In Our Time - Sensibility

Episode Date: January 3, 2002

Melvyn Bragg examines the 18th century idea of Sensibility. In Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, the lead character Yorick comforts a young woman who has been abandoned by a little pet goat that had proved as faithless as her lover. Yorick describes her effect upon his ‘sweet sensibility’, “I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe the tears away as they fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own - and then in hers - and then in mine - and then I wiped hers again - and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. (I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.)”It seems a bit mawkish to us now but Sterne, Richardson and Mackenzie were all part of the ‘cult of sensibility’ in the eighteenth century which elevated the sentimental novel to the height of literary art. Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility, has traditionally been taken as a parody of sensibility. But what caused the rush to emotion that so infused and enthused the Sensibility movement and was Jane Austen really so critical of the expression of feeling?With Claire Tomalin, literary biographer and author of Jane Austen: A Life and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London; Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In Lawrence Stern's A Sentimental Journey, the lead character Yorick comforts a young woman who's been abandoned by a little pet goat

that had proved as faithless as her lover. Yorick describes her effect upon his sweet sensibility in this way. I sat down close by her and Mariah let me wipe the tears away as they fell with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own and then in hers and then in mine and then I wiped hers again and as I did it I felt such undescribable emotions within me as I'm sure could not be accounted for

from any combination of matter and motion. It may seem a bit mawkish to us now but Stern, Richardson and McKenzie were all part of the cult of sensibility in the 18th century which elevated the sentimental novel to the height of literary art. In Austin's masterpiece, sense and sensibility, has traditionally been taken as a parody of sensibility. But what caused the rush to emotion that's so infused and enthused the sensibility movement? And was Jane Austen really so critical of that expression of feeling?

With me to make sense of sensibilities, Claire Tomlin, biographer and author of Jane Austen, A Life and the Life and Death of Mary Walsencraft. Also here is John Mullen, senior lecturer in English at University College London, an author of sentiment and sociability, the language of feeling in the 18th century, Hermione Lee, essayist and biographer and Goldsmith's professor of English literature at the University of Oxford. John Mullen, can we start with the word? Where did it come from? How did it arrive? And what did it bring with it? Well, it started off in the early 18th century,

a word which was descriptive of people's physical sensitivities, a word which people like physicians would use, actually. And then... What would they use it of? They would use it of the parts of the body which reacted to stimuli. That's really what it referred to, people. people's response to physical stimuli. And it became a word which was popularised as a description of people's emotional responsiveness.

And that's the sort of key transition. And that's how it gets picked up by novelists in the mid-18th century. Let's just absolutely get right to stimuli so everybody understands. You mean people being blinking or what specific stimuli did this word apply? Well, people flinching from things that caused them pain. but also therefore a connection to people's physical display of emotions. So weeping and trembling and blushing, all these. This should be evidence of the sensibility of your physical sensitivity to stimuli.

But then you can see it easily becomes evidence of your emotional sensitivity because some people respond more than others to things which might make us weep or blush or tremble. And then there's a second transition, which quite easily happens, and I think happens most of all in fiction, to sensibility referring to a kind of admirable sensitivity. So the best people have sensibility. I mean, notionally, everybody has it. But in fact, it's not just a capacity for feeling.

It's a capacity for the sort of best or most ennobling feelings. Was this word a word that was, handy to be picked up by writers at the time, or did it fit in with some wider philosophical reaction to what had been going on? Well, it does get used a bit by those whom we might now call philosophers who are interested in, who are interested in sort of questions of sociability of what makes people feel for others. Such as? Well, such as, I suppose, the main examples are from the mid-18th century. philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith,

they're very interested in what it is that makes one person sympathise with the feelings of another. I mean, for both of them, that is actually the basis of what they call moral sentiments. Our capacity to sort of thrum in tune with another's feelings is what allows us to be moral beings. Claire Tomlin, can you tell us how this word transferred into the novels of the time and how it became something of a cult and when and how that happened? Well, of course, it is a very ancient word. I mean, it's used by Chaucer, actually. And you find characters who display sensibility right through literature,

even if it's not always named such. In Chaucer, Troilus and Crusade, I'm giddy, expectation whirls me round. Here is a young man whose feelings concerned with love are too much for him, and his feelings when he's rejected are also too much for him, and he loses the will to live. So you get it right back in the 14th century. You get it in the 17th century.

Peeps in his diary displays weeping and uncontrollable responses to the emotions of his life. You get it in Shakespeare. Claudio, I'm giddy expectation. No, Claudio, this sensible warm motion, he talks about when he's fearing death, this sensible warm motion. It's a wonderful Shakespearean use of the word sensible sensibility. I'm the ordinary person, the non-academic here, so I'd like to suggest that what sensibility really is

is being in touch with your feelings. That is nowadays regarded as a very good thing. And I think if we look back in the history of sensibility, we'll see it's not just representations of women being in touch with their feelings, but also men being in touch with their feelings, men able to express these intense, overwhelming emotions that it's not just concerned for other people, it's concerned for their own personal emotion.

But to keep you this particular period, the 18th century, Claire, is it, it appears, the word appears, it's used more strongly, it's used more widely, it can be a word that can be huge to describe, if not so much a mover, then possibly a cult, and a lot of novels are using that word. So let's stick to that. Can you just give us, the background is very, very useful.

Let's stick to that. Give us some idea of the sort of strength of, of it then? Well, you've talked about Stern and you've talked about McKenzie. I would say Gerta comes in here in the mid-1770s. Gerta's book, Young Verta,

was about a young man of intense sensibility. The book became a European bestseller. It influenced absolutely everybody. I mean, it's seen as the beginning of romanticism by some people, but it's also a huge. What was there about him, which had not been there before which hit that spark of influence?

That he took his own, that his own feelings were too much for him, that his feelings when he was rejected by the woman he loved were more than he could cope with. He ceased to be able to cope with society. I think this is a very important point. And in fact, he commits suicide. He fails as a result of his overwhelming feelings so much that he ceases to be part of society. This is a very extreme example, but it was a very extreme example. was very influential, I think, in England, as well as on the continent.

Hermanniddi, can you gather that together and give us some idea of when it became almost a literary movement? Of course we're talking about a period of great rise in literacy, and that's very important, I think. More and more people are reading, and more women are reading and indeed writing. More lower classes. Lots of servants are reading sentimental novels. It's not just a middle-class thing. and there's great rise in circulating libraries and book clubs. So that's part of the coming of a cult of the novel of sentiment, as it got called.

And I think Richardson has an enormous amount to answer for. I mean, obviously, the Gertes is terribly important. Rousseau is also very important. But Pamela and Clarissa in the 1740s had an amazing, there was an amazing reaction to those books. And I think it's to do with a move towards realism, And this thing about sympathy that John was talking about is so important because people started to want novels where they could recognize their own lives,

where they could get a sense of people faced with choices about marriage and about money and about careers, not just people who were kind of likely to kill themselves because they couldn't control their own emotions, but people faced with difficult emotional predicaments of a sort of everyday kind, ordinary people. And of course there's a big fashion for, novels of sentiment and gothic novels and romances.

But I think more than anything, the novel of sentiment with these sensibility characters within them, has to do with a real desire to recognise your own life in fiction. And then out of that, you get a very interesting debate around the novel of sentiment about whether it's good for you or not. Because on the one hand, you have the idea that reading novels can give you an education in sort of philanthropy and tender-heartedness and benevolence. you get something like the bicker of Wakefield. And on the other hand, you've got the idea that novel reading is bad for you

and is dissipating and dangerous and inflames the emotions. And especially for girls, you know, it stops them doing their housework or, you know, it makes them too passive. It makes them have sort of fantasies about a life of sensibility. And there are lots of novels, interestingly, which carry kind of health warnings inside them. Can we just spread this out a little bit of sensibility? because what you all said is there's an awful lot to unpick there, but just one or two things.

I'd like to talk about the relationship of the idea of sensibility with fashion and with illness and refinement, those three things. So let's start with fashion. Did it just become just? Well, fashion's a very powerful vice, isn't it? Did it become fashion in that way, John? It did. Reading Richardson was a fashion.

But I think we should hold to what Hermione said also about the extraordinary impact, very difficult, I think, quite to sort of measure now of these first great novels, of Richardson's novels, I think, in particular. It was a fashion, but it wasn't a superficial fashion. I think people, Johnson said... I didn't think fashion is superficial. It isn't when you're talking about skirts, but it isn't when you're talking about movements. Well, it would come to seem to critics of sensibility later by about the 1780s,

that it was merely a kind of a set of gesturts. and postures that fashionable young ladies could learn, learn from novels. But I think when Richardson's novels first swept through Europe, actually, not just England, there was a real sense that, as Johnson said, he plunges us into the human heart, like no writer had ever done before, partly because of this idea that, I mean, it seems strange to us, but I think it was tied up with this idea that it sensibility, was the distinguishing characteristic, not just of literary characters,

but of ordinary people faced with terrible dilemmas. What about this notion of malady, Amalia, that something... John said right at the top of the programme and the relationship of sensibility in the medical sense in the literary sense. I mean, really putting it as crudely as possible, is it actually having too much sensibility makes you ill?

Yes. But being ill through sensibility is something slightly to be proud of. There's a whole narrative about nerves in the 18th century. I mean, there's an increasingly physiological account for psychological states. And people had all these wonderful theories about nerves, that they were like tubes or keys or wires. Strings, yeah. So that they mustn't get jangled or stretched or strained or blocked.

And if that happened, then you developed what was known as the English Malady, which was melancholy or depression or hypochondria or spleen, you know, vapours. Why is it called the English maladies? It was called the English malady because many people coming to England remarked on how prevalent depression and melancholy was in England. Actually, there's a book called the English malady by Dr. George Cheney. Who was Richardson's doctor. Exactly. So there's almost a fashion, to go back to fashion, there's a fashion for nervous ailments,

which is a sign of fine feeling and of sensitivity and indeed of, of, a certain kind of class. You know, the gentry have melancholy. The lower classes aren't melancholic. And that's linked to the idea that sensibility can easily tip over into something that's dangerous to you, bad for you, could even lead to suicide. And so there's a very interesting narrative of symptoms, as John was saying, which is partly in medical books and partly in novels of sensibility, where if you cry too much, like the hero of the man of feeling who's incredibly wet, and there's actually a 19th century edition of that book with has an indexed to tears, as in feet bathed in.

Or if you gasp and get breathless or feel sick or can't eat or can't sleep or go pale or almost have anorexia, this whole cluster of symptoms is attached to depression, to wasting away, to having this fashionable disease of melancholia. But it's also attached to the heroin of the sensibility novel. Claire? I think it's very difficult to know about the past in this way. I absolutely accept what you say. There was a fashion. But of course, people wear ill.

People wear anorexic. Young girls did go into declines. This has always been so. And it's very, very difficult now to look back and say that this was something that came up in novels. I'm not dismissing it. To say how it related to the reality of life. I think it's very interesting that it became a fashionable topic in novels. And I sometimes think the element of it.

of fashion. The novel of sensibilities rather like the kitchen sink school of drama or the silver fork school of novels. It is a label that people have put on because it clearly relates to a series of novels that did come out, but it doesn't perhaps take us very deep.

It's one of those wonderful, useful labels. But doesn't it reflect real anxieties about, for instance, the health of women? What did people think? Lots and lots of girls were actually Fading away and dying, I'm not sure. George Cheney, whom Hermione mentioned, I mean, made a small fortune

treating the English malady, whether, I mean, whether we might have other names for it now. You mean lots of young girls from brought to him? No, it wasn't particularly just girls. It was men as well. And Richardson himself was convinced, and there's substantial correspondence between him

and Cheney. And Cheney, typically, I mean, we can see, you know, if Cheney were alike, he practiced in Bath. He'd be in Los Angeles now, obviously. But Cheney's book, The English Malady, begins with a section called The Author's Own case because he suffered from it too. And that's what made him qualified to treat it.

He too suffered from this kind of oversensitivity, which I think was thought of as the price you paid for living in an unprecedentedly refined society. It gave you time, it gave you leisure, it gave you sensitivity, and therefore it could make you ill. We have to account for the huge take-up of read, more people were reading anyway, but these books found enormous readerships,

more and more people wrote them. And so something big was good. Was it anything to do with the reaction against materialism? Was there anything that we haven't said that it was to do with? Well, there's clearly a resistance to the idea of sort of mechanical, materialistic nature of the human, human being. I mean, there's a great argument for the soul and for something in, inner, that cannot be diagnosed out, that cannot actually be accounted for. And that's, that's obviously a very

important part of this, of this narrative. And there is also, isn't there, I mean, I just go back to Claire's thing that in a way, we can't really say whether this is just a fashion in novels or something that's really going on. Wasn't there also a tremendous anxiety about suicide in the 1770? Always a tremendous... But suicide is my point. But surprisingly, in a period we think of as being sort of enlightened and light and rational, you know, here are all these very dark and troubling feelings and symptoms going. Well, also, I think...

Just a little, in that kind of... Sorry, just to bring in the Mary Wilson craft because she was a figure that had her vindication of rights woman and the influence that she had. Well, of course, that's much later. That's... we're now getting to the end of the 18th century, and she is indeed. She is a marvellous link figure, Mary Wollstonecraft.

I mean, she's a figure of the Enlightenment. This is a very, very brilliantly clever young woman who has to make her way from a social position of no advantage she does. She works as a governor. She works as a companion. She writes her great book in 79 to do. She then, actually, she displays great sensibility as a child, as a girl. It's true.

She has great sympathy for the poor. She has a conflict with her own family, which is often a way of starting sensibility. I think she can't stand her own family. She has to sort of make her own. soul. Then she has a love affair and she becomes a mother and she is rejected by her lover and she becomes a great, a great romantic heroine, a great heroine of sensibility and she is certainly also known about by everybody. She is a very famous figure because she's written

a very important book and her life is not concealed. She shows that aspect of sensibility of romanticism of not concealing her own experiences and her own feelings. And she makes two suicide attempts, and these are known about two. So you're right, Melvin, she's a very, very important figure in this bit of cultural history, but she comes late, in it. But as I understand it, I'm going to move on a little bit here. Mary Wilson-Craft's attempt on her life was a big factor in Jane Austen. I'm going very carefully over hot curls with you lot, because you know so much about

Jane Austen, had an influence on Jane Austen. who started to write sense and sensibility in the 90s at the time of the backlash, but completed it much later. So can we use sense and sensibility for a few minutes as a sort of casebook of sensibility, almost as a sort of literary laboratory? I mean, first, Hermione, what does the title tell us? And can we just let's use the two sisters as a way in? Yes, should we sort of outline what happens very quickly?

Yeah, quickly. Would that be helpful? I mean, she starts it in, we think she started it in 75, and it was originally going to be called Eleanor and Marianne, so clearly setting up two individuals as these opposing, but not entirely distinct categories. I mean, one of the interesting things about sense and sensibility is that if you look at the dictionary definition,

sometimes the definition for sensibility, as in responses to other people's behaviour, is the same as the definition for sense. So there's quite often an overlap, and that's one thing she plays with, the relationship as well as the contrasts between sense and sense and sensibility. And it's the story of two young girls.

Marianne is only 16 when the novel begins, and Eleanor is 19. And they both encounter misfortune in love. Eleanor is in love with a rather quiet young man called Edward Ferris, who's going to become a clergyman and discovers he's been secretly engaged to an upstart minks called Lucy Steele. Marianne falls wildly, passionately in love with this romantic stranger called Willoughby.

who they become sort of twin souls. Their every taste, every enthusiasm is absolutely bonded because Marianne is this creature of great extravagant, unstoppable feelings. And Willoughby cruelly humiliatingly leaves her and Marianne expresses her grief to the full and falls into a perilous decline, almost to self-destruction. The word is actually used, and that does relate to the idea of suicide.

Whereas Eleanor, who is equally unhappy, is in deep sympathy with her, but controls her own feelings and he's always trying to protect Marianne from over-exposure. She's always trying to sort of hold her back and screen her. And in the end, Marianne has to sort of sink into marriage with a chap she thought was completely past his best-by date because he was over 35 and wore flannel waistcoats. And Willoughby is sort of taken out of the plot completely as this impossible character. And Eleanor, of course, marries Edwards.

So they're supposed to live happily ever after. But this also happens in a context of very materialistic money-grubbing, petty minor characters who give a sort of luster to Marianne's unworldliness and intensity. So what's Jane Austen saying about sensibility there, Hermione? She's saying that sensibility has to be controlled by good judgment and self-command, which is a tremendous thing. She's saying it's dangerous as well. She's saying it's dangerous.

and she's saying that it's asocial, anti-social. But this is very complicated because I don't think this is a simple contrast. And I think she has a lot of feeling for the heroin of sensibility. Claire. Yes, I entirely agree with what Hermannes has just said. I do think the book is a debate. I think it's a very important debate. It's almost a political debate about authenticity,

about the importance of being true to yourself and of speaking the truth, which is what Marianne does. And although Marian is made fun of at the beginning of the book for her accent, She is also shown as a girl who will speak up and reprimand Sir John Middleton when he says something about women setting their caps at men and tell him that's an old-fashioned stupid vulgar remark and she does it with all the force possible. So Marianne, I think, represents a great belief that you should tell the truth, that your primary act in life should be to be true to yourself and to be open. and even if this makes you vulnerable. Eleanor represents what was actually politically the conservative view, which was that in society you had to lie.

Ellen actually says you have a duty to lie. You have to conceal your feelings. You have to protect yourself. And by protecting yourself and by lying and concealing, you are not then vulnerable in society. And what we see in the course of the novel is that Eleanor does conceal her feelings and she remains invulner. Marianne, who is given a great tragic scene,

lets all her feelings hang out. She is in touch with her feelings, as I said before, and she becomes completely vulnerable. However, as the book progresses, the reader undoubtedly feels that Marianne, or this reader undoubtedly feels that Marianne has the right of it, that Marianne emerges as the person who is true. And in fact, Eleanor changes her mind about Willoughby.

acknowledges that Willoughby would have been the right husband for Marianne. And at the end of the book, Jane Austen fudges the whole thing up and marries poor Marianne off almost as a punishment. And the great clue is that Jane Austen gives no dialogue at the end. She tells us that Marianne marries Colonel Brandel. She doesn't show it. And with Jane Austen, this is always a sign that Jane Austen isn't quite with what she's telling us. John Mullen. Well, I don't know.

I think I disagree with almost all of that. I think, I suppose the most important thing I think that Claire said that I disagree with is that Austin, she says that Austin shows Eleanor to be invulnerable. And in fact, I think the book's all about Eleanor's vulnerability. And Marianne's true sort of ecclesism, isn't to realize that Willoughby is a bounder, but to realize that her sister has been suffering throughout the novel and that a kind of display of suffering, such as she has. I mean, her sensibilities learnt from books, that's the other thing. Ellen has suffered him because the man she loves

is a sickly engaged, you know she loves him, he loves her. Well, Ellen is something more... She's socially invulnerable. If I just put that in, I don't mean she doesn't suffer inside. I mean she has protected herself from humiliation. You said that Eleanor says it talks about telling lies, but actually it's Austin, the narrator who says that Eleanor tells the necessary lies that she has to tell when Marianne has kind of

embarrassingly refused to say the polite thing that she has to say on a particular occasion. She speaks of the duty. Just a second. Hermione coming. I think it's about adaptability and sympathy. Because Marianne, more in the early part of the novel, is very prescriptive, as you say. She's learned it from books.

And there's sort of wonderful moments where she says, it says Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable, had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. You know, it's a sort of rule book that she's going by. And Austin says it's one of these sarcastic outbursts. When you feel, sometimes you really hear Austin, and she says how she makes everybody suffer around her by refusing to be consoled. And then Austin says her sensibility was potent enough.

And it's a scathingly sort of crude thing for Austin. But I don't think Austin is a prescriptive writer, you see. People love to present Austin as a writer who tells young women how they ought to behave. I don't think this is true. I think she's saying, look, look, this is how it is. Here is an interesting situation. I think she's much subtler. She's much greater writer than that.

But isn't it about exactly about not being prescriptive, about not having set rules, which Marianne has for her sensibility. Sensibility is a rule book. Eleanor is adaptable and flexible. She's much more flexible. And hence she can come to see that there was something all right about Willoughby in the end. Not only that. She wishes Willoughby's wife would die. That's an extraordinary moment.

So that Marianne could marry him. But she also works through sympathy. And it is not for nothing that we get most of Marianne from Eleanor's point of view. We don't get her from her point of view. we get it through the sympathy that Marianne has, that Eleanor has for Marianne. And that's what makes Eleanor such a potent character. Well, I think also there's a connection here

to what we were saying earlier about the history of the novel. I mean, I think one thing that's rarely observed about sense and sensibility is that Austin's not, I think, just saying something about sensibility. She's trying to rescue the novel from sensibility. until Austin, essentially every heroine of an 18th century novel, including ones which nobody in their right mind not doing a PhD, would ever read anymore, has sensibility. And even a really quite cold-eyed and satirical writer like Fanny Bernie

gifts her heroines, this, I think, quite dubious property. They glisten with sensibility. And I think Ellen is such an important invention because it's not just she's been contrasted with, Marianne, she's in a sense being contrasted with every heroine of a novel from Richardson to Austin's own. Well, Richard... She just has the marks of sensibility.

She gets ill. Indeed. It makes her ill. She gets her ill. The self-destruction comes in. I mean, she catches a coal, but actually it's about... It's a fever from the imagination. She walks in wet grass in order, you feel, to catch a cold.

Indeed. But she has two illnesses, though, doesn't she? She's given the first illnesses dealt with comically. That's when Willoughby rides off unexpectedly. And Austin's satirical about that. And the second illness, when she finally realizes there is no hope and he's spurned her, that illness takes her close to death. And that we're supposed to find...

Can I say something more about symptoms? Because right in the middle of the book, there's this extraordinary screaming noise that Marianne is writing her letters. She's weeping so much she can hardly write. So her tears are sort of her text, really. And she covers her face with her hand and she makes this muffled screaming noise. And because she doesn't scream out, it's as if the novel is sort of muffling that scream. So you get this violence and this terrible sense of agony. But it's always being pulled back.

And I think that's the nature of the way Jane Austen sees life, that the scream has got to be muffled. Goodness, you two are very tough about Marianne. I suppose we do divide the human race, those who do identify with Marianne and those who don't. And I must just read you what Princess Charlotte wrote about Sense and Sensibility when she was 16 and she read Sense and Sensibility. And she wrote, in 1812, Marianne and me are very alike in disposition.

Certainly, I'm not so good. The same imprudence, etc. However, remain very like. I must say it interested me much. And I think that little princess was reading it the way perhaps more people have read it. But don't you grow out of being Marianne? Isn't that the point? I hope not.

I hope you don't. Marian is 16. The princess was 60. You know, this is about a very very... young girl and she's got to get older. But Jane Austen isn't writing a book to say Marianne Bad Ellen the Good. No, I'm not saying to all.

Marianne's got to be worth saving because after all, the novel also has a character in it, Lucy Steele, Sharp-eyed Lucy Steele, who is, who also embodies a certain kind of version of sensibility. She fakes it. And of course, one of the bad things about sensibility, as far as Austin's concerned, is you can fake it.

It's one, no, I, going into the lion's den this one. But at the end, it seems you could argue that Eleanor has displayed a profound sensibility throughout. And so she is not sensual, she's sensibility. And that Marianne at the end, by making an extremely sensible marriage, has changed from sensibility to sense. But the other thing that happens at the end is, that's wonderful. But the other thing that happens at the end, I think, is that you sort of lose Marianne. You're very close to her at the beginning of the novel And there's I mean, I do not think that this is a novel

Which says Marianne Bad, Eleanor Goode I think it is a very complicated mission I think one of the things the reader is left with Is a sense of loss Because you actually, you know, Marianne gets more distant from you As she is controlled and has to be sort of banked down And I feel a sense of loss and yearning when I finish the book I don't think you are close to her at the beginning of the novel

I think you are laughing at her at the beginning of the novel She is presented quite sort of crudely as someone to be laughed at for her silly behaviour. Talks to trees. She talks to trees. Always a bad time. All that is the prerotic element. That's there.

And then what I feel is that Jane Austen actually changes as the novel progresses, and I think this happens with authors. It happened to Tolstoy writing Anna Carrenna. She sees that Marianne is something else. And in fact, after Marianne gets to London, she is presented quite differently. I suppose the great thing about,

sense and sensibility is that it is such an ambiguous novel and such an interesting novel that critics have disagreed about it and this is what makes Jane Austen the great novelist that people are able to read her novels in different ways and to pluck from them different responses to sensibility. But for the purposes of this conversation before we move on into the how words with use the word, what would you say came out of what is Austin saying about sensible? Is there one thing or are there too many things to discuss? as they're one group of things. Hermione, first. I think there is one very strong thing

which has come up already, which is about language. One of Marianne's qualities is her fine taste, and that fine taste is partly to do with the use of language. I mean, it's love of poetry and love of nature, but it's also a despising of cliché.

And so there's a kind of purity, a sort of chaste purity, in Marianne's use of language, and her desire for language to be true, authentic, sincere, original gets her into trouble. But I think that the book values that very much. And totally do reflect her feelings? Yes, absolutely authentic. But she's deluded about that though, isn't she says we always know when she's, she's, her behaviour's question. She's just behaved very badly actually, kind of

riding around viewing the possession she thinks she's going to come into when she marries Willoughby and she thinks she will. And Anna suggests maybe this is not such a good idea. And she says, oh, I wasn't doing anything wrong. We always know when we're doing wrong. We always know. She's criticised, and she says I have an inner voice, which Jane Austen gives later to Fannie Price. So I think Jane Austen doesn't leave the sensibility. She does pursue it. And it's true that you can't rely on your own judgment because that way enthusiasm lies, that way kind of bigotry lies. You can't just rely on your own inner voice to judge the world around you. But nevertheless, there is a very great valuation of a true original, since.

authentic language. And I think it's precisely that balance between you mustn't just rely on your own feelings. You've got to have judgment. You've got to take counsel. But you do need to speak a kind of authentic, sincere language. Hermione, how would you say that words must talk of a poet's sensibility? I know it's never mind. Let's have a go. There was a flinching going on there. An active sensibility before my very eyes. I'm swooning away. No, not me at this day. But how did At the end of the century

we come to Wordsworth's idea of a poet's sensibility? Is that a progression from the sensibility we've been discussing? Is it something different? Is it coloured in a different way? This is such a big subject. That's why I flinched and swooned. But Wordsworth talks about, in the preface to lyrical ballads, he talks about the poet having an

unusual degree of sensibility. But when you come to the language of the romantic poets, actually the word sensibility, interestingly, is not used that often. I was looking at Hazlitz essay on gusto. And Haslett talks about, this is 1816, Haslitt doesn't talk about sensibility.

He talks about power, sensation, intensity, expression, sympathy, taste. But he doesn't use the word sensibility. And so it seems as if you're going to draw a line, a very crude line that goes from the novel of sentiment to the romantic poets, it's as if sensibility becomes a necessary item in a poet's ammunition. but that the creative power then becomes something rather more muscular and energetic and something that has to be proved on the pulses, as Keats would say. And then, of course, you get into a tremendously complicated splitting of romanticism

between poetry and social responsibility, between negative capability, this idea of empathy that, you know, Keith says I see a sparrow picking about the gravel and he becomes the sparrow enters into that being. where ideas that we've been talking about, like sympathy, are still there. But the terminology seems to have changed. It's one other thing about the way sentiment comes into romanticism that is worth talking about, I think, which is that by the time you get to the early 19th century,

the man of feeling, the lacrimos, weeping, feminine, sensitive man of feeling, has become very thoroughly parodied. When he gets an outing in a romantic text like Haslitz, Libera, Morris, where it's as if Haslitt's become Pamela. I mean, Hazlitz, who's fallen in love with his own lady's daughter, is the one who's weeping and swooning and having the emotional fits, and the girl is the one who's insensible and cold. And when this was published, this was greases,

it was great disapproval. It was vulgar, it was unmanly. So the man of feeling is a very dubious operation, I think, by that period. John, do you want to go, I mean, just as we're playing the Leaps and Bounds game, I mean, would you say, having talked a bit about the Wordsworth and that, though, and being very kind to summarise it in such a way, how far would this, did it push through further the idea of sensibility by the time we get to Dickens? Has it dropped away completely?

Well, I think the word sensibility has. I mean, I think Wordsworth is trying to sort of save it slightly because he wants sensibility. He uses actually, I think the adjective, organic in relation to it. And it's as if he wants to strip away all the refinements of the 80s, the 18th century cult of sensibility and kind of return it to some sort of almost visceral human sensitivity.

And use it for the common man. Yeah, use it for the language of the common man. And actually the tendency has been, even for you might think quite unexpectedly sort of rebellious figures like Mary Wollstonecraft to argue that the more refined you are, the more likely you are to have sensibility. And he wants to get away from that.

But I don't think that sort of proves impossible really. So I think the word does pass out of currency But what we might call sentimentality A word which sort of becomes a bad thing Becomes a bad thing becomes pejorative In about the 1770s or 80s That remains still with us, I think Especially in sort of film and television

That remains because it sort of promises What it always promised actually And the reason that sort of I think quite great writers like Richardson and Stern were interested in it, which is an access to sort of inwardness and to the things about yourself, which are best about yourself. And we talk a lot about, we've talked a lot about feelings, as if we always know what feelings are and literature has always displayed people's feelings. But it's quite interesting that alongside the history of the word sensibility, the word feelings actually doesn't get used in English before the 1770s.

People have feeling, and that is often a matter of their physical sensitivity, a kind of faculty people possess. But feelings are things which I think it's almost sometimes as if 18th century novel readers are the first people to discover that we all have feelings. Well, you mentioned Dickens. Now Dickens reduced everyone in England, man, woman and child to floods of tears when he wrote about. the death of little nell, the death of Dombie. And it's been very fashionable to sneer at this and to laugh at it. And so, you know, Oscar Wilde's quip about you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little nell. And there's a wonderful comment on this by the poet Gavin Newert.

He wrote a poem called How Life 2 is sentimental. It's about how his little baby fell ill and had to go to hospital. And the older child looked into the cot and said, baby, gone. and he says, and the word sentimental has come to mean exaggerated feelings, it would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then. And I think that's absolutely marvellous about laughing at sentimentality, because in life, in fact, exaggerated, dreadful things do happen. People's feelings are rightly stirred up.

Do you see Dickens' feeling for sentimentality, and I agree with you completely that I think it was profound, and Little Joe and all the death of the... Do you think that that is a continuation under another guise of sensibility that we've been discussing most of this programme? Well, I think it's not... It's not the word was not used.

But yes, as I said at the beginning of this programme, I think you can trace this particular thing which we've been calling sensibility right through human life and right through literature. So I do think Dickens is continuing. It's terribly interesting about Dickens because if you compare Clarissa with Esther Somerson, in Bleak House. I mean, Esther

is a sort of domesticated version of the sensibility her and she's pragmatic, she's domestic, she's, she's... And she's damaged, she's house trained, she also gets ill, she's also damaged, she also suffers, but she doesn't represent sort of Christian spirituality in quite the way that Clarissa does.

And it's as if the Victorian sort of soften and domesticate the novel of sensibility. And I think our worries about the word sentimentality now actually come out of a an early 20th century reaction against Victorian morality. So people like Samuel Butler and Virginia Wolf and Diem Forster and Meredith are all, you know, putting or putting down and getting away from what they think of as Victorian sentimentality.

And it was reinforced by a sort of idea that the Roman Imperium of Britain should be stiff upper lip. Yes, exactly. And Carlisian ideas about heroism and stoicism which have come through, which affect these romantic narratives. Can I also say that, I mean, I think that the, I think that the, perhaps disappointing things sometimes about Dickens, is that he doesn't do. What I think Richardson, to some extent, Stern to a great extent, do do, which has made their books survive the cult of sensibility.

And that is provide some in amongst the tearfulness, some really extraordinary mixtures of feelings. So that the piece Melvin read at the beginning, we laugh at now. And actually a lot of Stern's friends laughed at it. And he wrote a sentimental journey, which I think is a wonderful, devilishly cunning book

allows 18th century fans of sentimentalism to weep as much as they wish. And we know they did. And they painted lacrimos and pathetic portraits of scenes from a sentimental journey. It also enabled people to laugh at it. Somebody, a great friend of Johnson's once

said to her how affecting she found it. But why do I find a sentimental journey so affecting? She said, and Johnson said, My dear, because you're a dunce. I can't think of a better finish. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to John Mulliner, Mine, Lee and Claire Tomlinner. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.