Mackenzie's 'Man of Feeling': embalming sensibility. (writer Thomas Mackenzie)

This extreme sympathy with misfortunes . . . though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose than to render miserable the person who possessed it.

--Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

[E]very nobler feeling rises within me! every beat of my heart awakens a virtue!-but it will make you hate the world.

--Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling.

One of the most consistent features of recent studies of British, and especially Scottish, writers of the mid-eighteenth century is the grounding assumption that these authors were engaged in a shared project of constructing community, and that their texts are important insofar as they succeed in producing workable models of such community. The concerns of Hume, Smith, and Henry Mackenzie with constructing a theory and practice of "sociability" (to use John Mullan's term) for a changing society have been privileged in a number of readings of these authors by Mullan, Nicholas Phillipson, Richard Dwyer and others. In the face of the fragmentation of an increasingly complex and specialized society, a commercialism that challenged traditional forms of social filiation, and Scotland's loss of sovereignty with the Act of Union, such arguments run, eighteenth-century Scottish writers and intellectuals, even more than their English counterparts, were under pressing obligations to consider and formulate responses to questions about what precisely constitutes a community. Their primary task was to explore or, more simply, to supply appropriate relations and models for emulation in their texts. Hence readings of Hume that privilege his recasting the philosopher as a middleman facilitating exchange between the foreign realms of philosophy and polite society in his philosophical essays; of Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments that describe the notion of sympathy elaborated there as a foundation and counter-force to the atomizing tendencies of the society of self-interested higglers found in his Wealth of Nations; and arguments that sentimental fiction, most fully represented by Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, provides, in its appeals to common humanity and tabluaex of sympathetic communion, a code of ethics based on sensibility to compensate for the erosion of traditional notions of social responsibility.(1)