The Man of Feeling

Published in 1771, Henry Mackenzie's novel is a work of sentimental fiction structured as a fragmentary manuscript. The story follows Harley, a gentle and deeply feeling young man, through loosely connected episodes that expose him to the world's cruelty and occasional kindness, tracing his passage from hopeful departure to London through disillusionment and, finally, to a deathbed confession of love.

The novel opens with a framing device. An unnamed narrator, out hunting with a local curate, learns that a man named Harley once lived in a melancholy old house nearby. A strange recluse called "The Ghost" left behind a bundle of papers containing much of Harley's history, and the curate has been using the manuscript as wadding for his gun. This accounts for the narrative's many gaps, missing chapters, and non-chronological order. The narrator takes the tattered pages and finds them a collection of small episodes with considerable feeling but little plot.

From the surviving fragments, Harley emerges as a young man of modest estate and acute sensibility. His father died when he was a boy, and his education was haphazard, assembled from a country school, the local parson, and an exciseman. A conversation among acquaintances distinguishes two kinds of bashfulness: clumsy awkwardness that the world soon converts into impudence, and a deeper self-consciousness produced by genuine delicacy of feeling. Harley belongs to the second type, and his reserve costs him dearly. He fails to flatter a wealthy elderly kinswoman and is disinherited.

His neighbor, Mr. Walton, offers a letter of introduction to a London baronet who might help Harley secure a lease on crown-lands adjacent to his estate. On the eve of departure, Harley visits the Walton household, where his real motive is to see Mr. Walton's daughter, Miss Walton, a woman of twenty-four possessing gentle beauty, a soft voice, and unbounded kindness. His esteem has quietly deepened into love, though his shyness prevents him from ever speaking of it. Accompanied by the tearful farewell of his maiden aunt, Mrs. Margery, and the family's faithful old servant, Peter, Harley sets out for London.

Along the road, he encounters a ragged beggar who explains that telling the truth about his misfortunes earned him nothing, so he took up fortune-telling and petty deception, finding people far more willing to pay for predictions of happiness than to relieve genuine suffering. Harley gives him a shilling despite his hesitation.

In London, Harley's bashfulness thwarts him repeatedly. His visits to the baronet fail, and a fashionable young man who charms him with sparkling stories of high society turns out to be a former footman now working as a gauger, a low-ranking excise officer. Harley reflects that the fault lies less with the impostor than with the genuine upper class whose frivolity is so easily imitated.

Harley reluctantly accompanies friends to Bedlam, the London asylum, objecting that displaying the afflicted as a spectacle is inhumane. In the women's ward, he is drawn to a young woman of dignified bearing. Her father forbade her love match; her lover sailed to the West Indies and died of fever; her father then forced a marriage to a wealthy old man; grief and aversion drove her mad. She speaks tenderly of her dead lover, sings a plaintive song, and presses Harley's hand to her racing heart. He leaves in tears, giving the keeper money and begging him to treat her kindly.

A friend introduces Harley to a bitter older man whose closest friend once eloped with his fiancée and left him ruined. Over supper this misanthropist delivers a sweeping indictment of society: honor is a hollow substitute for virtue, politeness masks insincerity, and even benevolence is tainted by vanity. Harley listens in near-silence and reflects afterward that the man's severity, though unpleasant, may serve a corrective purpose.

Harley's trusting nature leads him into a card swindle at piquet, a two-handed game, where escalating bets cost him nearly all his money. That same evening, walking the Strand, he meets a woman who asks for wine in a faint, trembling voice and faints upon tasting it. She has not eaten in two days. Harley gives her his last half-guinea and pawns his watch to pay the tavern bill, while the waiter sneers and whispers the word "cully," meaning dupe (37).

Despite his friends' mockery, Harley keeps his promise to visit the woman, Miss Emily Atkins, in her squalid garret. The daughter of Captain Atkins, a career soldier, she was seduced and abandoned by young Mr. Winbrooke, the son of a neighboring baronet. Trapped in London by debt, she was exploited by a procuress, imprisoned, and finally coerced into prostitution. As she finishes her story, Captain Atkins bursts in, sees his daughter with a stranger, and draws his sword. Harley insists the captain is deceived. Emily throws herself at her father's feet, and Atkins's fury collapses into tears. Nature prevails over military pride, and father and daughter are reconciled. Harley arranges lodgings for them.

Harley soon learns his bid for the crown-land lease has failed. A man named Sam Wrightson reveals it was given to the same gauger whose sister has become the baronet's seamstress. Disillusioned, Harley leaves London by stage-coach.

Continuing homeward on foot, Harley discovers an old soldier asleep under a tree. The man reveals himself as Edwards, a tenant farmer Harley knew as a boy. Edwards recounts how he was forced off his family's long-held lease and ruined by bad seasons. His son Jack clashed with a local justice and was conscripted by a press-gang, a naval impressment squad. Edwards offered himself in Jack's place and was sent to India, where he witnessed the torture of an elderly prisoner and helped the man escape. Court-martialed and lashed for his act of mercy, Edwards was expelled from the regiment. The freed prisoner later found him, nursed him, and gave him money to return home. Harley vows to care for Edwards.

Near the village, they learn that Jack and his wife have both died, leaving two orphan grandchildren. Edwards faints at the news, then clutches the children in grief. Harley brings the family home. Mrs. Margery receives them warmly, and Harley installs Edwards on a small nearby farm, furnishing the house and helping plant a garden. Miss Walton visits the children and brings them new clothes. When Harley sees her there, he cannot speak a word.

Harley's quiet happiness is shattered by gossip that Sir Harry Benson will marry Miss Walton. The rumor proves false, but Harley still cannot declare his feelings. His health declines sharply after he contracts a fever while nursing Edwards, and a friend suggests to Mrs. Margery that Harley's hopeless love, compounded by the vast difference in their fortunes, is contributing to his decline.

On his deathbed, Harley speaks serenely of death, saying the world was always a scene of dissimulation for him. When Miss Walton visits, he summons his courage and confesses his love. She weeps openly and replies: "I know your worth—I have known it long—I have esteemed it—What would you have me say?—I have loved it as it deserved" (94). Harley seizes her hand. A faint color rises in his cheek; a smile brightens in his eye. Then his gaze dims, fixes, and closes. He sighs and falls back, dead. The shock of joy has killed him.

Old Edwards gazes wordlessly at his benefactor's body, attempts to leave three times, and each time returns to the bedside before finally flinging himself from the room. Harley is buried near his mother's grave beneath an old tree. The narrator continues to visit the spot, finding that it inspires noble feeling. He does not hate the world for Harley's sake; the gentleness of the place forbids hatred. But he pities the men of it.