HESEUS. The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are
no worse, if imagination amend them.

HIPPOLYTA. It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.

Shakespeare is commenting on the sentimentality which is generally
pleasing to Quince, Snug, Bottom, and the like. If he is mistaken it
is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of
carpenters and bellows-menders, and is not equally to be found among
those of the high estate of Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta herself. But
it would never have done to admit so much before an audience of
tinkers and tailors, splendidly patronised by a few young bloods of
noble birth. Sentiment is distinguished from sentimentality precisely
as Shakespeare suggests. The one is concerned with real emotions, the
other with shadows. The first is informed by the imagination, the
second is devoid of it, and is divorced alike from intellect and
common sense. To touch the chord of sentiment justly and truly is one
of the most difficult things in literature. Shakespeare himself by no
means always succeeded. There is often an affectation in his lighter
love-scenes which destroys the impression of sincerity. Even in life
one may see how at any time the note of sentiment may be turned to
absurdity by the least discordant element. The lover whose tender
expressions are wholly pleasing to his lady may become an object of
ridicule before an uninvited audience. Everyone can remember some
occasion when a whole company of persons, wistfully alluding to a
recent death, has suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter,
betraying, not lack of respect for the dead, but ridicule at some
falsity of expression.

Sentiment is one of the everyday emotions, fine and light in its
texture, requiring the tenderest and most delicate treatment, and
often it must pass off in laughter. It is something less than passion.
It is not concerned with tragedies or crises, but the subtlest
apprehensions of what comes and goes at every moment of life. It must
never be treated as if it were passion, or the slender threads of
which it consists will snap, and ridicule will justly reveal the
unbalanced judgment of the sentimentalist. Nor must it ever be far
from laughter, or it will collapse under its own strain, and we may be
betrayed into thinking that the cynic is the best judge of life. It is
the imagination exercising itself among things real, but not of the
first order of import