And this suggests that idea in which we find the most interior difference between true and false feeling. In the one the emotion is sought for its own sake as an _end_. In the other it is the _means_ to a higher good. One seeks to save its life and loses it. The other loses its life and finds it. The true benevolence is unconscious of itself as an end, and through such unconsciousness attains to substantial satisfaction. The spurious looks to nothing but the luxury of its own emotion, and thus continually transmutes into poison the very aliment on which it feeds. Like Milton's incestuous monsters, so do the matricidal pleasures of artificial sentiment. Into the womb That bred them ever more return-- engendering, in the end, a fiercer want, and giving birth to a more intolerable pain-- Hourly conceived And hourly born with sorrow infinite. There, too, we find the right notion of that word which would seem so incapable of all strict definition--we mean the much-used and much-abused term, _sentimentalism_. It differs from true feeling in this, that it is a _feeling to feel_--or, for the sake of feeling--a _feeling of one's own feelings_ (if we may use the strange expression), instead of the woes and sufferings of others, which are not strictly the _objects_, but only the _means_ of luxurious excitement, to this introverted state of the affections. Hence, while true benevolence ever goes forth in the freedom of its unconsciousness, sentimentalism is ever most egotistical, ever turning inward to gaze upon itself, and _feel itself_, and thus ever more in the most rigorous and ignominious bondage. The same position, had we time, might be taken in respect to what may be styled false, or theatrical mirth. Even mirth, which, under other circumstances, and when produced by other causes, might be an innocent and healthful recreation, is here utterly spoiled, because we know it to be all _acting_. It is all false; there is no reality in it; there is no true merry heart there. To the right feeling, there is even a thought of sadness in the spectacle, when we reflect how often amid the wearisome repetition of what must be to him the same stale buffoonery, the soul of the wretched actor may be actually aching, and bitterly aching, beneath his comic mask.