Henry Mackenzie--The Man of Feeling (1771)This book achieved a great popularity when it was first published, and is regarded as of minor historical significance today as a (very rough) precursor of the Romantic era. Its nominal subject is the travails of a sensitive and naive young man upon venturing a little into the world, a typical story, in our age perhaps considered to be rather tired, even to be draining the vitality from literature. The highly sensitive character was evidently a novelty in 1771 however. Hamlet is often considered to be of this type, though his intelligence and station, as well as the skill of his author obviously make him a rather high example of it. The quality of men constituting this family of characters had been steadily deteriorating since him as it was, and the pace of this deterioration has accelerated even more precipitously in the last 50 years. While it is clear right away that Henry MacKenzie is not a ferocious genius, the book begins in an engaging manner that is both lanquid and quirky, especially for the time period, and especially to someone who has been reading Clarissa for the previous three months. There is a potentially interesting device in which the story is presented in the form of a discovered memoir of which only fragments survive, but there are few hints given as to what the missing parts contain that add anything to the story, the parts of which that remain do not amount to much of one anyway. At the beginning of the book there was a leisurely attention to details that I rather liked (a scene I mentioned previously where a man sits down on a stone to remove a pebble from his shoe came from this book), and this is certainly Mackenzie's most notable talent as an author, but this note is not consistently maintained.

Some further observations:

This book is surprisingly quite dark too in its outlook on human nature. It is, as they say, utterly unrelieved by humor, and very little happens to the hero that is not in some way a mortification to his sensibility.

The conversations in the book are uniformly unnatural.

(Illustration: This is a picture by an artist named Rowlandson titled The Man of Feeling. While this particular scene does not directly refer to the novel, it was painted during the period of the book's popularity and it seems not unlikely that the title of this comedic drawing is in some way a play on that very earnest and sentimental work. It also seems to me to reflect something of the spirit of that time that I have always found genial.) There is an interesting passage on the nature of the poetic versus the more material(?) soul, which is relevant to the present, when pragmatism rules the day to such an extent that serious thinkers seem to be skeptical that such a thing as the poetic soul genuinely exists, and is not simply a pose intended to secure the poseur some refuge from or excuse for his failure in the challenges of economic and social competition in which he has no chance of success.

"Jack, says his father, is indeed no scholar; nor could all the drubbings from his master ever bring him one step forward in his accidence or syntax: but I intend him for a merchant...Tom reads Virgil and Horace when he should be casting accounts; and but t'other day he pawned his great-coat for an edition of Shakespeare.--But Tom would have been as he is, though Virgil and Horace had never been born, though Shakespeare had died a link-boy...'Tis a sad case; but what is to be done?--Why, Jack shall make a fortune, dine on venison, and drink claret...Tom shall dine with his brother, when his pride will let him; at other times, he shall bless God over a half-pint of ale and a Welsh-rabbit..."


There is one extremely pitiful scene where a farmer fallen on hard times is evicted from the tenancy where he has lived and toiled all his life. His old dog is unable to make it out of the yard, but drops dead upon reaching the spot where he was formerly wont to bask in the sun. The modern reader is more likely to find it hilarious than affecting.

As in all these old books, there is a generous amount of fainting among the characters. I have seen one actual person faint in my entire life, when I was eight years old (this incident took place at the historic Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1978. I vaguely recall that it was provoked by an explanation of colonial medical practices, which gives even this modern instance of this curious phenomenon an 18-century origin).

The man of feeling expresses some angst over the conquests and activities of the British nation in India. His objections are not argued with much manly force in opposition to the dominant-type males who drive the engines of history, but I suppose they are consistent with the attitudes of this once-neglected class of character.

I do not know that I have ever read a book that collapses so utterly as this one does at the end. With five pages to go MacKenzie, in the guise of the editor of the man of feeling's posthumous papers, announces that the remaining chapters are not really worth printing, being more or less the same as what preceded, and that "a few incidents in a life undistinguished, except by some features of the heart, cannot have afforded much entertainment". Three pages later, the man of feeling expresses his desire to "meet death as becomes a man...a privilege bestowed on few" (he had already been ill as a result of failure in love) and proceeds to collapse in death while declaring his earnest love for the local beauty who is betrothed to a more successful and desirable man on the beauty's parlor floor.

Mackenzie was 26 when this work was published, and on the strength of it maintained a leading role in Edinburgh literary life for the next 60 years. He was also an attorney and was the Comptroller of Taxes for Scotland for 32 years. He published two more novels, at the ages of 28 and 32, later edited and wrote for a couple of Spectator-type magazines, as well as published a play and some political pamphlets, his collected workings extending to 8 volumes (quarto, I assume) in toto. He married the daughter of a baronet with the unusual name of Penuel and had 11 children. The most recent edition of The Man of Feeling published in the Oxford World's Classics series came out in 2001.

Mackenzie was born on a defunct street in Edinburgh where the George IV Bridge now stands. He was buried along the north side of the Queen Street Gardens in that city. I am not certain whether his grave remains viewable or not. I have never been to Edinburgh.