Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century by Ildiko Csengei (review)

In the forty years since R. F. Brissenden published Virtue in Distress, the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility has been studied for signs of its fragility and limitations (John Mullan); for the ideological obfuscations and the gender politics which lie behind it (Robert Markley, G. J. Barker-Benfield); for its relationship to arguments about slavery, prostitution and empire (Markman Ellis, Lynn Festa), to commerce and economics (Liz Bellamy, Gillian Skinner), to oratory (Paul Goring), and to the senses (Ann Jessie van Sant); for its bearing upon 1790s radicalism (Gary Kelly, Chris Jones) and for its mediation of ideas of Scottish national identity (Juliet Shields). Yet, curiously, relatively little attention has been given to the psychodynamics that underpin this sentimentalism. The distinctive and original achievement of Ildiko Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and The Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century is to approach its subject matter in exactly such terms, teasing out the ‘repressed dimensions’ and the sometimes pathological ‘ambivalence’ at the heart of the Hanoverian discourse of feeling. This is not, though, an anachronistic study, bluntly imposing the categories of twentieth-century psychoanalysis upon eighteenth-century affectivity. Rather, even whilst pursuing comparisons with psychoanalytic topoi of our own day, Csengei treats her sources with historical sensitivity and with a good deal of scholarly precision. That her book also resists the trend to focus on single issues or on a narrow group of case studies, reverting instead to the capacious reach of Brissenden and Mullan’s monographs, makes it all the more welcome a re-examination of a well-trodden field – a field here made refreshingly unfamiliar.

Csengei begins her study by examining eighteenth-century philosophies of sympathy. She argues that, whilst the latter was typically figured in positive terms, as a harmonious correspondence or an emotional chain binding together willing parties, a background fear that it was, too, something mechanistic or magnetic – more like an infection than a moral impulse – also haunted such doctrines. Likewise, Csengei traces the anxious accommodation between disinterested altruism and egotistical self-love which underpinned accounts of sympathy from Shaftesbury onwards, and she attributes the latter (the awareness of self-interest’s influence) to the period’s repressed anxiety about the limited ‘power and range of our other-regarding sentiments’. Furthermore, if mechanistic, uncontrolled sentiments might be too weak, accounts of sensibility were also, she shows, dogged by the fear that such emotions might be excessive or unselective. A variety of sources are adduced to support these claims. Of these, Hume perhaps deserves more discriminating comment than he receives here. (Mullan, for one, has convincingly demonstrated how signal the differences are between earlier and later Humian treatments of sympathy.) However, Csengei reserves detailed focus for her analysis of Smith on this same topic. Her discussion of The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a tour de force, pressing the thesis that, in Smith’s hands, imaginary identification remained ‘fundamentally solipsistic and […] the very source of the social differences it was meant to alleviate’. Csengei supports this claim with three arguments. First, Smith acknowledges that some feelings – pain, hunger, sexual passion – are simply inaccessible to anyone but the agent currently experiencing them. Second, he contends that we are more prone to sympathise with the rich than the poor because the former more readily comport with the vision of order and system that, according to this aesthetically-minded philosopher, sympathisers wish to discover in the world. Third, Smith insists that both the act of sympathising itself and the pleasure we derive from it depend upon our being able to imagine a narrative frame for any incident before us, to place another’s emotional state within a story. Only thus do we access another’s feelings. But it follows that in various scenarios – as when we sympathise for the dead, when a mother ‘constructs a story around her baby’s suffering’, or when we ‘blush for the rudeness and...