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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
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)
While constructing community is clearly a central concern in mid-century Anglo-Scottish literary-philosophical discourse, there are however several problems with some of these modern accounts of the issue. They have tended, first of all, to obscure the important difference between the need or desire to produce community and the success of that project. This has been evident in readings of Smith, for example, that, having identified a need for a counter-force to the isolating trends of Smith's version of commercial society, read his account of sympathy in Moral Sentiments as supplying that force, despite Smith's own obvious doubts about the tendency of sympathy to do so.(2) Moreover, in the case of the sentimental novel, the common assumption that the recurrent features of such fiction--its exhortations to sympathy or fellow-feeling and charitable benevolence--necessarily indicate a primary commitment to the project of constructing community have overlooked ways in which sentimental novels elude and actively challenge that characterization.(3) Sterne's particular focus on the market appeal of sentimentalism in A Sentimental Journey (seeing financial opportunity rather than social responsibility in his response to the commercial context of his authorship) is one notable example.(4)
Mackenzie's popular novel, The Man of Feeling, with its reputation as that of the most typical, if not the most accomplished, sentimental novel, provides another, signal instance. The text has suffered from a certain critical neglect in more recent times. Those few readings of the novel that do accord it serious attention have approached it as an attempt to provide a model of practical morality for contemporaries in the figure of the man of feeling, Harley--one which unfortunately fails, given Harley's general powerlessness and too-exacting standards. The characteristic sympathy with which Harley responds to the various scenes of distress and joy in which he finds himself is, according to Mullan, Dwyer and others, intended to furnish the basis for a workable ethics, but fails in the task.(5) Such readings beg the question as to whether, indeed, Mackenzie's text and sympathy in general should be viewed in this manner. Neither The Man of Feeling in particular nor the sentimental novel in general stand likely to profit from readings that assign these texts the historical task of constructing community only to convict them of failure.
I shall argue instead that Mackenzie's novel, as a more or less exhaustive catalogue and summa of the conventions of the sentimental novel, marks a far more self-conscious moment in eighteenth-century literary discourse on the role of fiction in producing community and setting social standards than has been acknowledged. The concept of the sympathetic reconstruction of the emotions of others that Smith explores in Moral Sentiments, is also the consistent object of scrutiny in the sentimental fiction of Sterne, Mackenzie and Goldsmith. Smith and the sentimental novelist's concern with the power and currency of sympathetic bonds intersects, notably, with discourse on the novel and its effects on readers--a fact that criticism of sentimental fiction seems not to have noticed. This extensive discourse, of which Johnson's fourth Rambler essay and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote are the best-known examples, assigns considerable power to the novel to shape the social practices of its readers, a power that is presumed, however, to operate in distinctly non-productive ways.(6) It is this social agency of the fictional text that Mackenzie and Goldsmith take as their subject in their relatively brief forays into the novel; and it is this agency to which their examinations set limits. Reading the sentimental novel's dramatization of the powerlessness of texts to reform readers as a response to discourse about novels' potential for social disruption, rather than as a simple failure to produce workable schemes for reconstruction, produces an altogether more complex picture of sentimental fiction, and of Mackenzie in particular. In Mackenzie's hands, the failure of shared sentiment to effect the production of community is not a product of some historical miscalculation, but a problem central to the enterprise of writing fiction. In its elaboration of the limits of sympathy to reinforce communality, and its testimony to sympathy's tendency to produce an aesthetic pleasure rather than an ethical practice, Mackenzie's novel furnishes a complex valediction to sentimental fiction and a coda to the discourse on the power of novelists to intervene in the social sphere. This self-consciousness of certain limits to the social usefulness of a sentimental sympathy is quite distinct from failure.
The Man of Feeling (1771) was ranked by its first audience as a touchstone of the sentimental genre, even a litmus test of its readers' sensibility.(7) Lady Louisa Stuart attested to the warmth of its reception: "I remember so well its first publication, my mother and sisters crying over it, dwelling upon it with rapture! And when I read it, as I was a girl of fourteen not yet versed in sentiment, I had a secret dread I should not cry enough to gain the credit of proper sensibility."(8) The Monthly Review, otherwise not very favorably inclined to Mackenzie's work, asserted that anyone "who weeps not over some of the scenes it describes, has no sensibility of mind."(9) The novel has retained its status as exemplar of the genre of sentimental fiction, if not the same ability to command such readerly enthusiasm.(10) In recounting episodes from the life of the eponymous Harley, the text presents most of the familiar features of the novel of sensibility: scenes of tearful communion (67, 95), evocations of a feeling too full for expression in language (66, 105), and a fragmented narrative, this last device motivated by the status of the text as manuscrit trouve.(11)
The novel, his first, dominated the literary career and subsequent reputation of Henry Mackenzie. It was immensely popular, going through over forty editions in the decade after its publication.(12) The success of this work notably exceeded that of his two subsequent novels, The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigne (1777), his dramatic work (including The Prince of Tunis, performed 1773) and even his work as editor and major contributor to the two Edinburgh periodical papers, The Mirror (1779-1780) and The Lounger (1785-1787). He carried the sobriquet of "The Man of Feeling," settled on him after publication of the novel, until the end of his life. As late as 1825 Sir Walter Scott, in betraying surprise that the aged Mackenzie was in fact no "man of feeling," indicates the extent to which Mackenzie was generally identified with his most famous creation:
No man is less known from his writings. We would suppose a retired, modest somewhat affected man with a white handkerchief and a sigh ready for every sentiment. No such thing. H. M. is alert as a contracting tailor's needle in every sort of business--a politician and a sportsman.(13)
Scott's evident relief at the figure Mackenzie presented indicates another notable feature of Mackenzie's literary career: that is, the extent to which his younger contemporaries appear to have been concerned that the man of feeling was a type at odds with practical social requirements. The pleased surprise with which Scott greeted the gap between the author and the figure he had constructed from his novels, especially his first, echoes the comments of Robert Burns. Though an admirer of Mackenzie's writings, Burns nonetheless testified to an unease about The Man of Feeling's possible effects on readers:
From what book, moral or even Pious, will the susceptible young mind receive impressions more congenial to Humanity and Kindness, Generosity and Benevolence . . . than from the simple affecting tale of poor Harley? Still, with all my admiration of Mckenzie's [sic] writings, I do not know if they are the fittest reading for a young Man who is about to set out . . . to make his way into life. . . . [T]here may be a purity, a tenderness, a dignity . . . which are of no use,...
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