The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

values and morals. But poets and critics in
England never accepted the total primacy
of reason, and they were very willing to
take over a moral and aesthetic doctrine
which was in reaction against a too great
demand on reason. Such a doctrine
existed: the elaboration of a notion of a
personal, inner faculty, an emotional
consciousness which came to be called
sensibility. The doctrine assumed great
importance in English thought in the
eighteenth century, so much so that after
mid-century, the Age of Sensibility would
be a better label for the critical context
of English literature. The book that
crystallized this idea was the Earl of
Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (1708–11).
Shaftesbury develops a not very clear
neo-Platonic argument and an ethic,
based on this inner aesthetic sense, ‘to
learn what is just in Society and beautiful
in Nature, and the Order of the World’.
The natural moral sense is also the
individual taste, though Shaftesbury did
not abandon all traditional restrictions on
its free workings.
It is too neat to see the development
of the powerful idea of sensibility only as
a reaction to prevalent philosophical
doctrine, or as a component in the history
of Western empiricism. Northrop Frye, in
a valuable article ‘Towards defining an
age of feeling’ (reprinted in J. L. Clifford
(ed.), Eighteenth-Century English
Literature, 1959) suggests that there are
two polar views of literature. One is an
aesthetic, Aristotelian view that considers
works of literature as ‘products’, that
seeks to distance the audience. The other
view is psychological, seeing the creation
of literature as a ‘process’, and seeking to
involve the audience in this. Longinus’s
treatise On the Sublime is the classical
Greek statement of the latter, and
Longinus is an important source for
Sensibility 215
eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.
Sensibility is the important constituent in
the eighteenth-century form of the second
view. There had been a shift in critical
interest from the late seventeenth century
onwards, away from categorizing works
of literature to investigating the psychological
processes involved in creating and
responding to art. ‘Genius’ is the fascinating
concept in discussions of the artist,
‘sensibility’ both in discussing the artist
and analysing the audience’s response.
Since ‘process’ is also to be seen in
history and in nature, sensibility involves
a sense of the past and is frequently
the informing principle of reflective
‘nature’ poems like Thomson’s Seasons
(1726–30). Shaftesbury held that ‘the
Beautiful, the Fair, the Comely were
never in the Matter, but in the Art and
Design: never in Body it-self, but in the
Form and forming Power’.
Wordsworth and Coleridge developed
this idea of the ‘aesthetic imagination’,
which leads to the Coleridgean ‘primary
imagination’ where sensibility, human
perception, is ‘a repetition in the finite
mind of the eternal act of creation in the
infinite I AM’. Shaftesbury’s ‘sensibility’
was a little more modest than that, but it
had an all-important moral side. This was
later developed by Adam Smith in his
Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), which
had great influence on critics in later
discussions of sensibility. Smith added a
related doctrine: the power of sympathy.
Sympathy powered the benevolence that
Shaftesbury advocated, and Shakespeare,
it was agreed, had it to a sublime degree.
A poet to be truly great also needed a concomitant
of sensibility, the ‘enthusiastic
delight’ of imagination. Sensibility was
the particular faculty that responded
to the greatest imaginative power, the
sublime, another important part of
the later eighteenth-century critical