The Man of Feeling (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Although, novel? I'm not even sure one could call 'The Man of Feeling' a novel. Certainly, it is very different from what most of us would habitually expect from 'a novel'. I was brought to it by a recent plan I made, namely to read all major works in the history of the English novel (ask me not where I got the idea, I'm sure I couldn't tell). In this I'm letting myself be guided by Walter Allen's admirably book on the history of the English novel (The English Novel (Penguin literary criticism), though I have also ordered Terry Eagleton's The English Novel: An Introduction and Patrick Parrinder's Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, and it is through Walter Allen that I first heard of 'The Man of Feeling'.

What then is so intriguing about this book? Well, first of all, it is a story within a story: the adventures - for lack of a better word - of a certain Harley ('the Man of Feeling' of the book's title) are brought to us by a narrator named Charles, of whom we learn little more than his first name and that apparently he was a friend of Harley's, and Charles' writings themselves are reported by an unnamed narrator who acquired them quite by accident, as a friend of his was actually using the paper as wadding for his fowling piece.

This in turn is the cause of the next intriguing feature of 'The Man of Feeling': large parts - those used as wadding - are missing, so what is left is a sort of puzzle of bits and pieces, and the story opens with chapter 11! What follows are chapters 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 'a fragment', 33, 34, 35, 36, another 'fragment', 40, another 'fragment', 55, 56, and 'the conclusion'... As a reader, one is therefore confronted with something that is a far cry from the neat, chronological and interconnected story-line we usually expect in a novel. On the contrary, what you get are a number of scenes, one after the other, which often have little or no connection to one another except for Harley himself.

These chapters all have teasing titles ('The man of feeling talks of what he does not understand', or 'His skill in physiognomy is doubted'), and describe various scenes in which Harley finds himself confronted by a number of the 'set scenes' of the sentimental novel: meeting a beggar, a prostitute reunited with her father, Harley falling in love but too shy to declare his love, an old army-veteran reunited with his orphaned grandchildren, ... In all of these Harley reacts as 'a man of feeling': he sympathizes with these victims of a harsh commercial society, and often as not sheds a tear before helping them (at one point even giving away 2,500£).

What is ultimately most disturbing is that it remains unclear if Harley is a saint or a fool. Is he too good or too stupid for the society he inhabits? Or, an a broader scale, is it worthwhile or futile to 'do good' and help fellow human beings in distress? On the one hand, as much praise as Charles (the narrator) may bestow on Harley for his good works, on the other hand at a certain point in the book he asks whether the pleasure arising from charity 'be not often more selfish than social?'. Whatever the case, Mackenzie leaves it up to us to make up our own minds, and as such his book has at the very least the merit to make one reflect and make up one's own mind. And that, if nothing else, is surely as relevant today as it was in 1771, when 'The Man of Feeling' was first published!

To sum up, though this was definitely a completely different book than what I expected, it was a very intriguing, even disturbing experience which I can heartily recommend!