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Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century
THE form of the sentimental novel is typically that of an antibildungsroman: instead of a progress toward maturity, it deals sympathetically with the character who cannot grow up and find an active place in society. Its ideal is stasis or regression, which makes for episodic, cyclical narratives that often go nowhere or back where they began. Owing to different social assumptions about masculinity and femininity, the sentimental heroine can figure in conventional romance plots that end with wedding bells, since her role conforms to the popular sense of what a young woman should be; the sentimental hero poses an implicit challenge to accepted notions of masculinity, and he cannot be assimilated into the world represented in the novels. As a consequence, sentimental novels tend to become satires on 'the world,' but satires in which the hero himself cannot usually take part because of his naïveté, good nature, and general childlikeness. From one point of view, the cult of sentiment represents a clear challenge to traditional social, economic, and gender hierarchies, which it seeks to replace with bonds of fraternal benevolence embracing all mankind. From another point of view this movement is not egalitarian at all, but rather attempts to create a new aristocracy, possessing spontaneity, warmth, and delicacy of feeling, in place of an existing aristocracy perceived as emotionally artificial, cold, and coarse.
The sentimental novel often deals with adolescence, but in one way or another the onset of adulthood, the goal of the bildungsroman, is obstructed, evaded, or undone. The sentimental novel shows change -181- stopped or reversed-and often time along with it. The bildungsroman treats time respectfully, as not only measuring but fostering the processes it celebrates. In the sentimental novel time becomes a major enemy, the agent of feared or despised changes. Various strategies are devised to arrest or fragment its ongoingness, and to retrieve or redeem moments that seem to stand outside time or otherwise defy it. One such strategy is to break down the linear, causal, sequential flow of narrative into discrete episodes; another is to arrange episodes in nonchronological order (as Sterne does), or to introduce digressions (as Sterne and Mackenzie both do), or to posit gaps (as Mackenzie does with his «lost» chapters), all tending to disrupt temporal continuity. If the sentimental novelist is to free his hero from the ordinary effects of time, drastic tactics are called for, since narrative is always threatening to imply progress simply by unfolding in time. Such tactics as Sterne's and Mackenzie's, sometimes regarded as experimental departures from the realistic conventions of the standard novel, or as attempts to get beyond the «literary» artificiality of inherited narrative modes, are especially appropriate to the sentimental novel because of the significance attached to time. What is most benign about time in the bildungsroman-its efficacy as agent of growth and development-becomes in the sentimental novel its most malign feature: the power of time to transform boys into men and sons into husbands is the very thing that the sentimental novel tries to elude or deny.
We tend to think of the language of sentimentalism as an affected or exaggerated jargon: 'tears and flapdoodle,' as Mark Twain was to call it. Yet what is most characteristic of sentimentalism is not the set of terms with which it attempts to revivify the language of emotion, for these terms quickly dwindle into clichés, but rather a fundamental skepticism about the adequacy of language itself as a medium of expression or communication. The distinctive sentimental attitude toward language is to be discovered not in the shibboleths of its pioneers but in the conviction of sentimentalists of each generation that language, like the world that uses it, is profoundly debased: better suited to self-disguise than self-revelation, more often employed to exploit than to enlighten, ideally to be avoided but at all events to be used, if used it must be, with mistrust. Sentimental writers have responded to this impasse with two centuries of narratives in which articulateness is associated with villainy, and true heroism is more or less tongue-tied. Sentimental figures tend to be babes linguistically (as in other ways), out of whose mouths comes much odd-sounding sense. -182-
The menaced sentimental hero yearns for silence and the pure expressiveness of preverbal gesture. True, he may seldom reach this state-Mackenzie's Harley comes closer than most-and there may be something inherently paradoxical about the very attempt to represent it in words. All the same, Harley and his brethren prefer childish prattle to adult Babel, and the splash of a single tear is the next best thing to the perfect stillness of womb and tomb. The sentimental hero denies the desirability as well as the necessity of mastering language. Shunning forbidden knowledge-and to him there is really no other kind-he naturally repudiates the word, which is its key. He is disturbed less by the arbitrariness or artificiality of a system of verbal signs, which he finds equally in other social institutions, than by the enormities of adulthood to which language-learning is a kind of forced initiation. Eighteenth-century British fiction contains a number of wise fools, comic characters like Smollett's Win Jenkins, who utter truths greater or other than those they intend. But the sentimental hero belongs rather to a tradition of saintly fools, whose most eloquent testimony to truth is often garbled or mute.
The heroes of most sentimental novels are humorless. The image of the outside world is that found in satire: most people prove to be selfserving, callous, hypocritical, and so on. Moreover, the narrators are capable of considerable irony, as in The Man of Feeling. But the sentimental hero himself is generally lacking in irony and devoid of wit-perhaps owing to the authorial realization that wit is itself a form of control, a way of ordering, judging, and mastering one's world that would run contrary to the passive, victimized posture of most sentimental heroes.
Some critics have seen sentimentalism as springing from a basic optimism that renders satire unnecessary (men are naturally good, and need to be reminded of their latent goodness rather than their manifest shortcomings); or ineffectual (men's goodness can be elicited better through sympathetic tears than scoffing laughter); or immoral (satire indulges impulses in author and reader just as base as those it purports to chastise). In this view, later eighteenth-century literature exhibits a gradual moderating-some would say a blurring and emasculating-of the rigorous Augustinian or Augustan visions of man and society on which the satire of Swift and Pope had been based. This demanding ethos is supposed to have given way to a bland faith in progress-a confidence that though the world is not yet all it might be, philanthropy -183- and forbearance will bring it around, since its defects lie more in reformable institutions than in human nature itself.
Others have seen sentimentalism as the expression of a thoroughgoing pessimism: the belief that one can scarcely hope to improve society, but at most to escape from it. The idea of progress is not only an illusion but a snare, tempting man to linger in a city of destruction that he had better flee, even if flight inward (or backward) is the only route open to him. In this view, too, the individual may be inherently good, but society turns him into a predatory beast, and its customs and institutions are so incurably vile that the good man must be an exile or a victim-never the active, socially engaged hero of traditional epic or comedy.
In practice, the sentimental novel seldom subscribes completely to either of these extreme positions. Often the hero seems to spring from the sunnier conception of human nature, even though nearly everyone else in the same book reflects the more despairing vision. But if the philosophical or theological assumptions about human nature that underlie the sentimental novel are somewhat ambiguous, sentimentalism seems clearly if indirectly indebted to the English religious tradition in another of its functions: namely, as a technique for reviving the role of emotion in human conduct. Stigmatized as «zeal» or «enthusiasm» during the Restoration, the ardor associated with Puritanism had become suspect. Sentimentalism arises in the eighteenth century partly as a reaction against this taboo, and represents a kind of return of the repressed, a reopening of channels through which a broad range of human emotion, from passionate intensity to exquisite delicacy, might once again find expression. As a rehabilitation of enthusiasm, sentimentalism seeks legitimacy by appealing not to tradition or authority but to its truth to nature. The overtly secular character of much eighteenth-century sentimentalism seems, to adapt T. E. Hulme's remark about Romanticism, a matter of spilt religion-of religious instincts or energies reasserting themselves, but adjusting to a world in which their religious pedigree could be a liability rather than an asset. (When sentimental novels do set themselves the task of religious advocacy, as in Chateaubriand's Atala at the end of the century, religion itself becomes highly emotionalized and aestheticized).
It is worth observing the spirit in which Sterne introduces religious considerations into a work like A Sentimental Journey. Of all the early novelists, Sterne appears to be the adherent of sensibility most remote from Puritanism and most in accord with the affable, undemanding -184- worldliness of the Anglican establishment. Yet behind the gregariousness of Yorick (and of Sterne himself) lies an individualism that is always threatening, as in
