Heart & Mind: What is sentimentality? If one asks somebody who ought to know, one is told: an excess of emotion; or again, misplaced emotion. Both answers miss the point. Who can judge when emotion is too much? People vary not only in the power to feel and to express feeling, but also in their imagination, so that a stolid nature will deem it excessive as soon as love or grief is expressed vividly or strongly. Shakespeare is full of “exaggerated” emotion, but never sentimental. The same remark applies to the other answer. When is feeling misplaced? at the sufferings of a tragic hero? at the death of a pet? at the destruction of a masterpiece? One may argue that any emotion out of the common should be restrained in public, but that is another question, one of social manners that has nothing to do with a feeling’s fitness to its occasion. The diagnostic test must be found somewhere else.

Sentimentality is feeling that shuts out action, real or potential. It is self-centered and a species of make-believe. William James gives the example of the woman who sheds tears at the heroine’s plight on the stage while her coachman is freezing outside the theatre. So far is the sentimentalist from being one whose emotions exceed the legal limit that he may be charged with deficient energy in what he feels; it does not propel him. That is why he finds pleasure in grief and when he is in love never proposes.

-Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (411)

Politics: There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, further from the truth (…) Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice.

– J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in 18C England