is painful and thus to avoid reading the very sentence the advice is in and, by extension, Haggard's oeuvre, and, bearing in mind that not many potential readers are in Sir Henry Curtis' state, it is a claim to be writing a funny book.
Taken either sentimentally or mystically it's not formalistic. The accusation of "formalism" was levelled by Stalin at those composers whose work was not readily appreciated by the masses. It could get artists shot. Did in fact.
The piss-take option is formalism. Aimed at an elite few. Doing a high grade flannel to show how good you can do it sort of thing. Some people accused Dickens of laughing through the composition of the death of Little Nell scene. I suppose horror movie makers crease themselves laughing at the thought that they have got a nation's aunties and damsels peeping through their fingers.
Quote:When The Old Curiosity Shop was approaching its emotional climax — the death of Little Nell — Dickens was inundated with letters imploring him to spare her, and felt, as he said, "the anguish unspeakable," but proceeded with the artistically necessary event. Readers were desolated. The famous actor William Macready wrote in his diary that "I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain. . . . I could not weep for some time. Sensations, sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken." Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish member of Parliament, read the account of Nell's death while he was riding on a train, burst into tears, cried "He should not have killed her," and threw the novel out of the window in despair. Even Carlyle, who had not previously succumbed to Dickens's emotional manipulation, was overcome with grief, and crowds in New York awaited a vessel newly arriving from England with shouts of "Is Little Nell dead?" Tastes change, however: Oscar Wilde, that sardonic iconoclast, would later remark (though he might not, even in the saying, have believed it) that no one could read the death-scene of Little Nell without dissolving into tears — of laughter. Today, perhaps, we do not find it so mawkishly sentimental, but we cannot read it, obviously, as the Victorians did.
It is interesting it seems to me because it lines up sentimentalism and mysticism with totalitarianism.
