I have long wrestled with the difference between healthy emotion and sentimentality. The latter has long seemed to me more shallow, less useful, more an end in itself versus a natural and spontaneous self organizing reaction to something real happening in the world.
And tonight, it seems to me that sentimentality consists in the main in pity: either maudlin self pity, or grandiose pity for “the world” or some reduced representation of it. Sentimentality is a feeling which does not lead to a felt need for effective action. It might and often does lead to a felt need for symbolic action, but that is a trifle. This does no one any real good, and when substituted for actually effective action, it indirectly makes things worse.