Sympathy-Imitation-Metamorphosis : In Quest of Some Relations between the Theories of Sympathy and Those of Literary Creation from the Eighteenth-Century to the Early Nineteenth-Century in Great Britain

Abstract

Adam Smith says that when we sympathize with others, we exchange with them not only our "circumstances" but also our "persons and characters". Or, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sympathy contains the dynamic element of "mental metamorphosis". My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate how, in the eighteenth century, there existed a theory of literary creation to the effect that a dramatist or novelist writing in direct speech can be, for some moments, sympathetically identified with even an evil person, and make a speech in the character of that person. For example, Thomas Twining, whose fame as a translator and commentator on Aristotle reached Germany, drew on the theories of imitation developed by Plato and Aristotle to submit a theory of dramatic imitation involving the act of speaking or writing "in the character of another person." Somewhat later, William Hazlitt called attention to our unconscious act of speech in dreams, likening them to the art of the ventriloquist ; in other words, one who dreams is not aware that the others who speak to him are, in fact, but a metamorphosis of the dreamer. Using this analogy of "ventriloquism" occurring in dreams, Hazlitt tried to represent the power of a genius to metamorphosize himself involuntarily into another character.