A Film Canon

One of the clearest bridges between 'sensibility' and romanticism, The Man Of Feeling is effectively a series of voyeuristic, sentimental tableaux; a proudly anti-intellectual appeal to the erotic frisson of tears. Not only is the first conversation about political machination disrupted by an appeal to sentiment, and Bedlam - the quintessential eighteenth century voyeuristic space - figured as the logical conclusion of academic, scientific, economic and political discourse, but the one sustained account of government is immediately fragmented, part elided, part attributed to a subsequent redactor of the work. This makes Mackenzie's nebulous appeals to 'equality' somewhat halfhearted, but does gesture towards the novel's more enduring affective kernel; namely, its melancholy prescience of the disposability and mortality of the printed word itself. Opening with the discovery of the work proper in a romantic ruin, and marked attention to its decaying incompletion ("no more a history than it is a sermon"), Mackenzie uses what little narrative remains as the mere pretext for a series of transitory written and verbal gestures. These correspond to the unnamed protagonist's retreat to the country, culminating with the doggerel that he finds scrawled on the walls and furniture of an old inn and, finally, the pastoral poetic fragment that he finds carelessly attached to a rustic domestic implement, and which, written at nature's command, and quoted in its entirety, could be taken as a rough prototype for the whole romantic school: "As I talk I have seen her recline/With an aspect so pensively sweet/Tho' I spoke what the shepherds opine/A fop were ashamed to repeat."