The critic cannot overlook
them in literature; for it is in the realm of the imagination that
idealism, direct or perverted, does its best or its worst.
Sentiment is not perverted idealism. Sentiment _is_ idealism,
of a mild and not too masculine variety. If it has sins, they are
sins of omission, not commission. Our fondness for sentiment
proves that our idealism, if a little loose in the waist-band and
puffy in the cheeks, is still hearty, still capable of active
mobilization, like those comfortable French husbands whose plump
and smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of everything but
thrift and good living, one used to see figured on a page whose
superscription read, "Dead on the field of honor."
The novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment may prefer
sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine to the masculine
virtues, but we waste ammunition in attacking them. There never
was, I suppose, a great literature of sentiment, for not even "The
Sentimental Journey" is truly great. But no one can make a diet
exclusively of "noble" literature; the charming has its own cozy
corner across from the tragic (and a much bigger corner at that).
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