Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (review)

270 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 John Mullan. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. viii + 261pp. $75.00. This book illustrates Umberto Eco's observation that there is no such thing as a text perfectly closed to open-ended readings, for even formulaic sentimental texts, under Mullan's gaze, yield a multiplicity of implications. His stated purpose is modest: "What was originally posed as a capacity for sociability was eventually realized in the most private of experiences. If nothing else, I hope I can explain this paradox" (p. 17). He achieves considerably more: his interdisciplinary approach to die language of sensibility reminds his readers of its pervasiveness in eighteenth-century England, while his sustained focus on a single facet of sensibility—its imputed effect of "sociability"—enables him to make new and promising distinctions between major and minor documents of sensibility— including sermons, philosophical and medical treatises, letters and journals, as well as novels. The first and last chapters analyse philosophical and medical discourses crucial to the developing "language of feeling" in the century; the other three chapters discuss the novelists who made much of that language in their fictions: Richardson (chap. 2); Mackenzie and Goldsmith (chap. 3), and Sterne (chap. 4). In all chapters Mullan works to demonstrate that sociability, along with the much-discussed allied terms "benevolence" and "sympathy," was a persistently distant, even receding goal for the proponents of sensibility. Their constructs of sociability were all "fragile" (p. 8); indeed, their actual representations of sensibility in life and literature tended in the opposite direction, towards reclusiveness, melancholy, misanthropy ("the alter ego of feeling," p. 121), and various other forms of mental and physical pathology. Chapter 1 argues for David Hume as the representative philosopher of sensibility; he emerges from a discussion of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hartley, and Adam Smith as the philosopher who had, on die one hand, the most faith in sympathy as a basis for sociability and, on the other hand, the keenest awareness both of society's failure to achieve sociability and of philosophy's failure to escape its own solitariness. Mullan envisions Hume as a troubled man who lived with unresolved contradiction between his private and public selves: a sceptic who believed in the possibility of "immediate and complete communication" (p. 30) through sympathy; a hypochondriac and recluse who struggled to be a real-life model of sociability. Mullan believes that novels had a considerable advantage over philosophy in representing sensibility: they could freely admit the rare, fictive, even Utopian, nature of ideal sociability. Eighteenth-century novels generally celebrated what was rapidly becoming a cultural myth: "a parable about the uncorrupted powers of feeling" (p. 116). But even as they did, they demonstrated unresolved problems at the heart of that myth: the persistent ambiguity of the verbal and non-verbal signs of sensibility; the uncertain effects of the powers of feeling; and die subsequent undermining of sentimental fiction as an effective "vehicle for values and aspirations" (p. 1 17). Mullan defines the sentimental novel as an unstable "conflation" of "the morally instructive " and "staged exquisite scenes of feeling and distress" (p. 58). However, these components seem held together in an uneasy truce in his account of die creative ventures of novelists of sensibility. According to Mullan, such scenes of distress constantly slipped away from their authors' designated moral instructiveness into ambiguity, in great part because the main non-verbal instrument of the language of sensibility was the "massively sensitized feminine body" whose main signs were the highly suggestive "gestures and palpitations, sighs and tears" (p. 61). Richardson addressed this ambiguity by creating a series of supplements aiming to fix the meaning of tiiose signs and to prevent their misinterpretation: Pamela became a parable of the providential conversion powers of a young woman's sensibility; Clarissa a reconstruction of that parable as a story REVIEWS 271 of tragic failure—"die apotheosis of a sensibility too pure to be reconciled to the world" (p. 66); and Sir Charles Grandison a dubious attempt to "redeem Clarissa's harsh logic" by reasserting the possibility of virtuous men and happy families. Sterne's Tristram Shandy developed an equivalent model of...