Sentimentality, in all its forms, is the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause. (I take it for granted that the reader understands the difference between sentiment in fiction, that is, emotion or feeling, and sentimentality, emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration. Without sentiment, fiction is worthless. Sentimentality, on the other hand, can make mush of the finest characters, actions, and ideas.) The theory of fiction as a vivid, uninterrupted dream in the reader’s mind logically requires an assertion that legitimate cause in fiction can be of only one kind: drama; that is, character in action. Once it is dramatically established that a character is worthy of our sympathy and love, the story-teller has every right (even the obligation, some would say) to give sharp focus to our grief at the misfortunes of that character by means of powerful, appropriate rhetoric. (If the emotional moment has been well established, plain statements may be just as effective. Think of Chekhov.) The result is strong sentiment, not sentimentality. But if the story-teller tries to make us burst into tears at the misfortunes of some character we hardly know; if the story-teller appeals to stock response (our love of God or country, our pity for the downtrodden, the presumed warm feelings all decent people have for children and small animals); if he tries to make us cry by cheap melodrama, telling us the victim that we hardly know is all innocence and goodness and the oppressor all vile black-heartedness; or if he tries to win us over not by the detailed and authenticated virtues of the unfortunate but by rhetorical clichés, by breathless sentences, or by superdramatic one-sentence paragraphs (“Then she saw the gun”)—sentences of the kind favored by porno and thriller writers, and increasingly of late by supposedly serious writers—then the effect is sentimentality, and no reader who’s experienced the power of real fiction will be pleased by it.