Marriage represents the ultimate threat to Harley's innocence; sexual consummation would be a betrayal of his essential childlikeness and -188- an assumption of all the compromises, grossnesses, and responsibilities of adulthood in a fallen world. His gentle retreat into death is thus a more consistent and plausible finale to his brief career than marriage would be. Death is alluded to throughout the novel, not as the steady goal of a unified plot, but as an object of wanly pleasurable contemplation for those condemned to a world they long to escape. The book begins as it ends with the author in a state of pleasing melancholy, discussing graves. Mackenzie repeatedly sets up death as an alternative to sexual consummation, analogous to it but more desirable-especially if, as in Harley's case, the hero can be 'buried in a certain spot near the grave of his mother.' At the same time, by not actively pursuing death, Harley remains a purer sentimental hero than someone like Goethe's Werther; the childlike Harley cannot be so bold or resolute-in short, so 'manly'-as to perform any decisive action, let alone commit suicide.
The bildungsroman attaches such importance to learning processes that the question of whether man is innately good or depraved is not crucial to it. The sentimental novel not only introduces actual infants in idealized roles, but finds in childhood some of the same virtues imputed to the noble savage during the eighteenth century. Sentimentalism is akin to primitivism insofar as it looks upon social institutions as thwarting or perverting human dignity. Normal education thus represents a force for evil. In the bildungsroman, satires on education aim at practical reform, and assume that one can and must learn to live in the world, whereas the sentimental novel challenges not only the methods but the goal of conventional education.
Skepticism about formal education is only one expression, however, of the more general sentimental principle that the path from innocence to experience is a downhill one. Henry Fielding may attach positive value to a young man's acquisition of prudence, but for the sentimental novelist the wisdom of the serpent does not complement but rather contaminates the innocence of the dove. In the sentimental novel, at any rate, the hero does not mature or degenerate, largely because those two processes are regarded as synonymous, and also because process itself is a sentimental bête noire.
When character change does occur in sentimental fiction, it is reminiscent of the Protestant (and ultimately Pauline) pattern of dramatic conversion. Such works hold out the possibility of sudden, total transformation that comes about not through reflection, resolution, and -189- deliberate action but rather through something like an infusion of grace. The notion of conversion explains the perplexing fact of human change by postulating sudden leaps or twitches that mark a basic alteration of course. But the clearest instances of this abrupt movement from darkness to light occur in sentimental works of the following century-for example, in the Scrooge of Dickens's 'Christmas Carol.' In such novels as The Man of Feeling, the action may be as peripatetic as that of Tom Jones, and the hero may encounter as socially and morally varied a series of other characters, but the result tends to be a reiterated confirmation of the attitudes he set out with, not a revision or revaluation of them. In Mackenzie's novel, the indictment of the world becomes more comprehensive with each episode, but not more complex or profound. Great stress is laid on openness to experience, but only in the sense that the hero must be prepared to have his susceptibilities set a-jangling in all sorts of odd moments and unlikely places; such openness does not extend to the point of allowing the hero to be transformed by his experience. Affected yet not changed, he may become sadder, but he cannot grow wiser. Far from being embarked on a voyage of discovery, in search of something he doesn't already know or have, he is on a mission of recovery, trying to recapture a sense of fixity amid distressing flux, or to regain a long-lost haven of secure devotion.
Another way of illustrating the incompatibility of the sentimental novel with the bildungsroman, with education, and with process generally is to consider briefly the convention of love at first sight. The sentimental ethos, prizing instantly formed bonds of sympathy between strangers, tends to regard such moments of heightened sensibility as both possible and creditable to the parties involved: what better example could there be of benign directness and spontaneity in human affairs? The adversaries of sentimentalism not only challenge the substance and worth of sudden attachments, but also put forward an alternative conception of love as something gradual and cumulative, to be established only over time. According to this view, one does not fall in love, but learns to love. (Austen's
The convention of love at first sight helps to bring out a political aspect of sentimentalism as well. To conservatives, the notion of love at first sight is not merely silly but dangerous: it breaks through the barriers of class, circumvents the testing rituals of courtship, and allows the sexual relationship between individuals to overshadow the social and economic relationship between families that has always been the chief basis for upper- and middle-class marriage. Love at first sight transforms strangers into intimates, as happens repeatedly in A Sentimental Journey; and although Sterne balks at carrying this process (or any other) to its ultimate conclusion, others saw and drew out its implications. Love at first sight does for two persons what Christian conversion had done for one: it holds out the possibility of an immediate and total remaking of their essential situation. It thus lends plausibility to the notion that sudden transformation is possible on a more extended, perhaps even universal scale. If all mankind could be brought to undergo the change of heart represented in religious terms by Christian conversion and in more secular terms by love at first sight, the millennium could arrive overnight. A sentimental doctrine such as love at first sight thus appears subversive insofar as it helps discredit the belief that significant social relationships, including those between men and women, have to develop over time and cannot be formed or altered all at once. Sentimental fiction acknowledges that in the world as presently constituted, the distances between classes may be great, but it suggests the arbitrariness of those gaps by showing that they can collapse under the force of a single soulful glance.
The sentimental mode emphasizes the primacy of individual feelings, and this emphasis has sometimes been seen as revolutionary-as -191- tending to subvert the principles and duties that support institutions like the family, the church, and society at large. Customary rules of conduct and belief seem cold, oppressive, and inauthentic in competition with the keen promptings of impulse; in prizing the latter, the sentimental mode seems to place in jeopardy the entire moral and social system. The maintenance of order depends (according to its defenders) on a subordination of individual to social considerations, and of feeling to judgment; by reversing both priorities, sentimentalism seems to level or overturn an established, hierarchical scheme of things.
Some pioneers of sentiment, such as Rousseau, recognize and welcome the political consequences of preferring feeling to thought. Yet most of its early English devotees seem innocent of any leveling intention when they value the heart over the head. They assume that the existing order will remain intact; their highest hope is to find shelter from it and to relieve some of its victims, not to topple its institutions. When four kindred souls achieve a harmonious 'little society' at the end of David Simple, or when some women establish a more extensive utopian community in Sarah Scott's
From the beginning, sensibility encourages patterns of sensation and expression that-although held up as natural-differ from those of the generality of mankind. From Sterne onward there are those who value sensibility for its not being widely shared, for its representing a more elevated state of emotional and moral development than most people have attained. But like the signs of grace for which earlier Calvinists had to scrutinize themselves, the tokens of belonging to the sentimental elite have to be watched for and nurtured, as we see Yorick doing so sedulously in A Sentimental Journey. This makes for a curious paradox. On the one hand, the surest evidence of possessing sensibility is a capacity for spontaneous stirrings of benevolence toward others, an acute responsiveness to touching scenes and incidents in life as well as art. On the other hand, one's own feelings can displace the ostensible objects of those feelings as one's chief concern. Thus the very egotism that sentimentalism sets out to overcome can taint sentimentalism itself. As Hugh Murray observes in The Morality of Fiction, 'the votary of
