On Sentiment

Been reading Chesterton's collection of essays titled "Generally Speaking" and he attempts to get at a definition of sentimentality:

It is sentimentalism to use words in order to confuse and weaken, when they ought to define and decide. It is not sentimental to deal with things of sentiment such as tone or melody or minor graces of life. It is not false to be sentimental about these things that are avowedly things of sentiment. The evil comes in when we waver about weighty matters; not when we allow gossamer and thistledown to follow their own nature, which is to waver...

I have always felt it in the conventionalized laxity of fashionable divorce; where people want to change their partners as rapidly as at a dance, and yet want again and again to thrill at the heroic finality of the sacramental vow, which like the sound of the trumpet. They want to eat their wedding cake and have it.