by Roy Porter
Such Lockean views squared with classical teachings about literary production. For pundits like Pope, artistry was neither a gift nor supernaturally inspired; it was, he said, in his Essay on Criticism (1711) at bottom a matter of craftsmanship:
True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft' was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.14
Joshua Reynolds judged likewise: his aesthetics had no truck with fancy conceptions of divine illumination or spontaneous creativity. He found not merely pretentious but ‘pernicious’ all talk of ‘waiting the call and inspiration of Genius' or ‘attending to times and seasons when the imagination shoots with the greatest vigour’. Neither a ‘divine gift’ nor a ‘mechanical trade’, painting was a skill, demanding training, knowledge and practice, and novelty counted for less than the ‘ne'er so well expressed’.15 Imagination was, of course, prized – Addison celebrated the ‘pleasures of the imagination’, a phrase incorporated into Mark Akenside's 1744 poem of that title. But it had to be tempered with learning, wit and judgement, so as to nip in the bud that ‘dangerous prevalence of imagination’ which could lead to madness.16
All this was challenged by new thinking emerging around the middle of the century, which refigured genius into a celebration of uniqueness. Mechanistic models of mental operations, notably the association of ideas, became supplanted by organic images of creative processes modelled on vegetative growth.17 In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), the Anglican clergyman-poet Edward Young paid tribute to originality and creativity – Nature ‘brings us into the world all originals. No two faces, no two minds, are just alike.’18 ‘The common judgment of humanity’ and all the other critical nostrums vaunted by the Addisonians were now denounced as insipidly jejune: individuality must be given its head. Deriding slavish imitation, Young sent poets back for inspiration to Nature, where ‘genius may wander wild’. Instead of the consensus the Augustans courted, singularity was to be valued: ‘Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?’ bemoaned Young: ‘That meddling Ape Imitation, as soon as we come to years of Indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the Pen, and blots out nature's mark of Separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental Individuality.’19 Shakespeare was fortunate to have read in two books only, the book of Nature and the book of man; and ‘if Milton had spared some of his learning, his muse would have gained more glory’. The greatest geniuses were those who went to Nature's school, and knew no other teacher, and the artist's first rule must be to have none: ‘Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad.’20
Taking a similar tack, William Sharpe's A Dissertation upon Genius (1755) and Alexander Gerard's An Essay upon Genius (1774) 21 put originality first, seeing literary creation, by analogy with natural growth, as the outpouring of the original healthy psyche. The ‘vegetative’ genius capable of true ‘soul’ was defended from imputations of irrationality: ‘A perfect judgement is seldom bestowed by Nature,’ held Gerard, ‘even on her most favoured sons; but a very considerable degree of it always belongs to real genius.’22
The rethinking of genius brought the rehabilitation of enthusiasm. Mercilessly reviled by early Enlightenment religious critics, enthusiasm was reinvented as the fervent sensibility – one which, for that reason, thankfully lacked any public threat. Thus sanitized and privatized, it made its comeback first of all in the aesthetic sphere, with Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast: or Lover of Nature (1744) extolling gothic wildness and prizing Nature over art.23 Divested of its former apocalyptic garb, enthusiasm blossomed into a florid aesthetics, as private reading kindled the imagination and provided food for feelings.24 Denying Reynolds's neo-classical dictum that ‘enthusiastick admiration seldom promotes knowledge’, William Blake replied that it was ‘the first Principle of Knowledge & its Last’. ‘Mere enthusiasm,’ conceded Reynolds, ‘will carry you a little way’ – ‘Meer Enthusiasm,’ retorted Blake, ‘is the All in All!’25
The key late Enlightenment concept which validated the inner self was sensibility.26 It drew, of course, upon earlier sources. The Spectator had appealed to superior males to repudiate traditional machismo: draw-can-sir rakes and Sir Tunbelly Clumseys alike were absurd and inadmissible relics of a barbaric past; while ladies, for their part, were taught no longer to sit in silent submission but to feel. And in the fashioning of the sensitive soul, other vital ingredients were to hand. Material culture, print media and prosperity gave a growing slice of society opportunities for self-cultivation, as ‘longing as a permanent mode’ became the ‘key to the understanding of modern consumerism’.27 Mediated through mirrors and magazines,28 a heightened emotional investment was made in hearth, home and private affection. If, in twentieth-century narratives, notably the psychoanalytic, the family has routinely been depicted as thwarting self-realization,29 the new Enlightenment domesticity liberated individuality.
In examining and intensifying the sense of self, enlightened thinkers drew on new psycho-physiological models. Challenging the divinely delivered Christian soul or Cartesian cogito, post-Lockean thinking presented consciousness as infinite potentiality, a sum of shifting sensations, reliant on an indeterminate and trembling network of nerves and fibres discharging signals between the outside world and the inner je ne sais quoi.30 Neurology had just acquired its name, and popular doctrines of the nerves presented the human animal as neither a Platonic homo rationalis nor a Christian original sinner, but as an embodied self, wafted by the breezes of experience, vibrating with impressions, emotions and sympathy conducted via the nervous system. Symptomatic here is the coining by the Newtonian physician George Cheyne of the label ‘the English malady’.31 A malaise of introspection and depression, this new bittersweet complaint bore a formal resemblance to traditional Burtonian melancholia, but with subtle and significant differences. The melancholic had been a solitary or outsider, like Jacques in As You Like It. The sufferer from the English malady, by contrast, was, according to Cheyne, a creature of politeness: it was the pressures and pleasures of a mobile, open, affluent society which precipitated this quintessential Enlightenment disorder, which arose, he insisted, from the assaults on the nervous system produced by modern lifestyles, with their social emulation, copious eating and drinking, lounging, tight lacing, late hours and heady, competitive talk. Cheyne emphasized its rank-specific aetiology: the malady was unknown in simpler, primitive societies or among rustics, all of whom were too neurologically impoverished to be capable of falling victim. The Enlightenment thus formulated not just progress but its verso: the idea of diseases of civilization, afflicting meritocrats of feeling.32
It is also telling that, two generations later, in his A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), Thomas Trotter argued that the nervous crises identified by his predecessor had not merely proliferated but, like enlightenment in general, were percolating down the social scale, to afflict the middle classes – and women too.33 A mobile, pressure-cooker society, Trotter argued, made its citizens live on their nerves. They took to stimulants – the banes of tea and tobacco, alcohol and narcotics. Powerful habit-forming stimulants were increasingly consumed, but the law of diminishing returns applied. The result? Pain, insomnia, hypochondria and other injurious consequences, which in turn demanded medicaments, some of which – opium above all – produced devastating side effects, and were themselves habit-forming. Driven by morbid cravings for stimulants, modern society, with its ‘fast lane’ living, was becoming, Trotter argued, an addicted society.34 Nervousness bred narcissism, which itself triggered hypochondria and hysteria. Diseases of civilization and of the imagination came to afflict the self-conscious in a dramatic medicalization of the promise and pitfalls of modernity.35
The man and woman of feeling, too good for a bad world, thus became á la mode,36 and fascination grew with those ‘fine folks’ blessed, or cursed, with superfine feelings, electrically exquisite, elegantly refined. Among the smart set, and in the belles lettres whi
ch refracted and ratified modish opinion and images, morality itself might, following Shaftesbury, take on an aesthetic, subjective air, embracing personal leanings and longings (see chapter 7). No longer was duty graven on Mosaic tablets, deduced from Euclidian cosmic fitnesses or dictated by social convention; rather, for the man or woman of sensibility the good was what felt right, the impulsive outpourings of the honest and virtuous heart touched by desire or distress. Truth was internalized and privatized, as Descartes' clean-cut cogito dissolved into Hume's bundles of impressions, wishes and desires.37
With relationships between personalities and print becoming an ever more intense force field, fiction emerged as the choice medium for ‘rethinking the self’. Novels were precisely that: novel – constituting one of the literary genres born since the invention of printing.38 In the forging of fiction's imaginative empire, especially after 1750, it was the novel which took pride of place, associated from its inception with individualism and a certain political liberalism. Defoe's influential narratives invited identification with the protagonist as outsider or loner – Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders39 – and these were followed by novels of sensibility. Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1764), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1767), and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) were just the most pioneering or popular of scores of tear-jerkers which grabbed readers' sympathies and fed vicarious emotional identification. Mackenzie has his hero, the orphan Harley, go to London, where he is taken in by sharks and swindlers, but also meets virtue in the guise of a penitent prostitute, Miss Atkins, whom he befriends. Returning home, he encounters a broken-down soldier who turns out to be his childhood mentor, Edwards, whose doleful tale of misfortune and sacrifice wrings yet more tears from Harley. Arriving home, they find that Edwards's son is dead, leaving two orphan children. Harley catches a fever while nursing his old tutor; this, together with unrequited love, brings about first sickness and then a welcome death. The formula ran and ran.40
‘My dear girl, take the pen,’ exclaims the hero of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), ‘I am too sentimental.’ Popularized by Sterne, that very term sentimental – roughly, ‘emotion-full’ – was dismissed by John Wesley as absurd. ‘I casually took a volume of what is called A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Sentimental!’ he exploded: ‘What is that? It is not English; he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea.’41 Sentimentality was further popularized in periodicals like the Lady's Magazine (1770–1832). That successful monthly's diet of fiction specialized in cliché-packed tales: first love, then parental objection or some other hitch to courtship; next, some twist of plot, and finally a resolution thanks to the authorial invisible hand. Such a formula proved the magazine's fictional mainstay for half a century.42
Sentimental novelists often, however, drew on personal experience. Left by her husband with a gaggle of young children, Charlotte Smith projected herself as a shabby-genteel heroine in a hateful world. In novel after novel – Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), The Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), and The Young Philosopher (1798) – her heroines suffered at the hands of legal chicanery and male power, be it that of despotic fathers, ghastly husbands, duplicitous lawyers, conniving parsons and all manner of other blackguards and bullies. She kept herself afloat – financially and emotionally – by churning out one or two such formulaic novels a year.43
While ringing the changes in their melodramatizations of sensibility and suffering, the moral centre of gravity in sentimental novels always lay in the man or woman of feeling hurt by a heartless world.44 They dramatized virtue in distress in a more intimate and private register than the etiquette manual or sermon. Moral struggle might well be painted in black and white – integrity pitted against infamy, loyalty against lucre – but in the novel such quandaries were portrayed not as the cosmic allegory of a pilgrim's progress or the stoic grandeur of a Brutus, Cato or Lucretia, but individuated within common-or-garden bourgeois settings. Modern dilemmas were questions of divided loyalties to mercenary parents, or heart against head, in plots which dealt not with Miltonic sin and salvation but the troubled heart and the panting breast. In sentimental narratives the generous man or woman of sensibility would confront the crimes and cruelties of the world – would, above all, feel such evils – and respond with oceans of tears. Treading a via dolorosa and armed only with humanity, the hero or heroine would find malice or misfortune lurking everywhere, which thus accentuated a new predicament: what if, as now suggested, reason and beneficence would not, after all, triumph in a wicked world?
The sensibility, or sentimentality, cult thus painted a more sombre scene than that recently envisaged by the sanguine Spectator: the embattled individual could not count on a happy ending. Yet such trials had their compensations: distress, disappointment and defeat confirmed moral superiority and heightened the piquancy of personal integrity. And in any case, as leery critics always insinuated, through the frisson of such fictions, did not such a cult provide an open invitation to vicarious thrills and illicit passions, the pleasures of imagined Oedipal rebellion or virtual adultery between the sheets?
The novelty of the novel should not, however, be scanted. It was via such fictions and their spin-offs, like digests and magazine short stories taking over from the Bible as the age's master narratives – with Pamela supposedly being read out by clergymen from the pulpit that the enlightened voyage into the self, its yearnings and ambiguities, was pursued and popularized. The novel, to adapt Bolingbroke, was new philosophy teaching by examples, and dubious ones at that. The upstart genre also marks a decisive embourgeoisement and feminization of culture. With the likes of Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie and Mary Brunton proving the bestsellers around 1800, this was the first time ever that women had made a prime contribution, via the printed word, to the shaping of public manners and morals.45
Popular bewilderment and reactionary venom were levelled at the novel, saturated as it was with ‘modern’ values – which compares with some reactions to pop culture today:
‘Tis NOVEL most beguils the female heart.
Miss reads – she melts – she sighs –
Love steals upon her –
And then – Alas, poor girl! – good night, poor Honour!46
Countless warnings like that of dramatist George Colman, above, exposed the imputed giddy fantasy life of culture consumers, high on solitary reading. It was widely alleged that their readership comprised ‘raw prentices, and green girls’, or, in Johnson's phrase, ‘the young, the ignorant, and the idle’, sucked into the maelstrom of print.47 The giddy psychological confusion fed by novels supposedly led to such physical consequences as autoerotic cravings which might, in turn, precipitate nervous maladies or even wasting diseases. ‘She ran over those most delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation, novels,’ reflected Mary Wollstonecraft on her heroine's meretricious mother in Mary (1788) – ironically one of her own fictions.48 The morbid fantasy life novels incited, the novelist was sure, would lead readers astray: ‘it frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day’.49 Novels corrupted virtue, charged the critic Richard Berenger, ‘cheating’ women of marriage. Ladies who would otherwise have made ‘good wives and good mothers’ were turned from the proper ‘affections of social life’ by the inflated expectations of ‘romantic love’ there peddled. He served up a cautionary tale: the only child of a wealthy merchant, ‘Clarinda’ had abandoned herself to the ‘ensnaring practice of reading novels’, rejecting a husband because he was no ‘imaginary’ hero.50 The educator Vicesimu
s Knox agreed: novels ‘pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet… and teach all the malignity of vice in solitude’.51
The public disrepute of novels shows in the edginess of their champions. ‘Our family,’ Jane Austen joshed, ‘are great novel readers, and not ashamed of being so’52 – a defiant remark glossed in Northanger Abbey (1818):
there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. ‘I am no novel reader – I seldom look into novels – Do not imagine that I often read novels – It is really very well for a novel’. – Such is the common cant.53
But elsewhere the conservative Austen laid bare the novel's dangerous tendency to glamorize private passion over public duty, exposing such follies through Marianne in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and the younger Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice (1813). Above all, the project of modelling one's life on fictional characters was inane and pernicious – witness the caricature comic villain Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon (written in 1817), who
had read more sentimental Novels than agreed with him. His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned, & most exceptionable parts of Richardson; & such Authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson's steps, so far as Man's determined pursuit of Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling & convenience is concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, & formed his Character.54