Sensibility and its Contexts: Two Recent Books

Julie Ellison. Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Pp. 216. $16.00 paper.

Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times . Lawrence Klein, ed. and introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Pp. 736. $135.00 cloth.

The first problem faced by any scholar of eighteenth-century sensibility is delimitation. How should it be defined and how will it be understood? In what domains will it be shown to operate, and who will be shown to use it? We could say that it is a matter of choosing the most appropriate context, but that will not get us very far. Sensibility is such a ubiquitous term in the period's writing that there are too many contexts to choose from, though any choice will have important consequences for the direction and scope of our interpretations. So which context should we regard as primary? Does "sensibility" name the humanitarian movement that emerged from a "polite and commercial people" in the early to mid-eighteenth century? Does it refer to an "age of sensibility" in mid-to late-eighteenth century literature? Is it a "culture of sensibility" that overtook and redefined gender norms in the late-eighteenth century? Or is it an awkward compromise in the history of cultural semantics, an unstable fusion of moral, political, and aesthetic judgment that fell apart after the rise of an autonomous aesthetic sphere in the early nineteenth century? Can we simply say "all of the above," and move on to more specific issues, or should we try to see how the different strands of this seriously polysemous concept relate to one another?

Taken together, these two studies constitute a large-scale revisionist view of sensibility that shows how it once organized Enlightenment discourses of moral philosophy, politics, gender, and race. Because both writers emphasize the centrality of sensibility for eighteenth-century structures of knowledge, they depart dramatically from earlier scholars' dismissals of sensibility as vulgar, trivial, over-emotional, or unthinking. Neither of these studies restage the early nineteenth-century attacks upon "sentimentality" as weak, inauthentic, self-indulgent or hypocritical. As Julie Ellison points out in her introduction, politically-minded literary critics and commentators—especially those interested in gender—are now far more interested in giving sentimentality its due. Thus, when Jane Austen's Mr. Knightley dismisses Elton with the observation that he "may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally," we are far less likely to take such a judgment at face value. Instead, we may well ask what masculine codes of behavior Elton has violated when he flirts with Emma, and what codes Knightley relies upon to apply such a term to the younger man.

It seems appropriate to begin with Lawrence Klein's useful new classroom edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristics, since Shaftesbury's moral and aesthetic writings have long been considered one of the prime intellectual sources for later writers of sensibility (vii). It is also fitting because Klein, along with J.G.A. Pocock, has decisively reshaped our view of eighteenth-century genteel or middle-class culture. In Klein's introduction to the Characteristics, he offers his most succinct account yet of the importance of Shaftesbury for British and European cultural history, and consolidates and extends the implications of his earlier studies. The most important of these, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, retraced the intellectual genealogy of the "polite culture" that held sway in England through at least the end of the eighteenth century. Klein's contribution has been to show the importance of "politeness" for the period's social, moral, and aesthetic concerns. In Klein's account, it was Shaftesbury's expansive vision of a philosophically-informed polite culture that helped move the values of benevolence and natural affection out of the realm of moral philosophy into the culture at large.

Klein has exhaustively demonstrated how Shaftesbury's notion of "politeness" reached into every aspect of subjective...