SOFT

Cry me a river.

Usually applied to the saccharine strains of Barbra Streisand or the weepy end of Charles Dickens’ Little Nell, the term “sentimental” carries with it the worst excesses of emotion. Mount disagrees. Sentimentality, in the writer and novelist’s view, is the cultural expression of unbridled emotion, pressed into the service of love and belonging. This book offers a compendious review of Western European desire, from the medieval troubadours through the 18th-century “man of feeling,” to the Beatles and beyond. Mount’s view is that sentimentality binds us together as human beings. The arts of emotion “give one a sense of purposeful peace as well as of undimmed beauty.” Mount charts “sentimental revolutions,” none so revealing as the story of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740)—a book that “delves into character to a depth never previously attempted in fiction.” Similarly revolutionary are the songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney: “Their work has left the most lasting impact on the emotional life of the nation.” Mount’s aristocratic inheritance is there on every page, passing blithe judgments on critics and artists alike. Michelangelo is “as decisive and dynamic a thinker as he was an artist.” The Edwardians were “unforgivably popular.” One modern critic has “all the post-colonial detachment that comes naturally to an American academic.” Mount filters English and European culture through the lens of his sublime assurance, and while some younger readers may find his tone more Downton Abbey than downtown cool, his judgments always have the ring of common sense about them. “Sentimentality is indispensable to human flourishing.” And then he ends by quoting P.G. Wodehouse and Shakespeare, reminding us that the sun has never really set on English men of feeling.

A magisterial, personal reflection on the freedom to express our feelings in all their gushy beauty.