How Ironic is Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling?

References in parentheses are to chapters of the novel.



     Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling is the most popular and typical of the sentimental novels in vogue during the gestation of Romanticism, but it has long been recognized that Harley, its hero, is as much a criticism of sentimentalism as an exemplification of it. Since Mackenzie’s book, like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, is largely comic rather than dramatic, the hero’s effusions are as often ridiculous as affecting.
     In his 1824 essay “Henry Mackenzie,” Scott confidently declares that “the universal and permanent popularity of his writings entitles us to rank him among the most distinguished of his class.” While praising Mackenzie’s “tone of exquisite moral delicacy” which reveals “those finer feelings to which ordinary hearts are callous,” Scott worries that Harley might be taken for an absurd and effeminate “Quixote of sentiment.” He proffers “Harley's spirited conduct towards an impertinent passenger in the stagecoach, and his start of animated indignation on listening to Edwards's story as evidence of masculine vigor and assures the reader that he is confident Harley would dare “on suitable occasions, to do all that might become a man.”
     The problem is unavoidable. The virtuous Harley often manifests his warm human sympathy through charitable contributions of the sort recommended by both Christian and secular values. When he gives the fortune-teller a shilling, he is more doubtful than the reader about the morality of the action – he is supporting one who defined his profession as lying. The man’s indigence, however, is the result of misfortune (a fire and subsequent unemployment), and he declares that he had used to be a “plain-dealer” until he found the world too tight-fisted to give alms without something in return.
     Likewise Harley’s beneficence to the prostitute, the inmates of Bedlam, to Edwards and his family, and the similar generosity of Mountford in the story Edwards tells are all appropriate acts of kindness likely to meet the reader’s approbation. Yet Harley’s sensibility, his “delicacy,” leads him as often into foolish error. He fancies himself skilled at physiognomy and able to discern character at a glance, yet he errs repeatedly because he always thinks well of everyone.
     A man he takes for a gentleman is in fact a pimp (XIX), his guide in the psychiatric hospital turns out to be a madman (XX), and his companions are card sharpers who fleece him. (XXVII) While he is certainly kindly, many would describe him as unusually gullible as well. An impoverished aristocrat, he cannot conceive of working for a living. His only recourse is to attempt to advance his standing as a modest country gentleman by acquiring a land lease through political loyalty. He feels “no great relish for the attempt,” but lacks the energy to resist the urgings of friends. (XII)
     His feckless incompetence extends equally to affairs of the heart. Though in love with Miss Walton whose “natural tenderness” might seem to make her an apt mate, his “extreme sensibility” causes him to be silent when she is present. His partiality manifests as “paroxysms of fancy.” (XIII) Paralyzed by modesty, he is unable to express his feelings until he manages a belated declaration of on his deathbed.
     Harley is consistently governed by emotion. His contributions to the needy are determined by his flurried reaction to chance encounters rather than by conscious moral principles. His ethical decisions are especially open to error because they are subjective and impulsive, based on “delicacy” and “refinement” rather than analysis or insight. The fact is that Mackenzie’s man of feeling has an aesthetic system of morality. Suffering strikes him as horrifying because it is ugly. The coins he hands out are aimed at the amelioration of his distaste.
     The subjectivity of the vision of “the man of feeling” is emphasized by the fragmentary character of the manuscript and the accident of its supposed survival. At the outset the narrator calls his own story “of no importance,” and “without art” (deploying the ancient trope of claiming sincerity by asserting artlessness), noting that “had the name of a Marmontel, or a Richardson been on the title-page – ‘tis odds that I should have wept” (Introduction), thus acknowledging the greater power of fiction over fact to generate such a fashionable learned emotion. For Mackenzie there is little that separates morality in real life from the sympathy experienced by the reader of fiction since in both instances the focus is on the sensibility of the man of feeling himself.
     This is comedy indeed, but not wholly untethered to real morality. Mackenzie’s essays provide evidence of his views less ambiguous than the fiction. His essay “On Novel-writing” assumes that fiction should have a moral foundation though he concedes that some stories suffer a “perversion” from that base. Narratives operate by, “like all works of genius and feeling” by “promoting a certain refinement of mind,” yet he rejects the extreme, what he calls a “sickly sort of refinement.” He calls for a unambiguously moral literature and opposes characters of “mingled virtue and vice,” though of course such a phrase would describe everyone. He rejects the sentimental delectation of one’s own reactions in readers whose engagement with improving fiction has no influence on their lives, those whose consciences are separated from their feelings.
     His ambivalence about literary endeavors is foregrounded in another essay, “Defence of Literary Studies and Amusements in Men of Business.” Here the conflict is presented as a social tension produced by the rise of capitalism. The disinterested study, not of letters alone, but of science as well, is, he says, a “danger” to men of affairs, because “the fineness of mind, which is created or increased by the study of letters, or the admiration of the arts is supposed to incapacitate a man for the drudgery by which professional eminence is gained.” The newly rich are indifferent to art, or even contemptuous of it, since “learning and genius are proscribed, as leading their votaries to barren indigence, and merited neglect.” He claims that the old aristocracy was motivated by virtue, while the parvenus have no scruples and laments that men’s measure has come to be self-interest and money alone. He regrets the loss of a certain “independence and delicacy of mind” that accompany a “love of letters.” Aficionados of literature experience “a real superiority of enjoyment” of which mere “wealth-blown insects” are incapable.
     Yet Mackenzie makes a surprisingly feeble defense of the liberal arts and sciences. Like some academic pedagogues today justifying the universally required literature courses that require many teaching assistants, he notes that the student of literature will develop general analytical skills. He notes that, whatever its limitations, art at least provides entertainment superior to “mere sensual enjoyments,” and touts the value of reading for idle hours, for retirement, and for old age as if it were the equivalent of crossword puzzles or golf. His final argument limits art’s value to the private sphere. “In the closer intercourse of friend, of husband, and of father, that superior delicacy and refinement of feeling which the cultivation of the mind bestows, heighten affection into sentiment, and mingle with such connections a dignity and tenderness, which gives its dearest value to our existence.”
     As for the public world, though, Mackenzie is nostalgic for a social harmony that in fact never existed. He critique is thorough, beginning with the fortune-teller’s statement in the novel’s opening in which says there is no honesty in the world, obliging him to lie. (XIV) Toward the end Mountford with heavy irony refers to Respino as a “man of honour,” suggesting that worldly respect is no guarantee of morality. In a surprising passage perhaps in part motivated by his Scottish identity in spite of his Tory loyalties, Mackenzie’s man of feeling denounces imperialism. Though the whole passage is problematized by this fragment’s title: “The Man of Feeling Talks of What He Does Not Understand.” He sees clearly the economic motives that belie a civilizing “white man’s burden”: “when shall I see a commander return from India in the pride of honourable poverty?” Even this indignation is softened by sentiment. In the book’s conclusion is no denunciation of profiteers and exploitation, nothing but a soft-focus “pity” for the world.
     He certainly betrayed no Romantic radicalism in the other aspects of his life; rather he was a solid member of the Scottish ruling class. Apart from his literary activities (three novels, a play, the editorship of two periodicals, and biographical and political writings), he was a prominent lawyer, for many years attorney for the Crown, Comptroller of Taxes for Scotland, and an active controversialist, arguing for Conservative principles. I find nothing in his writings that would suggest that his views were anything but ordinary. He was simply a clever journalist and storyteller who aimed to embellish his career with ornamental literary accomplishments. The emotional extravagance that characterizes Harley, the narrator, and Mountford does not seem to have extended to their creator.
     Critics have wondered whether Mackenzie admired or satirized his main character, but these alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Is it not most efficient to imagine that Mackenzie wrote a piece inspired by the current vogue for the man of sensibility with the conscious aim of becoming a best-selling author? He was doubtless making fun of an extreme (like those who theatrically swooned as we know from diaries) while not condemning emotion in itself. Though he had initial difficulty in finding a publisher, once the work had appeared, it proved popular and he was referred to as the “man of feeling” for the rest of his busy life. While creating a hero of sensitivity, he remained a wholly conformist professional man who laughed at the excesses of his own character and exhibited in his own demeanor nothing of Harley’s extravagance. Some modern critics have suggested that out of this contradiction he crafted a subtly ironic figure; to me it seems the book’s themes arise more from his opportunistic use of a theme that was very much à la mode.