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What Is Sentimentality? Author(s): Brian Wilkie Source: College English, Vol. 28, No. 8 (May, 1967), pp. 564-575 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/374718 Accessed: 11/11/2010 23:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ncte. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English. http://www.jstor.org

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What Is Sentimentality?Author(s): Brian WilkieSource: College English, Vol. 28, No. 8 (May, 1967), pp. 564-575Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/374718Accessed: 11/11/2010 23:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ncte.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCollege English.

http://www.jstor.org

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564 COLLEGE ENGLISH

mean, when she bade the ladies good- night? The poem is a grotesquerie, often

nearly a parody; for only our assurance about intention will clearly distinguish parody from imitation or allusion; Eliot even told Arnold Bennett that yes, the notes were a skit, but not more so than some of the poem itself.

But the later Eliot, that great master of the anonymous, the ventriloquist of Tradition, has appropriated the poem, which is after all signed with a name in-

distinguishable from his; it is a very neo- classical poem now, and we lead students

through it. It failed, apparently, like every

other poem, to get poetry taken seriously by the people who quote it, much as Gulliver's Travels failed to reform the morals of England. It enacts that attempt and that failure: an enigmatic, nearly comic poem by a poet who no longer exists, who had ceased to exist by the time he had written it. For from that day on a man named T. S. Eliot lived, like the rest of us, in a world containing among other curiosities, a poem entitled The Waste Land: and the theme of The Waste Land, one may almost say, was that there existed (but there ought to) no such poem.

What Is Sentimentality? BRIAN WILKIE

ONE OF THE TERMS most often used when a literary critic wants to brand a work as bad is "sentimental." (I am referring both to published criticism and to class- room teaching.) Because the word is ac-

cepted by almost everyone as a pejorative one, because there is virtually no appeal from the verdict that a work is sentimen- tal, we ought to know clearly what we are saying when we make the charge. What, then, is sentimentality? I intend to make a few general suggestions, but I should make it clear at the outset that I do not promise any positive and strict definition that everyone will accept. At the very least, though, I hope to show that the way in which critics, including teachers, generally define the word is un-

helpful and in a high degree misleading.

Our question may well seem superflu- ous, for, interestingly enough, "sentimen- tal" and "sentimentality" are among the

very few terms-other than merely tech- nical ones like "blank verse"-of which a

fairly standard definition prevails among people professionally concerned with lit- erature. Of twelve basic handbooks on literature which I have looked at, two discuss sentimentality without defining it; the other ten all define the term in es- sentially the same way, with some but surprisingly little variation in wording, emphasis, and illustrative detail. All ten agree that sentimentality is the expression of feeling or the attempt to evoke feeling in excess of what the portrayed situation reasonably calls for. The common key- note is the idea of disproportion or excess. (See the Appendix to this article.) The

following definition of "sentimentality" is typical: "generally a pejorative word in literary criticism, indicating a superabun-

Brian Wilkie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He is the author of Romantic Poets and Epic Tradi- tion (1965).

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dance of tender emotion, a disproportion- ate amount of sentiment (feeling). It is sentimental to be intensely distressed be- cause one has stepped on a flower. A character, say, Hamlet, may display deep emotions, but they are sentimental only if they are in excess of what we feel the situation warrants." (Appendix, no. 2. It will surprise no one to learn that flowers come off badly in the definitions I col- lected; so do mothers, especially gray- haired ones, baby shoes, and small animals like goldfish and mosquitoes.) This defi- nition is, of course, an application of the ancient and honored principle of deco- rum, which insists, however tautological- ly, that what is inappropriate in literature is bad. But sentimentality, according to the current definitions, violates decorum in a special way: the violation is a quanti- tative one, an "excess."

Let us compare this definition with an actual work which I believe all or almost all of us will agree is sentimental. So that we may have agreement as wide as possi- ble, I choose one of the most extreme ex- amples I can think of, the notorious late nineteenth-century tearjerker, Henry Clay Work's "Come Home, Father." I ask the reader to think of this song lyric as a lyric poem; if he knows the melody I ask him to try to forget it for the moment and ignore whatever influence it may have in making him feel that the words are sentimental. If the reader does not know the melody, so much the better for our purposes. In the song a little girl is addressing her drunkard father in a saloon:

I. Father, dear father, come home with me now!

The clock in the steeple strikes one. You said you were coming right home

from the shop As soon as your day's work was done. Our fire has gone out, our house is all

dark, And Mother's been watching since tea, With poor brother Benny so sick in

her arms,

And no one to help her but me. Come home, come home, come

home! Please, father, dear father, come

home.

Refrain: Hear the sweet voice of the child Which the night winds repeat as they

roam! Oh, who could resist this most plain-

tive of prayers? "Please, father, dear father, come

home!"

2. Father, dear father, come home with me now!

The clock in the steeple strikes two. The night has grown colder and Ben-

ny is worse, But he has been calling for you. Indeed he is worse, Ma says he will

die, Perhaps before morning shall dawn; And this is the message she sent me to

bring: "Come quickly, or he will be gone."

Come home, come home, come home!

Please, father, dear father, come home! (Refrain.)

3. Father, dear father, come home with me now!

The clock in the steeple strikes three. The house is so lonely, the hours are

so long, For poor weeping Mother and me. Yes, we are alone, poor Benny is dead, And gone with the angels of light; And these were the very last words

that he said: "I want to kiss Papa good night."

Come home, come home, come home!

Please, father, dear father, come home. (Refrain.)

Few readers, I think, will deny that this is sentimental, and while to subject it to serious discussion is to break a singularly vulnerable butterfly upon a wheel, that incongruity is irrelevant to our purpose

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at present, which is to find out wherein sentimentality consists. Besides, it is not easy to find a more respectable work that we can all agree is patently sentimental.

The question is, does the sentimentality in the lyric arise from a disproportion be- tween the feeling and the situation? Sure- ly not. The little girl's brother is dying while her father callously drinks away his son's last hours; surely that is a situation in which emotional unrestraint can be understood and pardoned. By the crite- rion of the definition, neither the girl nor the chorus-like commentator who speaks the words of the refrain is being sentimental.

But perhaps the lyric is sentimental be- cause it asks us, the readers, to be greatly affected by the plight of the girl and her suffering family at home. But again some- thing like the same answer is possible: if we were actually present at an event like the one described, surely we would be moved almost unbearably, by sadness, pity, and indignation. And to the extent that we can project ourselves into the imagined situation we presumably feel the aesthetic equivalents of these emo- tions. (It will not do to object here that our response to a fictitious event ren- dered through art is necessarily different from our response to an actual event, since it is equally true that our response to a depicted scene is normally analogous and akin to what we would feel in life itself. When Gloucester is blinded in Lear we feel horror; when Falstaff says something funny we laugh. In any case, the standard definition we have been testing insists itself that the reader's re-

sponse should correspond closely to its occasion, that is, to what the work shows to be happening.) "Come Home, Father," then, is inviting neither the little girl nor us to feel emotion disproportionate to the situation; sentimentality here cannot be identified with that kind of excess. And yet I am sure that most of us will con- tinue to feel that "Come Home, Father" is sentimental and that its sentimentality

has at least something to do wih its being objectionable.

Still another possibility is that the lyric is sentimental precisely because we can- not project ourselves into the imagined situation and suspend our disbelief. We might grant that if we were physically present in the saloon we would be greatly moved, but-the objection runs- we never will be or could have been present at such an event, which is entirely unbelievable. No father could ever have been so cruel. And even if he were, cir- cumstances would still not conspire to clinch a moral in so pat a way. If the author wants to arouse heartfelt pity and indignation-the objection continues-let him present life as it is and show us, either realistically or more indirectly and symbolically, some of the truly existent evil in the world, not some meretricious and contrived example of sham pathos.

But is the situation really impossible? I suggest that, although most of us would not witness so completely outrageous a scene more than a few times in our lives at most, such scenes do occur. Instances are on record of cruelty toward and ne- glect of children which go beyond even what "Come Home, Father" shows us. And it seems reasonable to assume that some cruel parents are drunkards, and cruel for that reason. If, for example, one tries to reconstruct the background of the "Hundred Neediest Cases" singled out each December in the New York Times, one needs very little imagination to dis- cern highly melodramatic and "unlikely" histories in that background.

Furthermore, I doubt that most of us want to commit ourselves absolutely and exclusively to the doctrine that art must depict only what is highly probable and typical, however much we may admire Aristotle and Samuel Johnson. No one wants to condemn Oedipus the King be- cause very few men are either fated to marry their mothers or married to them by accident. There is nothing at all probable in the events which culminate

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in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet; indeed, improbability-"misadventured piteous overthrows"-is exactly what Shakespeare invites us to consider as the occasion for sorrowful sympathy with the lovers. But, even though strong emotion is evoked in the death scene ("Thus with a kiss I die"), few of us want to call the scene sentimental.

This objection might take another form, however. We might argue that the unlikelihood of the incident in "Come Home, Father" is not statistical but moral, that the lyric distorts the basic truth of human nature by training emo- tional heavy guns on a matter essentially peripheral to enduring human concerns. In a way this is true, I think-to the ex- tent, that is, that we can regard the lyric simply as a piece of temperance propa- ganda. But that will not rehabilitate our definition of sentimentality unless we are willing to insist both that poetry ought never to be propaganda (which may well be true) and-which is more germane to our problem-that all sentimentality is propaganda. Moreover, "Come Home, Father" need not be read as a temperance sermon, a genre which is more likely to excite the relatively virile feeling of in- dignation than sentimental tenderness; especially today, when the temperance is- sue has receded, readers are likely to find in the lyric a treatment, maudlin and embarrassing though it may be, of basic familial and filial relationships, which are values at the heart of literary works as great as Lear and the Aeneid. "Come Home, Father" affirms the central place of these relationships, positively through the little girl and negatively through the drunken father's contempt for them. The poem is not peripheral to human life and concerns. It is very bad, but not because it evades real issues.

In any event, to insist on either moral or statistical probability is to abandon the definition we started to examine. I be- lieve that we shall indeed have to aban- don it, but I do not wish to do that before

exploring one more possible application of it.

Perhaps "Come Home, Father" shows disproportionate emotion because it ex- ploits emotion exclusively, at the expense of reason and of a more comprehensive, balanced view of reality. According to James R. Kreuzer (Appendix, no. 3), sentimentality, besides involving a dis- proportion between emotional response and its stimulus, can also mean "an undue preoccupation with emotion, a loss of the perspective that relegates emotion to its proper place in the totality of an ex- perience." Mr. Kreuzer quotes in illustra- tion Thomas Moore's "The Last Rose of Summer" and then comments as follows:

Here we have a poet indulging himself in an excess of emotion over the last rose of summer. It is undeniable, of course, that there is a certain sadness con- nected with the passing of summer; but there is also a certain beauty in the fall of the year and the awareness on the part of most people that summer, with its flowers, returns again in a matter of months. The poet speaks here, however, as though the end of summer is the end of life itself. . ... The poet's attention is focused not on the whole reality of the end of summer and the last years of life- periods which have compensations as well as sorrows-but on the feeling of sorrow which is built up until the world itself has become only bleak.

Although some readers may catch a whiff of Voltaire's Pangloss here, on the whole Mr. Kreuzer sounds invincibly reason- able. But I submit that he does not help us much. A little earlier than the passage I have just quoted, he himself writes that "Weeping over the death of a child is normally an indication of an emotional response in proportion to its stimulus: weeping over the death of a goldfish is normally an indication of an emotional response out of proportion to its stimu- lus"; well, "Come Home, Father" is con- cerned not with a goldfish or flowers but

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with a child. But there is a much more important objection to be raised against Mr. Kreuzer. Do we not argue-most of us-that a literary work is to some extent at least its own place, a world unto itself in which the author selects his emphasis and deliberately limits his vision for the sake of pointedness and unity and the particular effect he is aiming at? What poet, I should like to know, undertakes to give us a complete and balanced view of reality? Is Lear's lamentation over Cordelia objectionable because he fails to remember that, as Swift's Struldbrugs well know, even death can be a blessing? Perhaps Shakespeare (taking all his works into account) and Dante and Homer come close to giving us a full view of reality, but how many poets can do so in a single lyric poem? Would we not be irked by having someone tell us that Donne's "Go and Catch a Falling Star" is a shoddy poem because its cynicism ex- presses less than the whole truth about love, since there are constant women as well as inconstant ones? Do we call "The Canonization" faulty because the author chooses conveniently to forget that every woman, doubtless including the one in the poem, has her faults? "The Last Rose of Summer" may well be a bad poem and a sentimental poem, but Mr. Kreuzer is far from having told us why. To expect a complete and balanced view of life from any one poem is like expecting every existent type of tree to be growing in

somebody's back yard. At this point I am ready to argue that

the definition of "sentimentality" as emo- tion inappropriate to the occasion is largely false or useless or both. At the very least the definition is not broad enough. It may indeed be sentimental to feel deep gloom at having stepped on a flower, but that does not happen very often in life and it happens only slightly more often in literature except where symbolism is involved (and symbolism puts the question on a much more com- plicated level). At least it can be said that

there are indisputable examples of senti-

mentality which have nothing at all to do with anything we can objectively call

"disproportionate" feeling. Furthermore, once we move up the biological scale from plants to animal life, even animals so low in the scale as insects, the problem of how much emotion it is decorous to feel becomes more difficult. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport," says Shakespeare's Gloucester, and, although it is obviously true that Gloucester and Shakespeare are

thinking mainly of human beings rather than of flies, the force of the metaphor depends on our ability to think of flies as suffering real, perhaps great pain. Moreover, the suffering of animals is an important and serious problem in such intellectually stringent fields as the phi- losophy of religion. Messrs. Steinmann and Willen, in their Literature for Writ- ing (Appendix, no. 4), use as the sole illustration of their definition of "senti- mentality" the act of "tearing one's hair at the death of a mosquito." Perhaps. But what if the animal is not a mosquito but a horse? Or, going back to the mosquito, what if one does not tear one's hair over the insect's death but simply weeps? What if one does not weep but just feels very unhappy? Where does one draw the line? And would the opinion of an ortho- dox Hindu concerning animal suffering be at all relevant to this problem or should Hindus be dismissed out of hand as senti- mentalists? Should the reluctance of Al- bert Schweitzer to kill insects be dis- missed as soft-brained sentimentalism?

Perhaps we should not wholly discard the standard definition of sentimentality as worthless; however fatuous it may seem when one examines it closely, the definition is accepted by many intelligent people, not all of whom, one presumes, are simply parroting one another. Doubt- less many critics and teachers will con- tinue to feel that in most works we wish to call sentimental there is some kind of excess. But any formula which depends

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on a general understanding of what situa- tions "warrant" is certain to be inade- quate, especially in literature, for there is no general agreement among human beings on these matters. If we are to have a definition of sentimentality, it will have to be a long and complicated one, filled with hedging words like "often," "sometimes," and "usually," and resting on our trust that readers will be flexible and commonsensical enough not to apply the definition to any literary work to which the definition is irrelevant. Of course, if all that is true there is little need for a definition of sentimentality; to the experienced reader and critic no def- inition will be necessary and to the inex- perienced no definition will be successful or helpful. But I do not wish to conclude this essay here, on so anti-climactic a note as common sense. Instead, I wish to men- tion some of the complications, historical and esthetic, which I think enter into our ordinary understanding of sentimentality.

The historical considerations include changes in setting, in fashions of taste, and in the climate of thought. Thus, "Come Home, Father" may seem some- what less sentimental if we remember that the lyric implies a setting in which social relief agencies were fewer and less potent than they are today. Similarly, any sus- picion that William Blake has a sentimen- tal attitude toward chimney sweeps will be dispelled by even a little knowledge of the almost incredible cruelty to which sweeps actually were subjected in Blake's time.

Such differences in historical setting between the world described in a literary work and our own world are usually of very minor importance, however, in causing us to regard a work as sentimen- tal. Changes in taste can be a little more important. In How Does a Poem Mean? (Boston, 1959), pp. 846-47, John Ciardi describes what he calls a "sympathetic contract" which poet and reader enter into, and the terms of this contract vary from age to age. In the 1840's intelligent

and in some ways hard-boiled men like Landor, Carlyle, and Francis Jeffrey could grieve, sometimes literally weep, over the death of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, a scene that for many readers today might represent a defining instance of sentimentality. (See Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph [New York, 1952], I, 304.)

The third historical consideration has to do especially with the eighteenth cen- tury, when what seem to be sentimental scenes were often used with conscious deliberation by authors as ideological vehicles in the great debate over whether human nature was good or bad. Thus, to think of the difference between Richard- son and Fielding as the difference be- tween sloppiness and healthiness of feel- ing is to oversimplify a large issue and to miss much of the authors' pointedness. The problem here is closely analogous, though seemingly in reverse, to that of interpreting certain modern existentialist writers like Nathanael West whose at- tempt to evoke nausea (the apparent op- posite of sentimental sweetness) is part of a symbolic and philosophical strategy and not merely a reflection of the writers' sensibilities.

We must also recognize that when we call a work or passage sentimental we are often reacting to certain esthetic strate- gies-for example, certain particular and technical aspects of style. That sentimen- tal passages often use a heightened style is, of course, too obvious to need proving, but it is significant that the heightening often takes a special form. Very often the techniques used are those of the ora- tor (a style not much in favor in litera- ture today). What we call sentimental writing often uses repetition ("Come home, come home, come home; / Please, father, dear father, come home"). Ex- clamations are frequent, as are rhetorical questions ("Oh, who could resist this most plaintive of prayers?"). Colloquial- isms are characteristic too ("Ma says he

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will die"; and compare Edgar Guest's "heap of living" that makes a house a home). Yet the general legitimacy of these techniques can hardly be con- demned without bringing into question a great deal of unquestionably good litera- ture, including Tennyson's "Northern Farmer" poems and Shakespeare's King Lear ("Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of stones!").

Artistry in a larger sense is also rele- vant. There are some works in which sentimentality seems to be an integral part of the author's total vision and there- fore essential to the total effect he wants a work of his to have. Balzac is a good case in point. Many parts of Old Goriot or of Cousin Pons or of Euginie Grandet seem in themselves very sentimental indeed, but I doubt that many people would call Balzac's total vision sentimental. Nor, probably, is this a matter of an author's overall greatness compensating for oc- casional blemishes or excesses; the tones of exaggeratedly intense chiaroscuro in authors like Balzac and Dickens are es- sential parts of the two authors' sensibili- ties, and to imagine Cousins Pons or The Old Curiosity Shop "improved" by great- er emotional detachment in the death scenes and by other similar changes is al- most to imagine the two novels out of existence. My point, then, is not that a work can survive or compensate for sentimental blemishes; sentimentality may in some cases be an organic part of a large vision of life that is valid both morally and as art. Granted that such instances of "formally necessary" senti- mentality are unusual, they are still part of the whole of literature, and one must not theorize about sentimentality in such a way as to exclude or prejudice them.

Certain definitions of sentimentality, in addition to mentioning excess or dispro- portion, stress that the excess is of ten- der feelings (e.g., Appendix, no. 2). This is surely involved in a crucial way with our ordinary charges of sentimentality; a moment's thought will confirm that when

we object to sentimentality we are almost always objecting to a form of indulgence in the softer emotions and very rarely to, say, excessive anger or disgust. I would assume that this point was too obvious to make except that so many of the hand- book definitions either fail to make it or make the point in confusing ways. I have already quoted one definition of senti- mentality that cites Hamlet as an example of a character who feels strong emotion that is nevertheless not sentimental. But if the criterion of disproportionate feel- ing in general were primary, surely Ham- let's feelings would (in many critics' eyes) be the very best possible illustration of sentimentality; one thinks immediately of T. S. Eliot's strictures, where the main point is precisely that the emotion shown by the Prince is greater than can be ex- plained by any evident cause; an "ob- jective correlative" is lacking (Collected Essays [New York, 1950], pp. 124-25). Yet Eliot does not call Hamlet a senti- mental play, nor to my knowledge does any reputable critic. Othello, on the other hand, has occasionally been called senti- mental, especially in its closing scenes. The reason, I feel sure, is that Othello, unlike most of Shakespeare's plays, takes as serious dramatic material sexual jeal- ousy, a subject that involves not the grand emotions of the public hero but rather the intimate, intensely personal, domestic emotions. ("Come Home, Fa- ther" is also focused on such emotions.) Feeling held to be sentimental is almost always, in fact, a specific kind of feeling, not an excess of feeling in general; it is a quality of feeling, not a quantity.

As I have already implied, there is a social or sociological dimension in most charges of sentimentality. Almost always its habitat is the middle or lower classes. The Philaster of Beaumont and Fletcher is probably, on all objective grounds, a more mawkish play than Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, yet I suspect strongly that the Gemiitlichkeit of Dek- ker would incur the charge of sentimen-

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tality much more often than the operatics of Philaster would, since Dekker's setting is bourgeois and that of Philaster aristo- cratic. In a similar way, the musical play West Side Story would be called senti- mental more readily than Romeo and Juliet would, though their stories are al- most identical in every aspect except set- ting. If one took the "heroic" plays of Dryden or Racine, with their constant concern over the conflict of "honor" or "honesty" with passion, and rewrote them for less aristocratic settings, the re- sults in terms of plot and tone would not differ much from what one can see every afternoon on television serials, and yet the latter would strike most judges as more sentimental than would the works of Dryden and Racine. In such comparisons we always advert to formal and artistic merit, and I am certainly not trying to impugn the artistry of Dryden and Ra- cine. But to call some works sentimental and other not on the basis of their artistry is to leave far behind the criterion of "emotion disproportionate to the occa- sion"; it is also to beg part of the question, since sentimentality is ordinarily held to be a cause of artistic failure and not sim- ply a symptom of a work that happens to be poor for other reasons. At any rate, my main point here is that our recogni- tion of a work as sentimental depends more often than we generally acknowl- edge on our sense of social class.

At this point I wish to propose two alternative ways of viewing sentimentali- ty. These two ways are not definitions, properly speaking; furthermore, the two hypotheses are in some ways independent of each other and do not, separately or taken together, comprise a "theory" of sentimentality. They are chips launched on the sea of speculation.

First, it may help us to understand sen- timentality if we think of it as lying at one end of a spectrum which runs from it to its emotional opposite. This opposite is the "hard-boiled," the "tough-minded,"

what in recent advertising for books and motion pictures is sometimes labeled "Not for weak stomachs." This hard- boiled-ness, the obverse and antithetical twin of sentimentality, is abundantly il- lustrated in recent literature and other arts, but it is not new. For example, it dominates much of Restoration comedy. Much of this comedy is ruled by con- ventions which may strike even us case- hardened modern readers as brutal, cold- blooded, and heartless. These plays are ruthlessly cynical (and not usually, I think, for satiric purposes) in their moral values-for example, in the way they condone systematic marital infidelity, fortune-hunting, and the snobbishness of polite society. Love in such plays involves about as much kindness as a poker game. This emotional and moral atmosphere is the opposite of sentimentality, but logi- cally the two may be considered equiv- alents. Both atmospheres rest on ques- tionable moral assumptions, but for opposite reasons: sentimentality invites us to find sweetness everywhere, while the hard-boiled attitude defies us to find it anywhere.

The important point is that to censor out either end of the spectrum-either sentimentality or the hard-boiled-is to cut oneself off from the knowledge and appreciation of a certain challenging atti- tude toward human experience and from a fecund area of literature.

Second, it may sometimes be helpful to regard sentimentality as an event or reaction rather than as a quality. To elaborate: it is possible to see sentimen- tality as neither subjective in the reader nor objective in the work but as deter- mined in different instances by varying proportions of the reader's attitude and the objective content of the literary work (whatever "objective" means here, exact- ly).

The old metaphor of "taste" in connec- tion with literary judgment becomes relevant at this point, in a very nearly literal way. There are certain poems or

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novels which nearly everyone who has "tasted" or experienced literature suffi-

ciently will find objectionably sentimen- tal-and this almost universal reaction

presumably reflects something actually inhering in the work-just as almost

everyone will find the settledness of his stomach threatened by actually poisoned food or by rotgut whiskey. But some of us might also get sick not from "objec- tively" bad food but from ice cream, baked alaska, or sweet sherry. The fault in these cases lies not with the food or with the cook but with the limitations of our weak stomachs. Yet-and this is the

important thing-the sensation of nausea will probably be very similar to what we feel after having taken bad food or drink.

Getting sick is an event, and when it

happens the fact is undeniable regardless of the cause. So it may be with sentimen-

tality; some people can stomach it better than others. And perhaps we ought to tolerate or even admire readers whose breadth of taste and hardiness of literary "stomach" allows them to enjoy that

extravagant, over-rich kind of literature which we call sentimental, just as we re- fuse to condemn out of hand the man who can eat baked alaska and drink port without getting sick. Many of us would feel guilty if our taste did not permit us to appreciate Nathanael West's Miss

Lonelyhearts because it is so full of pools of vomit; we might feel that our stomachs should be hardy enough for that. So with

sentimentality; a healthy tolerance of it

may indicate a strong stomach rather than, as many people seem to believe, a weak one. Sugar is as much a fact of life as vomit; one is a soft fact and one a hard one, if you will, but both are facts.

I shall conclude with a few obiter dicta about sentimentality and its relationship to the teaching of literature, especially on the introductory levels-in other words, just those levels at which the need for definition of literary terms is pre- sumably greatest and which are most

likely to be influenced by such defini- tions. My point is that teachers ought to be circumspect and tactful when they call a poem or other work sentimental; the word is a smear word, and to use it too freely is to over-sensitize students to anything that smacks of that quality. To do that can have several specific ill effects.

First, the student who is already biased against strong feeling in literature can be given a facile excuse for resting comfort- ably in his prejudices and not making a thorough attempt to understand the whole value of the work he is reading. This result is especially likely if the teacher makes the mistake of defining sentimentality as an excess of strong feel-

ing in general rather than of the softer

feelings in particular-a mistake he will be certain to make if he accepts at face value most of the current handbook defi- nitions.

Second, to use the term "sentimentali-

ty" too freely can set up an obstacle to the student's response to symbolism. I have already cited one textbook defini- tion of sentimentality which insists that to weep over the death of a flower is a

paradigm case of sentimentality. Picture, then, an inexperienced student who, trusting his teachers and textbooks and armed with that example, reads for the first time Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall" or Housman's "The Chestnut Casts his Flambeaux" or Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant"-all poems in which a strong emotional concern with flowers serves emblematically to reveal what the

poet considers a cosmic pattern or idea. Picture especially the reaction of such a student to Herrick's exquisite lyric "To Daffodils," which begins "Fair daffodils, we weep to see / You haste away so soon" (literally, weep), and continues with an exhortation to the flowers that

they wait until the "evensong," when

they and the poet will pray together and then depart in company. Anyone who hacks away at "The Last Rose of Sum- mer" or at Kilmer's tree that "lifts its

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leafy arms to pray" with so dull a tool as the standard definition of sentimentality we examined earlier had better beware of lopping down Herrick's lovely poem with the same strokes. The obvious de- fense of Herrick's "To Daffodils" is that the second stanza makes it clear that it is human life and not flowers that the speaker is really concerned about. But the same can be said in defense of "The Last Rose of Summer." It may well be true that Moore is being more sentimen- tal than Herrick is, but to show how that is true we must utterly discard our stan- dard definition of sentimentality, a defini- tion which is-unjustly, unintentionally, but literally and strictly-a devastating in- dictment of Herrick's address to the daf- fodils.

Third, from a psychological point of view, an over-insistence on the evils of sentimentality can excessively inhibit a student's response to literature. The stu- dent, especially if he has not studied lit- erature seriously for very long, can easily come to equate sentimentality with all ex- pressions of deep feeling in literature, so that, out of an instinct for safety and a fear of ridicule, he allows himself to enjoy only that one kind of literature which is tight-lipped or ironic or in other ways hard-surfaced. Furthermore, when a student has genuinely enjoyed a work that his teacher calls sentimental, he will be hurt and often alienated when he is told, in effect, that his values are meretri- cious. Granted that a callow, immature student really does need to have his tastes developed and trained, and that this pro- cess may require some inhibition of other tastes, it is still better for the inhibiting to work indirectly, through concentra- tion on what both teacher and student can equally enjoy and value highly, than for a teacher to uproot violently a taste which (as I have tried to prove in this essay) cannot really be weeded out very cogently through systematic argument and definition. An intelligent student who is led positively to enjoy literature will

gradually and naturally learn to eschew what is cheap and third-rate; he will put away childish things or let them atrophy by themselves like an old baseball glove drying up in the attic. Romeo's friends, with the best reasons in the world, could not persuade him that his "love" for Rosaline was foolish; what he really needed was to meet Juliet.

APPENDIX: HANDBOOK DEFINITIONS OF SENTIMENTALITY

In collecting the following definitions I looked at twelve handbooks which I chose completely at random. Two discussed senti- mentality without defining it and are not listed below. With these two exceptions I have included all the definitions I found in the books I consulted; I have deleted some material from several of the discussions of sentimentality cited (without, I trust, chang- ing the authors' emphasis), but in no other way have I exercised selectivity.

It may be objected that the definitions cited are not "scholarly," since they are drawn from textbooks aimed at beginning students of literature. But it is not easy to find discussions of sentimentality on a higher and more sophisticated level. More- over, to cite textbook definitions is particu- larly useful because it is in textbooks that teachers and critics record their unration- alized sense of what sentimentality is, the sense of the term that, presumably, they wish their students and readers to absorb.

It is noteworthy that most of the standard dictionaries used by college students do not mention the criterion of "excess" or "dispro- portion" in their definitions of "sentimental" and "sentimentality."

1. From Poetry: Its Power and Wisdom, by Francis X. Connolly (New York: Scribner's, 1960), p. 24: "Whereas a genuine poetic emotion derives from a vital experience newly imaged, freshly felt, originally ex- pressed, mere sentiment resides in worn-out emotions and conventional thoughts . The sentimental poem often pretends in- tense feelings without grounds to support them....

"The sentimental poem may be subjec- tively sincere in that it does express the

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writer's actual feeling. But, in another sense, sentimentality is insincere because it is fundamentally an exaggerated response."

2. From A Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed. Sylvan Barnet, Morton Berman, and William Burto (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 78: "sentimental. Generally a pe- jorative word in literary criticism, indicat- ing a superabundance of tender emotion, a disproportionate amount of sentiment (feel- ing). It is sentimental to be intensely dis- tressed because one has stepped on a flower. A character, say, Hamlet, may display deep emotions, but they are sentimental only if they are in excess of what we feel the situa- tion warrants. More specifically, 'sentimen- tal' writing refers to writing wherein evil is denied or overlooked or bathed in a glow of forgiving tenderness."

3. From Elements of Poetry, by James R. Kreuzer (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 196-197: "In essence, sentimentalism involves a lack of proportion between a stimulus that evokes an emotional response and the de-

gree and kind of that response. Weeping over the death of a child is normally an in- dication of an emotional response in propor- tion to its stimulus; weeping over the death of a goldfish is normally an indication of an emotional response out of proportion to its stimulus: it is excessively emotional or senti- mental. The term sentimental is also used to describe an undue preoccupation with emo- tion, a loss of the perspective that relegates emotion to its proper place in the totality of an experience. When an individual turns his attention inward, when he enjoys his senti- ments or feelings as sentiments rather than as a concomitant part of a total experience, he is in the realm of sentimentalism. When the momentary and slight regret that the death of a goldfish might legitimately evoke is nurtured by thoughts, perhaps, of the uni-

versality of death into a lasting and intensi- fied feeling of sorrow-enjoyed for its own sake-we have, again, sentimentalism. [Moore's "The Last Rose of Summer" is then cited as an example of sentimentalism and quoted in full.] Here we have a poet indulging himself in an excess of emotion over the last rose of summer. It is unde- niable, of course, that there is a certain sadness connected with the passing of sum- mer; but there is also a certain beauty in

the fall of the year and the awareness on the part of most people that summer, with its flowers, returns again in a matter of months. The poet speaks here, however, as though the end of summer is the end of life itself; he scatters the

. .. leaves o'er the bed,

Where thy mates of the garden Lie scentless and dead.

. .. The poet's attention is focused not on the whole reality of the end of summer and the last years of life-periods which have compensations as well as sorrows-but on the feeling of sorrow which is built up until the world itself has become only bleak."

4. From Literature for Writing, ed. Martin Steinmann, Jr., and Gerald Willen (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1962), p. 681: "Senti- mentalism (sentimental, sentimentality). Ex- pression of more emotion than, by ordinary standards of propriety, the object or the cause of the emotion justifies (for example, tearing one's hair at the death of a mos- quito)."

5. From Modern Rhetoric, by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), pp. 368, 373: "[Sentimentality is] emotion in excess of the occasion." "Sentimentality may show itself as pure gushiness or as a kind of hair-trigger emo- tional sensitiveness. But whatever form it takes, sentimentality always involves an im- plied demand on the part of the writer for more emotional response than the situation warrants; and it implies, on the part of the sentimental reader, a willingness to respond emotionally when the response is not actual- ly justified."

6. From Poems, ed. C. F. Main and Peter J. Seng (San Francisco: Wadsworth, 1961), p. 220: "Sentimentality is the evocation of a greater amount of feeling or emotion than is justified by the subject. It must not be confused with sentiment, which is merely another name for feeling or emotion, and which lacks the bad connotations of senti- mentality. Some students confuse these two nouns because the adjective sentimental seems to be derived from both. Sentimental goes with sentimentality, not with sentiment.

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The poet who adopts a sentimental tone becomes more tearful or more ecstatic over his subject than it deserves. The sentimen- talist is addicted to worn-out baby shoes, gray-haired mothers, and small animals-sub- jects certain to evoke an automatic response in a particular kind of reader. But sentimen- tality is not so much a matter of subject as it is a matter of treatment."

7. From Poetry as Experience, by Stage- burg and Anderson (New York: American Book Co., 1952), p. 449: "Sentimental re- sponse. (1) A poem in which the emotion expressed seems too great for the objective occasion which is alleged as its source. (2) In the reader, the feeling of more emotion than is justified by the situation in the poem."

8. From Understanding Poetry, by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), p. 559: "sentimentality. Emotional response in excess of the occasion; emotional re- sponse not prepared for nor justified by the poem in question. ..."

9. From Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, by Laurence Perrine (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 217: "Sentimentality is indulgence in emotion for its own sake, or expression of more emotion than an occasion warrants. A sentimental person is gushy, stirred to tears by trivial or inappropriate causes; he weeps at all wed- dings and all funerals; he is made ecstatic by manifestations of young love; he clips locks of hair, gilds baby shoes, and talks baby talk; he grows compassionate over hardened criminals when he hears of their being punished. His opposite is the callous or unfeeling person. The ideal is the person who responds sensitively on appropriate oc- casions and feels deeply on occasions that deserve deep feeling, but who has neverthe- less a certain amount of emotional reserve, a certain command over his feelings. Senti- mental literature is "tear-jerking" literature. It aims primarily at stimulating the emo- tions directly rather than at communicating experience truly and freshly; it depends on

trite and well-tried formulas for exciting emotion; . . it is unfaithful to the full com- plexity of human experience."

10. From The Order of Poetry, by Edward A. Bloom, Charles H. Philbrick, and Elmer M. Blistein (New York: Odyssey, 1961), p. 164: "Sentimental writing is characterized by an apparent request for an emotional re- sponse (often an automatic or stock re- sponse) above and beyond that which its subject or situation, as presented, would reasonably warrant. The inferior poet may call our attention to a wilting flower (which may to him symbolize his waning chances of poetic success), and then importune the reader to join him in weeping over this perfectly ordinary and natural situation. In order to avoid the charge of sentimentality in such a request, the poet would have to prepare the situation carefully, make the flower a special one, be discreet in letting it blossom into a symbol, and excise the proba- bilities of triteness by the touch of irony.

"Some subjects (such as Mother, Home, and Country) have been so often sentimen- talized by such agencies as orators and greeting cards that they are very difficult for a poet to deal with in an original manner that will cut through sentimentality to honest and legitimate sentiment or feeling. A brilliant triumph over these difficulties is George Barker's "Sonnet to My Mother," which works quickly to erase (and then subsequently to earn or justify) the fond declarations of its beginning:

Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,

Under the window where I often found her

Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,

Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand, . . .

"Age-old emotions are the true concern of the poet, but he must always, through his fresh perceptions and phrasing, make them new."