SENSIBILITY

Sensibility, declared the Scottish moralist Hugh Blair (1718–1800), is the "temper which interests us in the concerns of our brethren; which disposes us to feel along with them, to take part in their joys, and in their sorrows" (Sermons, p. 24). Blair, whose work on aesthetics and morality would later become staple reading for Harvard undergraduates like Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1820s, took Romans 12:15 as his text for this particular sermon: "Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that do weep." But the social efficacies of sensibility were not confined to the religious realm. Drawing on John Locke's theory that early sense impressions ultimately determine character, writers and moral philosophers of the eighteenth century sought to place sensibility in a social context to determine its role in shaping an ethical, productive and happy citizenry. "Sweet sensibility!" writes the anonymous author of The Hive (1795), "Tis from thee that we derive the generous concerns, the disinterested cares that extend beyond ourselves, and enable us to participate [sic] the emotions of sorrows and joys that are not our own." Sensibility was, these writers averred, the emotional glue that held society together, countering the tendency to self-love. Blair's essay was published in New York and Philadelphia in 1790, and the Scottish common sense school of moral philosophy (including the earl of Shaftesbury [1671–1713], Francis Hutcheson [1694–1746], David Hume [1711–1776], Adam Smith [1723–1791], among others) to which he belonged was instrumental in defining American notions of sensibility and sentiment well into the 1830s.

Sensibility, the heightened awareness of the senses, both emotional and physical, became a popular subject not only for moralists, but also for novelists and poets in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The English author Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768), about a man who travels through France encountering painful scenes over which he empathetically weeps, initiated a series of publications on the virtues of sensibility whose influence crossed the Atlantic. As the historian Roy Harvey Pearce discovered, diaries of Americans in the 1770s revealed men and women who self-consciously tried to imitate Sterne's hero. And the first American novels published in the 1790s took as their subject the joys, and the sorrows, of sensibility. The two—joy and sorrow—were, in fact, considered inextricable, since the generous nature that moves one beyond the self makes one susceptible to grief as well as to happiness. But in the emotional economy of the eighteenth century, such a trade-off was by and large represented as worthwhile. As Hannah More put it in her poem, Sensibility (1795), "Would you, to 'scape the pain, the joy forego, / And miss the transport to avoid the woe?"

By the end of the eighteenth century, the cult of sensibility had produced its share of critics and detractors, at first mostly British. Since, as Sterne and More implicitly suggested, even sorrow itself could become a source of pleasure, sensibility was considered, dangerously, a possible end in itself. Although ideally a vehicle to compassion and thus social harmony, extreme delicacy of feeling could devolve into emotional self-indulgence. Artificial feeling, rather than genuine and active care for another, threatened to make a mockery of sensibility. Moreover, delicacy of feeling was potentially at odds with "manly rigor." Though the true man was popularly represented in British fiction from the 1760s through the 1780s as someone capable of generosity and benevolence, writers began to worry about the effects of refined feeling on the human constitution. "The only ill consequence that can be apprehended from [sensibility] is, an effeminacy of mind, which may disqualify us for vigorous pursuits and manly exertions," wrote Vicesimus Knox in his Essays, Moral and Literary (1792). Women, who were believed already more susceptible to emotional instability than men, were particularly at risk in indulging their fantasies of feeling through such things as excessive novel reading. But the danger to society of overly sensitive men posed an even greater threat. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's widely read The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) showed, along with a feminizing of the mind and spirit was the tendency of self-reflection to produce an unhealthy desire for solitude and an aversion to the pleasures and needs of the community. Sensibility, then, while denoting at first blush one's capacity for socialization, could—when indulged too freely—result in estrangement, melancholy, and finally, even madness or death.

American writers at the turn of the century acknowledged the dangers to the body and the body politic of, as one of them said, a "too great delicacy and sensibility." But by and large, the potential for sensibility to create a feeling of community and nationhood remained a grounding principle throughout the early national period. The death of George Washington in 1799 occasioned numerous discourses on the necessity of public mourning and the bond of "social sympathy" produced by mutual grief; in one funeral oration by Samuel Bayard, such grief was declared to be a confirmation of Americans' "sensibility as men." Critiques of such views of feeling and of justice based on feeling—in the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), for example—would not be taught at American universities until the 1830s. Prior to that time, notions about the relationship between politics and sentiment were predominantly framed by mid-to-late-eighteenth-century ideas that confirmed the sensitive man, embodied in the artist or poet (Longfellow, for instance), as the true American, both in his own example of sensibility, and his ability to cultivate it in others.

See alsoEmotional Life; Fiction; Romanticism; Sentimentalism .

bibliography

Ellison, Julie. Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Elizabeth Barnes