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Haywood's romances-in-little lay, however, in a romantic over-refinement of the passions rather than in a too vigorous animalism. Full of the most delicate scruples is "The Surprise: or, Constancy Rewarded" , appropriately dedicated to the Sir Galahad of comedy, Sir Richard Steele.
Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool.
'I wanted to put you in such a position with regard to the Brothertons that you could have no scruples in respect of them such as my father feared from what he called the over-refinement of your ideas of honour. The treatment you must receive would, I thought, rouse every feeling against them. But it was not all for my father's sake, Wilfrid.
You can succeed I repeat it college or no college; all you have to do in the latter case is to put on a little more steam. And remember that some of the world's sages of the practical have closed their life's wisdom with the deliberate opinion that a college education is a waste of time, and an over-refinement of body and of mind.
Perhaps you think that refinement and good education produce greater womanliness than ignorance and low surroundings. So they do; but the worst of circumstances, as we have already shown, cannot crush it. There is much to be feared from over-refinement, or, rather, superficial cultivation, which breeds selfishness, vitiates strength, encourages false pride, enervates the whole life of a girl.
Over-refinement leads to the softer life and ofttimes to degeneracy. Exalted ego is an indication of degeneracy and may have been inherited. Of those things we inherit that are good we must hold, and everlastingly must we watch those which are bad. It is never wise to wander far away from basic principles into preachment. What we need is guidance along the road to the goal of personality.
As time went on, the over-refinement and literary sophistication of the florid school of oratory became more and more powerful. The puritan reaction of the Roman Atticists in the direction of the simplicity of Lysias defeated itself in over emphasis and ended in establishing coldness and aridity as literary ideals.
In order to give effect to this train of reflection, let me direct you to some specific instances in which this desire is manifested. Perhaps I may say, without any over-refinement upon my topic, that there are three things in life to which the desires of men especially cling, three tabernacles which upon the slope of this world they would like to build.
And, even as the iron chest, studded with nails, or the walnut press, unadorned save by the intrinsic beauty and dignity of their proportions, and the tender irregularities of their hammered surface, the subtle bevelling of their panels; even as these humble objects in some dark corner of an Italian castle or on the mud floor of a Breton cottage, symbolise in my mind the most intense artistic sensitiveness and reverence of the Past; so, here at this Exhibition, my impressions of contemporary over-refinement and callousness are symbolised in a certain cupboard, visibly incapable of holding either linen or garments or crockery or books, of costly and delicately polished wood, but shaped like a packing-case, and displaying with marvellous impartiality two exquisitely cast and chased doorguard plates of far-fetched, many-tinted alloys of silver, and a set of hinges, a lock and a key, such as the village ironmonger supplies in blue paper parcels of a dozen.
His tastes, his sympathies, his affinities were all with the old order; but the old faiths economical, social, religious were fermenting within him in different stages of disintegration and reconstruction; and his reserved habit and often solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over-refinement. His future career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him.
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