The Moral Sentiments
All human nature is mixed, Henry Fielding wrote in Tom Jones (1749), a favorite novel of both Dickens and Thackeray. “Life most exactly resembles the stage, since it is often the same person who represents the villain and the hero; and he who engages your admiration today will probably attract your contempt tomorrow.… A single bad act no more constitutes a villain in life than a single bad part on the stage.”1 Apparently Fielding believed that “human nature” is an entity that, in the tradition of faculty psychology, can be reified from observable qualities and actions. Modern readers are not likely to be as certain as Fielding about what this “human nature” is or even if it is. Even the esteemed Encyclopedia of Philosophy has not attempted to define the protean phrase, while the Oxford English Dictionary is remarkably weak in its historical presentation of the multitudinous uses of the phrase. That all human beings, with the rarest of exceptions, contain both attractive and unattractive, constructive and destructive elements has become a truism of modern culture, whose tolerance for idealizations and personifications in life and in art has been declining noticeably since the eighteenth century. When dealing with “human nature” as a phenomenon and as an explanation of behavior, modern democratic society as a whole desires to be as inclusive as possible while at the same time protecting itself from both criminals and saints.
Fielding himself raised the standard of normative probability in regard to everything, and especially in regard to “human nature.” Even his idealized characters, like Sophia Western and Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones, are partly shaped under the pressure of literary realism. The increasingly strong tradition of literary and philosophical realism from the eighteenth century on raised questions of human definition that came to be widely addressed; philosophy, through much of the eighteenth and a good part of the nineteenth century, was moral philosophy and psychology. By the late nineteenth century, though, even those most idealistic about human nature and least satisfied with behavioral definitions were likely to agree with Fielding’s inference that you cannot build castles in the mud without getting your hands dirty. Robert Browning dramatically condemns his “Pictor Ignotus” (Unknown Painter) of 1845 who has declined to use his immense artistic talents because he fears and condemns the mixed nature of human beings.
Blown harshly, keeps the trump its golden cry?
Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?
(11. 71–72)
Most of the writers and philosophers of what is sometimes prejudicially called the Enlightenment took a positive, rather optimistic view of “human nature.” They had no doubt that such an entity existed, and that it could be described in normative terms that applied to the generality of mankind, as the innate disposition or character of individuals and of humankind as a whole. Tradition and the force of belief compelled them to assume that mankind had a maker, though considerable difference of opinion existed about the form and the qualities of the maker, and about the relationship between the maker and the made. But it was widely believed that the maker’s greatest creation, humankind, a subdivision of Nature or the total creation, had been endowed with certain inalienable qualities shared by the entire species which could, sensibly and logically, be called “human nature,” to differentiate it, for example, from animal nature. At this high level of discussion, then, one could talk about human nature without referring to particular examples, which might or might not prove the rule. For the rule, whose broad features controlled all discussions and depictions of human beings, existed prior to examples, all of which stretched back in a long line to Adam and Eve, to Biblical character typology. The popular imagination then, as now, had no doubt that human character was stable, archetypal, and universal. In the Enlightenment, the educated elite, despite considerable variety of opinion in many areas, generally accepted that “human nature” was an identifiable entity, a real thing, and that it could be defined in universally applicable abstract terms.
Eighteenth-century moral optimism created an exaggerated sunshine in which human nature glowed, and whose brightness much of modern culture has found unacceptably monochromatic. Some of that sunshine glowed from the emerging secular idealism and gradual tilt through the age of revolution toward democracy and a redefinition of human nature that for the first time included human rights. Of course, eighteenth-century British culture had its somber, even dark, views and visions as well. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift makes dramatically persuasive the king of Brobdingnagia’s condemnatory definition of humankind as “the most pernicious race of odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl on the face of the earth.” Samuel Johnson viewed human nature as innately flawed—even sanity itself was constantly threatened by a natural predisposition to excess and madness—and to speak only of eighteenth-century optimistic views of human nature would be to distort the complex reality by stressing only the dominant tendency.
Strong forces in the Enlightenment—of religion, of philosophy, even of popular culture—resisted moral idealism. The arguments of the most influential moral philosophers, such as Lord Shaftesbury, Henry St. John, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, are informed and invigorated by their awareness of the somber opposition, Calvinistic, theocratic, aristocratic, evangelical, mathematical, and even economic. Whether directly acknowledged or not, the influential phrases of Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) cast a formidable shadow over the next two centuries.
For the laws of nature—as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to—of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.2
Hobbes’s overpowering darkness could be lightened only by an exaggerated brightness, a spotlight so bright that it could illumine his darkness. Eighteenth-century optimism is to a considerable extent a reaction against the Hobbesian view of a viciously flawed human nature, which only a repressive state can control and only a god of grace can redeem. Such a dim view of human nature represents the secularization of the Puritan vision, which was based, after all, on daily experience as well as on universal rules about fallen human nature in a fallen world. The Puritan view seemed at times an effective, experiential definition of human nature based on observation of the “pernicious race.”
It is precisely this view that the Enlightenment as a cultural movement attempted to reject. Of course, both Puritan and Enlightenment culture tended to evaluate human action in moral terms. Fielding and his latitudinarian contemporaries were as compulsive on such matters as the Puritans, though the tone is noticeably different. Fielding and his contemporaries expressed a very unpuritanical genial tolerance for “natural Imperfections,” mainly because they believed in a cosmic framework that absorbed moral flaws into a benign social structure.3 Nevertheless, on the middle ground of moral performance, the Puritan and Enlightenment cultures were in fundamental agreement on the necessity for a personal and communal code of behavior whose ultimate authentication is the Judaeo-Christian prescription of love, justice, and harmony.
The pervasive challenge for Enlightenment as well as Puritan culture was to interpret and explain immoral rather than moral performance, partly because of its prevalence, partly because it fascinates in a way that moral performance does not. The construct “human nature” needed to be further explored, its mysteries made clear, its basic elements revealed. On the success of this venture depended the earthly paradise or the heavenly city or both, if one’s philosophy could contain both. Fielding attempted to explain corrupt actions as consistent with the “natural Imperfections” of human nature, part of his socially oriented theological view of the cosmos in which the emphasis is on the Enlightenment’s earthly paradise. His Puritan predecessors and contemporaries, with an emphasis on the heavenly city, explained the same acts as the result of the fallen condition of human nature. Whatever the definition and explanation of human nature, the need to explain and the hope that a satisfactory explanation could be constructed dominated much that was thought and written in British culture at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. The declining interest in modern culture, outside of religious communities, in explaining either moral or immoral performance probably results from the loss of any credible standard against which to evaluate it, and from a reversion to the folk wisdom that holds that such evaluations tend to be reductive. In general, the modern response to nastiness is either active opposition or a stoical reference to “human nature.”
Sentimentality in the Western tradition takes its force from a keen awareness of the mixed nature of human nature. It is an attempt, among other things, to generate or at least to strengthen the possibility of the triumph of the feelings and the heart over self-serving calculation. As an offspring of Enlightenment optimism, sentimentality assumes the existence of innate “moral sentiments.” Historically, sentimentality found its propitious moment when both the latitudinarian and Puritan explanations of human nature were losing their effectiveness and the possibility of comprehensive alternative explanations, particularly of good and evil, seemed dim. Sentimentality promised to locate the grounds of moral performance in feelings, innate moral feelings, without demanding that these moral feelings produce moral actions (though the desirability of such a result was central to the Victorian consciousness), and without demanding that a belief in the centrality of moral feeling necessitated a comprehensive theory of human nature or of the cosmos that explained all mysteries and resolved all inconsistencies.
Many people, some of them rather admirable, both in the past and in the present have used the word as if being sentimental were a virtue, though often with no sense of an obligation to define its meaning or explain the significance of the concept. The Oxford English Dictionary presents a reasonably clear history of the term. The word sentiment came into English as early as the fourteenth century and meant (in chronological sequence) “one’s own feelings,” “physical feeling,” “mental attitude (of approval or disapproval),” “an emotion,” “a thought or reflection coloured by or proceeding from emotion,” “an emotional thought expressed in literature or art,” and “a striking or agreeable thought or wish.” The words sentimental and sentimentality were coined in the middle to late eighteenth century to indicate something “characterized by sentiment” and “the quality of being sentimental,” respectively. Throughout the eighteenth century and through much of the nineteenth, neither word had pejorative implications, except in special cases. With slowly gathering force, sentimentalism came to denote late in the nineteenth century the misuse of sentiment, “the disposition to attribute undue importance to sentimental considerations, to be governed by sentiment in opposition to reason; the tendency to excessive indulgence in or insincere display of sentiment.” The word sentiment and its various forms could still be used non-pejoratively, as in James Anthony Froude’s remark that “a nation with whom sentiment is nothing is on its way to cease to be a nation at all.” But the notion of sentimentality as insincerity, as false feeling, even as hypocrisy, became increasingly strong. Though popular culture—and social and political life in general—kept its heart beating with the blood of sentimentality, intellectual modernism and modern high art stigmatized sentimentality as the refuge of philistinism and small minds. Sentimentality was not moral because it was not an expression of true feeling, of natural feeling, and the feelings themselves were not a reliable guide to moral action. The notion of unearned and undisciplined feeling, and the fear of a dangerous misperception of the role of feeling in life in general, reached back to infect with distasteful overtones and to distort ahistorically the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century definitions of sentiment and sentimentality.4
The eighteenth-century writers most responsible for imposing moral value on “sentiment” were David Hume and Adam Smith. In his Essays and Treatises (1758) and especially in his discussion of the passions in Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), Hume argued that “the ultimate ends of human actions can never … be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependence on the intellectual faculties,” and that inherent within all human beings is “some internal taste or feeling … which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other.”5 Hume stressed that we act not on the basis of thought but of feeling, and that we all possess a moral “sentiment” that we get pleasure from responding to. Hume’s optimistic definition of human nature has its complement in Adam Smith’s. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith created the genial metaphor of the “internal … impartial spectator,” the “man within the breast,” a second self that we all possess, against whose altruistic and benevolent standards we judge our thoughts and actions. This better self serves as an internalized guide and self-corrector, a projection of our innate moral sentiments.6
The value of sentiment and its positive connotation in eighteenth-century definitions of human nature, such as Hume’s and Smith’s, have been obscured to many modern readers in a way that they were not to the Victorians. Part of the confusion results from confounding sentiment with sensibility, the latter connected with the eighteenth-century emphasis on “the man of feeling.” The “man of feeling” developed into the Romantic hero of sensibility. The “man of sentiment” developed into the Victorian hero of the good and the moral heart. Some of the classic texts of eighteenth-century literature have contributed to modern obfuscation about the meaning of sentiment and sentimentality to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1759) tempts readers to assume that the feelings are discontinuous, disjointed, even anarchic, and that sexual passion is an expression of sensibility that need not recognize moral and social restraints. Henry Mackenzie’s depiction in The Man of Feeling (1771) of a sensibility too refined for active engagement with a coarse society may be taken as a claim that sentiment is asocial or antisocial. And even Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1776), an influential favorite of the Victorians and widely acknowledged to be a powerful teacher of virtue, may contribute to the modern confusion about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century definitions of sentiment since, in that novel, moral sentiment frequently seems to be misapplied to unworthy recipients or, even worse, to be the grounds for self-punishment.
Both Hume and Smith believed that an access of feeling cannot be an excess of feeling. Feeling cannot be self-destructive or socially harmful unless it is divorced from the other attributes of Human nature inherent in all human beings. In that context, there can be no excess, or even misapplication, of feeling, for the basic nature of human nature is moral. The moral sentiments are a constituent, a given part of us, whether we will or no. The more responsive we are to our moral feelings, the better, the more moral, our individual and social conduct will be. The question of sensibility in the Romantic sense and of sentimentality in the modern sense of falsification of feeling has no meaning in this context. On the contrary, it is the absence of the expression of moral feeling and the restriction and denial of the value of sentimentality that are unnatural, that are falsifications of reality.
Some of the major Victorian writers read Hume and Smith, and some occasionally read Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. But whatever the philosophical and literary resources available to them—from the book-laden shelves of Thomas Arnold’s library at Rugby to the few portable items in the suitcases of the Dickens family—the Victorian poets and novelists were shaped more by the popular literature they read and by the temper of the times than by any formal attempt to master the “thought” of the previous century. Thackeray vigorously attests to the pervasive influence of Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith, though he rather regrets that Hogarthian earthiness had been excised from the legacy. Dickens, like Thackeray, acknowledges how important his reading of eighteenth-century fiction was to the formation of his values and his definition of human nature. Carlyle, in response to his extensive reading of eighteenth-century literature, including Hume and the other moral philosophers, rebels against the values and the rhetoric of sentimentality in ways that reveal how inescapable its influence was. His reading in his formative years of eighteenth-century fiction, with its advocacy of the moral sentiments, probably contributed to his hostility to Victorian fiction which seemed to him to advocate no philosophy at all.
Carlyle’s predilection for moral idealizations prompted him to contrast favorably the seriousness of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister with Victorian fictional entertainments. Art was the business of philosophers, of serious minds. Victorian fiction neglected the crucial issues of nature, human nature, and the moral foundation of the human situation. It lacked moral earnestness and intellectual seriousness. Its sentimentality expressed its moral and intellectual superficiality. That he himself also had absorbed into his basic values and his literary-philosophical ideas some of the assumptions and structures of moral philosophy and the moral sentiments did not prevent him from denouncing and dismissing the sentimentality of his contemporaries. And, like the great propagandists of literature, he exaggerated for pedagogic purposes, intent on playing the gadfly to secular humanism and liberal Protestantism. Dickens recognized and valued Carlyle’s penchant for calculated distortion about genre and principles. As with his jeremiads against authority, democracy, and social disorder, such distortions were dangerous only if not properly discounted and irrelevant only if taken literally. Carlyle himself, like Dickens and Thackeray, had found his earliest instruction among the delights of Defoe, Smollett, and Fielding. And the “cloud-capped towers” of Shakespeare’s art always remained for him more engaging than expository philosophy.
Eighteenth-century moral philosophy primarily made its way into the Victorian consciousness through the works of the great writers of eighteenth-century fiction, particularly Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Goldsmith. One poet, however, made a substantial contribution. Alexander Pope was the Victorian’s “Philosopher, Guide, and Friend,” the vade mecum of available insight, expressed in the pithy wisdom of closed couplets, on matters of human nature and the human situation. Dickens and many of his contemporaries were certain that it was not true in regard to social conditions that “Whatever is, is RIGHT.” But they did aspire to share, without always being successful, Pope’s conviction that some “Eternal Art” is “educing good from ill.” Dickens found Pope’s combination of social satire and universal optimism an attractive model. So too did Tennyson, who transformed universal optimism into visionary transcendence, screened by a degree of social indifference that Dickens never felt and could never afford. Pope’s confidence that God has a firm grip on his universe seemed dubious to Carlyle, whose definition of life as conflict and history as revelation could never admit of certainty about local providence. But even Thackeray’s low opinion of “Vanity Fair,” where there are no heroes, did not prevent his extolling Pope’s Dunciad, in which “heroic courage” speaks and “truth, the champion, shining and intrepid,” fights “a wonderful and victorious single combat in that great battle which has always been waging since society began.”7 Dickens and Thackeray embraced Pope’s claim that, despite man’s mixed nature and state,
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen.8
In the area of human definition, Pope’s phrase from the Essay on Man, “the surest virtues thus from passions shoot,” provided the Victorian focus, as it provided the focus for Fielding’s Tom Jones and Richardson’s Clarissa.9
Of the eighteenth-century novelists widely read by the Victorians, only Defoe depicted the Hobbesian world of suspicion about human nature and dramatized its faulty moral potential. It was not a view that eighteenth-century moral philosophy and the schools of sentimentality which developed from it found attractive. Despite the widespread recognition among the Victorians of Defoe’s merits as a craftsman and the power of his depiction of a world fallen from grace, his appeal was mainly to the nonconformist world, effectively displaced from the center of the stage of English letters by the dominance of Anglican mainstream culture. Radical Protestantism is more often than not the object of satire in Victorian literature, in Emily Brontä, Browning, Dickens, Eliot, Arnold, and Trollope, or disregarded, as if outside the pale of civilized consciousness, in Thackeray and Tennyson.
As has often been noted, Defoe’s works give fictional embodiment to the Puritan ethos. Every thing that happens to his characters is the “merciful Disposition of Providence,” which determines and controls individual and social life in its minutest particulars.10 Human nature, an actor in a universal drama, is sinful because the terms of the drama, the words of the given script, demand that it be so. The feelings of the actors in the drama are part of their fallen nature, their worst part, not their best. For Defoe, feeling and passion are indistinguishable, and it is the failure of right reason or sound judgment in the face of the strength of the passions that is the sign of the devil within us. In the world of Moll Flanders, our “Natures” are “capable of so much Degeneracy.” Passion constantly overwhelms reason, for all human passions come from “the Devil in the inside of man.”11 In Defoe’s depiction of “human nature,” his characters can take neither blame nor credit for the ethical content of their thoughts and deeds. Moll’s consciousness has been made a battleground in a conflict in which she is an involuntary participant. External factors determine the result. But, since human consciousness is the battleground in this internalized conflict, Defoe’s people find it difficult if not impossible to take a neutral attitude toward the participants. They must sign on with either Satan or God. The stakes, then, become as high for the battleground, for human beings, as for the prime antagonists, though Defoe’s people are not themselves responsible for the existence of the conflict and the conditions under which it is fought. And, of course, they bear no responsibility for the final outcome, which has already been determined by supernatural powers.
Defoe, then, has little interest in “Human Nature” but a great deal of interest in human consciousness. Defoe’s people do not have innate moral sentiments; all human feeling is contaminated by passion. Moll’s feelings play no role in determining her destiny, and whether she acts morally, defined in theological terms, depends on the outcome of the battle between God and the Devil rather than on the qualities of her human nature. All human emotions are witnesses, not sources. Even repentance, the gift of grace, is not the triumph of innate moral feeling. It is a step in an externally controlled process in which feeling plays the role of witness, not author. In that sense, Moll is a plastic creature. Her “nature” is distinct from her personality, the former a predetermined vehicle in a cosmic competition, the latter a triumph of Defoe’s artistry.
Whether moral feeling is a volitional element perplexed, sometimes even distressed, some Victorian writers who found themselves engaged in bitter conflict with the Puritan legacy represented by Defoe. The evangelical counterrevolution against latitudinarian views had great force in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of the major Victorian writers found evangelical doctrine and rhetoric frighteningly authoritarian, and, though evangelicalism and Romanticism sometimes seemed curiously similar, the role of the heart in evangelical conversion was more like Defoe’s witness to grace than like Romantic notions of the heart as the seat of moral feeling and the source of moral performance.
Despite Shaftesburyan optimism meeting keen resistance from social liberals on the one hand and evangelical revisionists on the other, even those Victorian writers who had reservations about the innate moral nature of human nature maintained the ideal as a model. Carlyle, for instance, the most Puritan of the important Victorian writers, whose authoritarian impulses made his liberal Protestant friends uneasy, believed that human feelings are the source of belief rather than that belief determines the value of human feelings. Though he responded to his Puritan heritage strongly enough to absorb some of its views and much of its tone, Carlyle nevertheless believed that some people at least do have innate moral sentiments. Certainly “heroes” do. And he did have a firm sense that there is an entity that can be called “human nature.” It works in mysterious ways, an essential element in the complicated miracle of creation, and human beings have a degree of control over and hence responsibility for its performance. The strength of Carlyle’s expressed detestation of eighteenth-century mechanism and secularism should not obscure the subtle ways in which Hume, Smith, and the moral philosophers in general qualify his Puritanism and influence his view of human nature.
Shaftesbury’s optimism resulted from his belief that human well-being and happiness are within our potential because human beings are endowed by a benevolent creator with innate good impulses, which align our personal well-being with the well-being of the community. All “our happiness depends on natural and good affection.” Still, the “affections,” which are the source of our morality, must be guided byjudgment to enable us to distinguish between the “self-passions,” which are unnatural in that they are not conducive to our well-being, and our moral feelings.12 In the view of the moral philosophers, human beings have been given an innate moral sense, which operates as feeling rather than as thought. “We conclude,” Hutcheson wrote, “that all Men have the same Affections and Senses.” The dangerous passions, which Hobbes fears, which Defoe believes are the expressions of the Devil, can readily be brought to heel by the natural affections acting in consonance with sound judgment.
How can any one look upon this World as under the direction of an evil Nature or even question a perfectly good PROVIDENCE? How clearly does the Order of our Nature point out to us our true Happiness and Perfection, and lead us to it as naturally as the several Powers of the Earth, the Sun, and Air, bring Plants to their Growth, and the Perfection of their kinds? … Is not … our Nature admonished, exhorted and commanded to cultivate universal Goodness and Love, by a Voice heard thro’ all the Earth, and Words sounding to the Ends of the World?13
Hume, who changed the word “affections” into “sentiment,” strengthened the claim made by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in the war against Hobbesian pessimism and Puritan determinism. What matters most is that human beings give their innate feelings the opportunity to determine their actions rather than permit actions to be determined by external forces, whether theological or secular. Like Shaftesbury, Hume desired to give perniciousness and the unruly passions sufficient recognition so that the doctrine of innate moral sentiments would not be undermined by the widespread sense gained from general experience that virtue does not have an easy time of it. But it is the innate “sentiments” that provide the decisive blow in the victory of goodness. Neither “reason” nor “utility” can provide it. For “in all moral decisions,” it is “sentiment” that gives “preference to the useful above the pernicious tendencies. This sentiment can be no other,” Hume claims, “than a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and a resentment of their misery, since these are the different ends which virtue and vice have a tendency to promote.”14
The “sentiment” that Hume believes promotes “the happiness of mankind” Fielding locates in and makes identical with the “good heart.” The “good heart” is not an organ but a given tendency to react with moral feeling. Neither education nor theology provides or accounts for it. All human beings have the potential for it, though its effective realization is sometimes balked by a pernicious environment or by other qualities. All human nature is mixed, Fielding exclaims, though he dramatizes, paradoxically, in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, a world in which some human natures are mixed and a few are absolutely good. Those that are mixed, driven by the half-yoke of realism, derive their unattractive characteristics from the misfortunes of their environment or the mysteries of genetic deprivation. But whatever has gone wrong proves an instructive complement to what has gone right: Black George is outbalanced by Partridge, Blifel by Tom. Ultimately, ill nature is in the service of good nature, and good nature, the visible representation of the moral sentiments, is an innate quality of “Mankind.” Fielding indeed assumes that he has “good-natur’d Reader[s]” who by nature will feel pleasure in virtue and hostility to vice.15
Claims of the ideal in a mixed world are, of course, difficult to maintain, and Fielding creates irony and comedy in dramatizing the ideal, aware of the satiric potential in the interaction between characters whose natures are absolutely good and those whose natures are sufficiently mixed so that they cannot be relied on to act well always. In Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams gracelessly assaults a resisting world with his innate goodness, and the idealized Adams and the unidealized mixed nature of humankind effectively neutralize one another. The conflict is benign, the result is comedy, and in the end a model of harmony—a reconciliation of the ideal with the real—emerges. And even Parson Adams’s goodness is a manifestation of sentiment, not philosophy, of innate feeling rather than doctrine. After preaching stoical resignation to Joseph, who believes that Fanny is being raped, Adams bursts into hysterical lamentation at the report, fortunately false, that his son has drowned.16 Fielding is aware, of course, that the ideal has inherent difficulties for the novelist, who is under the constant pressure of verisimilitude, no matter how determined his efforts to manipulate or even defy the demands of realism. He feels the inescapability of the standard of the probable, the possible, and the marvelous. Parson Adams’ innate goodness may be drafted into the army of the probable only if humanizing and comically acceptable “imperfections” accompany its service. And yet Fielding demonstrates how strongly committed he is to the ideal and how difficult of realization ideal characters are in literature in his creation of Sophia, who exists to demonstrate that the ideal must be the model for all human aspirations.
Why Fanny, Joseph, and Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews and Tom, Sophia, Mrs. Nightingale, and the narrator in Tom Jones have good hearts and innate moral sentiments to a degree that distinguishes them from much of the rest of humankind Fielding does not elucidate other than to imply that he believes in a hierarchy of natural goodness. For example, Thwakum can thwack and Square can square until doomsday: they cannot destroy or even modify Tom’s innate goodness. And Blifel can read sound doctrine and study moral philosophy endlessly without improving his moral nature. Fielding seems to believe that there are innate differences from birth in the degree of moral sentiment human beings possess, though, conveniently, characters in his novels usually rise in the social scale to the level that their innate qualities deserve. Once error and confusion have been resolved, inherited social position and moral qualities generally turn out to be consonant with one another. Fortunately, Fielding is incapable of absolute consistency on this point, and in minor characters, such as Partridge and Mrs. Nightingale, who possess good hearts, Fielding quietly reminds us and himself that the moral ideal and social position do not always dovetail. But he is still far from the ethos that compels Dickens to separate the moral sentiments from middle or high birth, and he is especially distant from the view of human nature that enables Dickens to depict Nancy in Oliver Twist and Martha in David Copperfield as versions of Sophia. Despite low birth and battered lives as prostitutes, they have innate moral sentiments and are admirable people.
Samuel Richardson’s impact on Victorian literature, particularly on the novelists, was more powerful than even Fielding’s, partly because he framed the central questions about human nature, the moral sentiments, and sentimentality in ways that were more directly accessible both to his contemporaries and to the Victorians. Fielding’s novels are narrated through a character once removed, the author-narrator. Richardson’s novels are dramatic narratives, mostly in the words of the participating characters. Despite his commitment to the moral sentiments, Fielding made his appeal to the heart through the head. Richardson made his appeal to the heart through the heart, through a heightening of feeling in the first-person drama of the epistolary novel. For this and other reasons Richardson was a part of popular culture in a way that Fielding was not, and he was closer to the popularization of the doctrine of the moral sentiments that made the sentimental novel and “being sentimental” fashionable by the middle of the eighteenth century. Richardson may have appreciated the irony of one of his sympathetic readers asking him to define “sentimental,” a word
so much in vogue amongst the polite, both in town and country.… I have asked several who make use of it, and have generally received for answer, it is—it is—sentimental. Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word; but am convinced a wrong interpretation is given, because it is impossible everything clever and agreeable can be so common as this word. I am astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk … I had just received a sentimental letter.17
That Richardson had published two years earlier a novel, Clarissa, that elevated the ideal and depicted the tragic consequences of subordinating moral sentiment to “everything” that society thinks “clever and agreeable” did not discourage Lady Bradshaigh from addressing her question to him. She was partly right in asserting Richardson’s authority on the subject. Whether he intended it or not, he made it easy for his readers to separate the religious substance of Clarissa’s feelings from the dramatic expression of the feelings themselves.
There is no evidence that Richardson read Shaftesbury and Hutcheson or that he had the slightest conceptual interest in moral philosophy. But neither was he by education or by values a Hobbesian. In fact, the forces in Clarissa that embody Hobbesian power and Realpolitik, particularly Clarissa’s father, brother, and sister, are purposely presented as repugnant manifestations of the middle-level authoritarianism that Hobbes’s view of human nature promotes. Richardson’s Anglicanism is more somber than Fielding’s, more inclined to envision human nature and dramatic conflict in Manichaean terms that are Miltonic and Puritanical. Clarissa and Lovelace are like God and Satan in conflict. Still, their allegorical rigor is constantly softened by their sentiments, particularly Clarissa’s, and even Lovelace is a creature ultimately consumed by the power of his own feelings unrestrained by judgment. The other characters in the novel seem remarkably like those in Fielding’s novels, embodiments of the mixed nature of human nature. They live in a normative world that affirms the possibility of the moral sentiments while recognizing the powerful limitations imposed on their expression by contingent circumstances.
Richardson helped establish the popular and loose expression of sentimentality that Lady Bradshaigh protested against by his convincing depiction of the feelings as the dominant mode of learning and being in Clarissa. But the implications of his tightly connecting feelings to moral performance in his depiction of Clarissa and loosely connecting feelings to moral performance in the other characters in the novel were disregarded in the rush to debase the sentimental into a popular value with little substantive and certainly no moral meaning. Clarissa is intended to be as much a representation of the innate moral sentiments in their ideal form as is Sophia. Having a sense of normative realism in these matters similar to Fielding’s, Richardson grants that the nature of most human beings is mixed. But, like Fielding, he asserts in his main character an ideal of goodness in which goodness is defined as the innate moral sentiments writ large. Having decided that ideal goodness can best be dramatized when it is the seeming victim of absolute viciousness, Richardson’s drama is the holocaust writ small. Lovelace is Clarissa’s necessary antagonist and fate, then, and Clarissa’s insufficient prudence is not only a device of characterization to propel her tragedy but also a negative measure of how true she is to her feelings. Though being true to her feelings may create serious worldly problems for her, such truthfulness cannot get her into trouble with God, whose bosom is her destination. Richardson’s Clarissa, Fielding’s Sophia, Dickens’ Little Nell, and Thackeray’s Amelia Sedley are cut from the same cloth of philosophical sentimentality. Whereas Fielding and Thackeray find comedic resolutions for the ideal in conflict with the flawed human community, Richardson and Dickens hear the angelic voices of a heavenly community singing a tragic chorus of the resolution that comes only in death.
The distinction between sentimentality as an expression of the doctrine of the moral sentiments and sensibility as a register of the capacity to respond to external stimuli needs to be emphasized. Sentimentality is the possession of innate moral sentiments; sensibility is a state of psychological-physical responsiveness. The latter concept led in the second half of the eighteenth century and in the Romantic movement to portraits of the artist in which the defining characteristic is intense sensibility. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) embodies in its fragmentary form the “soft sense of the mind,” a mind whose sensibility is so keen that it cannot tolerate the structures of literature or life. Its main characters are in retreat from life even before they have encountered it, convinced that they must flee from both experience and art. The “man of feeling” is a Romantic in embryo, contributing to and becoming absorbed into the Romantic fascination with the “numbness unto death” that may result from the man of keen sensibility dealing with the ordinary things of this world. Neither the moral philosophers nor the doctrine of the moral sentiments advocates retreat from experience and community, though not all the Romantic poets do either. Wordsworth, the Romantic poet most influenced by moral philosophy, favors the growth of the artist into community and into the service of “the still sad music of humanity.”
Mackenzie did not offer the Victorians the attractive moral paradigms that Fielding and Richardson did, and though the Romantic influence was powerful throughout the nineteenth century, it was just that aspect of Romanticism, its glorification of sensibility, with which the Victorians felt most uncomfortable. Mackenzie contributed to the Romantic belief that the feelings are the source of joy rather than goodness. And, just as goodness has its necessary antinomy in evil, so too joy has its in pain. Mackenzie anticipated the depiction, in Keats’s and Coleridge’s poetry especially, of the feelings alternating between joy and misery, with the assurance that all joy irreversibly leads to isolation, alienation, and emotional numbness. The Victorians preferred “sense” to “sensibility,” pursuing ideals to counterbalance the mixed nature of reality and intent on confirming community values as best they could. They were attracted to sentimentality as a moral and communal ideal rather than to sensibility which promoted separation and withdrawal. Mackenzie’s reputation, inseparable from his depiction of “the man of feeling,” survived with some dignity and respect into the Victorian period. But, though Dickens owned a set of Mackenzie’s complete works, The Man of Feeling had lost most of its relevance by the Victorian years. In contrast, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) became for the Victorians the bible of moral sentiment. Its pastoral depiction of the triumph of innate goodness shaped and reinforced Victorian sentimentality. Whatever the attraction to modern readers of the thesis that the novel satirizes the optimistic visions of Dr. Primrose, Goldsmith’s contemporaries and his Victorian admirers would have been stunned by the absurdity of such an interpretation.18 “No book upon record,” John Forster claimed in his influential biography of Goldsmith, “has obtained a wider popularity and none is more likely to endure”; for “good predominant over evil, is briefly the purpose and moral of the story … which sets before us, with such blended grandeur, simplicity, and pathos, the Christian heroism of the loving father, and forgiving ambassador of God to man.”19 To the Victorians, Dr. Primrose seemed a paragon of virtue whose adventures exemplify the good heart and the moral sentiments, and to see virtue was not only to admire but to love it.
Goldsmith’s is a skeletal imagination, without the flesh of human fullness. But it is precisely this paradigmatic quality, this bare-boned presentation of grandeur in terms of the innate moral sentiments, that elevated The Vicar of Wakefield into its special position among the Victorians. That all humankind, even hardened criminals, had hearts that could be moved, innate moral responses that could be tapped, by the message of Christian love was a stirring reaffirmation of what many Victorians needed to believe. And the messenger was inseparable from the message. The Victorians loved The Vicar of Wakefield. It was a book that gave them moral “pleasure,” a sermon in fiction that touched their hearts with the truth of its moral philosophy, uncomplicated by the larger canvas that the dialectic between the ideal and the real imposed on Goldsmith’s predecessors. It seemed a version of Joseph Andrews with Parson Adams as the main character and without the complicating themes of Joseph’s story. Everyone, Goldsmith claims, has the potential for the awakening of the moral sentiments, which are the prime constituent of human nature, given to us by a Universal Maker whose sectarian limitation as a Christian god does not prevent his smiling on all humankind.
Though Primrose, like Parson Adams, has his human imperfections, they are the source of comedy rather than satire, and The Vicar of Wakefield depends, as does Joseph Andrews, on the resolutions of comedy in which no expression of the moral sentiments can be too strong or too frequent. Even the occasional parodying of the language of popular sentimentality is gently put to the service of affirming the moral sentiments. Goldsmith, like Dickens, Thackeray, and Carlyle, was alert to the potential for the exploitation of sentiment in which people “pay you by feeling,” a phrase from Boswell’s Life of Johnson that Forster quotes in his Life of Goldsmith.20 But Goldsmith and his Victorian advocates unequivocally rejected the self-protectiveness and the cynicism that deny that the moral sentiments are the basic constituent of human nature because there are many who abuse the language and the power of the moral sentiments for self-serving ends.
Victorian sentimentality inherited from eighteenth-century moral philosophy a strong anti-sectarian, though not anti-Christian, commitment. Strongly anti-Puritanical, it was antagonistic to Protestant fundamentalism, to the gloomy strait-jacket of religious literalism. Within dissent, enthusiasm, religion as an experience of the feelings rather than of the intellect, flourished. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicalism emphasized the religion of the heart. But it was part of a vision of human nature that credited God’s grace rather than innate human qualities for religious conversion and moral performance. Human beings needed to make themselves as open and as responsive to God’s grace as possible, but responsiveness to other stimuli, whether moral, aesthetic, or sensual, implied at best a failure of concentration on the main chance, at worst an improper if not corrupt attention to all those things that are not God. The Romantic poets directed the heart away from grace toward the self-sufficiency of the imagination. The Victorian novelists directed the heart back in upon its own high resources, the innate moral sentiments. And, since Dickens and his Victorian contemporaries were perplexed about the source of the moral sentiments and unable to explain in religious or other terms why some people have stronger moral sentiments than others, the evangelicals responded to Dickens with a grudging admission that he was of God’s party without knowing it.
Dickens was, like Thackeray, purposely and deeply anti-Puritanical, which was both a particularized bias and an expression of his general disinterest in theological schemes. Human nature fascinated him. Still, all his efforts to explain human nature in terms that relate individual performance to some cosmic scheme faltered from the beginning and failed in the end. To some degree, his sentimentality is inherent in his anti-Puritanism, but to a greater degree his sentimentality is the result of the deep satisfaction as well as the occasional perplexity he derived from defining human nature in the terms of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. More than any other great writer in the British tradition, Dickens has been accused of being pejoratively “sentimental” with little regard either for what such expressions of “sentiment” meant to him and his contemporaries or for the philosophical tradition that argued that the sentiments were inherently moral.
Victorian sentimentality was central to the attempt of British literature and philosophy in the first half of the nineteenth century to defend the value of the ideal against the increasingly powerful forces of philosophical realism, which claimed that the ideal has no place either in life or in literature.21 Such realism represented the growing tendency in post-Renaissance European culture to conceive of human nature as basically flawed, unredeemed and unlikely to be redeemed by transcendent forces, the product of biology and social conditioning rather than of spirit and will, and best depicted within the confines of the permanent “prison-house” of everyday experience. Of course, the idealism associated with Plato and the belief in human perfectibility as a transcendent phenomenon made constant counterattacks, of which Victorian sentimentality was one. The counterattackers recognized the difficulty of resisting what they felt to be the demeaning view of human nature and human potential that ordinary modern experience seemed to support, and that the traditional doctrine of the fall had anticipated. The Bible itself could be seen as a stage in the development of philosophical realism in Western culture. As we move further away from Eden into history, the moral ideal becomes less a part of our daily lives and inappropriate to depictions, especially in the novel, of the truths of daily existence.
For the Victorians, the truths of philosophical and literary realism were disturbing ones. The fall from ideal epic proportions, if not of the body then of the heart, to human size and deflationary details needed to be resisted, both the act of falling itself and the even more dangerous belief that the fall had already occurred. The mock heroic of Pope and Fielding, the Manichaean conflict of Clarissa, the sardonic manipulations of human size from Swift to Louis Carroll, Blake’s depiction of the fall of godlike man into constricting smallness, Thackeray’s novel whose subtitle declares that it is without a hero, and Dickens’ creation of ideal embodiments of the moral sentiments from Little Nell to Little Dorrit express how powerful and how difficult to resist the non-idealistic view of human nature had become. The doctrine of the moral sentiments was a key weapon against the elimination of the moral ideal, and Victorian sentimentality was a late, occasionally shrill stage in the rear-guard action to defend human nature from further devaluation.