Book review: Witty, robust defence of the power of sentimentality to effect change

The central thesis of Ferdinand Mount's 'Soft' is compelling: Sentimentality is a form of mass soft power that steers us towards a better, more humane world

Ferdinand Mount argues there have been three sentimental 'revolutions' in 'Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality'. 

• Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality 
• Ferdinand Mount 
• Bloomsbury, hb £18.00

‘What’s wrong with being sentimental?” said Paul McCartney

recently. “Sentimental means liking stuff.” But if it simply meant liking stuff, then why, Ferdinand Mount asks, is sentimentality regarded as “a heinous sin”?

It is because modern culture has become saturated with the nauseating spectacle of sympathisers weeping for the less fortunate, performative displays of love, and over-emotive reactions to the realities of life. 

Worse still, sentimentality is synonymous with the language of political correctness and its oft-despised contemporary correlatives: Wokery and virtue signalling.

In Soft, Mount launches a witty, illuminating, and robust defence of the power of sentimentality to effect social change. 

Sympathy for the sick motivated the founding of the first hospitals in the Middle Ages while the abhorrence of cruelty and injustice led to the abolition of slavery. 

Over the last 200 years, popular feeling has led to greater equality for women and homosexuals.

Exploiters of sentimentality have helped to improve the lives of less fortunate people: If weeping celebrities help to change opinion about a genuine cause, then what is wrong with that?

Mount argues there have been three sentimental ‘revolutions’. 

The first was the invention of courtly love by troubadours in 12th century France, which Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont’s suggests was a “complete revolution of the human psyche”. 

An entire tradition of courtly love poetry, entangled with the symbolism of Christianity, found its way to medieval Britain. To be in love became “the summit of human experience”. 

A significant political counterpart to this newfound poetic interest in the human heart was the reign of King Henry III. 

Henry reportedly “wept buckets”, but whose combination of “generosity, pacifism, and assiduous piety” helped to usher in social stability and a commercial and agricultural boom.

By the end of the Middle Ages, sentimentality was out of favour: The seismic shifts of the late Renaissance and the Reformation ushered in a harder and more masculinist emotional paradigm. 

As a history of art, Mount offers some deliciously contrarian opinions. 

Michelangelo’s suspicion of the commonplace scenes in 16th century Flemish painting is symptomatic of the Italian Renaissance maestro’s pursuit of a higher ataraxia (calmness): 

“Michelangelo does not seek to make us weep… Can weeping too not be part and parcel of great art?” 

Cervantes’ Don Quixote, widely regarded as the first novel, is dismissed as “the product of a harder age”.

It would not be until the 18th century — Mount correctly identifies Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as the key moment — that the second sentimental revolution occurred. 

Richardson, like many fellow novelists invested in the contemporaneous vogue of sentimentality, filled their pages with romantic and sexual dramas, until they were swept away by rationalist, dry-eyed writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.

Mount saves his strongest attacks for 20th-century modernism, when art underwent a thorough dehumanisation. 

Look at Picasso’s Guernica he says: If you did not know its subject, you might even see “gaiety” in its “gestural, fabricated” figures. 

He detects a disdain, if not downright hatred, for the masses in the tone of high modernist artistry: 

In many cases (he cites Nietzsche, TS Eliot, WB Yeats, among others) an “unsavoury intelligentsia” expressed antisemitic views, detested suburbia, and were contemptuous of social democracy.

Mount’s claims are stretched at times. He improbably pinpoints The Beatles (and specifically the year 1963) as heralds of the third sentimental revolution, our current age of permissiveness, liberalisation, and equality, though clearly there is now a counter-revolt against sentimentality.

Nonetheless, the central thesis of Soft is compelling: Sentimentality is a form of mass soft power that steers us towards a better, more humane world.