‘What’s wrong with being sentimental?’ Paul McCartney once asked an interviewer. Ferdinand Mount pretends that he was shocked. Here was a songwriter who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest since Schubert questioning an ‘entrenched shibboleth of modern high culture’ – the contempt for all that is emotionally sloppy and intellectually soft. But how delighted Mount must really have been. He opens his book with the quote. Later he returns to McCartney, recalling how he sang ‘Hey Jude’ at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee, and how the million-odd people standing out in the Mall joined in ‘that warm, witless, endless’ chorus – ‘na – na – na – na-na-na-na’.
Mount’s argument in this erudite, immensely entertaining book is that to be warm and witless (if by ‘witless’ one means devoid of irony, flippancy and cool) is not only to be on the side of the nice and good. It is also a form of power. Not that Mount isn’t witty – I have seldom read a work of cultural history that made me laugh out loud as frequently as this one did. But he is earnest in his belief that sentiment (called ‘sentimentality’ by those who disapprove of it) can prompt substantial social change, reverse injustices, ameliorate the lives of ill-treated people and – sentimentality alert! – enable love.
He identifies three ‘sentimental revolutions’, each one followed by an era of chilly reaction. The first began with the troubadours. Mount accepts C S Lewis’s thesis that they invented courtly love, and he relates that development to the humanisation of medieval Christianity, with its motherly Virgin and crowds of kindly interceding saints. Then, after a ‘stony age’ of austere Protestantism and neoclassical Renaissance grandeur, came the age of sensibility. Mount sees the phenomenal success of Samuel Richardson’s novels as the manifestation of a cultural shift that led to the abolition of slavery and powered the social reforms advocated by Charles Dickens (scoffed at by Trollope as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’).
Reaction followed in the age of imperial ‘manliness’, the era of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, William Ernest Henley’s ‘Invictus’, the stiff upper lip and the proto-fascist idealisation of warfare as noble and hygienic. It continued into the era of modernism, when many artists, anxious to avoid sentimentality, gave up on representation altogether and the Bloomsbury Group sniffed at the sympathetic realism of the fiction of Arnold Bennett and H G Wells. The third revolution, still ongoing in Mount’s view, saw the creation of the ‘permissive society’, which encouraged tolerance and inclusivity, and produced the Beatles’ song ‘All You Need Is Love’.
One could argue with this scheme, but why bother? It serves its purpose as a framework to contain Mount’s musings, learned references and jokes. He doesn’t adhere rigidly to it himself and is amused to point out that neither did many of the cultural heroes he writes about. The knights of the romances pined and yearned over their unattainable ladies, but continued to ‘whack each other’ ferociously ‘from dawn to dusk’. Chaucer could be ‘affectingly sentimental and bitingly anti-sentimental’ within a single story. Oscar Wilde famously sneered at the death of Little Nell, but he also wrote the pathos-packed stories of The Happy Prince and wept as he read them aloud to his children.
Mount makes for a delightful guide as he leads us on an idiosyncratically selective tour of Western culture in the last millennium, weaving together surveys of art, literature, social history and philosophical debate. His frame of reference is that of a now-rare species: the man of letters. He quotes in German, Latin and Anglo-Saxon. He remarks in passing that a lyric he quotes in modern French is even better in the ‘plaintive, metallic’ Occitan of the original. His responses are fresh and trenchant and unshaped by received opinion. Of Picasso’s Guernica – generally considered the visual equivalent of a scream of pain – he writes: ‘its gaiety might even make you smile a little.’ He accuses Goethe and Rousseau, two sages reverentially treated by most commentators, of being ‘drenched in bad faith’.
In his asides, as diverting as they are digressive, Mount hops off the tour route to bring in Yeats, Lord Chesterfield and Karl Marx. He writes enthusiastically about creative geniuses from Chrétien de Troyes to Lead Belly. He doesn’t make the mistake of thinking comedy can’t be serious: he gleefully cites Noël Coward and P G Wodehouse. His authorities – Johan Huizinga, Denis de Rougemont – tend to be from a previous generation, but the voice of Richardson’s Pamela reminds him of Bridget Jones.
His dominant argument is that sentimentality works. Dickens’s writing was disliked not because it was feeble but because of its power. One of the novelist’s sternest critics deplored his ‘working upon the feelings by the coarsest stimulants’, which enabled him to exercise a ‘very wide and a very pernicious political and social influence’. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was dismissed on its first appearance as ‘Sunday-school fiction’, too ‘full of women’s sloppy emotions’. But as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson each rather sheepishly admitted, it has what Wilson called ‘eruptive force’. A probably apocryphal but telling story relates that Abraham Lincoln, after the start of the American Civil War, called Harriet Beecher Stowe the ‘little lady who started this great war’.
This book is full of tears. To Michelangelo, Flemish art was inferior to Italian art because it encouraged the viewer to emote. Italian painting was grand and marmoreal. ‘Only intellect can appreciate [it],’ he observed. It will never cause the viewer ‘to drop a single tear’. Matthew Parker, a stern Reformation-era archbishop of Canterbury, deplored ‘howling or blubbering’ at funerals as ‘womanish’, ‘childish’ and ‘beastly’. But two centuries later, John Constable wrote of Gainsborough’s landscapes that ‘on looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them’. Emotion without perceptible meaning or purpose – how Michelangelo would have scoffed.
But Mount argues forcefully in favour of ‘sloppy emotions’ and sodden handkerchiefs. ‘O how my eyes run!’ writes Richardson’s Pamela. ‘Don’t wonder to see the paper so blotted.’ We should all cry more, feel more and allow our sympathies to guide our reason, Mount insists. He ends his book with William Blake’s words ‘a tear is an intellectual thing’. As readers of his wonderful memoir Cold Cream will know, he once headed Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit. What a wet she must have thought him.