Ours has been almost an 18th-century reaction. “When we cry deeply, we are closer to our natural and to our divine state,” Rousseau wrote approvingly, believing tears to be evidence of sincere and deep emotion on the crier’s part, as opposed to the shallow verbal interplay of polite society. But it was also a cult, just as much as the periwig: perhaps there has never been a more intentionally tearful century. Among the fashionable gentry, blubbing indicated fine morals and exceptional sensitivity. According to Tom Lutz’s book on the subject (Crying: the Natural and Cultural History of Tears), the primary goal of dramatists, actors, poets and novelists was inducing “abundant and pleasurable tears” in their audiences, which as a result, burst into fits of what Lutz calls “moral weeping” or, less visibly, felt a heightening of their sexual urges. Tearful eroticism became part of courtship. In Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, the hero and his companion Lotte read odes together as they touch and weep. Three years earlier, in a novel called The Man of Feeling by an Edinburgh lawyer, Henry Mackenzie, the protagonist wept at the drop of a hat – or rather between kisses, at the news of a dog’s death, and on hearing the “romantic melancholy” of a shepherd’s horn.
- Andy Murray's tears are hard to watch, By Ian Jack, Guardian.co.uk, July 12, 2013.
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