THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

digressions as ‘incontestably ... the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading’. He goes on, typically, to shift his
image from the natural to the mechanical, comparing his narrative to a
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complex working machine: ‘I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections,
and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the
whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going.’ Everything - digressions, hiatuses, absences, lacunae, dashes,
asterisks, and the famous black, blank, and marbled pages - is co-productive of the novel’s peculiar energy and
essential to its questioning of meaning. The title-pages of the first two volumes published in 1760 bore the epigraph
derived from the Greek philosopher Epictetus: ‘Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.’ Tristram Shandy
suggests that all information is contingent, all interpretation relative. The very act of reading draws the reader into a
participation in the creative process. If Smollett’s novels have had a peculiarly fruitful influence on the development
of the nineteenth-century novel, the impact of Sterne’s liberation of narrative has been most fully appreciated in the
twentieth century.
Sensibility, Sentimentality, Tears, and Graveyards
In 1749 Samuel Richardson’s by now regular correspondent, Lady Bradshaugh, wrote to him asking: ‘What, in your
opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite ... every thing clever and
agreeable is comprehended in that word ... I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we
were a sentimental party. I have been taking a sentimental walk.’ We do not have Richardson’s reply to her question
but he must surely have guessed that she already knew the answer. A year earlier Lady Bradshaugh had initiated the
correspondence by writing pseudonymously to the novelist with the request that he save the ‘divine Clarissa’ from the
threat of impending death and grant her a happy end with the penitent Lovelace. Despite being past what she termed
her ‘romantic time of life’ Lady Bradshaugh blushingly admitted ‘that if I was to die for it, I cannot help being fond
of Lovelace’. Her tears over Clarissa and blushes over Lovelace are evidence of the emotional effect produced on early
readers of Richardson’s fiction; her wonder at the fashionable use of the word ‘sentimental’ equally testifies that such
emotions were shared by others. The novelist himself had proclaimed that he had aimed to ‘soften and mend the
Heart’ and he had stressed in Grandison that ‘a feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without’.
A literature that moved pity in its readers was viewed as morally instructive. A powerful evocation of feeling, or a
shared compassion, it was held, made ultimately for a more humane society. Where Shaftesbury had proposed that
benevolence be viewed as an expression of natural virtue, the fiction of Richardson and his sentimental successors
could be seen as ducts for the emotional sympathy which bound a community together.
Dr Johnson’s definition of ‘sensibility’ in his Dictionary as ‘quickness of sensation’, ‘quickness of perception’,
and ‘delicacy’ indicates something of the
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new prominence of a balance of ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ in the mid-eighteenth-century understanding of the processes of
perception. Whereas Johnson defined ‘emotion’ as, on the one hand, a ‘disturbance of the mind’, he also offered the
alternative idea of it as a ‘vehemence of passion’ which could be either pleasing or painful. Provided excess was
avoided, emotion and spontaneity were seen as necessary complements to reason and deliberation not as oppositions
to them. Two singularly lacrimose descendants of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple - Henry Brooke’s The Fool of
Quality (1764-70) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) - stress the importance of male emotion, as
opposed to male rationality, in an often unfeeling world and a calculating society. Brooke (1703-83) presented his
‘fool’, Harry Clinton, as a product of a benign philosophical scheme of education, one which already shows the
influence of Rousseau’s Émile (1762); this education, which preserves rather than conditions his natural innocence, is
both a buffer against the multiple misfortunes that befall him and a means of reconciling his awareness of human
misery with his euphoric conviction of divine providence. Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling had an even greater
currency. Its hero, Harley, is, like Clinton, a sentimental innocent who weeps uncontrolledly over the succession of
unfortunates he encounters. Mackenzie (1745-1831), who was much given to asterisks as a means of expressing
inexpressible emotion, exposes the unworldly Harley to those who are victims of the world’s callousness in order to
test the flow of his gushing fount of human sympathy. Mackenzie’s later story Julia de Roubigné (1777) deals with a
yet more tragic vehemence of passion, an account of a fraught marital crisis crowned by the murder of a supposedly
adulterous young wife by her despairing, but otherwise virtuous, husband. When Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen