Word: sentimentalist
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...from Bouvier-land. For the rest, along with Mary Cassatt, John Audubon and Childe Hassam, there were some art ists who had scarcely been heard of for years. A former naval person like the President would understandably favor a seascape by James Bard. But a Mount Monomonac by the sentimentalist Abbott Thayer, who died in 1921, or a portrait of Queen Victoria by the stodgy Franz Winterhalter, whom Ruskin dubbed a "dim blockhead," were plainly special tastes...
...most striking difference, the Great Divide of personality, is a matter of the temperature of the heart. Smith is a bit frosty; displays of emotion make him visibly uncomfortable. Sam Rayburn, in contrast, is a sentimentalist, a man of strong and easily stirred feelings, who unashamedly weeps in public when moved. Men who were there still choke up when they recall Rayburn's anguished speech in the House on the death of his old friend Alben Barkley, the speech that ended, "God comfort his loved ones. God comfort me." The difference carries over into politics. Judge Smith...
...thrown out of school for mischiefmaking. He has a knack for sketching and, still in his middle teens, decides to become an artist. The rest of the vast novel is his own rambling, episodic, thoughtful account of his struggles to learn how to paint. Keller is no sentimentalist, but his narration is cluttered with most of the furniture of the sentimental novel-the childhood love who dies of consumption, the mother who starves herself to buy her son's art supplies, and the chance meeting, when all seems darkest, with the count's fair young daughter...
...ruins of a settler's cabin or the barely traceable midden of an Indian camp. Graves's record of the journey is an eloquent elegy. While the author makes it clear that he finds one era fascinating and the other dull, he does not make the sentimentalist's mistake of saying "that Texans were nobler men in the days of the cattle drives than they are in those of "pink Thunderbirds and patio living...
Harvard's chair honors more: an anti-sentimentalist philosopher whose national fame rose and fell in a few brief years (circa 1930). In that essentially sentimental era, Babbitt's "new humanism" so riled both liberals and conservatives that nobody really listened. What Babbitt proposed, in his prickly prose (Democracy and Leadership, On Being Creative and Other Essays'), was an end to the gathering tyranny of abstract causes. He despised any assumption that the "only significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society." The struggle, said he, lay in the will...