The evil sentimentalism which we all have reason to deplore from time to time as we pass through life is generally, I think, definable as a tame and cold or small and inadequate manner of speaking about certain matters which demand very large and beautiful expression. The sentimentalist's comment on death or first love, for instance, is offensive, not because his words are too big, but because they are not big enough. We all feel, for instance, that if a journalist having occasion to see the dead child of some poor woman, should in the depravity of his nature talk of it having "a little angel face"- we all feel, I say, that such a journalist is rather a nasty fellow. But the reason is because the thought is in the presence of a great tragedy, entirely trivial. the august and poignant fact about the child is not that it looks like an angel, or is pretty, or even good; the sacred thing about it is simply that it is dead. The tragedy is just the same if it happens at that moment to look like a baboon. The observation is therefore bad, not because it is emotional, but because it is not emotional. It is bad, not because it is soft,  but because it is really very hard and cruel. It is outside the atmosphere; it is strictly to be called "bad taste," because it has not tasted the bracing and bitter substance of calamity. It has drunk the dreadful wine from the same cup as the child's mother, but it has not felt the smack of the difference between this and the weak wine of mere humanitarianism.

-The Outlook, Volume LVVVI (September to December 1905), "The Eclipse of Sentiment"