Bleak House: An Argument For Sentiment

A Liverpudlian with a dead, idolized mother who did hard labor in German port towns and rose to the top of the world…Dickensian in story and sentiment.

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Dickens uses the word "heavy" to describe the youngest of the Neckett children, who is in all likelihood not that heavy at an impoverished eighteen months, but Nabokov likes the vocabulary because it "weighs down the sentence at the necessary point." In one well-placed sentence Dickens begins unveiling Skimpole's monstrosity. Neckett, a bailiff Skimpole has nicknamed "Coavinses," dies before he can arrest the "child" as a debtor. Skimpole tells Esther and Mr. Jarndyce that Coavinses was a widower with children…while merrily playing the piano, celebrating his good fortune. In a swift change of scene, Esther seeks out the children and finds them in a cheap room with old furniture, a six year-old boy nursing his infant sibling. It is not the child who is heavy, but the state of affairs compared to the lightness of Skimpole's point of view.

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Esther and Mr. Jarndyce meet Charley Neckett. "Skimpole is a vile parody of a child, whereas this little girl is a pathetic imitator of an adult woman." A lot happens in this scene. Charlotte Neckett, who gives her age at "over thirteen," a pretty girl wearing woman's clothes and doing woman's work when she should be getting an education and feeling much more carefree, wearily walks in and immediately takes the baby, astonishing Esther with her "steadiness." Consider…

1. Coavinses has given Charley her diminutive nickname, a sign of fatherly love and regard alien to Skimpole's conception of him. With one stroke, Dickens humanizes the dead man.
   


2. From the state of affairs, Charley is laboring mightily to keep herself and her siblings alive and as well as possible, and by her manner and speech (the steadiness) she recognizes the burden but bears it without complaining, acting out of love and empathy. Compare this to Skimpole's narcissistic lifestyle and treatment of a family the reader and Esther do not meet for several hundred pages.
   


3. Mr. Jarndyce's character. The reader should already like him as one of Dickens's benevolent forces, with his good nature and recognizable character tic (the east wind…a wind which could blow clouds to block a sunrise, a wind which produces fog). He has been seen to respect and go out of his way for Esther, Richard, and Ada, and he somehow genuinely likes Skimpole. But when he meets Charley, his cheery, regarding demeanor takes on new hints not yet witnessed but recognized by Esther as "tender, compassionate, mournful," in a man who must turn his face away as he asks Charley, "How do you live?" Mr. Jarndyce, who likes everyone, is overcome when he knows he has met someone who needs his compassion…he will be overcome more when he develops feelings for Esther. But he is struck by emotion in a way Skimpole definitely does not affect him.
   

Dickens is sentimental in a way Homer and Cervantes never were, and his sentiment must be understood and not attacked by the reader. Nabokov had great respect for Homer and something beyond respect for Cervantes…there is an entire volume of his writings on Don Quixote. I myself like Homer (while preferring Virgil) and love Cervantes. Dickens loved Cervantes, and Bleak House contains several allusions and even nominal references to the author and his saga. (Chapter 17, where Esther becomes a Dulcinea figure to the Sancho-like (in his devotion) Mr. Guppy and Allan Woodcourt, so much like Quixote except in his sanity.) The distinction Nabokov is drawing comes from a facet of Dickens which may be the most hard to deal with, and which helped turn me off from Dickens through high school and college.

"People who denounce the sentimental," Nabokov says, "are generally unaware of what sentiment is." I denounced the sentimental in high school, when my devotion to Woody Allen and Monty Python was at its peak, and my first year of college, when I wrote a rather good poem full of wordplay and dry poking fun for my mother's Christmas card and was forced to scrap it and write what I felt was forced-rhyme dreck which she, and everyone else, loved. Then I went to Europe and was separated from my family and home for the first time ever…and discovered just how sentimental I really was.

Sentiment is not about overt displays or dramatic declarations of love and compassion. Sentiment is the ability to care for people to such a degree that you are unable to resist feeling whatever emotion they feel, and the dual force combines within you to make you WANT to express something. You're separated from your family or your significant other and missing them greatly. A person who is aware of sentiment KNOWS that their lover, parent, sibling miss them as well and this translates into extra emotion on top of something already great, like pouring just that more milk and adding that one extra teaspoon of sugar to your coffee cup. It overspills, and in humans it manifests as a reaction.

What is the difference between the sentimental and the empathetic? Empathy is based in reason as much as emotion…an intellectual determination that other individuals have desires and responses, and these must be taken into account when you interact with them. Sentiment is empathy plus love, the love any psychologically sound human being feels for at least SOME others. John Robison, the Asperger's syndrome possessor who wrote the fantastic memoir Look Me In the Eye describes it like this: if you tell him that there's been a train wreck or plane crash which has killed all the people aboard, he understands this is bad and feels empathy because he intellectually recognizes these were people who loved and were loved and did things in which some way benefited society, but it stops there at reason. But when something happens to his wife, child, or friends, or they do something for him because of their emotional response to him, it is enough to move him to physical reaction, be it tears or that beautiful form of human connection (my words), the kiss.

For one last outside comparison: Sir Paul McCartney is often compared unfavorably to John Lennon despite their equal brilliance as songwriters, the yardstick being that Lennon dealt in genuine emotions while McCartney was a sentimental composer of "silly love songs." From my readings of their biographies, Lennon, in my interpretation, was a conflicted man who spent his entire life searching for an ideal love he never exactly found. He cared for others, but his emotions were kept confined to himself and a tight circle. McCartney, on the other hand, for all his flaws, was always upfront as a man who mixed empathy and love. His dictatorial command of the Beatles stemmed from loving both the music and the men he worked with…he fought to keep them together until he realized they were doomed. And when he found a life with a woman he loved and plenty of children, happiness manifested itself in irrepressible ditties…and, in the two albums he made after Linda died, raucous explosions and painfully sad music. ("From a Lover to a Friend" is one of the saddest song I've ever heard.)

So now we come back to Charles Dickens, whose message in Bleak House and so many other books was of empathy's battle with apathy. Dickens so firmly believed in empathy and its effect on society, was so tirelessly outspoken about the need to improve society, was married, had passionate affairs, fathered children in the double-digits…he was in such extreme contact with so many people that sentiment was as natural to him as writing like this is for me.

"Keen, subtle, specialized compassion, with the grading and merging of melting shades, with the very accent of profound pity in the words uttered, and with an artist's choice of the most visible, most audible, most tangible epithets." So says Nabokov. So say I. This is Dickens's sentimentality, and it only enriches Bleak House in a way it should enrich our lives.