Historiography, Pastoral, Novel: Genre in The Man of Feeling

Abstract

Historiography, Pastoral, Novel: Genre in The Man of Feeling April London In a letter to his friend James Elphinston, Henry Mackenzie ends his summary account of The Man ofFeeling with the comment that these "episodical adventures" should not be considered a novel: "You may, perhaps, from the description, conclude it a novel; nevertheless, it is perfectly different from that species of composition."1 The disclaimer might be interpreted as little more than pro forma were it not for the critique of novel writing that is so conspicuous a feature of Mackenzie's fiction. Such metanarrational commentary is not unusual in eighteenthcentury novels. But Mackenzie's version deserves particular attention because it engages the conventions of other, competing genres in highly revealing ways. In the process, The Man of Feeling testifies at once to its author's keen awareness of the prestige attaching to the classical modes and to his sense of the extensions of meaning that the novel's less prescriptive understanding of genre allows. Fiction's most distinguished rival in the art of constructing narrative was history. Mackenzie, anxious to rescue the novel "from the contempt which it meets from the more respectable class of literary men," was particularly alert to the challenge posed to the novel by Enlight1 "To James Elphinston," 23 July 1770, Literature and Literati. The Literary Correspondence and Notebooks ofHenry Mackenzie. Volume I Letters 1766-1827, ed. Horst W. Drescher (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), p. 48. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 1, October 1997 44 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION enment historiography.2 In an attempt to legitimate his own novelistic practice as a form of social commentary interesting to an educated, male audience, Mackenzie counterpoints his fiction against two authoritative genres, each possessing a characteristic relationship to time. The first, classical historiography, is present inferentially in Mackenzie's adaptations of its principles to the structure of his own narrative. The second, an ahistorical pastoral, is directly and explicitly invoked in the characterization of the hero, Harley. While Mackenzie's use of both history and pastoral serves as corrective to the perceived "lowness" of contemporary fiction, he nonetheless wishes to draw on the novel's own distinctive strength: its ability to render the complementarity of private and public spheres. But gender also contributes to his sense of the novel's representational possibilities. In the essay that follows, I argue that Mackenzie's depiction of genre in dialogic terms is informed and enabled by the prescriptive force of customary gender distinctions. The intersections of genre and mode—history, pastoral, novel—are thus underwritten by a gendered language that ultimately allows him to affirm the political efficacy of literature. This framing of the debate between historical process and literary discourse (and its sexual politics) survived the fleeting popularity of The Man ofFeeling, acquiring new urgency in the revolutionary literature of the 1790s, and shaping the early fiction of his admirer, Sir Walter Scott. As an active participant in what he elegizes in a letter of 1784 as the "brilliant Era" of Hume, Karnes, and Ferguson, Henry Mackenzie was particularly well positioned to assess recent developments in historiographical and literary practice. To him it appeared that "general & philosophic views of the subject [form] the great distinction between Modern History, since the time of Montesquieu, & the Ancient."3 His 2 Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger 20, 18June 1785, Novel and Romance 1700-1800. A Documentary Record, ed. loan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 328. Enlisting supporting comments from a periodical essay published some years after the novel in question perhaps requires explanation. The contemporary understanding of genre, I think, supports such cross-generic references. As I argue over the course of this essay, the interdependency of genres is premised on authorial responsiveness to the challenge mounted by the competing forms and on a subsequent tendency to anatomize rival characteristics. This is especially true of emergent, unstable genres such as the periodical essay and the novel, each of which justifies its own workings by invoking the practices of the other. The periodical essays are especially interesting in terms of the insights they provide because they explicitly discuss questions relating to audience that are broached in the novel through...