\u2018What\u2019s wrong with being sentimental?\u2019 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 \u2018entrenched shibboleth of modern high culture\u2019 \u2013 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 \u2018Hey Jude\u2019 at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Elizabeth II\u2019s golden jubilee, and how the million-odd people standing out in the Mall joined in \u2018that warm, witless, endless\u2019 chorus \u2013 \u2018na \u2013 na \u2013 na \u2013 na-na-na-na\u2019.<\/p>\n
Mount\u2019s argument in this erudite, immensely entertaining book is that to be warm and witless (if by \u2018witless\u2019 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\u2019t witty \u2013 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 \u2018sentimentality\u2019 by those who disapprove of it) can prompt substantial social change, reverse injustices, ameliorate the lives of ill-treated people and \u2013 sentimentality alert! \u2013 enable love.<\/p>\n
He identifies three \u2018sentimental revolutions\u2019, each one followed by an era of chilly reaction. The first began with the troubadours. Mount accepts C S Lewis\u2019s 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 \u2018stony age\u2019 of austere Protestantism and neoclassical Renaissance grandeur, came the age of sensibility. Mount sees the phenomenal success of Samuel Richardson\u2019s 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 \u2018Mr Popular Sentiment\u2019).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reaction followed in the age of imperial \u2018manliness\u2019, the era of Rudyard Kipling\u2019s \u2018If\u2019, William Ernest Henley\u2019s \u2018Invictus\u2019, 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\u2019s view, saw the creation of the \u2018permissive society\u2019, which encouraged tolerance and inclusivity, and produced the Beatles\u2019 song \u2018All You Need Is Love\u2019.<\/p>\n
One could argue with this scheme, but why bother? It serves its purpose as a framework to contain Mount\u2019s musings, learned references and jokes. He doesn\u2019t 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 \u2018whack each other\u2019 ferociously \u2018from dawn to dusk\u2019. Chaucer could be \u2018affectingly sentimental and bitingly anti-\u00adsentimental\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018plaintive, metallic\u2019 Occitan of the original. His responses are fresh and trenchant and unshaped by received opinion. Of Picasso\u2019s Guernica \u2013 generally considered the visual equivalent of a scream of pain \u2013 he writes: \u2018its gaiety might even make you smile a little.\u2019 He accuses Goethe and Rousseau, two sages reverentially treated by most commentators, of being \u2018drenched in bad faith\u2019.<\/p>\n
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 Chr\u00e9tien de Troyes to Lead Belly. He doesn\u2019t make the mistake of thinking comedy can\u2019t be serious: he gleefully cites No\u00ebl Coward and P G\u00a0Wodehouse. His authorities \u2013 Johan Huizinga, Denis de Rougemont \u2013 tend to be from a previous generation, but the voice of Richardson\u2019s Pamela reminds him of Bridget Jones.<\/p>\n
His dominant argument is that sentimentality works. Dickens\u2019s writing was disliked not because it was feeble but because of its power. One of the novelist\u2019s sternest critics deplored his \u2018working upon the feelings by the coarsest stimulants\u2019, which enabled him to exercise a \u2018very wide and a very pernicious political and social influence\u2019. Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin was dismissed on its first appearance as \u2018Sunday-school fiction\u2019, too \u2018full of women\u2019s sloppy emotions\u2019. But as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson each rather sheepishly admitted, it has what Wilson called \u2018eruptive force\u2019. A probably apocryphal but telling story relates that Abraham Lincoln, after the start of the American Civil War, called Harriet Beecher Stowe the \u2018little lady who started this great war\u2019.<\/p>\n
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. \u2018Only intellect can appreciate [it],\u2019 he observed. It will never cause the viewer \u2018to drop a single tear\u2019. Matthew Parker, a stern Reformation-era archbishop of Canterbury, deplored \u2018howling or blubbering\u2019 at funerals as \u2018womanish\u2019, \u2018childish\u2019 and \u2018beastly\u2019. But two centuries later, John Constable wrote of Gainsborough\u2019s landscapes that \u2018on looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them\u2019. Emotion without perceptible meaning or purpose \u2013 how Michelangelo would have scoffed.<\/p>\n
But Mount argues forcefully in favour of \u2018sloppy emotions\u2019 and sodden handkerchiefs. \u2018O how my eyes run!\u2019 writes Richardson\u2019s Pamela. \u2018Don\u2019t wonder to see the paper so blotted.\u2019 We should all cry more, feel more and allow our sympathies to guide our reason, Mount insists. He ends his book with William Blake\u2019s words \u2018a tear is an intellectual thing\u2019. As readers of his wonderful memoir Cold Cream will know, he once headed Margaret Thatcher\u2019s policy unit. What a wet she must have thought him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018What\u2019s wrong with being sentimental?\u2019 Paul McCartney once asked an interviewer. Ferdinand Mount pretends that he was shocked.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-107621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}