The Sentimentality Trap—Ben Myers

by Ben Myers

How Much Emotion?

Sentimentality is the aesthetic sin that so easily besets Christian art. The Christian artist, in as much as he or she seeks an audience within the church, will be constantly tempted toward the sentimental. But what do we mean when we describe a work of art as “sentimental”?

I wish to stress from the beginning that sentimentality is not simply too much emotion, but rather an imbalance of emotion, an over-investment of emotion relative to that in which it is invested. Sentimentality is a misdirection of emotion, emotion for its own sake without a reference in the tangible world. Rejecting sentimentality does not mean rejecting emotion as a fundamental part of aesthetic experience. I have never put down a poem and complained that it was too moving, too resonant. Sentimentality, on the other hand, I find immediately repulsive.

What is Sentimentality?

Sentimentality is a defect in the quality, not the quantity, of feeling in a poem. But how is a writer or a reader to recognize this defect in feeling that we are calling sentimentality? The best guide is a wide experience of the art. The great tradition is a highly reliable guide in this matter, and, reading those poets we have, by an election lasting generations, inducted into the canon, one finds very little that is sentimental.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, working in the nineteenth century, an age in which sentimentality enjoyed a great vogue, often approaches the sentimental but stops short of indulging in it, as in the stark and restrained closing lines of the “terrible sonnet” usually referred to as “Carrion Comfort”: “Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod / Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.” There is here none of the pharisaical self-righteousness that one finds in so much Christian sentimentality. Rather, Hopkins gives a frank, unflinching, and unexaggerated account of his spiritual struggles. The poet’s restraint puts parentheses around the exclamation, a device that prevents the awe from disproportionately ruling the line. With the emotion in proper proportion, we do not lose sight of the physical reality behind the poem, a reality subtly conveyed in the verb lay. The specificity of the verb gives us a glimpse of a real man passing sleepless nights upon his cot. It is clear that Hopkins learned much of his craft from reading the Psalms. The poem, though focused on spiritual struggle, is far from abstract sentimentality.