the Puritan past, to dissolve into downright solipsism. Communal, fraternal, and sexual bonds bring people together only very partially, tentatively, and precariously. The test of behavior is not its conformity to some divinely imposed, biblically sanctioned norm, but rather its capacity to amplify, intensify, and elevate one's own sensations. In this respect Sterne is closer to D. H. Lawrence, and both are closer to what can be labeled Puritanism, than to the ideals of moderation and social accommodation invoked from many Anglican pulpits in the eighteenth century. To the pure all things are pure, as Sterne slyly reminds us, and whether we call this a religion of self-cultivation, a religion of the heart, or a latter-day recrudescence of Antinomianism, it clearly embraces enthusiasm in place of restraint, and prefers the redeeming excess to the prudent, Pharisaical mean.
Yorick is intent on confirming his membership in an aristocracy of the spirit, and on identifying and attaching himself to other chosen vessels. Discriminating between different kinds and degrees of feeling thus becomes a constant and crucial task; and in its analytical aspect as well, Yorick's absorption in his own emotional life draws on earlier religious habits of self-scrutiny. A preoccupation with nuance can lead to subtleties akin to those of the seventeenth-century French romance, with its elaborately refined cartes de tendre, and may owe something to this tradition. Yet English novelists probe the niceties of sentiment less out of punctilio than from a conviction that they offer the best and almost the only gauge of one's true status, social or spiritual. Outside the pages of Richardson, what is at issue is seldom salvation versus damnation in any literal sense. But when the question is whether one belongs to Yorick's elite or to the herd of Smelfunguses and Mundunguses, almost as much can seem to be at stake. Phrased in this way the problem may sound trivial, yet Sterne demonstrates that this secular variant of the central Calvinist worry-am I after all a sheep or a goat? — can be at once droll and all-important.
The main traits of the sentimental novel can be found as early as Sarah Fielding's David Simple of 1744 and Samuel Richardson's
Like most sentimental novelists and most sentimental readers, Mackenzie takes a somewhat equivocal position toward his subject. In his horror at the brutality and treachery of ordinary adult «civilized» life, and in his sympathy for its victims, he is very close to his hero. But the very qualities that distinguish Harley as a sentimental hero tend to keep him from judging the world harshly or condescendingly: to allow him such attitudes would be to confer on him a power to retaliate that would belie his character as humble, charitable, downtrodden innocent. Mackenzie, however, wants to register not only Harley's helpless dismay, but his own active indignation at the world's villainies, and it is through his editor, his narrator, and other spokesmen who turn up in the course of the story that Mackenzie can pass judgment on them. Moreover, there are some features of his hero with which Mackenzie evidently does not wish to be identified: by making his subordinate narrators speak of Harley from time to time with gentle but wry amusement, the author can prevent our supposing that he is as naive or ineffectual as this 'child in the drama of the world.' In short, Mackenzie presents himself as a genuine man of feeling but also as something of a man of the world: framing devices permit him this necessary combination of oneness with the hero and distance from him.
This pattern also holds true of the hero's relation to characters within the book, and to the reader. Like other sentimental heroes, Harley exercises generosity and compassion toward those less fortunate than he. The objects of his alms and tears sometimes reciprocate with tales of their own beneficence toward others still lower on the ladder of help-186- lessness and woe. Whether or not one's feelings of pity necessarily imply a sense of superiority to their object, the sentimental novel suggests that for pity to be a pleasurable emotion some such comparison, favorable to oneself, must be drawn. Not that the principle is openly avowed. To declare baldly, as Hume does in his Treatise on Human Nature, that 'the misery of another gives us a more lively idea of our happiness,' and 'therefore, produces delight,' would be fatal to the entire enterprise. Within the novels, gestures of commiseration are portrayed as uplifting to both parties; that the bestower is in some sense gratified at the expense of the recipient, whom he has a certain interest in not raising to his own level, is unthinkable. At any rate, the thought does not occur to the sentimental hero; nor can the thought occur to the reader without destroying the flattering illusion that his pleasure in witnessing so much distress does credit to the goodness of his heart.
However we choose to regard our benevolence toward a hero like Harley, this response does seem to involve a certain distance between us and him. Another kind of distancing results from the attitude of our culture toward sentimentality itself: we laugh uneasily at so-called heroes who cry so easily and so copiously; we find ludicrous and embarrassing their tendency to exaggerate; we are disturbed yet contemptuous about what we take to be their self-indulgence. This would be enough to account for the condescending tone in most modern criticism of sentimental fiction, even if there were no more legitimate aesthetic grounds for it. Yet distancing is not the whole story. The modern sensibility recoils with amusement from the traits I have just mentioned, yet it hankers on some level for the pastoral world that these qualities serve to create. Here people are still capable of intense emotions; here they still care about each other; here they do not disregard one another's pain and suffering. The outer world Harley encounters is anything but pastoral, and may be more cruel, rapacious, and gross than our familiar one. Yet his sheer responsiveness to it constitutes a kind of pastoral alternative to the cynical, «adult» blunting of response that the world more commonly induces. Thus Harley's spontaneity, naïveté, and innocence make him a pastoral figure with whom a part of us wishes to identify, despite (or perhaps because of) our own compromised, inhibited worldliness.
Moreover, Harley witnesses or is told about instances of such melodramatic wrongdoing that his reaction is one of pure revulsion. Villains and villainy are presented so starkly that he is not perplexed by difficulties of evaluation, nor are we. Instead, we are invited to check the inten-187- sity of our response against the example set us by the hero. What matters is not the qualitative accuracy of moral judgment, but the quantitative adequacy of moral feeling-the goodness not of our heads but of our hearts. The focus within the novel is not on actions, which involve choice and responsibility, but on reactions-particularly reactions so abrupt as to preclude deliberation. The very idea of pausing to weigh motives and circumstances is alien to the man of feeling; it smacks of the prudential, calculating, worldly wisdom that the sentimental novel sets out to discredit, and introduces an element of cold- blooded circumspection into a process which (in the sentimental view) ought to be instinctive and instantaneous.
A further source of appeal in books like The Man of Feeling should be mentioned. Within the story, Harley is not exactly quiescent, since his feelings are in constant turmoil, yet action is not something he initiates or performs, but something he undergoes and responds to. His life touches him deeply, but he seems powerless to affect its shape or outcome. In all this his role resembles that of a reader more than that of a conventional hero, and the resulting emphasis on passive responsiveness relieves the reader of certain burdens just as it does Harley. We are not challenged to bestir ourselves, to gird up our loins, to sally forth as pilgrims or soldiers in one or another cause, as we are by much other literature. This is seen as a problem by Hugh Murray, author of
Throughout the book the orphan Harley is sentimentally in love with the unattainable Miss Walton. But sex is everywhere associated with betrayal, and is one of the chief sources of evil and misery: the Misanthropist is soured by a trusted friend eloping with his fiancée, the Prostitute is driven to the brink of the grave by the conventional consequences of a conventional seduction, and Signor Respino nearly ruins an entire family out of 'criminal passion' for the incorruptible wife. «Passion» of the sexual variety is invariably 'criminal'-which puts Harley in an awkward position as a lover. When Miss Walton eventually reveals to him that she is not unattainable but had secretly loved him all along, death is the only way out of his impasse.
