What a change to meet The Man of Feeling, MacKenzie’s depiction of a man of effusive compassion. Published in 1771, Man of Feeling fed into the “facination with the relation between emotion and judgement and “captured the imagination of the reading public” (Mackenzie intro 9, 11).
It is interesting to note how the narrator comes by a ‘a bundle of papers’ found in the room of a man, referred to as a ghost, Harley, the man himself! On reading them the narrator describes them as a “bundle of little episodes” without “a single syllogism from beginning to end” which made “excellent wadding” for his hunting gun. (MacKenzie 48-9). Of course, I had to look up the word “Syllogism” which according to my dictionary is loosely defined as Logic or a formulae of argument where one premise furnishes a logical connection between two other terms.
The stories, a series of unrelated incidents that evoke strong emotion in the protagonist, Harley, illuminate the embodied sentiment of the male in an age of reason. The short stories describe ‘things as they seem’ and reveal ‘things as they are’ to Harley, the feeling man, who seek the underlying truth. In the story of his encounter with an unvirtuous lady, Harley’s empathy and his belief in her story and his respect for the “virtue in those tears” (Mackenzie 85), results with her being reunited with her father who is an officer.
His sensibility is overly developed to his own detriment. In his ‘soap-box’ like sermon about the immoral victories of colonial conquests in India, he advises that “feelings are not yet lost that applaud benevelonce and answer inhumaanity” (Mackenzie 119, should be strengthened. On the other hand, Harley is emotionally immature when it comes to personal relationships and his benevelonce which overflowes to his own detriment is demonstrated in his inability to seek his own happiness with Miss Walten, with whom he cannot express his own subverted feelings of love. He is so introverted in her presence that “filled with a thousand sentiments” which “gushed so impetuously on his heart, that he could not utter a syllable” in her presence.
This novel was a pleasant change of pace from our Dear “Pamela”
