Abstract
Campbell outlines the key features of the cult of sensibility, noting that the term was regarded as a personal quality as well as an ideal of character, one generally involving a susceptibility to tender feelings, typically manifest by a show of tears. Viewed in this way sensibility can be seen as a charismatic quality akin to the gift of grace, one that evolved directly from the Calvinist’s emotionalist doctrine of signs. Campbell uses material from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to illustrate key features of the cult. Crucially ‘sensibility’ became an aesthetic as well as an ethical issue, with the key concept of ‘taste’ uniting the two, covering as it did feeling sorry for others and being moved by beauty. This meant manifesting sensibility was essential in order to be thought a ‘good person’ as well as the possessor of ‘good taste’, with obvious implications for one’s consumption practices.
We must judge the soul of every man by the degree of emotion he displays in the theatre.
Sebastien Merrier
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Notes
- 1.
Louis I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press), p. 5.
- 2.
Owen Barfield, History in English Words, new edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 177.
- 3.
It is important to recognize that the ethic of feeling identified here as sensibility constituted an entirely novel cultural phenomenon. As Crane comments, ‘it was not a philosophy which the eighteenth century could have derived full fledged from ancient or Renaissance tradition. It was something new in the world – a doctrine, or rather a complex of doctrines – which a hundred years before 1750 would have been frowned upon, had it ever been presented to them, by representatives of every school of ethical or religious thought. Neither in antiquity, nor in the Middle Ages, nor in the sixteenth century, nor in the England of the Puritans and Cavaliers had the “man of feeling” ever been a “popular type”’ (see R. S. Crane, ‘Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’, A Journal of English Literary History, 1 (1934), pp. 189–90).
- 4.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow: Fontana/Croom Helm, 1976), p. 237.
- 5.
Collins Dictionary of the English Language (1979), s.v. ‘sentimental’.
- 6.
Alex Preminger (ed.) Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
- 7.
Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 195.
- 8.
Both references are to be found in Lodwick Hartley, Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century: An Essay and a Bibliography of Sternean Studies 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 38.
- 9.
Erik Erämätsa, A Study of the Word “Sentimental” and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England (Helsinki: Annals Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Ser. B, 74 (1951), no. 1).
- 10.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 59.
- 12.
J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 92.
- 13.
Whilst some individuals were considered to possess ‘natural’ sensibility, it was also considered possible to develop or cultivate such tendencies. This generally involved exposing oneself to those stimuli considered likely to produce an emotional reaction in a person of true sensibility, and then striving to bring forth such a response in oneself. Such a regime could obviously provide its own opportunities for emotional indulgence. The distinction naturally brings Weber’s discussion of charisma to mind (see Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (London, Methuen, 1965), pp. 2–3).
- 14.
The phrase is the title of a book by Henry Mackenzie, first published in 1771.
- 15.
Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility, p. 32.
- 16.
Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist, p. 195.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Brian Vickers, Introduction to Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. ix.
- 19.
René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, vol. 1, The Later Eighteenth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), p. 73.
- 20.
Maximillian E. Novak, Eighteenth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 157.
- 21.
Joseph Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature: A Study of the Literary Relations between France and England during the Eighteenth Century (New York: Burt Franklin, 1899), p. 289.
This shows clearly how the Calvinist doctrine of signs has become carried forward into the secular ethic of sensibility. In fact, Sterne, who probably did more than any other writer to popularize the ideal of sensibility, was a clergyman, and thereby forms an obvious link between the two.
- 22.
There are grounds for believing that women adopted this ideal more enthusiastically than men.
- 23.
Vickers, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, p. viii.
- 24.
For further evidence and a discussion of contemporary attempts to explain why emotions should be the source of pleasure, see A. O. Aldridge, ‘The Pleasures of Pity’, A Journal of English Literary History, 16, 1 (March 1949), 76–87, and Earl R. Wasserman, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’, A Journal of English Literary History, 14, 4 (December 1947), 283–307.
- 25.
Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, p. 103.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Darrel Mansell, The Novels of Jane Austen: An Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 46–7.
- 28.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London: Avalon Press, 1949), p. 31.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 80.
- 30.
Interestingly, this self-referential form of emotional triggering is still identified by the use of the adjective ‘sentimental’; objects which have special resonance for given individuals being said to possess ‘sentimental value’.
- 31.
Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 52.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 71.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 76. The satiric tone does not negate the truth of this observation.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 92.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 173.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 179.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 209. It follows from this analysis that Marianne’s behaviour is not at all impetuous in the sense of being action undertaken without consideration; she knows what she is doing and she considers it right to behave in that way. To that extent, her behaviour could justly be said to be premeditated (although pre-imagined or pre-rehearsed would probably be better terms). It is only from a utilitarian and consequentialist ethical perspective that Marianne’s conduct is unproblematically dubbed ‘impetuous’.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 211–12.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 250.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 241.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 191.
- 49.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 282.
- 50.
First impressions appears to have been Jane Austen’s original title for Pride and Prejudice, and is referred to by Mansell as ‘a conventional phrase for love at first sight’ (Mansell, The Novels of Jane Austen, p. 78). He also cites a contemporary work on landscape gardening to show both the currency and importance of this idea: ‘There is no principle of art [of landscape gardening] so necessary to be studied as the effects produced … by … that general disposition of the human mind, by which it capable of receiving first impressions’ (Ibid., p. 48; italics in original).
- 51.
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 282.
- 52.
Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 81.
- 53.
Mansell, The Novels of Jane Austen, p. 14.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 16. As Mansell notes, a similar sudden friendship is intimated in Sense and Sensibility when Elinor first meets Lucy Steele. True to her commitment to ‘sense’ Elinor does not respond (Sense and Sensibility, p. 113).
- 57.
Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 301.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 54. Marianne is, however, decidedly unlike most heroines portrayed in the novels of the period, for she neither elopes nor actually expresses herself in favour of doing so. Colonel Brandon does confess to Elinor that in his youth he loved a girl very much like Marianne in temperament, and that they planned to elope (Ibid., p. 168).
- 61.
Ibid., p. 41.
- 62.
Religion does play a part in justifying the cult of sensibility – natural religion, as opposed to Christianity, serving to legitimate the cult of sentiment in the same general fashion that it served to legitimate the cult of reason. This connection became more indirect, however, as systems of ethics and aesthetics developed independently of the world-view that generated them.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 64.
- 64.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘The Parallel of Deism and Classicism’, in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: George Braziller, 1955), p. 92.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
This term comes to be the very focus of the dispute, with the aristocracy and the middle classes attributing a different meaning; see pp. 154–60 below.
- 67.
Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–49), vol. 1, p. 202. As Fairchild notes, Pietistic Christianity is essentially an anti-neo-classical force (Ibid., p. 218). Given a weakening of religious convictions, however, combined with the middle-class determination to be considered as good as the aristocracy, elements of this movement became mixed with neo-classicism. The ensuing aesthetic revolution constituted the second major development in the evolution of modern hedonistic culture accomplished through the introduction of classical ideas into the Protestant tradition (the first, as we have seen, involved the development of natural religion).
- 68.
This is less ironic than it might seem as middle-class culture was itself made up of rationalistic utilitarianism and sentimental Pietism, with the consequence that aristocratic attacks on the former often tended to assist the latter, and vice versa. Shaftesbury was, in fact, opposing the Hobbesian tradition in ethics and did not intend to lend support to a bourgeois, anti-aristocratic aesthetic.
- 69.
Quoted by Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility, p. 13.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 71.
Shaftesbury’s philosophy of ethics was a good deal more complicated than is implied here. There was, for example, a considerable stoic ingredient (see Esther A. Tiffany, ‘Shaftesbury as Stoic’, PMLA, 38 (March 1923), no. 1, 642–84), whilst he never endorsed the excessive displays of emotion that became the hallmark of sentimentalism. Nevertheless, his arguments in favour of an intuitive moral sense, which was ‘felt’ rather than rationally apprehended, clearly did a great deal to supply that movement with its necessary intellectual support. For details of Shaftesbury’s philosophy see Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967); Basil Willey, The English Moralists (London: Chatto and Windus), pp. 216–32; as well as Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility.
- 72.
Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility, p. 15. A more elegant restatement of this same position is, of course, subsequently encountered in Keats, but then the idea of an innate moral sense and its intimate association with the apprehension of beauty and truth is taken up by Rousseau in France, from whom it enters directly into the mainstream of romantic thought, and also by Francis Hutcheson, who transmitted it to Hume, Adam Smith and other members of the Scottish group of moral philosophers.
- 73.
Another critical consequence of Shaftesbury’s teachings and the development of a philosophy of sensibility was that pleasant emotions could themselves now be cited as acceptable reasons for conduct. The fact that one gained pleasure from a given emotion indicated that the action which it prompted was right and good, and thus that experience of the emotion could itself be cited as sufficient grounds for the action; indeed the more powerful the emotion or the more intense the pleasure, the greater the claim for virtuousness which could be made. This was, of course, exactly what happened in the emergent cult of romantic love, where ‘passion’ became the only acceptable justification for conduct, but it also had significant repercussions for consumerism, as it meant that a rhetoric of liking could now suffice to legitimate purchases.
- 74.
That virtue and beauty were closely associated, if not identified, in eighteenth-century thought, is revealed by some of the phrases in common use at the time, such as ‘virtue’s sweet charms’, ‘moral grace’ and ‘moral beauty’ (see Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility, p. 19).
- 75.
The middle-class tradition of philanthropic concern, with its distinctive sentimental concern for children and dumb animals, can be seen to have its origins in this dimension of eighteenth-century sensibility (see Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, pp. 105–6 and Appendix II).
- 76.
The list of authors is interesting for the indication it gives about the literary tastes of the person of sensibility. It is not surprising that Cowper and Scott should figure prominently, whilst Pope is admired ‘no more than is proper’ (Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 48).
- 77.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 78.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 21; B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619–1800): A Background for the Study of Literature, 2 vols (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 228–9; Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, Appendix IV.
- 79.
Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 82.
- 80.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 81.
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), p. 28.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 83.
It is a matter of regret that social scientists have neglected to consider this important phenomenon in any detail. Apart from such occasional descriptive studies as Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1959), the topic has been left to aestheticians and cultural historians.
- 84.
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, s.v. ‘Taste’.
- 85.
Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, p. 24.
- 86.
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, s.v. ‘Taste’.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
E. N. Hooker, ‘The Discussion of Taste, from 1750–1770, and the New Trends in Literary Criticism’, PMLA, 49 (June 1934), no. 2, 577–92, see esp. p. 579.
- 89.
Ibid., p. 585.
- 90.
Various lines of thought contributed to this generally confused state of affairs. The problem posed by the concept of the sublime, for example, as that which, whilst pleasing, was outside the rules of traditional aesthetics, was one. Another was that school of thought which, emphasizing the je ne sais quoi quality in works of art, treated beauty and hence taste as fundamentally indefinable. Of growing significance, however, was the influence exerted by associational psychology, which emphasized the relationship between ideas of beauty and the distinctive experience of the individual mind. As each man’s education and experience was peculiar to him, he would respond in an essentially individual manner when brought face to face with beauty. Hume was the major figure in this tradition, and in his essay ‘On the Standard of Taste’ he argued that beauty does not belong to things in themselves but merely reflects the mind’s reaction to them. This aesthetic subjectivism was to become an important influence upon the thinking of the Romantics.
- 91.
Hooker, ‘The Discussion of Taste’, p. 591.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 589.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
See Leo Lowenthal and Marjorie Fiske, ‘The Debate Over Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England’, in Mirra Komarovsky (ed.), Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), pp. 66–9.
- 95.
See the argument in Francis Gallaway, Reason, Rule and Revolt in English Classicism (New York, Octagon Books, 1974), p. 286.
- 96.
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 845. Bentham actually tries to make satisfaction the basis of taste, which is the mistake, as noted earlier, of confusing comfort with pleasure.
- 97.
Hooker, ‘The Discussion of Taste’, p. 588.
- 98.
Ibid.
- 99.
Terminology can be a problem here. A fashion usually means the prevailing style, whilst the fashion typically means that one which is the latest or most approved. In contrast to these, the term ‘fashion pattern’ is used to imply the overall system of rapidly changing aesthetic standards that serves, in modern societies, to generate an endless sequence of individual fashions.
- 100.
Changes in aesthetic standards succeed in opening up new areas of hedonistic experience because of pleasure’s intimate association with a change in stimulus.
- 101.
The idea that designers and manufacturers ‘make’ fashion in the sense of foisting unwanted products on consumers is to confuse the appearance of a new fashion with the mechanisms which allow the pattern as a whole to operate. Mandel, for example, observes that ‘fashion is a typically social phenomenon, with the impetus coming from the side of the producers (the designers), not from that of the consumers. It is the few important couturiers in Paris who “make” fashion, not the “public”’ (see Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, trans. Brian Pearce, 2 vols (London: Merlin Press, 1970), p. 66). Obviously the couturiers are critical in effecting the introduction of a given style, but in doing so they are responding to the popular demand for novelty.
- 102.
Taste refers both to an actual and to an ideal pattern of preferences. As an actual pattern it points to the consistency of liking and disliking which characterizes our choice of stimuli: it thus represents the nature of our pleasures, or more accurately our judgement of the comparative intensity of pleasure to be obtained from different sources of stimulation. The actual pattern will of course be significantly influenced by past experience, as most ‘tastes’ are ‘acquired’. On the other hand, taste also refers to an ideal pattern of preferences; those which reveal the individual’s ability to discern and appreciate aspects of the environment which aesthetic theory has indicated are beautiful. Thus whilst individuals simply ‘have’ taste in the first sense (and nobody can be without it unless their sense organs are impaired) in this second sense an individual may or may not have ‘good taste’. We may assume that individuals will try and bring these two senses of taste together, either trying to change their real preferences in order to bring them in accord with the ideal, or arguing that their real choices should be made the standard for assessing aesthetic value.
- 103.
This division arises out of a contradiction which lies at the very heart of the concept of sensibility: the tension which is bound to arise between being sensitive to the actual plight and real feelings of others, and being oneself susceptible to displays of intense emotion. The assumption made by the original advocates of sensibility appears to have been that these would be congruent with one another; that is, through empathetic identification with the ‘sufferings’ of others one would be bound to feel that pity and sympathy which prompts benevolent conduct. It is clear, however, that a self-interested concern to display the correct emotions can easily come to interfere with a person’s ability to successfully empathize with another’s plight, just as an overriding concern to identify another’s feelings correctly may inhibit one’s own exhibition of emotion. These self-regarding and other-regarding tendencies are hard to keep in balance, and it is therefore unsurprising that the key concept of ‘taste’ became subject to contrasting interpretations, the tension ultimately manifesting itself as a conflict between sincerity and propriety.
- 104.
This is, in its effect, a process of de-aestheticization similar to that advocated by the utilitarians.
- 105.
Austen, Sense and Sensibility, p. 164.
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Campbell, C. (2018). The Ethic of Feeling. In: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79066-4_7
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