Roughly two years ago to the month, I was sitting in my college room browsing a commentary on a play with the kind of wavering concentration devoted to an academic book you don’t strictly need to be reading. For picturesque sake, the court outside was filled with warm midday sunshine, which cast panes of colour through my open dormer window as I pored over this battered little book, a pocket second edition Indian red hardback, dust-jacket long gone, passed through decades of students, of E.R. Dodds’ landmark study of Euripides’ Bacchae. Amid the intriguing, slightly dated, observations about the play’s mixture of cult and myth, eyes flicking aside to count down the page numbers, a phrase stuck out.
“[Euripides’] concern in this and all his major plays is not to prove anything, but to enlarge our sensibility – which is, as Dr Johnson said, the proper concern of a poet” [1]
An arresting phrase, to be sure. A phrase which grabs the attention, as a phrase is wont to do which you suspect of confirming what you half believed already, granting the satisfaction of seeing it formulated anew, more fluently than you could conceive yourself. But can it claim, like many such arresting phrases when considered more closely, to mean anything much?
Putting aside the pithy caution about looking for what you want to find ‘proven’, what was this business about ‘enlarging sensibility’? For, like other deceptively commonplace words with an alluringly abstract air, such as love and culture and beauty, sensibility can mean an awful lot of things. At least six distinct meanings, according to the OED. Emerging first as a term describing a capacity to be received by the senses, then a human ability to respond to sensory stimuli, gradually the word became associated with emotion, feeling and mental rather than physical perception. By the eighteenth century it gained ground as a voguish concept to describe the Romantic quality of being readily and strongly affected by emotional or artistic influences and experiences, a reaction against the perceived insincerity of the prevailing cultural ideal of ‘politeness’. Yet by the century’s end, sensibility itself would fall foul of the same crusade against the superficial, becoming associated with narcissistic, affected sensitivity, or else put down as silly and excessive, most famously by Jane Austen.
Though perhaps never quite shaking off the shadow of this association with sentimentality, sensibility persisted for the Victorians as a positive moral quantity, a kind of intrinsic element of character belonging to the socially refined and cultivated person. Like its parent term ‘culture’, sensibility was something which the discriminating individual possessed: a synonym for taste suggesting sensitivity to aesthetic and moral experience. During the twentieth century, however, sensibility gradually lost this hierarchical sense, and came – often appearing in the plural – to describe the ways of seeing, feeling and organising sense perception into expressive forms relative to specific nations, classes, religions and artistic movements (the sensibility, for instance, ‘of rural England’). For modernists, everybody had sensibility(/ies), and differences were in kind rather than in quantity.
A notable idiosyncratic interpretation of the word in this vein was offered by T.S. Eliot in his conception of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’. According to Eliot, modern culture after the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century was marked by a fundamental and negative change. Pre-modern ‘sensibility’ entailed an integration of ideas and emotions, cognition and feeling, a structure of experience that involved ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought’. [2] But as the rational life of the scientist diverged from the expressive life of the artist, thence emerged a split between experience and perception, and a kind of self-alienation in which the unbridgeable gap between the intellect and the emotions was the modern condition.
Eliot’s notion of sensibility as a singular (now lost) entity diverged from the pluralist use of the word by later cultural historians and anthropologists, but the emphasis on coupling ideas and emotions would prevail. Though in academic contexts it would come to appear a little antiquated towards the end of the century in light of postmodern theory, sensibility remained an important analytical category that linked the formal, emotional and sensual elements of art. Popularly, it retains an impressive melange of associations, from insight to intuition to empathy.
But back to the quote from the commentary, or more properly the misquote, as apprehended by this piece’s title. For Samuel Johnson did not properly even say this. In his life of the playwright William Congreve, the lexicographer describes a reader of The Mourning Bride feeling ‘what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty’. [3]
Almost a bit like what I had felt, then, in a far less grandiloquent sense, upon reading Dodds. But why draw attention to the misquote? Firstly, by way of introducing a guiding thread for this blog, namely the layering of meaning that accrues around words, texts and objects – the rich biographies people create for things, ideas, places, their mnemonic weight, loaded with metaphors, claims and desires. Though Johnson is often thought of as a critic of sensibility as akin to selfish sentimentality, here his use carries more positive connotations of perception and understanding. And while Dodds’ observation is clearly underwritten by earlier senses of the word, his modernist version of the term describes a shared boon of artistic expression. Understanding the reworking enriches our own reading of the term and both writers.
Secondly – and perhaps more importantly – excavating this particular misquote lets us appreciate what I consider to be more profound point Dodds is making. For Dodds turns Johnson’s specific observation into an idea at once more general and forceful, broadening sensibility to become an imperative for poets, and rendering it a collective good. It is precisely the capacious semantics of sensibility – condensing perception, emotional states, collective or cultural orientation, moral presupposition, and matters of taste and style – that give the phrase its heft. Going beyond poetry, the resolve to ‘enlarge our sensibility’ becomes an assertion about what makes great art.
If uncovering layers of meaning in texts, places and art is to be the ‘thread’ of this blog, Dodds’ remark might humbly be taken as its litany and aim. This is sensibility understood as a willing susceptibility or a keen emotional awareness of how to picture and understand human situations. By sharing quotes and images and my own modest reflections, I am not, let it be noted, trying to ‘prove’ anything. Only let this effort serve as an entreaty to contemplate the world about us, human expression or otherwise, for its own sake.
[1] E.R. Dodds (1965) Bacchae. Second Edition.
[2] T. S. Eliot (1921) ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, published in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York, 1932), 241–250, quotation from p. 246.
[3] S. Johnson, ‘Congreve’, chap. 35, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, quoted in Rediscovering E. R. Dodds, ed. C. Stray et al. (Oxford, 2019), p. 141, n. 27.
Photo: The folds of Mt. Kithairon // The setting for Euripides’ spectacle of divine madness (image my own, 2014)
The Still Point 
A pleasure to read your essay. It made me think about whether cultivating sensibility can be said to progress through stages that, with some Eastern examples, act an attempt at belonging.
Instructive sensibility can resolve ambiguity or redefine the quotidian in terms of a belief system. For the former, think of the ways of seeing whereby subtle dissenting interpretations of historical events were encoded by Song painters in landscape paintings – particularly destitute refugees, or devastating floods were often comments on political incompetence. For the latter, Noh tradition lays a foreground of stereotypical narratives and symbolic gestures to reveal a background of Buddhist concepts.
But developing insight is not enough unless one expresses it and sustains the artistic community. Urban ‘Abbāsid poets like Abū Nuwās and al-Mutanabbī would travel to the desert to live with the Bedouin and improve their own Arabic. Thus initiated into folklore and the discursive style of earlier brigand (sa’alik) poets, they could further the courtly tradition with their own experiences even without committing to the peripatetic lifestyle. More directly, collaborative poetry, at least in the Japanese tradition of renga, and its popular later version renku, offered a setting for the pre-modern side of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ you discuss. It lost its appeal in the Meiji era, as it was naturally counter to self-alienation. It also did not fit within the Western ‘sensibility’ of individual creation that the Japanese were trying to adopt, and which was, in itself, an exercise in belonging.
Referring back to Dodd’s quote it could be argued (although with better examples than my lay reading could provide) that even if the poet intends to prove something, the active process by which individuals engage with that ‘familiar image’ and by reflect it into their community ‘meets it again amplified and expanded’.
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