[In the following essay, Chapin explores the influence of Shaftesbury's ideas about benevolence on other eighteenth-century philosophers.]

Referring to what he calls “the mid-eighteenth-century cult of the ‘man of feeling,’” R. S. Crane argued that this cult owed much to “the propaganda of benevolence and tender feeling carried on with increasing intensity by the anti-Puritan, anti-stoic, and anti-Hobbesian divines of the Latitudinarian school.”¹ Donald Greene has challenged this argument in the pages of this journal,² but neither Crane nor Greene has paid much attention to writers who might be said to exemplify this cult. Who were these men of feeling? Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling was published in 1771, and while proponents of Crane's thesis might argue that “divines of the Latitudinarian school” had prepared the public for the appreciative reception of Mackenzie's novel, Gerard A. Barker has shown that the Harleyan mode of sensibility is more adequately explained by reference to the doctrine of sympathy (or empathy) as expounded in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) than it is by reference to the writings or sermons of divines.³ Smith's theory owes little to such writings or sermons but something to Francis Hutcheson,⁴ whose own ethical thought owes much to the Characteristics of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a deist whose ethical theory owes more to Plato and the ancient stoics than it does to the teachings of Christian divines.

As long ago as 1916, Cecil A. Moore had argued that Shaftesbury and his disciples were chiefly responsible for the rise of the ethic of benevolence and tender feeling during the period 1700-1760.⁵ But Crane, taking note of Moore's article, argued that the influence of Shaftesbury began too late to have been an important factor in “the popular triumph of ‘sentimentalism’ toward 1750.” Yet toward the conclusion of his essay, Crane admits that the influence of Shaftesbury in this “popular triumph” was very real and very important “especially after 1725 when it was reinforced by that of his disciple Hutcheson.”⁶

Leaving the reader to make what he can of this, I would emphasize that Crane's essay blurs the distinction between the man of feeling and the benevolent man. The former was recognized as exceptional, however admirable. Mackenzie and his readers understood that Harley was unfit for this world. His extreme sensibility set him apart from other men of benevolent temper, an Allworthy in fiction or a Ralph Allen in real life. And while everyone approved of the benevolent man, not everyone approved of the man of feeling. Here I am concerned only with the latter. It seems safe to say that there were no eighteenth-century Harleys in real life, but some writers did impress contemporaries as especially distinguished for tender or sentimental feeling.

In one such writer the Shaftesburian influence appears to have replaced the “Latitudinarian” influence. Known to a wide circle of friends as a man possessed “of a most tender and benevolent heart,” the poet James Thomson everywhere praises what he calls “humanity” or “social love” as the highest virtue.⁷ In the 1727 edition of Summer, Thomson praises Barrow and Tillotson, two of the “Latitudinarian” divines cited by Crane, as expressing “the Strength, and Elegance of Truth.” But in the 1730 edition these divines are replaced by “the generous ASHLEY,” the “Friend of Man.” And Thomson's conception of social love as a divinely implanted emotion seems closer to Shaftesbury's moral sense theory than to the ethical teaching of Barrow or Tillotson. In the opinion of James Sambrook, Thomson's latest editor, “Thomson's ethics are Shaftesburian; so is his rhapsodic tone, so at times, it seems, is his theology.”⁸

Thomas Percy praised William Shenstone as “one of the most elegant and aimiable of men,” whose “tender writings were but the counterparts of his heart, which was one of the best that ever animated a human body.” According to Robert Dodsley, “tenderness” was Shenstone's “peculiar characteristic; his friends, his domestics, his poor neighbours, all daily experienced his benevolent turn of mind. Indeed, this virtue in him was often carried to such excess, that it sometimes bordered upon weakness.”⁹ Shenstone's twentieth-century biographer, Marjorie Williams, finds “echoes of Shaftesbury's philosophy on almost every page of Shenstone's Works.”¹⁰ Indeed, Shenstone writes as though certain Shaftesburian ideas were hardly a matter of controversy: “LORD Shaftesbury, in the genteel management of some familiar ideas, seems to have no equal. He discovers an eloignment from vulgar phrases much becoming a person of quality. His sketches should be studied, like those of Raphael. His Enquiry is one of the shortest and clearest systems of morality.”¹¹ Shenstone was a man of leisure who devoted a major portion of his time and energy to the improvement of his ferme ornée at Leasowes. Hence it was important for Shenstone's self-esteem that taste be regarded as a faculty worth cultivating. Not only did Shaftesbury emphasize the importance of good taste; he argued that taste and virtue are near allied, an opinion Shenstone was happy to embrace. “Surely it is altogether unquestionable,” he writes, “that taste naturally leads to virtue.”¹² Shenstone may have regarded himself as a Christian, but in ethics he follows Shaftesbury and the ancients rather than Christian divines: “An obvious connexion may be traced betwixt moral and physical beauty; the love of symmetry and the love of virtue; an elegant taste and perfect honesty. We may, we must, rise from the love of natural to that of moral beauty: such is the conclusion of Plato, and of my Lord Shaftesbury.”¹³

But perhaps the best example of the writer as man of feeling at mid-century is the minor poet and essayist, John Gilbert Cooper. If Dodsley believed that Shenstone's tenderness of feeling was sometimes carried to an excess, others believed this to be deplorably true of Cooper. A deist and an ardent admirer of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Cooper goes further than Shaftesbury in rejecting “the authority of analytical reason both in the arts and in the sphere of morals.”¹⁴ If for Shaftesbury our natural love for truth, beauty, and virtue “must mature in cognition and must be controlled by reason,” for Cooper “whatever is true, just, and harmonious, whether in nature or morals, gives an instantaneous pleasure to the mind, exclusive of reflection” (my italics).¹⁵ Feeling is not all for Cooper, but it is much, and this valuation evidently impelled him on occasion toward an expression of sentimental feeling which some contemporaries found ridiculous.

According to Edmond Malone, Cooper “was the last of the benevolists, or sentimentalists, who were much in vogue between 1750 and 1760, and dealt in general admiration of virtue. They were all tenderness in words; their finer feelings evaporated in the moment of expression, for they had no connection with their practice. [Cooper] was the person whom, when lamenting most piteously that his son then absent might be ill or even dead, Mr. Fitzherbert so grievously disconcerted by saying, in a growling tone, ‘Can't you take a post chaise, and go and see him?’”¹⁶ This story, recorded also by Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, is included by Alexander Chalmers in his life of Cooper as an instance “of that romantic feeling which is apart from truth and nature.”¹⁷ As another instance of this, Chalmers cites Cooper's Latin epitaph upon the death of his first son, an infant who expired the day after he was born. What contemporaries thought of this effusion is sufficiently apparent from a burlesque translation which Chalmers included in his edition of Cooper's poetry because he believed it was precisely what so “ridiculous an original” deserved. A few lines will indicate its tenor: “Beneath doth lie / OF HENRY GILBERT COOPER / All that could die: / The prettiest, sweetest, dearest babe / That ever dropt into a grave. / This lovely boy, / His dad's first joy, / Was son of 'Squire JOHN, / And SUE his wife, who led their life, / At town call'd Thurgaton.” And so on for seventeen more lines.¹⁸

The Fitzherbert story is biased testimony, reported by friends of Johnson, and Johnson entertained a hearty dislike for Cooper.¹⁹ The Latin epitaph, on the other hand, is, as Chalmers says, “a curious specimen of sentimental grief.” But Chalmers, unlike Malone, is not a biased critic. He has some complimentary things to say about Cooper's poetry and remarks that “if the general tenour of his works may be credited,” Cooper “possessed an amiable and affectionate heart.”²⁰

I do not contend that writers especially known for tender or sentimental feeling are invariably admirers of Shaftesbury, but I hope enough has been said to show that Crane's is not the only genealogy of the man of feeling. One is not surprised to find that Cooper was deist. After all, the belief that man's innate goodness is such that he has no need of redemption through faith in Christ is more likely to encourage tender or sentimental feeling than the belief that man is a fallen creature. And, as Greene has shown, Barrow, Tillotson, and the other divines cited by Crane, however they might praise benevolence, never denied the Fall.²¹

Notes

1. R. S. Crane, “Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’” (1934), in Studies in the Literature of the Augustan Age, ed. Richard C. Boys (New York, 1966), pp. 206, 230.

2. Donald Greene, “Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’ Reconsidered,” Modern Philology 75 (1977): 159-83.

3. Gerard A. Barker, Henry Mackenzie (Boston, 1975), pp. 28-34.

4. Smith's theory differs in important respects from Hutcheson's, but Smith builds upon Hutcheson's conclusion that “the first perceptions of right and wrong” cannot be the “object of reason.” These perceptions derive from “immediate sense and feeling,” and so far as Smith is concerned, Hutcheson had explained this point “fully” and “unanswerably” in his “illustrations upon the moral sense.” See Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York, 1966), pp. 470-71 (pt. 7, sec. 3, chap. 2).

5. Cecil A. Moore, “Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England,” in Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700-1760 (New York, 1969), pp. 3-52.

6. Crane, pp. 207, 229-30.

7. George Lyttleton, Works, ed. George Edward Ayscough, 3d ed. (London, 1777), 2:203 (“Dialogue 14” of Lyttleton's Dialogues of the Dead [1760]). According to Ralph Cohen, it became a commonplace of Thomson's biographers that the poet lived a life of “indolence and benevolence” (The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's “The Seasons” and the Language of Criticism [Berkeley, 1964], p. 111). For Thomson's praise of humanity and social love, see James Sambrook's commentary on Spring 878-903 in his edition of The Seasons (Oxford, 1981), p. 336.

8. Thomson, The Seasons, ed. Sambrook, p. xx. For the substitution of Shaftesbury for Barrow and Tillotson, see Summer 1551-55 and apparatus (pp. 130-31), and Sambrook's note to Summer 1551 (p. 361).

9. University Microfilms facsimile (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977) of The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer, ed. Cleanth Brooks (Baton Rouge, La., 1946), p. 37; William Shenstone, Works, ed. Robert Dodsley, 5th ed. (London, 1777), 1:8.

10. Marjorie Williams, William Shenstone: A Chapter in Eighteenth Century Taste (Birmingham, Warwickshire, 1935), p. 133.

11. Shenstone, Works, 2:174-75.

12. Letters of William Shenstone, ed. Marjorie Williams (Oxford, 1939), p. 529 (Shenstone to Richard Graves, October 26, 1759).

13. Shenstone, Works, 2:273. Dodsley tells us (Works, 1:8) that in his private opinions Shenstone “adhered to no particular sect, and hated all religious disputes. But whatever were his own sentiments, he always shewed great tenderness to those who differed from him.”

14. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York, 1942), 2:323. Fairchild's work is dated, but his account of Cooper's religion (pp. 320-24) seems to me accurate in almost every respect. In his chief poem The Power of Harmony (1745), and in his Letters Concerning Taste (1754), Cooper attacks “superstition,” but it is immediately apparent that “superstition” is a code word for “Christianity.”

15. Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens, Ohio, 1967), p. 245; Cooper's prefatory “design” to The Power of Harmony in The Works of the English Poets, ed. Alexander Chalmers (London, 1810), 15:519.

16. Sir James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone (London, 1860), p. 427.

17. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934-50), 3:149; Thraliana, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1951), p. 62; Works of the English Poets, 15:504.

18. Works of the English Poets, 15:504, 538.

19. Prior, p. 428.

20. Works of the English Poets, 15:504-6.

21. Greene (n. 2 above), pp. 169-73.