Mackenzie's Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility

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 regulations 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 tableaux 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...