Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850 9780812299564

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Resounding the Sublime

SOUND IN HISTORY Emma Dillon, Series Editor

RESOUNDING THE SUBLIME Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850

Miranda Eva Stanyon

un iver sit y of pen nsy lvan i a press phil adelphi a

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-5308-5

For Matthew

contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Note on Translations and References

xi

Introduction

1

PART I. HE R AIS’D A MORTAL TO THE SKIES; SHE DREW AN ANGEL DOWN: EN GLISH LIT ER ATURE, CIRCA 1670–1760

Chapter 1. Music as a “Bastard Imitation of Persuasion”? Power and Legitimacy in Dryden and Dennis

23

Chapter 2. “What Passion Cannot Musick Raise and Quell!” Passionate and Dispassionate Sublimity with the Hillarians and Handelians

52

PART II. HISSING SNAKES AND ANGELIC HOSTS: GERMAN LIT ER ATURE, CIRCA 1720–1770

Chapter 3. Reforming Aesthetics: Bodmer and Breitinger’s Anti-Musical Sublime

83

Chapter 4. Klopstock, Rustling, and the Antiphonal Sublime

111

PART III. SUBLIME BEAUTY AND THE WR ATH OF THE ORGAN: EN GLISH AND GERMAN LIT ER ATURE, CIRCA 1770–1850

Chapter 5. The Beauty of the Infinite: Herder’s Sublimely-Beautiful, Beautifully-Sublime Music

141

viii

Co n t en ts

Chapter 6. The Terror of the Infinite: Thomas De Quincey’s Reverberations

171

Conclusion

198

Notes

209

Bibliography

235

Index

263

Acknowledgments

273

a b b r e v i at i o n s

Advancement

Dennis, John. The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry. London, 1701.

Critische Briefe

Bodmer, Johann Jacob. Critische Briefe. Zurich: Heidegger, 1746.

Dichtkunst

Breitinger, Johann Jacob. Critische Dichtkunst. 2 vols. Zurich: Orell, 1740.

DNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

DQW

De Quincey, Thomas. The Works of Thomas De Quincey. Ed. Grevel Lindop et al. 21 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–2003.

DVjs

Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte

ELH

English Literary History

Grimm

Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 vols. in 32 parts. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1961.

Grounds

Dennis, John. The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry. London, 1704.

Grove

Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, 2007–2020.

HFA

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Werke in zehn Bänden. Ed. Günter Arnold et al. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker, 1985–2000.

x

a b b r ev i at i on s

HKA

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb. Werke und Briefe: Historischkritische Ausgabe. Ed. Elisabeth Höpker-Herberg et  al. 40 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974–2010 (Hamburger KlopstockAusgabe).

Kant AA

Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 29 vols. Berlin: Reimer/De Gruyter, 1900– (Akademie-Ausgabe).

KU

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. In Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. Ed. Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Reimer, 1973.

MGG

Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 2nd ed. Ed. Ludwig Finscher. 20 vols. in 2 parts. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994–2008.

OED

Oxford English Dictionary online. Oxford University Press, September 2013.

PE

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. 2nd ed. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759.

SEL

Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

SiR

Studies in Romanticism

Spectator

Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. The Spectator. Ed. Donald Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

ZBZ

Zentralbibliothek Zürich

n o t e o n t r a n s l at i o n s a n d references

Unless other wise noted, translations are my own. The original text is given alongside translations only where particularly relevant. For ease of reference to some poems, references are given to line numbers within each stanza; for example, “s.ix.3” is line three of stanza nine. Translations of Peri hypsous, unless noted, are from Arieti and Crossett’s edition.

Introduction

Once again, arose the swell of the anthem—the burst of the Hallelujah chorus—the storm—the trampling movement of the choral passion—the agitation of my own trembling sympathy—the tumult of the choir—the wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds. —Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de profundis (1845) The flute . . . seems to carry them away and fill them with divine frenzy. . . . Why, the very tones of the harp, themselves meaningless, by the variety of their sounds and by their combination and harmonious blending often exercise, as you know, a marvellous spell. (Yet these are only a bastard counterfeit of persuasion, not . . . a genuine activity of human nature.) —Longinus, Peri hypsous (first century C.E.)

In the later seventeenth century, a new translation of Pseudo-Longinus’s firstcentury treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) by Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711) revitalized interest in the sublime.1 Discussed in hundreds of essays and treatises, and driving innumerable scenes of astonishment, transport, and elevation across media and genres, the sublime became the central category of aesthetic innovation in the long eighteenth century—the period that witnessed the development of aesthetics itself as an explicitly defined domain. A response of pleasure springing from extremity and excess, the sublime was not just about art but about how we make sense of the world, and how we negotiate the limits of our knowledge and powers.2 But what does the sublime sound like? Is it the lush and giddy dissonances of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde? The “masses of harmony”

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in Handel’s Messiah? Does the sublime sound like the roaring of a train— perhaps the blurry mass of iron in Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed? The deep rushing voice of the Greek poet Pindar, evoked centuries after his death by Horace? Or is it like the silent stones under the feet of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist? The answer traced in this book is that dissonant, harmonious, discordantly concordant, noisy, and silent sublimes all played their parts in the varied discourse of the sublime. Music has typically been regarded as marginal to the sublime’s history, or a latecomer to a literary and philosophical feast. This book shows how integral music was to forming and transforming the sublime on its home turf, in rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. Focusing on English and German texts and the intricate relationships between them, I seek to reread—or, perhaps better, re-sound—sublimity through the lens of music, from the sublime’s rise to prominence in the later seventeenth century, through the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century and their reverberations in the nineteenth century. Closely reading a series of canonical and little-known literary and critical texts in dialogue with musical cultures, the book offers new perspectives on the sublime as a transdisciplinary, transmedial, and transcultural phenomenon. In doing so, it argues for the importance of sonic models to the sublime; it traces harmonious, discordant, and resolutely silent varieties of sublimity; and it suggests resonances between past sublimes and current aesthetics and ethics. My account is based on a particular understanding of the chronology of the musical sublime, and its disciplinary and medial situations. Music did not enter the sublime with Haydn, Beethoven, or even Handel. Instead, seventeenthcentury writers always already considered music in formulating their reemergent Longinian sublime. We also misunderstand the history of the sublime if we approach it from within narrow disciplinary boundaries: the sublime did not emerge as a rhetorical-philosophical discourse and then jump like a supervirus from one species (literature) to another (music). This means questioning the assumption that the musical sublime came into its own when a bond between music and rhetoric waned toward the end of the eighteenth century, and “autonomous” instrumental music came to the fore, or “music itself ” broke free of the shackles of language.3 To question this view of music also means challenging still-common ideas of the sublime as essentially inimical to representation and resemblance. Ironically, music, the art modernity supposes most remote from representation, and the sublime, an aesthetic now associated with unrepresentability, repeatedly joined forces in early modern literature to create

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hyperrepresentations, so vivid that they overwhelmed the boundaries between the senses. This sublime transported its recipients over sensory and medial thresholds. Yet music and the sublime have not always spoken with one voice: music sits in a generative tension with the sublime in many of its foundational texts. From Longinus to Boileau, Dryden, and Dennis, through Bodmer and Breitinger, to Burke, Herder, and Kant, music has epitomized the sublime, and been a thorn in its side. Longinus uses the flute and lyre to evoke the overpowering effects of the fifth source of the sublime—arrangement or composition—before turning on music’s “images and bastard imitations of persuasion” and excluding it from the sublime.4 But is Longinus not begging the question, since his sublime itself oversteps persuasion? “For,” the opening of his treatise famously claims, “our persuasions are usually under our own control, while these [sublime] things exercise an irresistible power and mastery, and get the better of every listener.”5 The critic and dramatist John Dennis (1658–1734), an early champion of the Longinian sublime in Britain, similarly forms his sublime by both including and excluding music. The sublime Alps make “such a Consort up for the Eye, as that sort of Musick does for the Ear, in which Horrour can be joyn’d with Harmony.”6 But when he defines poetry, Dennis rejects the common notion that “Harmony” or the “Musick” of numbers is essential to poetic excellence: “Passion,” not musical arrangement of sound, generates sublimity, and makes even inharmonious language poetic.7 Although Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) barely classifies music as a fine art, he nonetheless names the oratorio as one of three possible “presentations” of the sublime in the beaux arts.8 And when he describes the psychological operation of the sublime as an Erschütterung (shock, agitation, shattering, related to schüttern, to vibrate or tremble), “a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction of one and the same object,” he evokes terms from nerve theory themselves developed through images of vibrating strings.9 The antagonistic intimacy between music and the sublime rests on conventional if contradictory understandings of music in the classical and European traditions.10 Music has been something like an essentially contested concept: the most and least sensuous art, trivial tinkling, or the music of the spheres.11 It can raise or purge the passions; model harmonious order or create uncontainable tumult; be the mate or nemesis of language and logos; offer a pure play of form or the unmediated content of feeling. Transient, intangible, and invisible, defined by Augustine as a “science of good measuring” rather than an object, music often seemed to lack a fixed essence.12 In early modern Europe, its supposed

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lack of solid essence could associate music with fleshly transience and diversion (as in vanitas iconography), or with the fleeting inspirations of a higher order. Interest in music as underdetermined continues all the way through nineteenthcentury ideals of incorporeal, infinite music into postmodern celebrations of sound as materialist—yet itself immaterial—vibration.13 Scholarship has often portrayed music or the sublime as undermining imitative and representational paradigms in the long eighteenth century, accompanying new ways of thinking about what art and human creativity were all about.14 This book investigates the combined workings of music and the sublime, but it also complicates more traditional accounts of aesthetics. Music in classical thought often functioned as a mediator between higher and lower orders—following the canonical account by the Christian Neoplatonist Boethius, its ratios and correspondences connected the disparate spheres of sound, humans, society, cosmos. This apparently static cosmic framework in fact lent music to a Longinian-Boileauian sublime foregrounding energetic transmissions of power and elevation, a dynamism core to the modern aesthetic of the sublime. We often imagine the sublime as shadowy, infinite, immeasurable, and unrepresentable. Yet musical sublimes did not emerge at the expense of music’s strong connection with ratio, measure, resemblance, and, by extension, representation. These connections persisted even as theories of cosmic order governed by the music of the spheres were put under severe pressure by heliocentrism, by growing belief in an indefinitely or infinitely large and complex cosmos, and by discomfort with analogical thinking.15 And they persisted even though eighteenth-century discourses on the imagination and beaux arts, where they sought to unify their object under the rubric of imitation or representation, often had little time for music or puzzled over how and what it represented.16 A tenacious thread linked music and harmony with resemblance and mimesis into the late eighteenth century, and a similarly tenacious thread linked resemblance and mimesis with sublimity—through figures of harmony and music—well into the nineteenth century, where we might expect imitation to be eclipsed by principles of expression, organicism, or autonomy. The sublime crossed many forms of cultural production and inquiry. Nonetheless, its center for early moderns was Longinus’s rhetorical treatise on supremely effective verbal composition. The rhetorical tradition broadly conceived was the heartland of the sublime. This made music particularly important because it was not easily separable from those qualities that made language sublime in the first place. Classical rhetoric and poetics closely aligned language and music. Summarizing earlier opinions, Quintilian noted that early poetry

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was sung; that music education was preparation for rhetorical training; that some authorities ranked music above poetry; and that music and literature were once united arts.17 (Early modern education drew music and language still closer together, moving music from the medieval quadrivium of mathematical arts to the linguistic trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.) In this tradition, the music of language could, on one hand, indicate formal harmony, or the ordering of sounds and ideas, including the harmonizing of sound with sense that was held to intensify language’s ability to transport meaning and to transport listeners. On the other hand, music could indicate language’s sounding, material qualities, along with their sometimes overwhelming effects on embodied listeners. From this perspective, the problem of music was internal to Longinus’s sublime, and it has helped to crystallize debates about the nature of sublimity ever since: debates over form and formlessness; reason and matter; order and chaos; passion and tranquillity; infinity and limitation; transmission and transgression; power and violence. To take a key example, we can interpret John Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Musique (1697) as celebrating music’s irresistible power or castigating the too easily moved listener, depending on how we value powers— like the sublime or music—that seem to exceed reason, transporting us above normal human limits and leading us to transgress normal standards of morality. Does a true sublime always ultimately involve reflection and reason? If so, in Dryden’s narrative perhaps only Timotheus, the musician who manipulates Alexander the Great’s passions, qualifies as sublime. Or does the sublime gain its very legitimacy by violently surpassing reflection—since the sublime “does not properly persuade” but bestows “a certain noble vigour, an invincible force which carries away the soul of anyone who hears us”?18 These alternatives both assume that music transgresses limits and affects the listener’s body and passions at the expense of reason. What, then, should we make of the way writers such as the critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1704–1803) and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) couple sublime music with limits, order, and reflection? Evidently, the antagonistic intimacy between music and the sublime has been enduringly important to literature, but in very different ways. By engaging with interlocking networks of writers who illuminate the musical sublime in literary culture, this book draws out the particular and divergent uses to which musical sublimes were put. Odes like Alexander’s Feast—which both represents music and was destined to be heard as music—sit alongside theories of the sublime that stumble across music as metaphor or as practice, and reflections on music that less explicitly activate the sublime—like Herder’s insistence that the

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psalms gain irresistible power from their musicality, “carry[ing] jubilation and sound with them in all their limbs.”19 Writers’ interactions with musicians and music sit alongside theorists’ approaches to problems like musical representation, poets’ deployments of concepts like harmony and dissonance, or of literary topoi about the legendary violence and immediacy of music, and alongside literary engagements with experiments on sonic phenomena like vibration, resonance, and reverberation. All of these literary and critical texts belong, on my reading, to what is sometimes called “musicking”: the social and cultural “activity that is called music.”20 This is because media exist relationally, as “recurring effects of intermedial forces” and historically specific “configurations” of sounding and nonsounding phenomena.21 This is as true for literature as it is for music. Music not only shaped critical reflection on literature and the making of literary texts, it indeed helped to establish “literature” itself—an institution whose modern contours emerged during the eighteenth century. The development of literature is indexed by vogues for criticism (encountered in this book with Dennis, Pope, Bodmer, Breitinger, and Herder, but also with the music criticism of Avison), by the establishment from the 1760s–70s of philology in German universities, and of the first chair in rhetoric and belles lettres in Britain (occupied by Hugh Blair, chief eulogist for the bard Ossian), by new reading practices (pedagogical, affective, and imaginative), by changing divisions between nonimaginative and imaginative literatures (De Quincey will term the latter “literature of power”), and not least by growing literacy and print markets, accompanied by nostalgia for supposedly lost oral immediacy and crazes for “primitive” song, ballads, and improvisation.22 As a result, music relates to literature in very varied senses in this book, and I avoid treating some texts as belonging to music proper and others to mere commentary on music. Variety and specificity are thus keynotes of the book.23 But there are patterns within this variety. A first critical intervention is to argue that music brings into focus three broad conceptualizations of sublimity: as predominantly discordant; as harmonious; or as a complex concordia discors (concord of discords).24 A second key argument is that music plays various roles within the characteristic narrative of the sublime. It can act as: 1. a site where the sublime is represented or dramatized, as in an opera whose characters are overwhelmed by a sublime revolution, flood, or volcano, or a symphony evoking a passage from astonishment, fear, and violence, to final elevation or joy;

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2. the overpowering sublime object itself, the occasion for an experience of the sublime by a listening or performing subject (either because of the music’s formal qualities, processed by the mind, or its effects on the body); 3. that which is sublimed, the lowly or abject agent that undergoes a strange elevation, for instance, through music’s contact with the loftier power of language; 4. a boundary of the sublime, separating true from false sublimity; 5. a model or explanation for the workings of the sublime, where music figures some defining characteristic of sublimity, be that harmony, passion, or penetrating oscillations passing through the nerves as through vibrating strings. These roles overlap and are not exhaustive. But articulating them draws attention to the fact that studies to date largely treat music as a site of the sublime (1), albeit generally on the understanding that music dramatizing the sublime was intended to induce listeners to experience sublimity (2). Such dramatizations of the sublime within compositions are more peripheral to this book. My focus on other deployments of music reveals a variety of broad historical patterns and transformations. One is that over the course of the eighteenth century music increasingly forms the occasion for the sublime (2), through its overpowering physiological or emotional effects (a power to move body and psyche), its cognitive effect (a capacity to formally model infinitude or other wise arouse reflective astonishment), or its power to trigger sublime memories and associations. Conversely, music becomes less likely to need subliming (3) or to form a boundary policing the sublime (4), as it had for Longinus. Critics more often position language as aspiring to music’s sublimity than imagine a verbal sublime triumphing over mere music, or a poetic sublime jeapordized by musical qualities within language. Music thus helps to constitute oratorical, poetic, and literary power in different ways over time and between cultures and situations. Yet the boundary-policing function of music found in many accounts, from Longinus, to Dennis, to Bodmer and Breitinger, remains crucial to understanding the sublime. Music is not unimportant in such accounts because it is excluded from sublimity proper, anymore than madness is unimportant to sanity, conceptually or socially. Music here might be said to form “a constitutive or relative outside,” part of “a set of exclusions that are nevertheless internal to that system.”25 The sublime has long been ubiquitous in literary studies. But while musicological interest has grown in recent decades, Resounding the Sublime is one of

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the first monographs dedicated to the musical sublime, and the first devoted to the musical sublime in literature. Sustained attention to the topic beyond musicology is rare, and case studies often treat Romantic and nineteenth-century literature.26 Musicologists have focused on particular composers, compositions, or trends in musical listening and criticism.27 While in-depth studies are eagerly awaited from Keith Chapin (on eighteenth-century German music) and Sarah Hibberd (on French Revolution-era opera), Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s theoretically oriented Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (on which more soon) remains the only major monograph devoted to the topic since the Wagnerian Arthur Seidl’s dissertation, “Vom MusikalischErhabenen. Ein Beitrag zur Æsthetik der Tonkunst” (Of the Musically Sublime: A Contribution to the Aesthetics of Music [Ph.D., Regensburg, 1887; Leipzig, 1907]).28 What explains this relative scarcity? The reasons are complex but partly explained by debates over ideology and method rooted in disciplinary history. In the 1980s, the West German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus drew attention to the musical sublime in two studies of Beethoven, E.  T.  A. Hoffmann, and contemporary comparisons between the symphony and the Pindaric ode.29 These, however, were overshadowed by Dahlhaus’s immensely influential 1978 monograph, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (The Idea of Absolute Music), which subsumed musical sublimity to so-called absolute music (roughly, both “nothing but music” and music evoking the idealist Absolute).30 Absolute music powerfully linked music theory and practice, especially the rise in status of instrumental music, with German idealism and nonrepresentational trends in aesthetics. Musicological enthusiasm for the sublime as an independent subject has waxed especially as enthusiasm for absolute music has waned. Dahlhaus’s term was identified as anachronistic and romanticizing, an unsavory relic of his attempts to divorce music from Marxist-influenced social and material history in Cold War Berlin.31 Concerted musicological work on the sublime consequently began several decades after the sublime flourished in critical theory and literary studies. The sublime perhaps offered an appealingly historically grounded and apparently critically progressive alternative to absolute music—although a taint of aesthetic elitism and spiritualizing romanticism persisted, not least given Adorno’s diagnosis that the sublime was a defunct aesthetic expressing the Kantian-bourgeois subject’s grandiose elevation of its autonomous spirit above nature.32 Related to this historiography is a methodological problem. The belated attention to the sublime in twentieth-century musicology sometimes seems to be

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projected onto the development of the musical sublime itself. That is, early modern music is represented as receiving the sublime as a hand-me-down from literature and philosophy. This has some plausibility. For Longinus, the sublime happened in verbal composition. The eighteenth-century fascination with the sublime accordingly is assumed to begin in literature and related philosophical and critical writings. Sublimity was then recruited as an already well-formed youth into the ser vices of music. Thus Claudia Johnson influentially claimed that “the very notion of the musical sublime emerges for the first time” in midcentury criticism on Handel, which “adapts truisms about the sublime in literature for the first time to an exclusively musical context.”33 Johnson’s landmark article set the Handel debate and its apparent debt to a purely literary sublime in the broader context of music’s rise in status, its recognition as a genuine art: “Eighteenth-century British music critics appropriate the sublime in literature . . . to dignify music itself as a medium for original genius.”34 This account, however, downplays the history of the religious sublime, which often braided together music and exultation, spiritual elevation or enthusiasm. It further suggests a sharp division between music and other pursuits, and consequently between musical and nonmusical disciplines, overlooking the role of music in texts not “exclusively musical.” Reconsidering criticism on the sublime, and literature taken to exemplify the sublime, uncovers a more integral role for music. Eighteenth-century writers, moreover, frequently noted that music’s borders were fluid: Greek “music,” as the critic Aaron Hill reminded his readers, also included words, dance, and acting.35 The close connection between mousikê and education helped key music into broader desires for national cultivation and reform in a polite (Whig) sublime, desires also coupled with the sublime in German-speaking lands with their reform discourses. Disciplinary boundaries have fragmented approaches in other ways, too. Passing over Johnson’s arguments about eighteenth-century Britain, published in a largely literary-historical journal, the musicologist James Webster could argue vis-à-vis Germany that the “musical sublime . . . developed in the period bounded roughly by the mid-1790s and the death of Beethoven.”36 These parameters suggest a reading of the sublime with Kant as its telos. For Webster, “eighteenth-century aestheticians,” stymied by mimetic theory, “were no more capable than philosophers of imagining a genuine musical sublime; they remained wedded to the rhetorical concept of the sublime.”37 Like Johnson, Webster suggests a well-developed literary-philosophical theory belatedly entering music, this time through the Kantian C. F. Michaelis.38 Changes in ideas about imitation and expression around 1800 certainly affected both music and the

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sublime, making the two close allies in post-Kantian thought. But if we took Webster at his word, ultimately no one could have imagined any kind of genuine sublime before Kant: the sublime in the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries was an illusion; the true sublime was invented by the sage of Königsberg. Similar issues are vividly illustrated by Wye Allanbrook’s “Is the Sublime a Musical Topos?” (2010).39 Too closely identifying the sublime with the Kantian sublime, Allanbrook concluded that even explicit references to the sublime in music writing before Kant were references to nothing much at all (sublimity merely meant loftiness, ceremony, seriousness). The musical sublime, if it existed, was a nineteenth-century phenomenon: “Truth be told,” she confides, all “these efforts to back the sublime into the late eighteenth century make me a little queasy. There isn’t all that much evidence for the musical sublime in this period.” 40 However, as Allanbrook almost concedes when she paraphrases Kant, “the musical sublime exists . . . in the mind of the beholder,” and eighteenth-century beholders and behearers clearly found music sublime.41 Composers like Purcell, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, and C. P. E. Bach, ancient and modern bards, Davidic prophets, and Pindaric lyricists, even acoustic phenomena that tested the boundaries between music, sound, and noise—bagpipes, bells in the night, rushing wind—all could be sublime. The sublime here is not cordoned off from greatness of soul or high solemnity—indeed, Kant continues to blend these kinds of loftiness with his transcendental subjectivized sublime— but this “impurity” is no reason to doubt its existence.42 James Beattie indicates the range of the eighteenth-century sublime when he writes in 1783: “Music is sublime, when it inspires devotion, courage, or other elevated affections: or when by its mellow and sonorous harmonies it overwhelms the mind with sweet astonishment: or when it infuses that pleasing horror aforementioned which, when joined to words descriptive of terrible ideas, it sometimes does very effectually.” 43 Characteristic here is Beattie’s composite interest in the affective and ethical effects of art; in passive, suspended rapture (astonishment) as well as object- and action-directed responses (like courage); in sweetness and horror; and in music as both an independent play of sounds and an element in a composite verbal art. Beattie’s suggestion that it is words which lend music the specificity of “ideas” and enable feelings of “horror” does not inauthenticate this account of music as sublime but rather reminds us that the sublime is always situated in complex, changing skeins of meaning. Recognizing this kind of conceptual messiness, Brillenburg Wurth took quite a different tack to that of many musicologists. Her study offered a critical

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theory of the “musically sublime” as a modality of this aesthetic, distinct from perceptions of music as sublime. It sought through dialogue with, especially, Lyotard’s postmodern sublime and through readings of her own listening experiences to “critical[ly] rewrite” the categories of the Kantian sublime “as specifically musical experiences.” 44 The historical narrative provided by Brillenburg Wurth begins in the late eighteenth century, when instrumental music, construed as an “empty sign,” became a symbol and bearer of sublime “in-definity (indeterminacy and infinity).” 45 For her, instrumental music’s inability to resolve into referential meaning, representation, and closure grounds a nascent or fragmentary counter-sublime that opposes the stable narrative of the “legitimate sublime” and that thrives in postmodernity. While the legitimate sublime follows a passage from confusion to mastery, fear to pleasure, “heterogeneity” to “homogeneity,” the counter-sublime is “aporetic,” mingling pleasure and pain, mastery and subjection in an experience that refuses “closure” and “transcendence.” 46 Something “specifically musically sublime” emerges in full only with Wagner.47 While benefiting greatly from Brillenburg Wurth’s approach, the present book offers a significantly different genealogy, conceptualization, and method. Music’s alignment with an aporetic sublime is persuasive, especially for the nineteenth century, but ultimately too partial, resting on post-Romantic assumptions about music.48 Music frequently embodied resolution, order, and harmony, not “irresolvability.” Moreover, a “legitimate sublime” is not so easily separated from the counter-sublime: simultaneous experiences of pleasure and pain, and elements of irresolution, unmasterable excess, and aporia, mark canonical treatments of sublimity.49 Finally, the issue of transcendence deserves revisiting. Transcendence has been a fraught concept since the Enlightenment, falling under suspicion along with enthusiasm and mysticism as an appeal to unmediated knowledge and experience that transgresses the individual subject’s proper authority and limits. A strong part of the sublime’s appeal is that it can help carve out alternatives to such forms of transgression and supposed escapism, not in spite of but through its thematizing of the liminal and transgressive.50 Yet instrumental music does not necessarily defy transcendence while texted music promotes it. Lacking concrete and humanly conceived referents, instrumental music could be particularly open to the charge of offering listeners delusions of transcendence. As the foregoing suggests, critics have often responded to the untidy history and elusive content of the musical sublime with somewhat misleading intellectual clarity. This response belongs to an age-old game in theorizing

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sublimity, one difficult to avoid: distinguishing true from false sublimes, policing the boundaries of a phenomenon itself characterized by testing limits. The difficulty began with Longinus. His fragmentary treatise opens without defining sublimity, and its very title may be an accident of scribal history rather than the author’s designation of his topic.51 Longinus himself set the true sublime against bombast and Corybantic intoxication (both figured by music). Boileau scorned those who searched for the sublime in the sublime—who looked for the real sublime in the rhetorical genre of the high style (stile sublime).52 Of course, thinking involves abstraction, but this need not mean reducing the sublime to a singular concept or searching for a pure, unambiguous essence—the sort of “virgin form of radiant white,” “disclose[d]” by “Celestial clouds,” that John Townshend uncovered in his Ode to Music (1791).53 In this book, then, the sublime is approached as a variegated discourse, enmeshed with understandings of sublimity that precede Boileau’s translation, mingling with and defined against objects ranging from ecstasy, enthusiasm, and transcendence to epic greatness, encomium, and satire. Equally, the musical sublime is not aligned with dissonance or harmony, irresolvability or resolution, order or passion, rhetoric or idealist autonomy. It is better imagined as a discursive field where various configurations of harmony and dissonance were cultivated or as an instrument that can be tuned to different temperaments, played in many keys and modes, calling up a plethora of melodies and harmonies, and employed by wildly different collaborators in churches, drawing rooms, opera houses, and installations. By the term “discourse” I hope to indicate the level at which the diverse and sometimes internally riven texts analyzed here can be taken as a single object: not the level of a concept, program, well-defined body of writings, or a set of composers or musical features. This object, very roughly, comprises utterances that employ music in imagining the sublime, and vice versa. “Utterances” include singing, composing, and playing, although I focus on writings normally considered literary and theoretical. Peter de Bolla’s Discourse of the Sublime (1989) has sharpened many readers’ awareness of the difficulties and appeal of such an approach. According to de Bolla, the modern rhetoric of the sublime typically positions sublimity as exceeding definition, categorization, rule, or articulation. The commonsense distinction between a discourse and its object becomes difficult here: talk about the sublime often seems to itself become sublime or produce sublimity. Talk poses as a selflegislating specimen of itself.54 The sublime in this regard exacerbates something core to discourses more generally. They are less inert bodies of claims about external objects than ways of dividing up and articulating experience,

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and so creating those objects—pragmatic ways of acting in the world, interacting with others, and exerting power. Alongside landmark literary studies such as de Bolla’s, this book is indebted to the growing revisionist scholarship on varieties of sublimity before Kant, Burke, Boileau, and even Longinus, and on the sublime as a pre- or transdisciplinary, multisensory category.55 It is equally indebted to sound studies, an interdisciplinary field that offers new ways to conceptualize the porous boundaries between the senses and the arts, and between what is sometimes separated into “practice” and “theory,” actual music and discourse about it. Perhaps surprisingly, while writers from many disciplines established sound studies, music’s place in the field is not straightforward. Sound is not infrequently positioned as a corrective to music, itself seen as a “subset of sounds” overpriveleged and naturalized by traditional, elitist, specialized, Western-centric scholarship.56 This book hopes to contribute to more fruitful integrations of the study of music, literature, and sound. A particularly important reference point for me is Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance (2010), which mapped connections between hearing and reason from Descartes into the twentieth century. This was a period shaped by a “resonance paradigm,” according to which sound’s production and transmission, its reception and processing by the ear, nerves, and brain, were all pervasively structured by resonance, a mirroring of vibrations or oscillations passing from medium to medium. The notion of repetition has special traction in Resounding the Sublime, where music is recurrently connected with structures of mirroring or doubling—whether these structures relate to political and artistic questions about how elevating power is legitimately transmitted and replicated, or to forms such as Pindaric odes, antiphony, psalmody, and operatic repertoires, or to concepts such as Longinus’s sublime “turn,” mimetic self-referentiality, and the poetic trope of sound echoing sense. Resounding in my title thus has interlocking meanings. When we re-sound the literary history of the sublime, I argue, we find a phenomenon always already resonant—already existing in and in relation to sound, and already connected with sonic models of transmission. More broadly, my book responds to the rethinking of music within the sonic turn in the humanities. A current shorthand definition of music as “ordered sound” immediately suggests, on one hand, music’s blurred boundaries with speech and, on the other, the potential problem of looking at the sublime— insofar as it is triggered by formlessness and chaos—through an art form so intimately concerned with order and harmony. Yet harmony is a capacious concept, sometimes imagined to combine concord and discord, and so to contain or

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depend on disorder. Discord itself covered uncertain territory in the long eighteenth century: intervals of fourths were generally not considered discordant, as in medieval music theory, but older treatises in circulation still held that sevenths should be shunned, although they were essential to seventeenth-century harmonic language. At the other extreme, any note construable or meaningful within a composition’s harmonic progression might be described as harmonious.57 Only unintegrable noise would be discordant under such a definition. Noise, of course, is also polyvalent. A broad acoustic definition is “the ultimate limit case of an inharmonic sound, in that it has no discernible pitch or pattern.”58 Yet this clearly excludes many pitched and repetitive sounds commonly identified as noise (we don’t usually talk about the music of a scream or car alarm). Acousticians themselves stress that “noise can play a crucial part in characterizing a musical sound,” as in “the breathy attack of a note on the flute.”59 Noise is a political and social category as much as an acoustic one, leading to its alignment with resistance, antitraditionalism, and modernity. So for Jacques Attali noise was the sound of the new, that which is not yet discernible through existing orders and not yet naturalized as harmony (positioned as always a delusive, oppressive sociopolitical construct).60 More broadly, scholars have taken up productive definitions of noise as “unwanted sound” or “sound out of place,” the latter phrase borrowed from anthropologist Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as “matter out of place.” 61 Still, even the best anthropological or culturalhistorical catchphrases exclude intentionally produced or consumed noise like rough music, carnivals, and tantrums.62 The explicit incorporation of “noise” (not to mention silence) into modern compositions stretches the definition still further: this is sound out of place in place. Sitting at the boundary between order and noise, the music of war (clangorous trumpets, drums, bagpipes)—and at a further remove the “music” of roaring cataracts or rushing winds—represent earlier intersections between noise and the musical sublime. Granted a broad understanding of music co-defined by language, discord, and noise, music becomes an ideal lens for a history of the sublime, not as excessive or formless per se, but as a site of long-term debates about the limits and value of order, harmony, and perfection. My approach here aims to avoid some of the deepest pitfalls of projecting present understandings of music and the sublime onto the eighteenth century. I was nonetheless first drawn to this project by distinctly late twentieth-century concerns. In some ways, Richard Taruskin was right to suggest that the “history of music in the nineteenth century could be written in terms of the encroachment of the sublime upon the domain of the beautiful.” 63 As a student of

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German literature as well as music, I inherited strong misgivings about the Romantic musical culture Taruskin is talking about, and more broadly the kinds of music we might instinctively map onto the sublime today: on one hand, the monumental, lush violence of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1865); on the other, atonal instrumental music that “emancipates” itself, not only from the prison house of language, but also from tonality as a naturalized language of feeling. Such music has been shaped by the discourse of the sublime, which, along with yearnings for geniuses and ineffably intuitive judgments, continues to color aspects of music education, performance, and listening. To understand and perhaps change this culture, it helps to articulate and follow through its assumptions, to know its prehistory. This is part of the context to which this book hopes, indirectly, to speak. The narrative that ties Beethoven (the occasion for Taruskin’s comment) to Wagner’s chromaticism, and thence to Schoenberg’s atonalism, is a powerful but contentious one connecting music, the sublime, and politics, a narrative rehearsed vividly in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947) and still current.64 Very briefly, this narrative parallels the emancipation of music and its human makers from arbitrary cultural constraints, with the decay of inherited harmony, and the rise of sublime, fascist genius-dictators.65 Nazi arts policy and aesthetics were indeed grounded in appeals to the sublime, as others have shown. Hitler infamously insisted that “art is a sublime mission that carries an obligation to fanaticism.” 66 Anxieties about the musical sublime represent an extreme case of wider arguments about the path from the long eighteenth century to German fascism. The problem may be identified with hubristic Enlightenment reason, as in Adorno and Horkheimer’s portrait of “the fully enlightened earth radiat[ing] disaster triumphant,” or with the supposed transgressive irrationalism of Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment, as in Isaiah Berlin’s verdict that “although it may be thought that some” Romantics “went too far and wildly overshot every possible mark, yet the world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed terrifying, not to say dramatic, change in men’s outlook in modern times.” 67 In either case, the long eighteenth century bears the brunt of critique. An important part of evaluating such accounts is to better understand the range of the discourse of the sublime, in the period when things are supposed to have gone so right for music, and (eventually) so very wrong for the world. This task is a rich one, since, pace Taruskin, the sublime’s “encroachment” on the beautiful in music was firmly established in the eighteenth century. Even as the sublime and the beautiful were being dichotomized—and thus became

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capable of encroaching on each other’s territories—they also began to jostle with each other for attention and respect within music. Addison’s early eighteenth-century version of the sublime, the great, was compatible with the beautiful and coexisted with a third category, the novel.68 The subsequent canonization of the sublime and beautiful as aesthetic’s yin and yang, typified by Burke’s mid-century treatise, later allowed their reintegration into complementary or dialectical economies by writers like Schiller, Herder, Mörike, Nietzsche, and Wagner. This conceptual history is bound up with music: such “dialectics” between the sublime and beautiful regularly involve analogies of musical harmonization, or unions between music and vision. (Indeed, the musical sublimes analyzed in this book are typically intermedial encounters rather than isolated aural experiences.) Yet Taruskin remains partly right about the sublime’s nineteenth-century rise, given that the musical sublime is not a singular entity but a discourse always interpreted and reinterpreted by speakers, and therefore always construable as a new and revolutionary movement, or instead as the rediscovery of a venerable lost aesthetic. In other words, it is meaningful to say both that Beethoven participated in his own reception as an originary, unfathomable, primal Behemoth and that he projected himself as a kind of epigonal heir to Handel’s sublime.69 This multiplicity means that the history of the musical sublime might spark alternative ways of thinking, hearing, and playing in the present. If the histories of discourses, practices, and concepts are not linear but marked by swerves, ruptures, inversions, and appropriations alongside stubborn continuities, then re-sounding the musical sublime in the long eighteenth century can remind us that other worlds are possible, as well as suggesting some of the ways that our world became the one it is. Beethoven’s engagement with the music and figure of the naturalized Englishman Handel signals another important dimension of this history: the way discourses traverse national and linguistic boundaries. Each part of Resounding the Sublime highlights an aspect of Anglo-German exchange in forming the musical sublime. Georg Friederich Händel, darling of the Hanoverians, was crucial to the first explicit controversy about the musical sublime (Part I of the book). Bodmer, Breitinger, and Klopstock analyzed and emulated Milton’s sublime within their wider dialogues with English literature (Part II). Herder adopted the conventions of the English music ode and employed and excoriated Burke; with De Quincey, Handel’s music can serve as a touchstone of a British sublimity infected by German thought (Part III). Together, these currents show why the musical sublime should be read as a transnational phenomenon, though this is an agonistic transnationalism, nationalist as much as cosmopolitan.

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France is a notable silent partner in this regard, since borrowings between German- and English-speaking writers are frequently triangulated with the bastion of French neoclassical culture. The distribution of Anglo-German exchanges confirms Germany’s wave of Anglophilia in the long eighteenth century.70 German writers often looked toward England as a model for social, moral and literary-critical renewal. Britain was hardly cut off from German influence, not least in musical culture, and from later in the century interest and exchange grew into self-conscious orientations toward German thought and culture.71 To map its transnational discourse, this book employs detailed literary case studies. Its choices are primarily guided not by the desire for a broad picture of AngloGerman entanglements, nor a connected history of empirical interactions and intellectual influences—although many emerge—but rather by the desire to resound the history of the sublime from within. This means showing the work of music within both canonical and little-known engagements with the sublime. Each part of the book also draws out tensions in conceptualizing music that made it a formative irritant for the sublime. Part I describes music’s generative roles in the proliferating discourse surrounding the sublime from the Restoration to later eighteenth-century Britain. Part II picks up the transformations of these discourses in German literature from the early eighteenth century, when the Hanoverian dynasty brought Britain closer to German-speaking lands and German “reformers” tied idealizations of Britain to projects of German enlightenment. Part III examines two significant Anglo-German responses to Burke and Kant, showing how music continued to fuel and challenge dominant versions of the sublime well into the nineteenth century. Part I, “He Rais’d a Mortal to the Skies; She Drew an Angel Down,” takes its title from Dryden’s remarkably influential Alexander’s Feast and evokes one tension in seventeenth-century musical thinking. Does music raise listeners up toward the divine or pull them down to the body, its appetites and passions? This tension was particularly fraught after the English interregnum, in a society divided over the pleasures of the flesh and united, at least to some degree, in its suspicions of transcendence and enthusiasm. Through Dryden’s poetry and Dennis’s critical writings, chapter 1 suggests the conjoined rise of poetic and musical sublimes from the later seventeenth century. Questions of musical and sublime power, I argue, spoke strongly to contemporary debates about the nature and foundations of legitimate power and its transmission in government, natural philosophy, and religion. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between the passions and music as the sublime cemented its place in British culture. Central to this story is a group of

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artists and critics surrounding Aaron Hill, both an active recipient of Dennis’s sublime and instrumental in launching the London career of Handel, soon the epitome of the sublime composer. This chapter helps challenge the idea that a “rhetorical” sublime developed into a “psychological” or “emotional” sublime through the course of the eighteenth century. Such a narrative seems propitious for music, long held to raise and move the passions at will, and fits snugly with the view that eighteenth-century philosophers simply identified aesthetics with emotion.72 Yet most eighteenth-century thinkers did not recognize “emotions” as an affective category; Longinus insisted that sublimity could exist without pathê; and music’s ability to quell bodily passions was as proverbial as its ability to raise them. Music in fact contributed to two modes of sublimity, characterized by extreme competing passions and by dispassionate states. From Hill to Burke, this discourse helped to shape disinterested aesthetics and precipitate the new category of emotions. Burke’s influence was felt through the later eighteenth century not only in Britain but also in German-speaking lands. Yet Burke did not initiate or define German interest in the sublime. Part II shows how commonplace ambivalences about music fed into distinctive configurations of the senses, epistemology, art, and perfection in German-speaking lands. Little read today, especially in the Anglosphere, J.  J. Bodmer and J.  J. Breitinger were the most influential early promoters of the sublime in German. These Swiss theorists show most clearly how music acts as a formative irritant for the sublime. They harnessed the poetic sublime to projects of cultural, spiritual, and civic renewal. Their sublime, influenced by Milton, Dryden, Addison, and others, was also shaped by Zwinglian theology and Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy. This made for a vexed engagement with music. Models of harmony were essential to their aesthetics, and their visions of social renewal looked to oral genres, including medieval love song, Homeric bardism, and folk music. Yet Bodmer and Breitinger vigorously excluded from their sublime both practical music and the “musical” sounds of poetry, coded as fleshy, animalistic, and emptily rhetorical—as what language must disown in order to become sublime. Chapter 4 follows the transformations of their work by Bodmer’s onetime disciple, Klopstock, the German poet of his generation most closely associated with sublimity. For him, music is the highest expression of humanity, a power mediating between humankind and the sublimity of Christ and the angelic host. Klopstock’s transformation of the discourse draws on a Lutheran theology of music and humanist rhetorical tradition. The eighteenth century is sometimes thought to have witnessed the demise of rhetoric and with it the rise of both

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autonomous music and the “modern” aesthetic of the sublime. These chapters test this progressive history by exploring the vitality of rhetorical thinking in Klopstock’s Lutheran-humanistic sublime, and the venerable anti-rhetorical impulses within Bodmer and Breitinger’s attempts to purge music from the sublime. Part III homes in on hints and extensions of the Longinian sublime that became increasingly definitional for modern audiences: transgression, fear, infinity, and unrepresentability. These are treated very differently by Herder (chapter 5) and De Quincey (chapter 6), both responding to Burke’s and Kant’s sublimes. For inheritors of postmodern and post-Kantian sublimes, it might seem self-evident that music is sublime because it is infinite, indeterminate, nonrepresentational, and irresolvable. But for Herder around 1800, music was sublime for diametrically opposite reasons. It articulated relationships within the infinite, rather than dissolving them. It expressed and clarified human passions with the irresistible immediacy of Longinus’s lightning bolt, rather than leaving experience obscure and indeterminate. Its resonances represented humans to God. And it modeled resolution and harmony, not irresolvability. The potential for infinite harmony, transparency, and relationship, however, is not always comforting, as De Quincey’s writings emphasize. De Quincey associates infinite knowledge and interrelation with the terrible pleasures of aural vibration, and he conjures up a model of the human being and his corpus of writings as a sublimely reverberating body. De Quincey’s autobiographical texts call into question Kant’s sublime by making totalizing consciousness or reason (the satisfying end of Kant’s sublime) a source of terror in itself—when the whole “delirious vision of life re-awaken[s] for torment; [and] the orchestras of the earth open simultaneously to [his] inner ear.”73 Oscillating like a sound wave between delirious totality and fragmentation, clarity and obscurity, De Quincey’s writing hardly crowns a continuous literary tradition of the musical sublime. This is because no such continuous tradition exists. What De Quincey does offer is a fitting conclusion to this book, partly in making such vivid use of the resonance paradigm of sound under which all the texts examined stand, and partly because he so closely associates the musical sublime with recollection. With his recollections careering wildly through time, and through English and German texts, De Quincey offers tantalizing vantage points on the variegated discourse of the musical sublime in the long eighteenth century. Resounding the musical sublime emerges throughout as an open-ended undertaking, a set of soundings of past discursive practices—of sound in history. But it is also an invitation to tune our attention to the resonances of this past in the present.

chapter 1

Music as a “Bastard Imitation of Persuasion”? Power and Legitimacy in Dryden and Dennis

The power and the problem of music were critical to the emergence of the sublime as a prominent literary-philosophical discourse in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The musical sublime, this chapter argues, resonated strongly with questions of power’s legitimate foundations and transmission, pressing issues across this period. The questions were in some ways built into Longinus’s Peri hypsous. For Longinus, music generated “bastard [νόθα] imitations [μιμήματα] of persuasion.”1 The first term describes anything spurious or counterfeit and denoted literal illegitimacy (the child of a citizen with a slave or noncitizen, a hybrid animal), suggesting problematic succession or impure transmission. The second term refers again to things counterfeit and imitated, or occasionally artistic representations; tellingly, Plato uses μιμήματα to scorn what we would now call instrumental music—the music of the harp or flute alone—for its inability to represent properly.2 But why exactly are music’s bastard imitations a problem for the sublime? What did this apparently transgressive aesthetic have to do with persuasion—characterized by reasoned, voluntary assent—with proper imitation, or with legitimacy? I explore these questions through the poet, dramatist, and critic John Dryden, author of two music odes and the libretto for the first surviving all-sung English opera. Art as imitation always involves following and succession. Displaying a heightened concern for propriety and harmonious succession, Dryden also wrestled with the absolute power that flouts and overrides propriety. A royalist and in later years a Catholic excluded from royal favor under William III, Dryden raises in his music

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writings questions about the meaning of “height” and “power”: about how we can separate true from false sublimity and whether hypsos can be debasing. Living through several crises in English rule, Dryden dramatizes, too, the issue of power’s transmission—of “True Succession” and bastardy.3 These issues are brought into sharper focus by his follower, the Whig critic John Dennis. An early and vociferous champion of the Longinian sublime in Britain, Dennis is characteristic of many early modern theorists in his suspicion of music and simultaneous inability to exclude it from the sublime. Dennis grapples with the sublime as a capacious category of energetic greatness that exceeds dichotomies between harmonious beauty and discordant or noisy sublimity, and opens up the sublime as a structure of concordia discors.

Power in Restoration Religion, Natural Philosophy, and Politics To situate these readings, we need to sketch music’s relationship to imaginings of power in late seventeenth-century England, and the treatment of music in the Longinian-Boileauian sublime that Dennis and Dryden inherited. If the sublime “presents at once all the force of the orator,” if it is a manifestation of power, then what is the foundation of that power?4 Or is there no foundation but manifest power itself? Such questions were unsettlingly open in postCommonwealth England. Newtonian natural philosophy and Hobbesian political theory alike could suggest that the physical and social worlds were governed simply by attraction and repulsion, calculable without reference to an unmoved prime mover, even if the ultimate source of power and the mechanics of its transmission between bodies remained unsatisfyingly mysterious. And while most Britons were at least nominally Christian, appeals to a self-evidently “credible god term” were undermined by real and phantasmal skeptics, atheists, nonconformists, and Catholics, not to mention resident and exotic nonChristians.5 God terms often affected music terms in this period, and religious wars and reformations were accompanied by debates about music’s nature and proper use. Lingering Augustinian and Boethian theories aligned audible harmony with a metaphysics of ascent through the correspondences between lower and higher orders, making improper uses of music a corruption of something fundamentally elevating.6 Yet the traditions of the English reformations, influenced by Erasmus and Calvin, tended to undermine this musical ethics and metaphysics. In this context, Restoration England represents a heightened case of general

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theological uncertainties about music’s power. A returned Stuart court that had been exposed to elaborate Continental Catholic music, and accustomed to hearing correspondences between heavenly harmony and sacral kingship, met proponents of a Puritan ethos that at its most extreme regarded congregational psalms as the only permissible church music.7 Little wonder debate proliferated on the dangers of sacred music and the dubious propriety of opera for a rational, reformed nation.8 Changes in natural philosophy, too, had repercussions for imagining musical power. As Penelope Gouk argues, “The emergence and institutionalisation of a distinctively new kind of science in this period—characterized by its emphasis on the value of instruments and observation” in making “knowledge”— “was intimately connected with the emergence and institution of a radically new kind of music,” a connection exemplified by the emergence of dedicated concert halls alongside research institutions like the Royal Society.9 In some ways, the power of sound manifested the mysterious workings of action at a distance worried at by post-Newtonian physics. “For what can be more Strange,” asked Jeremy Collier, “than that the rubbing of a little Hair and Cut-gut together, should make such a mighty Alteration in a Man that sits at a Distance?”10 In other ways, research into the propagation of sound offered models for other natural and psychological phenomena. Generated through a cross-fertilization of humanistic musical thought and experimental physics, the seventeenthcentury resonance model of sound explained, not only the sounding of strings, or propagation of impulses through the air, but also the reception of sounds by the ear and brain through vibration.11 This pervasive account of vibratory waves lent music theory a cohesive yet flexible explanatory power that was attractive in other domains. A number of members and correspondents of the Royal Society who worked on the physics and mathematics of sound, for example, used resonating instruments to model human character and its susceptibility to powerful sympathies and vibrations.12 While such models were not sui generis—there are ancient models of the individual, family, or universe as stringed instruments— new scientific theories attached music to matter in new and sometimes disturbing ways.13 As indicated throughout this book, the pervasive effects of resonance could suggest a subject, social body, or entire universe passively vibrating to the tune of an unknown, even aleatoric, piper.14 The mysterious or even fictitious source of legitimate political authority was also contested in later seventeenth-century England. The balance of power between Parliament, people, and monarch; the emergence of party politics; jockeying between court, city, and town in London; and the claims of law,

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precedent, religion, or arbitrary sovereignty—not to mention the sway of royal mistresses, advisers, factions, plotters, and mobs—were matters of anxious discussion.15 Tying political sensibilities to the sublime is a delicate matter. Some years ago, Jonathan Lamb proposed three basic readings of the sublime’s politics.16 In the first, the sublime ultimately affirms the subject, granting freedom and power in tandem with the once-overwhelming agent of sublimity (this Lamb characterizes as a bourgeois, family-romance reading); in the second, we are deluded into thinking we share the power of a sublime master who enslaves us (a dialectical reading); in the third, the sublime entails pragmatic transferals of power that exceed distinctions between truth and delusion (a sophistic reading). In the third reading, rhetorical and political power consist in pure, ungrounded movement: the sublime orator is “uncommitted to ontology, teleology or truth, and dedicated to the libidinal pursuit of power.”17 Although Lamb is concerned with eighteenth-century sublimes, this reading illuminates the libertine sublime of Restoration England—part of a provocative elite display culture of sexual excess, wit, skepticism, and sometimes blasphemy and sedition— where a “fetishization of greatness” placed “energy” above “ethics,” and forced “satire and panegyric . . . closer together.”18 The libertine moment also encourages a refinement of Lamb’s account of the politics of the sublime. Lamb contrasted sublimity as a reproducible, authoritative rule that supports a stable, self-reproducing hierarchy—as practiced by the “neoclassicists” Boileau, Dryden, and Pope—and sublimity as a revolutionary “usurpation” of power—for supposed “modernists” or “libertarians” like Dennis. Dryden’s and Dennis’s musical sublimes do accord with a general divide whereby, it seems, early whiggish poets imagine harmony as a mixture of concords and discords (concordia discors), and tory- and Jacobite-oriented writers imagine harmony as more purely consonant.19 Yet staging perfect consonance is not straightforward. Moreover, in the libertine aesthetic to which Dryden (not uncritically) contributed, the supposedly “libertarian” or “modernist” transgression of rules sits uneasily close to the absolutist power to author and suspend rule. Alexander’s Feast in particular makes music an infectious vector of power and height, blurring boundaries between sovereigns, usurpers, and loyal inheritors of hypsos. Equally, whiggish writers like Dennis are rarely straightforwardly antiauthoritarian. Dennis enjoys hierarchies, canons, and traditions. He positions himself as a ravished inheritor of Dryden’s Restoration sublime and writes himself into a post-1688 political climate where claiming to overthrow tyrannous absolutism (and with it specious consonance) is ideologically acquiescent.20 Rather than opposing “neoclassicist” and “libertarian”

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sublimes, then, we might see overlapping “libertine” and “loyalist” strands informing the musical sublime, sometimes within the same writer’s work. Whatever political sensibilities they supported, literary allegories of harmony, discord, and resolution and its interruption were fertile ground for political panegyric and critique.21 Such textual strategies belong to the myriad ways in which music intersected with political power. At court, Charles II cultivated a French musical profile—a royal soundscape to complement the more commonly discussed royal image—including an attempt to bring Jean-Baptiste Lully to London and a subsequent call for “something at least like an opera” from Dryden and the Catalan-French composer Louis Grabu, who had been Master of the King’s Music until the 1674 Test Act forced his retirement.22 Musical commissions, performances, and listening formed part of those rituals of power before which, the Earl of Newcastle advised Charles, “even the wisest . . . shall shake off his wisdom and shake for fear.”23 Musical taste, then, belonged to discursive practices of power, dread, and sovereignty that intersected strongly with the sublime. Take the case of Charles’s coronation. When Samuel Pepys found the “noise” following climactic moments in the coronation “so great” that he “could make but little of the Musique” accompanying it, this does not mean the music might as well not have been played.24 We can imagine that an underlying harmonious sound together with its shrouding “noise” created what Newcastle called the “mist” of ceremony “cast before” a prince.25 Such musical effects accord with the visual staging of the coronation, visible to only a few: the glory of the crowning was partially veiled from sight and communicated by “a great shout” of acclamation passing through the abbey.26 In the midst of sometimes visible but inaudible musicians and an invisible but audibly proclaimed king, we sense something of the paradoxes of representing power that run through the sublime.

Music, Mimesis, and Mousikê in Longinus Music’s place in the sublime was a perennial problem. Stephen Halliwell reminds us that, unlike modern sublimes that rely on transgression, “cognitive failure or inadequacy, Longinian hypsos infallibly brings with it the promise of a fulfillment and enlargement of the mind’s own potential. It operates through a sense of the removal or transcendence of limits, not a confrontation with impediments.”27 The threat music poses to the integrity of the sublime nonetheless suggests that even the illimitable has its limits.

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These musical limits are constitutive to Longinus’s sublime. In his terms, to be cultivated or educated is to be “musical,” schooled in mousikê by the Muses. Yet Longinus’s text often associates audible music with the atavistic or ridiculously overblown.28 Underlying this equivocal treatment is a tension between nature (often allied with impulses and bodily passions) and art (allied with order) in the sublime. Music is cast in contrary roles here, as natural and artificial. This is especially clear in Longinus’s underdiscussed fifth source of sublimity, “arrangement” (synthesis), or “the way things are set together.” Sound is arrangement’s basic unit in the late rhetorical tradition.29 Within this framework, Longinus sharply distinguishes senseless harmonious sounds (which push us beyond proper human limits) from meaningful, verbal harmonious sounds and their interlinked ideas (which push us beyond mere limits).30 The distinction is vehemently maintained but tenuous. “Harmony,” writes Longinus, is a “natural instrument for persuasion and pleasure,” working “with freedom and emotion” (xxxix.1), but potentially excessively so: You see, though, on the one hand, the flute instils certain kinds of emotion in the audience, so as to make it go out of its senses and become full of corybantic frenzy, and, placing in it a kind of rhythmic step, it makes it necessary for it to step to its beat and to assimilate itself (“even if it is altogether uncultivated” [or “unmusical”]) to the melody, and though the sounds made by the lyre (heaven knows), while they express nothing by themselves, still, by the variation of their sonorities and by their beating against one another and by their mixing in concord, often cast, as you know, a wonderful spell—and surely these are images and bastard imitations of persuasion, not, as I said, legitimately bred works of human nature—do we not, on the other hand, take it that arrangement, being a kind of harmony of that language which grows naturally in human beings and fastens itself to our very soul, not just to our sense of hearing, exciting diversified ideas of words, conceptions, situations, finenesses, melodiousness, all coming into being at our creation and being reared up with us, and, simultaneously, by a varied mixing of sound, driving into the souls of those nearby the emotions which are stirring in the speaker, and over and over again making the hearers stand with him in communion, and making the greatnesses fit harmoniously together with the structuring of styles in speaking and writing, do we not then take it

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that by these very modes arrangement enchants us and at the same time on each occasion puts us in the mood for boldness and a sense of worth and sublimity and everything which it includes in itself, completely and really prevailing over our perceptiveness in every way? (xxxix.1–3) The “epideictic bravura” of this enormous period enacts or harmonizes with Longinus’s argument about the overpowering effects of verbal arrangement.31 Such “self-mimicry” is central to Longinus’s sublime, as Neil Hertz powerfully argued, enacting a “sublime turn” or form of “resonance” between what Longinus presents as sublime objects and his sublime discourse about them.32 Hertz’s term “resonance” is fitting: music and harmony creep into this self-imitating sublimity, powering what Lamb called “a subversive mimesis that incorporates . . . figures of force” from its own illustrations in a covert “bid for power.”33 Pretending to merely evoke the power of Demosthenes or Homer, Peri hypsous itself becomes sublime. If this bid for power “depends on suppressing any . . . distinction between what the orator says [the object of discourse] and how he says it [his discourse],” then for Longinus a significant part of the “how” of effective discourse is harmony, styled as a kind of technology for transmitting sublimity.34 And while Longinus practices a “subversive mimesis” of others’ sublimity, music and sound threaten to subvert his own account of the sublime. The twists and turns of his sentence work to hide this threat: sound per se cannot “fasten[] itself to our very soul,” and yet it is “by a varied mixing of sound” that the “emotions” of “words, conceptions, situations, finenesses, [and] melodiousness” transport us, making our souls mimic the movements that “stir[]” the speaker until we “stand with him in communion.” Sounds are the means by which other things move the soul, and one of these other things, curiously, is melodiousness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, too, music may be anomalous in accounts of artistic representation not only because it seems amimetic, “express[ing] nothing by [itself],” but also because, from another perspective, it is the very stuff or mechanism of mimesis. Music thus connects the sublime with principles often seen as antithetical to it: imitation and aptum (“fit”). Arieti and Crossett stress that Peri hypsous draws a coherent “negative analogy” between music and speech based on music’s lack of meaning. Verbal harmony in Longinus’s long sentence is not merely aural but conceptual: the sentence moves from the unrefined flute’s single notes to the more refined lyre

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and thence to the richer harmonies of words, supporting the argument that true arrangement is “harmony plus meaning.”35 And yet the meanings communicated by words (logoi) and assented to by reason (logos) in persuasion are precisely what Longinus’s sublime surpasses.36 Since truly sublime arrangement “prevail[s] over our perceptiveness in every way,” the distinction between music’s “bastard imitations of persuasion” and sublime words’ exceeding of persuasion looks shaky. How do we really tell persuasion’s lawful children from her bastards? Can we take it for granted that music, with its frenzies and spells that travesty the effects of persuasion, is not sublime, given that the sublime itself does not persuade but “ravishes” us into “transports” akin to “ecstasy”? Or, to pose the question in terms resonant with Restoration politics—when the succession crisis positioned Charles II’s natural son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, as a more legitimate heir to the throne than the king’s Catholic brother, James—will bastards be less viable, loyal, pleasing, or effective than their legitimate kin? Familiar dichotomies in musical thought emerge in Peri hypsous. Verbal arrangement might display sublime consonance and ratio, qualities allied with musical harmony and cultivation. But music’s associations with immediacy, irresistibility, emotional and physical transport, and with magic and cultic ecstasy, threaten to make it the Mr. Hyde to the true sublime’s Dr. Jekyll. We already meet in Peri hypsous the possibility that the height of language might not elevate humans and reason but rather make us more bestial, more vulnerable to arbitrary rule, irrational violence, or abandoned sensuality. Memorably, the treatise closes by lamenting the debased condition of the modern world where true sublimity is withering along with virtue and political freedom (xliv). Longinus works both through and against music, deploying it to evoke the sublimity of language as patterned sound, whose practice is the height of human culture and education, and to purge sublime language of the leaven of that same sonorous sensuousness, which sends humans wild and cannot produce “legitimately bred works of human nature.”

Boileau and Music Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus drew music still closer to the sublime. While Longinus’s vocabulary subtly distinguished the effects of music from those of sublime language, with Boileau music causes “transport” and “admira-

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ble ravishment” just as the sublime “ravishes,” “transports, and produces . . . admiration.”37 Nonetheless, in his broader critical writings Boileau repeatedly disparaged music. He deplored opera’s irresistible ability to diffuse sensualism and moral turpitude through the nation, castigating his enemy Philippe Quinault, Lully’s principal librettist.38 Boileau’s famous attack on opera, Satire X, “Les femmes” (1692), was “echoed and elaborated by generations of critics.”39 Nevertheless, as Jean Terrasson argued in his Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade (1715), the critique by Boileau of opera’s amorous plots and encouragement of tumultuous passions was hardly consistent with his praise of passionate responses to poetry.40 Not unlike Longinus, Boileau excludes and includes musictinged effects from literary culture. Music becomes a scapegoat for what he other wise praises, and it helps carve out a space for a literature at once respectably controlled and valued for its excesses. Beyond engagements with music, Boileau’s framing of the sublime as a transmission of force and feeling stoked libertine and Augustan fascinations with transferals of height, sound, and energy in Britain.41 On Boileau’s reading, Longinus had championed “the energetic smallness of words” against the lethargic largeness of lofty style.42 As Emma Gilby notes, “Energy always carries a sense of transference: it has to be transferred, reassigned as work . . . upon another person or object.” 43 Dryden and Dennis will share Boileau’s stress on energy, but not his denigration of the merely rhetorical character of high style. Dryden does not exclude rhetorical loftiness from his sublime, and neither writer decouples sublime effects from lofty topoi. Historians of the sublime are often enamored of “sublime” ruptures and paradigm shifts; like Boileau, they identify true sublimity by its split from verbal look-alikes and old pretenders like high style, perfection, and religious elevation. Samuel Monk influentially wrote that, with Boileau, “the sublime is severed from rhetoric and becomes art, a matter of the revelatory quality of thought and the emotions which that quality, vividly presented, evokes.” 44 Such histories tend to obscure the musical sublime generally—which feeds off longestablished discourses associating music with metaphysical height and splendor—and Dryden’s sublime in particular. Monk relegated Dryden to a bygone era, dismissing his engagement with the sublime as a “concern . . . with the sublime style.” 45 Understandably so: following the subterranean channels between sublimity and mimesis, Dryden yoked together elevation of matter, style, speakers, and audiences. He emphasized propriety, aptum, and resemblance— yet also their entanglements with inversion and unlikeness.

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Dryden’s Sublime and the Problem of Harmony Dryden first mentions Longinus and Boileau in his Apology for Heroique Poetry (1677), which paraphrased Boileau’s translation and called Longinus “undoubtedly, after Aristotle, the greatest Critic amongst the Greeks.” 46 Esteem for Longinus combines here with a Horatian definition of “wit” as “a propriety of Thoughts and Words” or “Thoughts and Words elegantly adapted to the Subject.”47 Returning to this definition in the preface to his semi-opera or through-composed masque Albion and Albanius (1685), Dryden tentatively extended the rule of propriety to opera.48 Indeed, propriety, with its connotations of ownership and authority, reigns in this work, an allegory promoting Stuart legitimacy and decorous succession from Charles (Albion) to his facsimile James (Albanius). Now best known as a candidate for the title of first English opera, Albion and Albanius illuminates the emerging category of sublimity in Dryden’s writings through its adoption of parallels between musical and political accord customarily drawn by English masques. Consonance and resemblance pervade Louis Grabu’s music, with items like the duet “The Rosy Finger’d Morn Appears” representing the relationship of the brothers Albion and Albanius through close musical doubling.49 Dryden’s preface portrayed mimetic propriety, equated with musical harmony, as the mechanism of royal loftiness and power. In Albion’s plot, Dryden explains, the already iterative structure of restoration becomes a “double restoration,” as the regime recovers from the Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis, and Rye House Plot.50 Grabu’s dedication to the printed score (probably written with Dryden) drives home the theme. The opera’s transparent plot doubles external political reality; in the political world, a “pretended [Popish] Plot” doubles “true Conspiracy” against the Crown; blood links brother to brother; their “nearness of . . . Blood” matches “conformity of . . . Fortunes.”51 When Charles died before the opera could be premiered, its ending was altered to represent Charles’s apotheosis and its mirror, James’s elevation to the throne: the “Type” of accession and kingship mirrored its antitype of ascent into heaven.52 At first sight, music exemplifies elevating propriety in Dryden’s preface. Poetry written for music is governed by “propriety of sound,” a “harmonious sweetness,” and “smooth[ness]” preadapted to the composer’s notes.53 The librettist must cultivate such “nicety of hearing that the discord of sounds in Words as much offendeth him as a Seventh in Musick wou’d a good Composer.”54 But of course sevenths are themselves part of music (codified intervals, not noises), and the intensity, turmoil, and contrariety with which they were associated did not offend the musicians who set Dryden’s texts. Seventh chords

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are relatively common in Albion and Albanius, and striking melodic leaps of a seventh occur in settings of Dryden’s other texts.55 As this miniature conceptual dissonance begins to suggest, music will be a source of discord as well as concord. It will destabilize the nexus of concord, loftiness, power, and resemblance in the preface, and raise the possibility that real sublime power, whether held by gods, kings, or artists, might ultimately exceed limits, propriety, and resemblances—might be almost necessarily dissonant. Conceptual dissonances abound in the preface. Dryden proposes that music’s sweetness and smoothness are incompatible with high style. However, the whole premise of opera—that characters sing where we talk—demands that its personae be immortals and heroes, creatures absolutely unlike us. Opera consequently demands “lofty, figurative, and majestical” words, although these are unmusical.56 In the preface singing acquires a paradoxical, autocratic kind of loftiness, excluded from rhetorical height but elevated above everyday discourse, flouting quotidian proprieties through its exhibition of the “marvellous and surprizing.”57 Music makes improper what would other wise be natural and probable—using lofty style for lofty characters—and lends “propriety” to what would other wise be improper—an actor throwing lightning (Jove) or transmitting messages as fast as thought (Mercury).58 Music thus helps establish and unsettle relationships between central components in early modern understandings of sublimity: resemblance; high style; artistic force; political power; and metaphysical height. Music’s involvement with the emerging discourse of the Longinian sublime becomes clearer in a poem written two years later, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687, and in Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musique (1697).59 The Pindaric associations of these irregular music odes are significant. Imitations of Pindar’s epinikia—choric odes singing the praises of victors in the Greek games and their powerful patrons—flourished in later seventeenth-century England alongside growing fascination with Longinus, who praised Pindar’s unpredictable fieriness (xxxiii.5).60 Early modern audiences knew Quintilian’s praise of Pindar, aligned with the high style (“his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence”), and Horace’s homage in Carmina 4.2.61 Whereas Longinus stressed Pindar’s tendency to fall “flat,” Horace transferred the possibility of falling to Pindar’s imitators. Pindar is a “swan” who “soars into the lofty regions of the clouds.” But any competitor has “wings . . . waxed with Daedalus’ skill, and is destined to give his name to a glassy sea. Like a river rushing down a mountainside, swollen by rains above its normal banks, Pindar boils

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and surges immeasurably on with his deep booming voice . . . whether he rolls down new words in his daring dithyrambs and is carried along in free unregulated rhythms, or sings of gods and kings,” or men whose victories in the Greek games make them “equals of the gods,” or youths snatched (raptum) by death, “refusing them to black Orcus.” 62 The Pindaric genre was thus inscribed with boundary crossing, transgression; with daring, overwhelming, visceral vocality; and with extreme height that linked the poet to his elevated subjects. Following a belief in the skill of the Greek poet’s “ free” rhythms and the hidden depths of his obscure ideas, Boileau defended Pindar’s artful beau désordre against charges of incoherence. Like Jerome and his early modern successors, Boileau compared Pindar to David, whose “broken sense” in the psalms revealed traces of divine inspiration.63 Pindar was thence drawn deeply into debates about the sublime and its real or apparent disorderliness and exceptionality, as revealed in ancient song. English Pindarists largely followed Abraham Cowley’s conclusion in Pindarique Odes (1656) that Pindar’s metrical regularity was lost or chimeric. “Irregular” Pindarics without strophic patterning came to dominate odes to the victorious, powerful, and high-born, including court odes with elaborate musical settings. Pindarics praising music itself proliferated from around 1683, when a London music society founded annual St. Cecilia’s Day celebrations.64 Each year, a church ser vice with an anthem and sermon on music preceded a banquet and newly commissioned ode, with “Music by the best Voices and Hands in Town; the Words . . . set by some of the greatest Masters in Town.” 65 The genre of odes established by the short-lived celebrations, particularly Dryden’s contributions, are a vital source for the musical sublime. Cowley’s Pindarics remained impor tant precursors to these highly intertextual music odes. Especially imitated was the interlacing of music with creation and apocalypse, order and disorder, in The Resurrection. Cowley’s poem begins with resemblance and succession, linking Apollonian harmony with docile order: Begin the Song, and strike the Living Lyre; Lo how the Years to come, a numerous and well-fitted Quire, All hand in hand do decently advance, And to my Song with smooth and equal measures dance.66 The “last Trumpets dreadful sound,” however, will “drown[]” these “gentle Notes” in an anti-music— contrary to sound, consonance, and order—that “to the

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Spheres themselves shall silence bring, | Untune the Universal String.” 67 Yet disorder proves creative, as in the irregular Pindaric form: the trumpet awakens the dead and recomposes their “scatter’d Atoms”; its “mightier Sound” literally “make[s] its Hearers Ears.” 68 The ode’s music, then, is simultaneously a force of shock, destruction, and disorder, and of cohesion, creation, and reordering. Dryden picks up these pairings in his Song for St. Cecilia’s Day. Music appears as a mediator between heaven and earth, living and dead, and between various kinds of power: power over the cosmos and the passions, and power to compose and agitate. As D. T. Mace observed, the poem thus encapsulates “two major and opposing seventeenth-century conceptions of . . . music”: “as harmony and” as “a stimulus of the passions.” 69 The poem opens and closes with stanzas celebrating the agent of creation, “heav’nly Harmony.” These bookend a catalogue of instruments and their associated passions.70 The first five lines describe “Nature” in a state of chaos in verse devoid of rhymes and low on metrical repetitions. In line 6, in a musicalization of the fiat lux—whose sublime power Longinus famously praised and Boileau and his opponents furiously debated— the “tuneful voice” of harmony appears to enliven torpid matter, crying: “Arise, ye more than dead” (l.7). With each subsequent line, what seemed like randomly segmented prose is revealed as part of an intricate fifteen-line metrical and rhyme scheme. A “heap | Of jarring Atomes” concurrently “leap” “to their stations” (ll.3–4). “Obey[ing]” “music’s power,” undifferentiated matter is ordered into distinct qualities of “cold, and hot, and moist, and dry” (ll.8–10). As these humoral elements suggest, cosmic ordering includes and is repeated within humans: creation runs in an ascending scale “From Harmony to Harmony | Through all the compass of the Notes” to “clos[e] full in Man” (ll.13–15). Harmony’s aligning of similar structures in the cosmos, in humans, and in audible music is again invoked in the penultimate stanza, where Cecilia’s music makes an angel “Mistak[e] earth for heaven” (l.54). Music forms a channel from like—if extremely unequal—to like, just as harmony aligned heaven and kingship, Charles and James, apotheosis and self-surpassing artistry in Albion. By confusing heaven and earth, Cecilia’s music prefigures the apocalyptic union of earth and heaven projected, but not presented, in the final verse. Just as Cowley’s speaker in Resurrection heard the last trumpet “Untune the Universal String” but shied away from representing postapocalyptic order (“Stop, stop,” he charges, as the “Great” “hint” of his theme “[en]rage[s]” his “Pindarique Pegasus”), so Dryden closes abruptly with the prophecy of “Musick” “untun[ing] the Sky” (l.63). While harmony in the cosmos as we know it is analogous to audible music, the new world “order” perhaps cannot properly be called silent,

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noisy, or tuneful: it exceeds audiation, aural comprehension or representation. This liminal moment belongs to a poem at the “loyalist” end of the sublime spectrum (and Cowley and Dryden were indeed loyal royalists): apparent disorder is obscured systematicity, and sonic power lies in order, resemblance, and hierarchy; yet, like an absolute ruler, music remains sovereign over its own laws and can “devour” existing orders at any time (l.60). Harmony’s power over order and disorder matches its power over passion. The inner stanzas of Dryden’s poem simultaneously narrate a loose history of instrumental music, from its creation by Jubal to its apotheosis in Christian sacred music, and represent a series of instruments and their governing passions: wonder at the first instrument, the lyre; martial agitation and anger for trumpets and drums; woeful love for flutes; tortured love for violins; “holy Love” with the organ (l.45). We might trace here the outline of a common emotional narrative of the sublime, moving from astonished arrest, through alarm, to elevation and self-inflation granted by identification with the sublime object—in this case, audible harmony, a quality lying within imitative poetry as well as music. In Jubal’s stanza, repetitions of a tiny number of rhymes and the enclosing of the stanza by the repeated exclamation, “What Passion cannot Musick raise and quell!,” evoke a stasis and fixation fitting for Cartesian understandings of how wonder suspends judgment (ll.16–24).71 Jubal’s brethren express a precritical admiration for the overwhelming power of music: they fall idolatrously “on their Faces” and “worship” Jubal’s lyre: Less than a God they thought there cou’d not dwell Within the hollow of that Shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. (ll.21–23) Next, rapid, energetic triple pulses imitate “The TruIpets loud Clangor,” and an abrupt shift to duple rhythms paints “The double double double beat” of the drum (ll.25–26, 29). This verse resonates with the sublime’s mysterious transition from fear and awe to inflation and pride: traces of fear are evident as the trumpet sounds “mortal Alarms” and cries, “Charge, Charge, ’tis too late to retreat” (ll.28, 32). Retreating is evidently on someone’s mind, until fear is swallowed up in courage. Somehow, listening to the instruments’ “shrill . . . Anger” and “thunder[]” (ll.27, 30), we are inspired, not with terror, but an echoing anger. As in the sublime, “we are filled with . . . pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.”72

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Elevation and inflation close the cata logue. The organ surpasses and undoes the power of secular, humanly created music, and does so by evoking the radically different feeling of “holy Love”: But oh! what Art can teach What human Voice can reach The sacred Organs praise? Notes inspiring holy Love, Notes that wing their heav’nly ways To mend the Choires above. (ll.42–47) A comparison follows between Orpheus’s legendary lyre, which moved not only passions but also trees and stones, and Cecilia’s organ, which drew down an “Angel” (l.53). Cecilia thus “raised the wonder” of music “high’r” than Orpheus had (l.51) and implicitly raised a higher kind of wonder than that felt by Jubal’s brethren. Their static wonder is transformed into the freer patterns of Cecilia’s stanzas with their emphatic ejaculation, anaphora, and running trochees carrying their theme of intensifying, exalting ascent. The organ directs love toward heaven, unlike the jealous and melancholy love of earlier verses. Like the organ’s notes, this love ascends, being purified in a way that recalls Augustinian and Neoplatonic models of the redirection of earthly passion toward God.73 It seems plausible to hear overtones of the Longinian sublime here, too, with its transformative transmission of loftiness from sublime object (heavenly harmony) to recipient: heavenly music raises earth to a state even an angel could mistake for heaven; the earthly organ does not palely reflect but “mends” or augments the celestial choirs. If Cecilia’s angel could mistake earth for heaven, readers might be forgiven for mistaking this sublime for traditional religious ascent. My suggestion is that the Song’s interpretability under both rubrics points to music’s amenability to the discourse of the sublime: we should not expect clear-cut shifts here. Similarly, the Song’s onomatopoeic, imitative dimension is at odds with concepts of music and sublimity as amimetic. Yet vivid, illusionistic representation was crucial to Longinus’s sublime and its early modern reception, where classical enargeia (vivid description or presentation) shaded into Aristotelian energeia (actualization, energy, activity).74 Many verbal devices described by Longinus aimed to transpose the reader into the orator’s or poet’s position through phantasia (visualization or enthrallment), and he devotes considerable space to how

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words and meters harmonize with or mimic their sense in order to forcibly transform readers’ emotions (Longinus xv, xxxix). Ten years before the Song, in his Apology for Heroique Poetry, Dryden singled out these effects as sublime. He defended Cowley’s obscure and uneven Pindarics on the grounds that bold figures, exclamations, and sudden and disordered connections were “natural” and “graceful” in Pindarics, imitating a mind possessed by “passion.”75 Importantly, the grace of irregularity seems not to extend to sonic features like rhyme and “numbers” (meter). As in Albion and Albanius, and following classical tradition, in his Apology Dryden associates poetic music by default with measure and sweet transitions. Thus “the ear must preside” over “the choice of numbers” in order to guarantee “the Harmony of Pindarick Verse”; “the cadency of one line must be a rule to that of the next; and the sound of the former must slide gently into that which follows; without leaping from one extream into another.”76 The best part of Cowley’s own odes was not musicality but vivid imagery: “Imaging is . . . the very heighth and life of Poetry. ’Tis, as Longinus describes it, a Discourse, which, by a kind of Enthusiasm, or extraordinary emotion of the Soul, makes it seem to us, that we behold those things which the Poet paints, so as to be pleas’d with them, and to admire them. . . . If Poetry be imitation, that part of it must needs be best, which describes most lively our actions and passions[.]”77 Dryden’s irregular music ode deploys another kind of sublime “Imaging,” aural rather than visual. Where Albion and Albanius’s preface worried at differences between words and music, in the ode harmony is the mainspring of both, and harmony’s power over mimesis in both drives elevation. The poetic-rhetorical sublime on this reading contains or even merges into a musical sublime. The organ’s voice surpasses the “ human Voice” as a speaker of praise whose all-encompassing range spans the distance between earth and heaven, carrying human passions with it; Jubal’s chorded shell “spoke”; Harmony creates through a verbal directive: “Arise.” The Song’s cata logue of passions, then, suggests a nascent musico-poetical sublime. It adumbrates a common narrative of the sublime and describes instruments overwhelming auditors, compelling them to take on various passions. The same effects are (ideally) impressed on the reader/listener by devices of aural “imaging.” Dryden’s second music ode, Alexander’s Feast (1697), departed from the Cecilian ode tradition by dedicating all but its final stanza to the narrative of a feast celebrating Alexander the Great’s victory over Darius.78 Music here allegorizes questions about sublime power in politics and poetry. Dryden has the legendary poet-musician Timotheus propel Alexander through a series of con-

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trasting passions, culminating in his troubling destruction of the alreadypacified city of Persepolis.79 The ode revisits many of the Song’s concerns: music’s power over wildly differing passions; the opposition of secular and sacred music; music as a channel between heaven and earth; the proximity of verbal-rhetorical and musical persuasion; and the power of music to vividly, even delusively, “image” scenes for listeners. Longinus’s discussion of phantasia indeed resonates strongly with Alexander’s Feast. As Joshua Scodel notes, Alexander’s vision of slain Greeks and vengeful Furies echoes “Longinus’ first example of sublime phantasia” (xv.9): the maddened vision Orestes has of his mother sending the Furies after him.80 In both cases, phantasia “enslave[s]” its recipient. In Alexander’s case it “breaks down the distinction between the poet’s sublime diversion [from war] and brutal violence.”81 Both sublimes are called up by the voice of an actor or lyricist. If visual “imaging” is a sort of efficient cause for the recipient’s enslavement, then sound drives vision. Alexander’s Feast was long celebrated for its sublimity.82 More recently its satirical dimensions have been stressed. Critics in the 1970s, highly alert to irony and allegory, proposed identifying Alexander with William III, the tragic Darius with the defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne, and Timotheus with whiggish laureates like Shadwell and Tate.83 Dryden was a renowned satirist, and he theorized satire as sublime.84 The Pindaric’s association with lofty eulogy made it ripe for parodic inversions. Yet the poem’s long reception as panegyric testifies to its “double-tonguedness.”85 Any satisfactory reading must acknowledge its ability to hold in tension the sublime and the bathetic, including the possibility that the poem draws into William III’s reign the libertine sublime that painted “all-powerful, epoch-making” transgressive desire as elevating, and even included abjection within the sublime, confusing distinctions between height and baseness.86 The poem’s portrayal of music is central to its double-tonguedness. Are Timotheus’s “Lydian Measures” (l.97), which excite Alexander’s overmastering desire for the courtesan Thais, a spur to heroic passion or effeminate debauchery? When “horrid Sound[s]” stir Alexander to fire Persepolis, is Timotheus encouraging a glorious act of revenge or demented tyranny (l.127)? To what extent does music corrupt, rather than simply encouraging Alexander’s propensities? Can the poem simultaneously satirize weak rulers (the strong should be able to resist music) and parody music’s legendary power (mocking Whig court poets), or does Alexander’s susceptibility ultimately affirm “The Power of Musique” and poetry, regardless of its moral force or application? In keeping with interpretations of the poem as ironic, Ruth Smith has argued that Alexander’s

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Feast, like many contemporary sermons, critiqued secular music to show its supersession by divine music in the final stanza.87 This argument tends to underplay the poem’s studiedly noncommittal verdict on Cecilia’s victory: Let old Timotheus yield the Prize, Or both divide the Crown; He rais’d a Mortal to the Skies; She drew an Angel down. (ll.177–80) As Turner puts it, these last lines effectively trace “the two halves of a divided crown or closed circle.”88 It is hard to adopt a hermeneutic of belief about the music of “Divine Cecilia” and a hermeneutic of suspicion about Timotheus’s “trembling Notes [which] ascend the Sky, | And Heav’nly Joys inspire” (ll.171, 23–24). Smith’s survey of St. Cecilia’s Day sermons and other music writings more powerfully drew attention to debates between Anglican, Puritan, Dissenting, and other voices about the nature and trustworthiness of music. The common ground, Smith suggested, was “that the only justification and safeguard of music-making . . . is a right state of mind and heart.”89 Music was overdetermined as underdetermined. This view reiterated much earlier ideas about the decisive role of spiritual orientation in determining the moral value of experiences—ideas that allowed even relatively ascetic reformers to justify polyphony.90 But as the base note in a divided field of opinion, it underlines the connection of music with mutability, with lack of essence or inherent direction. This reinforces the importance of music per se—as something more than an allegory for poetry or politics—to Dryden’s exploration of the “dark side of . . . sublime Pindaric power.”91 How does the dark side sound? Analysis of the ode’s prosody and diction would yield one set of answers. We might examine the prevalence of those liquids coded ambiguously in seventeenth-century theory as soft, harmonious, and musical, or alternatively as harsh, satirical, and sinister (r, the “littera canina,” and s, the “Litera Serpentina”), especially where soft sounds seem misleading.92 The ode’s dense allusiveness might also sound sublime: some phrases that seem strikingly original in fact echo earlier texts.93 We might see the problems of succession and norm-defying novelty in the ode’s narrative mirrored in a play between what sounds strikingly new—as if distinctively created and owned by Dryden—and a pleasure in almost-forgotten echoes and repetitions. The ode is also marked as weighty, resonant, and elevated by its loose and rapidly changing Pindaric rhythms, which combine with relatively strong rhymes

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to create a sense of time freely stretched and molded against the timekeeping of repeated sounds. Each rhyme here might sound like an unexpected achievement of fit or harmony, while also reminding us of the poem’s freedom from metrical norms. For Walter Scott, “we listen for the completion of Dryden’s stanzas, as for the explication of a difficult passage in music; and wild and lost as the sound appears, the ear is proportionally gratified by the unexpected ease with which harmony is extracted from discord and confusion.”94 Such sounds darken if we doubt the audible return of harmony or the motives of the harmonist. Many eighteenth-century commentators praised the ode’s “musical” versification.95 Yet to call poetic sounds “music” only begins to answer the question of how poetry imagines sublime music, how it marks convergences and distinctions between literature and music. To go a half step further, we can note that the ode’s representation of music exhibits almost all the features that eighteenthcentury theorists of sublimity applied to music: suddenness; loudness; length; gravity; sounds of tumult.96 The poem is structured around Timotheus’s sudden and dramatic changes in “Strain”; the music rousing Alexander to revenge is “horrid” and “lowd[ ],” “like a rattling peal of thunder”; Cecilia’s organ, an instrument with a huge range, volume, and sustaining power, “added Length to solemn Sounds” (ll.124, 126–27, 165). The poem interweaves these qualities with the sublime’s signature responses of astonishment (Alexander “stares around,” “amazed”), ravishment (“With ravish’d ears, | The Monarch hears” the musician’s “lofty Sound”), and inflation (music “swell[s] the Soul” and makes the emperor think himself a god, ll.128–29, 34, 37–38, 160). The sublime’s telos, loftiness, is studded through the poem, forming a sort of axis of elevation that generates the poem’s central ambiguities. The first stanza begins with Alexander “Aloft, in awful State” (l.3); the second with “Timotheus, plac’d on high,” his “trembling Notes ascend[ing] the Sky” (ll.20, 23). This height resonates with the matter of Timotheus’s song: Timotheus tells how “Jove” “left his blissful seat above” and “rode” “Sublime on Radiant Spires” (ll.25–29). Jove is sublime in the sense of “aloft,” yet also sublime in the libertine-Longinian mold, divine and violent, possessing Longinus’s lightning bolt and a power that ravishes and transforms mortals.97 Longinus’s orator “ravishes” the listener, swelling him with pride as he confuses what he has heard for what he has himself generated; Jove ravishes “fair Olympia,” “stamp[ing] an Image of himself ” on her body so that she swells to produce a son, Alexander, in whom the humanly generated and divine are mingled (ll.30, 33). Elevation marks the scene of Alexander’s rage, too: Alexander pliably raises

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his head at Timotheus’s “lowder Strain,” and at his invocation “See[s] the Furies arise,” “toss their Torches on high,” and “rear” snakes (ll.124, 132–33, 143). This invocation is Timotheus’s final act, the culmination of the musical actions that “rais’d a Mortal to the Skies” (l.169). Yet whether Alexander’s firing of Persepolis can be called lofty is a moot point. This raising/razing is immediately set against the elevation through humility proper to Christian music. The obscure comparison between Timotheus and Cecilia leaves modern sacred music hovering between supplementation (Cecilia “Enlarg’d” and “added” to classical art, ll.164–65), supersession (“yield[ing] the Prize,” l.167), and some kind of mirroring (whereby admiration for Cecilia’s pagan counterpart indirectly accrues to the saint). Through such ambiguity, sublime propriety and harmony tilt into extreme impropriety; mirroring as repetition approaches mirroring as reversal. This opens the poem to parodic readings, but also to questions about the transferal of force in the sublime. Alexander’s Feast revolves around scenarios where the divine is transferred to earth, where the lofty stamps its energies on the lowly, sketching out contradictory accounts of how the low is raised up, rather than simply humiliated, by divine power. These scenarios involve encounters between a stratified field of actors—music, Timotheus, Alexander, Jove, the narrator—and audiences—Alexander, Thais, the “Peers,” the “list’ning Crowd” (ll.6, 34). Both the interactions between agents and parallels lurking between different interactions cloud our sense of where elevating power resides and how it moves. A sample of these moments indicates their entanglement with music and sound. Like Apollo’s lyre and Zeus’s thunderbolt in the Pindaric tradition, Timotheus’s lyre and Alexander’s sword wield parallel but competing powers.98 After Timotheus stoked the emperor’s vanity at his conquests, moving him to fight “his Battails o’er again,” The Master saw the Madness rise, His glowing Cheeks, his ardent Eyes; And while He Heav’n and Earth defy’d, Chang’d his hand, and check’d his Pride. (ll.67–72) On one hand, Timotheus is positioned as Alexander’s detached observer and manipulator. On the other, the repetition of pronouns blends musician and auditor: the construction “Chang’d his [Timotheus’s] hand, and check’d his [Alexander’s] Pride” even confuses the characters (the “hand” could be Alexan-

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der’s with its sword). And while the man who “defy’d” “Heav’n and Earth” is probably the vainglorious monarch, the legendary Timotheus, too, defied strictures against musical excess and innovation when he invented the eightstringed lyre and practiced extravagant mixed modes.99 This grammatical overstepping of boundaries appropriately suggests both characters’ sublime transgressions, and the ways the sublime itself transgresses boundaries between orator and listener. Timotheus as much as Alexander is an overreacher, Pindaric either in his genuine superiority to rules or in his Icarus-like tendency to fly too close to the sun. The blurred relationship between musical and political sovereignty goes further. Jove appears as Alexander’s supposed father only in the “lofty Sound” of Timotheus’s song. Is loftiness here ultimately borrowed by Timotheus from Alexander’s divine genealogy, or lent by the musician to Alexander? In the first scenario, musical power derives from preexisting divine power. In the second, political power is bound up with musical-rhetorical persuasiveness. The “list’ning Crowd admire the lofty Sound” of this song and respond: A present Deity, they shout around; A present Deity the vaulted Roofs rebound. (ll.34–36) The crowd presumably acclaims Alexander, the immanent “Image” of his divine father, but their admiration is attributed directly to Timotheus’s sounds. This is phantasia in the root sense used by Longinus, as something “engender[ing] speech,” as well as seemingly making present that which we hear (xv.1). Playing the “chorded Shell” adored as a god in Dryden’s Song, Timotheus throws around Alexander that phantasmal “mist” of ceremony that in Restoration theory was intended to separate a monarch from his subjects by presenting him “Like a God, for the holye writt sayes wee have Calde you Godds.”100 The audience’s redoubling shout—underlined by the triplet of rhymes between Timotheus’s “Sound,” “around,” and “rebound”—reflects the doubled source of power here, political and musical. The enraptured crowd uncritically spreads Timotheus’s acclamation of Alexander’s divine lineage, and the roof resounds it still more passively. A stress on panegyric or satire, however, will determine whether this rhyming triplet is interpreted as resplendent or redundant, whether music amplifies and transfers loftiness, or nebulously diffuses it, obscuring the source of power (and truth) in a noisy interference between music, narrative, god, monarch, receptive listeners, and dumb matter. It is in this setting that

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With ravish’d Ears The Monarch hears, Assumes the God, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the Spheres. (ll.37–40) Alexander’s ravishment by his own lofty lineage, then, emerges as a re-sounding of power, the mimetic effect of sound’s mediation of loftiness from Jove to Timotheus to the crowd to the roofs above. The ode again presents a Longinian blurring between what we hear and what belongs to or emanates from us. What is the effect and truth-value of this blurring? Alexander is quite possibly not Jove’s son, and the language surrounding the “god-like hero” stresses dissemblance: his father was belied by a dragon’s appearance, and Alexander assumed, affected, and seemed.101 Alexander’s assumption of Jove’s power, moreover, follows a plot that will emerge as archetypal in the historiography of the sublime: the son identifies the father’s violent, overwhelming power as his own; the internalized sublime object can then elevate rather than crush him, providing he follows its rules (a “bourgeois” reading). Alexander’s sublime elevation draws attention to the sleights of hand in such narratives, hovering between an assertion of (royal, divine) power and a submission to (musical, myth-making) power; between delusion and truth. Even if truth were irrelevant in the sublime (the “sophistic” reading), it is significant that this is not a shared fantasy: unlike Longinian sublimity or Horatian decorum, Alexander’s Feast does not insist that the inspiring poet feels the passions he arouses.102 “Plac’d on high | Amid the tuneful Quire,” Timotheus seems as removed as Cecilia from earthly passions (ll.20–21). The musician is the inscrutable observer and mover of others’ transporting sensations, their acts of sublime heroism or tyranny. Without an ultimate point of elevation from which to view Alexander’s feast, or an all-penetrating lux to illuminate it, Dryden’s musical sublime leaves us with the mutable construction and movement of power. Here, as elsewhere, Dryden’s music moves auditors’ bodies and affects, transforming them into images of the lofty powers and passions they hear, yet without owning a definable essence. Music is a channel or mediatrix that herself moves through mediators (singers, instrument, crowds, narrators). Although music is center stage in Alexander’s Feast, it nonetheless remains a power behind the throne. Indeed, if Turner is right that eros generally governs Dryden’s sublime, then music becomes a power behind the power behind the throne: when

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Alexander submitted to Thais’s charms, “Love was Crown’d, but Musique won the Cause” (l.108).103 Like Longinus’s sublime of harmonious arrangement, Dryden’s sublime imagines a propriety between lofty sounds, high subjects, heightened emotions, and intense representations (visualizations or audiations), powering a mimetic elevation of the listener. Simultaneously, through music Dryden imagines sublime resemblance and harmony collapsing into transgression, descent, inhumanity, usurpation and violence.

Dennis’s Concordia Discors In a letter of 1694, Dryden praised the Pindarics of his disciple John Dennis and encouraged him to impose “Measures” and “cultivat[ion]” on this wild “Land newly discover’d” by Cowley: “You have the Sublimity of Sense as well as Sound, and know how far the Boldness of a Poet may lawfully extend.”104 A few months later, Dennis published a Pindaric on Dryden’s new translation of Virgil’s Georgics, praising his “Success” in “emulat[ing]” Virgil’s “Flight” (ll.14– 15).105 Dennis’s ode is overstuffed with the allusive vocabulary of Pindaric height, transcendence, and music. No Icarus striving after Pindar, Horace’s “Dacian swan,” Dryden successfully follows where Virgil, the “Mantuan Swan,” “explores” “unbounded Heav’n,” “While with Seraphick Sounds he Towring Sings” (ll.2–3, 12–13). Dryden translates Virgil into “modern Numbers, which express | Their Musick, and their utmost Might” (ll.12–13). Dryden’s “Musick” and “Might” echo Virgil’s “Musick, and his Height” (ll.6–7). Similarities in sound and repetitions in vocabulary mark the easy bonding of loftiness, power, and poetic music, and the astonishingly immediate transport, from like to like, between Virgil and Dryden. Dennis offers an early and extreme example of the many whiggish writers who appropriated Dryden’s sublime, a cultural pattern that has been somewhat obscured by more direct lines between Dryden and tory poets.106 This particular ode follows the footsteps of Dryden’s musical sublime in its most untroubled, syncretic aspect. Pleasing sound, artistic force, cosmic harmony, and classical rhetoric march to the beat of the same drum. Dennis’s second stanza links poetic height with rhetorical genres, contrasting the “middle Air” to which Virgil and Dryden keep in singing of “ humble Rural Things” with moments when their “sonorous Flight | To Heav’n sublimely Wings” (ll.16–20). In stanza 1, the inadequacy of our “Praise” raises that of the gods, who hear Virgil with “ravish’ d Ears, | And tune their own harmonious Spheres | To his Melodious

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Lays” (ll.7–10). An obvious nod to Alexander’s Feast, “ravished ears” is one of those resonant phrases of Dryden’s that was also a poetic commonplace in the 1690s, and so another moment where the sublime trades on transmitted cultural tropes—and tropes of transmission—not unspoiled natural originality.107 Dennis’s ode closes with the metaphorics of harmonia mundi, familiar from Dryden’s Song and the wider context of Cowleyan Pindarics and Cecilian odes: “each Line” of Dryden’s verse becomes a celestial “Orb[]” dancing “to [its] own Celestial Sound[]” (ll.39, 43–45): Each [line] with bright Flame that Fires our Souls is Crown’d, Each has magnificence of Sound, And Harmony Divine. (ll.40–42) As in the conjoining of “Musick,” “Height,” and “Might” in stanza 1, the sublimity of audible sounds blends with lofty “Thoughts,” divine inspiration, fiery poetic furor (l.38), and with a harmony spanning sound and sense. Ironically, none of these easy harmonies characterizes the sublime that Dennis theorized as a critic.108 Despite his affiliations with Restoration libertines, wits, and Stuart royalists such as Dryden, Dennis also helped to canonize the sublimity of Paradise Lost, with its republican rejection of the servility of rhyme; he participated in a whig sublime celebrating inter alia the manly military virtues of William III; and he wrote in the orbit of a whiggish movement for reforming manners that targeted the theaters (reopened by Charles II) as a particular source of corruption. Dennis’s defense of certain kinds of poetic harmony and of the stage—including his own “tragedy” with “musical entertainments,” Rinaldo and Armida—involved distancing himself from standard musical tropes in poetics and scapegoating opera (effeminate, foreign, Catholic, unnatural, nonsensical).109 His criticism typically dismisses the sublime in music, while illuminating for us the role of music in the sublime. The discordant harmonies between Dennis’s own writings, and between Dennis’s and Dryden’s sublimes, in fact chime with Dennis’s broader model of the sublime. Recognized as an early enthusiast for the Boileauian-Longinian sublime ever since contemporaries dubbed him “Sir Tremendous Longinus,” Dennis presented the sublime as a kind of concordia discors: a paradoxical mixture of tumultuous passion leading to composed harmony, and harmony increasing passion.110 In the context of early eighteenth-century anxieties and fascinations surrounding transcendence and enthusiasm—anx ieties about excessively direct claims to knowledge of ultimate realities, fueled by recent

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religious, intellectual, and civil turmoil—Dennis fashioned sublimity as an “enthusiastic Passion,” related to but qualitatively different from ordinary feelings.111 The ode form is a spur for developing this theory, especially lofty, eulogistic odes like the Pindaric. The category of enthusiastic passion helps square Dennis’s theory that “Passion is the chief thing in Poetry” with Longinus’s insistence that “many sublime passages” “are quite without emotion.”112 As Dennis puts it, “In some branches of the greater poetry,” “[a]s in the Ode,” it is “impossible for a Poet every where to excite in a very great degree, that which we vulgarly call Passion.”113 There must therefore “be two sorts of Passion. First, That which we call Vulgar Passion, and Secondly, Enthusiasm.”114 Harnessing the problematic energies of both enthusiasm and passion, Dennis’s sublime claims fleetingly to reconcile our discordant faculties and so reconcile humankind with God. As Dennis defines and refines the nature of poetry and its apotheosis in the sublime, he repeatedly employs musical metaphors with wide-ranging implications. A striking example is his letter on crossing the Alps, an early text portraying the mountains as sublime rather than monstrous or simply impractical. The Alps for Dennis read like a passionate poem, “design’d, and executed too in Fury.”115 Nature becomes Longinus’s sublime orator, soaring above technê to become what she is: physis. Her “careless, irregular and boldest Strokes are most admirable,” and while regular, cultivated beauty produces “delight,” “transporting Pleasures follow’d the sight of the Alpes, and what unusual transports think you were those, that were mingled with horrours, and sometimes almost with despair?”116 The beau désordre of David’s and Pindar’s songs here marks the Alps. The letter takes up an equivocation between creation and destruction, form and formlessness, explored a year earlier in Dryden’s Song. If God had established harmony, creating a good cosmos (order) by separating light from darkness and forming what was “void and without form” (Gen. 1:2), then were the jagged, tumbled, and threatening Alps part of creation, or a token of the Fall and Flood? Perhaps the very signs of destruction in the Alps were an eloquent, perversely fitting, testimony to God’s might, and the unsoundable abyss between the fallen world and the first creation. “If these Mountains were not a Creation, but form’d by universal Destruction,” Dennis writes, “then are these Ruines of the old World the greatest wonders of the New.”117 Tying together creation and the eschatological Flood, Dennis’s Alpine sublime resonates with the strange harmonies of Dryden’s first music ode, where the fiat musica of harmony’s command, “Arise ye more than dead,” made even the first creation a prefiguration of the

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Resurrection and Apocalypse. Entering a ravine, Dennis next meets “an astonishing Prospect”: “Ruins upon ruins in monstrous Heaps, and Heaven and Earth confounded. The uncouth Rocks . . . void of all form, but what they had receiv’d from Ruine; the frightful view of the Precipices, and the foaming Waters that threw themselves headlong down them, made all such a Consort up for the Eye, as that sort of Musick does for the Ear, in which Horrour can be joyn’d with Harmony.”118 A music of pleasure and horror, consonance and discord, or concordia discors, makes its way into the sublime. Dennis breaks off here, just as Dryden’s Song breaks off at the thought of music untuning the skies: “I am afraid you will think that I have said too much,” Dennis writes, pretending to recoil from what is either an excess or a failure of communication. “Yet if you had but seen what I have done, you would surely think that I have said too little.”119 Despite his protestation, Dennis is more inclined to say too much than too little, and it is his excesses—reiterations, elaborations, self-contradictions, his tendency to extremes—that reveal most about music in his sublime. This is evident in two ambitious treatises, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). Both tie music to four basic qualities: passion, reason, reconciliation, and sensuousness. Sometimes, music is merely a passionate and sensual art, subordinate to sublime poetry, which combines passion with reason.120 Passions are discomposing movements of the soul, and from “the disorder that is found in our [postlapsarian] Passions . . . proceeds all our Unhappiness, and all our Vice.”121 Sometimes, as “Harmony,” music instead figures the order and reason that let us sublimely “pass the bounds that circumscribe the Universe.”122 Recalling Boethian theory, Dennis equates the “Regularity of motion” in “the little World, which we call Man” with the harmonious movements of Nature and mind: “As Nature is Order and Rule and Harmony in the visible World, so Reason is the very same throughout the invisible Creation.”123 Elsewhere, harmony surpasses reason itself to become the goal of sublime art. Sublimity “exalt[s] the Reason by exalting the Passions,” ending our “Discord” and “civil jars” (another musical term) by establishing “Harmony” among the “Faculties,” thus elevating us to “Paradice” and reconciliation with God.124 Finally, Dennis famously maintains that passion, not formal linguistic features, is the sine qua non of poetry. He consequently defines poetic sublimity at the expense of sound-related features like meter and rhyme, commonly conceptualized as musical. Dennis cites the commonplace that poetry “must be Musical,” “For Numbers distinguish the parts of Poetick Diction from the periods of Prose,” yet argues “Passion is still more nec-

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essary to it than Harmony”: “For therefore Poetry is Poetry, because it is more passionate and sensual than Prose.”125 When contrasted with passion, music is aligned with language’s formal, arbitrary appearance—its accidents against passion’s substance. And not only in poetics: according to a pamphlet critiquing luxury and social and political disorder, “[a] musical Voice is natural . . . to . . . Birds, but always accidental to Men.”126 Dennis is reflecting on the emerging Italian opera world in London and taking a stab its brightest star, Nicolini. This renowned castrato had just created the title role in Handel’s Rinaldo (1711), the first Italian opera composed for the English stage. Accident here means “mere appearance” or “happenstance” but also suggests the castrato’s being “gelt”—an illegal procedure often attributed to accidents in horse riding or the like that supposedly necessitated an operation.127 Dennis hints that, although superficial, music is not culture’s adornment or refinement of nature but an emasculating lack: while “Manly Pleasures are rational, mere sensual Pleasures are common to Beasts with Men. The Pleasure that effeminate Musick gives, is a mere sensual Pleasure, which he who gives or he who receives in a supreme Degree, must be alike unmann’d.”128 Dennis thus condemns music’s “supreme” pleasure as an unnatural coupling, even rape, where a singing man overwhelms and unmans a listening one. Yet Dennis cannot so easily dismiss sensual aurality through this dynamic. Such force is indeed crucial to Dennis’s own sublime, infamously figured as “committing a pleasing rape upon the very Soul of the Reader.”129 In a passage whose general phrasing derives from Boileau, this particular expression recalls Dryden’s biblical satire of the Monmouth rebellion, Absalom and Achitophel (1681). Dryden’s smooth-tongued adviser Achitophel (the Whig politician Shaftesbury) exhorts David’s bastard Absalom (Monmouth) to “commit a pleasing rape upon the Crown” by usurping his father, David (Charles II).130 Achitophel enacts a sort of “sublime turn” in his speech, seizing the power he claims only to describe as Absalom’s, and seducing Absolom to rebellion.131 As in Dennis’s satire of opera, then, we find here a multilayered figurative male-tomale sexualized usurpation involving political discord and all-too-persuasive voices. Both scenarios resonate with Alexander’s Feast, and the broader problem of legitimating and controlling sublime persuasion. Looking to mid-eighteenthcentury political oratory, Lamb sees a “conundrum” for the sublime: “A bifurcated judgement is necessary both to applaud the eloquence which can transport an audience and to reprobate the . . . speaker who harnesses such elevated sentiments to private ends.”132 Widening our historical lens, we might call this the “Timotheus conundrum” in the long eighteenth century, a conundrum linking

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politics, sexual power, poetry, and music. Faced by this conundrum, Dennis’s Advancement tries to separate laudable sonic ravishments from the dark side of the sublime by bifurcating music, as when he sets the excluded music of another “wanton,” “effeminate” castrato, Siface, against the included music of “Virgilian Harmony,” full of “Mastery,” melody, and “Force.”133 Demeaned by opera, the category of music is redeemed and elevated by poetry. By coding music variously as sensuality, passion, reason, and reconciliation, Dennis unsettles his own categories. He thereby hints at what the sublime as enthusiastic Passion means—a tumultuous movement that exists curiously without personal or social strife—while obscuring the difficult question of how his sublimity can simultaneously be aligned with reason/order and represent a combination of reason with its others, chiefly passion. Perhaps the slippery status of music is excused by the paradoxical guise of the sublime in a fallen world, where our failure to properly grasp moral reformation demands the intervention of the sublime in the first place. Dennis sometimes plays on this paradox, linking it explicitly with music: “ ’Tis a little odd to consider, that Passion which disturbs the Soul, should occasion it to produce Harmony, which . . . employ[s] the Order and Composure of [the Soul].”134 This oddness is foundational; not reasoned away but confirmed by an appeal to sensible experience. For “as Passion, which is the Disorder of the Soul; produces Harmony which is Agreement; so Harmony which is Concord Augments and propagates Passion which is Discord. All who are acquainted with Poetry or Musick must be . . . sensible of this.”135

Conclusion In Dennis and Dryden’s writings, the boundaries between literature and music are flexible and porous. Sound and audiation belong to poetry and its forceful effects; indeed, for Dennis, poetry is a meta-art “comprehend[ing] the force of all these Arts of Logick, of Ethicks, of Eloquence, of Painting, of Musick.”136 The following chapters move between discourses that similarly blend verbal and musical power and those that see musical sound as categorically external to literature. But throughout, they show how the power of music exemplified the power of the sublime. Imagined as a force within language, part of its “propriety,” music could not simply be excluded from oratorical, literary, or rhetorical sublimity. Nor could theological, anthropological or physical-historical conceptions of the sublime’s underpinnings, in harmony or discord, order or disorder,

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transgression or decorum, easily disentangle themselves from music. Dennis’s complex exclusions and reinclusions of music mark an important commonality between English discourses of the sublime and the writings of Boileau and Longinus. Together with Dryden, whose engagements with the ambiguities of musical power are vital to understanding the early modern sublime, Dennis’s writings illustrate the antagonistic intimacy between music and the sublime from the beginnings of sublimity’s reemergence as a distinctive, compelling, and soon voracious aesthetic category. The double codings of music in this chapter—as peace or tumultuous movement; ordering or chaos; something that purges or raises the passions; the sensual or what surpasses sense—continue to inform the developing discourse of the sublime explored in chapter 2, through British culture in the first half of the eighteenth century. Dryden’s Pindarics and Dennis’s focus on passion will both prove formative here.

chapter 2

“What Passion Cannot Musick Raise and Quell!” Passionate and Dispassionate Sublimity with the Hillarians and Handelians

“What Passion cannot Musick raise and quell!” exclaimed Dryden’s Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687. During the long eighteenth century, this exclamation would increasingly become a genuine question, as the psychic landscape of British women and men was reshaped, and the domain we know as “the emotions” emerged. In 1783, the organist and critic William Jackson asked: “ ‘What passion can music raise or quell?’ Who ever felt himself affected, other wise than with pleasure, at those strains which are supposed to inspire grief—rage—joy—or pity? and this, in a degree, equal to the goodness of the composition and per formance. We attend—are pleased— delighted— transported—and when the heart can bear no more, ‘glow, tremble, and weep.’ ”1 Jackson distances himself from those who still saw music as imitating and inspiring passions (as he himself had done earlier), and supports an emerging aesthetic paradigm, which identified a faculty for “pure pleasure” in the perception of artistic “goodness.”2 For Jackson, neither musically induced experiences of pleasure, delight, and transport nor physiological responses like glowing, trembling, and weeping were passions. All “tears, in fact, [were] nothing but the mechanical effect of every strong affection of the heart.”3 Extreme musical pleasure was, however, sublime—hence Jackson’s allusion to Dryden’s music odes, by the 1780s a touchstone of sublimity, and to the “sublime” bard Ossian, then at the height of his popularity, who made “readers glow, and tremble, and weep.” 4

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Although many in the eighteenth century aligned extreme passions with the sublime—and with music—the separation of passion and sublimity by writers such as Jackson was not a departure from Longinian discourse but rather one outgrowth of it. For Longinus and his followers, passion (pathos) was not essential to the sublime. Passion was nonetheless important, forming the second source of sublimity, and often accompanying other sources. Thus Longinus praised Sappho for her sublime selection and combination of ideas, but not coincidentally the poem he chose to exemplify her compositional skill was a lyric about extreme passions in love. Sappho creates what Longinus calls a united poetic “body,” but one ironically depicting a human body threatening to fall apart under love’s pressure. In the words of an anonymous 1698 translation of Peri hypsous, Sappho’s “Soul, her Body, her Tongue, her Eyes, her Ears, her Beauty, are drawn as so many different Persons, just at the point of expiring. And with what contrary Passions is she mov’d? She freezes, she burns; she is mad, she is very wise; she is afraid her Heart is just bursting; that one would think, that she was not possest by only one Passion, but that the whole circle of them made a general, jarring Rendez-vous in her Breast.”5 The phrase “jarring Rendez-vous” hints at a connection between sublime passions and two aspects of music explored in this chapter. First, jarring refers to harsh and dissonant sounds, and so to an element of composition—dissonance—that can figure conflicting states like terrible joy.6 As we will see, eighteenth-century writers took up this classical perception of conflicting passions in the sublime, alongside contrasting neo-Lucretian views of sublimity as a dispassionate state. Second, by the later eighteenth century “jarring” could refer to physical vibration caused by blows, and by extension to the vibration of stringlike nerves, which Burke, among others, made central to the sublime.7 A related premise of this chapter is that the musical sublime’s relationship to affective experience was so unstable as to test categories like passion, affect, and emotion.8 In turn, debate about this domain shaped the musical sublime, underpinning varieties of sublimity characterized by either violent or absent passion. Differences between terms for feeling are slippery but significant. Most generally, passions were movements of the soul toward an object deemed good or away from one deemed harmful.9 Emotions, according to a paradigm that crystallized in the nineteenth century, were largely “morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings.”10 The term “emotion” rarely refers to passions and affections in Dryden’s world, but in its older senses of agitated movement and moving out (e-motion) it remains relevant to the sublime and music in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. As Thomas Dixon’s

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influential study suggests, passions belonged to a “differentiated” thoughtworld of sentiments, appetites, and affections (often understood as weaker, higher, calm, intellective, or benevolent passions), involving the body, will, judgment, and morality; emotions dominated a later thought-world and vocabulary shaped by empiricism and new mental sciences.11 Eighteenth-century discourses of music and sublimity sit between these never hermetically sealed worlds. Writings on taste and later on aesthetics—the discourse that asks “What moves me?”—played a distinctive role in theorizing emotions.12 The states provoked by the sublime present a particular need for theorization: they apparently move us toward objects deemed harmful; they are and are not passionate; and while resembling higher moral or social affections in some ways, they are vehement rather than weak, and, as Burke will insist, not self-evidently benevolent or sociable. Another way to frame this is to say that the sublime addresses anomalies in object-directed accounts of the passions. Some impressive objects do not cause a clear movement of the soul, because our judgment about whether they are positive or negative is suspended (in wonder or astonishment). Conversely, some movements of the soul are not motivated by objects in a conventional sense—their object is unclear or highly mediated and distanced. Dennis’s enthusiastic passions are a case in point. Passions are “Enthusiasms, when their Cause is not clearly comprehended,” or when their cause is elevated by its rarity or our rarefied approach to it: they are “moved by the Idea’s [sic] in Contemplation or the Meditation of Things, that belong not to common Life.”13 The modern paradigm of disinterested aesthetics—for Kant, separate from passions altogether—develops this kind of eighteenth-century thinking. To explore this history, I first return briefly to Dryden’s Song, an emblem of the precarious place of passion in the sublime. I then turn to Aaron Hill and his circle, especially Joseph Mitchell and Eliza Haywood. These “Hillarians” were important adapters of Dennis’s passion- and movement-oriented sublime and active in the cult surrounding Handel. The Handelian context later sparked a revealing exchange between the musicians and commentators Charles Avison and William Hayes. The chapter closes with the most famous English theorist of the sublime, Edmund Burke, and locates his wary treatment of music in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757/9) within broader changes in thinking about passionate movement and empirical feeling in the sublime. Methodologically, picking up chapter 1’s arguments about the chronology of the musical sublime, this chapter suggests why the sublime must be viewed not as a literarycritical discourse transferred to music but as a multi- and pre-disciplinary phenomenon.

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Reprise: Dryden’s Song The trope of music as language of passions was widespread in the later seventeenth century. Nicholas Brady’s music ode called it “Nature’s voice,” the “universal tongue” that simultaneously and immediately “express[es] and move[s]” “the passions.”14 The genre of music odes later blended into odes on the passions like William Collins’s The Passions: An Ode for Music (1746). A Pindaric by the young Burke took for granted a connection between music odes, passion, and sublimity, as it took up motifs from Alexander’s Feast to praise the doctor and phi losopher Paul Hiffernan: Hiffernan continues the work of “great Longinus,” the sage who understood the “Structure” and “source” of “Man’s Passions.”15 Nonetheless, music was not only a mover of passions but also a technology that released humans from passion altogether.16 A good share of music’s value in antiquity lay in a therapeutic ability to purge passion—associated with movement—by restoring a tranquil harmony and balance connected with mathematical ratio and the order of the cosmos. Dryden’s claim that music raises and quells passion responds to this duality, applying to music formulations from classical rhetoric that had deep connections with the sublime. According to these formulations, speech must incitare et moderare, exitare aut sedare, inflammare et extinguere—stimulate and moderate, excite and calm, inflame and extinguish.17 For Dryden, the “other” of musical passion was not aesthetic pleasure but the cosmic and theological power of harmony. Chapter 1 linked the catalogue of passions in Dryden’s Song with an emerging musical sublime whose final “holy Love” could be read as the apotheosis of passion or its extinguishing by something like a passionless, non-carnal affection. Such movements are not uncommon in music Pindarics, repeatedly marking the climax—and complete reframing—of their catalogues of instruments and passions. In the Song, a larger structure intensified this pattern: the framing stanzas describe “heavenly Harmony” without evidently thematizing specific passions or using those onomatopoeic qualities that act as verbal correlates for passion-stirring music. Instead, the stanzas’ complex intersecting metrical and rhythmic patterns perform an obscure harmony, like the inaudible music of the spheres. Following Milton’s description of angelic dance, we might call such harmony “intricate, | Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular | Then most, when most irregular . . . [it] seem[s].”18 It is the supreme expression of music’s power but seems to swallow up passion. Absence of passion need not, however, imply absence of sublimity. After all, the sublimity of Genesis 1’s fiat lux, praised by Longinus (ix.9), rested less on pathos

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than on astonishing performative power. And this biblical moment is precisely the subject reworked by Dryden’s first stanza—with music replacing light—and revisited in his last, before the speaker turns from Genesis to Apocalypse, prophesying the moment when the last “Trumpet” “shall untune the Sky” (ll.59–63). These framing stanzas have puzzled critics, who often want to see Dryden’s ode as incipiently modern and secular, and therefore not genuinely interested in the “cosmological orthodoxies” of harmonia mundi or theological orthodoxies of “apocalyptic dread.”19 The ode is better understood as playing on music’s structural doubleness when it comes to passion, and on an existing early modern sublime influenced by Lucretius’s De rerum natura (remember the Lucretian atomic vocabulary in stanza 1). Intersecting with the Longinian sublime, the Lucretian sublime centered on philosophical visions of the entire cosmos. For Longinus, nature “breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is greater and more divine than ourselves. Thus the whole universe is not enough to satisfy the speculative intelligence of human thought; our ideas often pass beyond the limits that confine us. Look at life from all sides and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, and you will soon realize what we were born for”.20 Lucretius’s philosophical poem similarly encouraged wonder at the immensity of nature and an answering reevaluation of human powers. The Lucretian philosopher-poet feels “divine plea sure . . . and horror” (divina voluptas . . . atque horror), a quintessentially mixed feeling like Dennis’s “delightful Horrour.”21 Dryden’s Grand CHORUS, with its driving regular rhythms and climactic final triplet of rhymes, might well evoke such horror mingled with elation, as it imagines the “last and dreadful hour” when “The Dead shall live, the Living die,” and a “crumbling Pageant” will give way to a new heaven and new earth (ll.59–63). Unsurprisingly, later ambitious music Pindarics return to this theme.22 Dryden’s emerging musical sublime provided rich material for later poets and critics—not to mention musicians like Handel, who set both odes in the 1730s. Finally, alongside mixed feelings, the Lucretian sublime involved kinds of feeling distinct from passion. Within Lucretius’s Epicurean philosophy, true pleasure was a nonpassionate, stable tranquillity that arose when moving passions and moving pleasures (eating, drinking, sex) ceased. As we will see, this ancient alternative to passion resonated with conceptions of harmony as composure and fascinated writers on the sublime from the Hillarians to Burke.

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Hillarians and Handelians In the 1720s, the poet, critic, impresario, and entrepreneur Aaron Hill was “perhaps the most important, certainly the most ubiquitous, man of letters in London literary life.”23 His literary circle—the Hillarians—vigorously promoted the sublime. Members included Eliza Haywood, whose poetry and scandalous novels developed what has been called an erotic sublime; Edward Young and James Thomson, prominent poets of natural and religious sublimes; and less well-known advocates for sublimity like Richard Savage, David Mallet, and Joseph Mitchell.24 Hill himself promulgated a sublime strongly influenced by Dennis, not least in its focus on extremity of feeling and movement, domains connected by motion though not by the category “emotions.”25 Hill, moreover, helped launch the English career of Handel, soon to become the sublime musician for British audiences. As director of opera at the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket from 1710 to 1711, Hill commissioned, designed, produced, and contributed to the libretto of Handel’s Rinaldo (1711), the first Italian opera composed for England. By his death in 1759, Handel’s sublimity was widely owned.26 When John Mainwaring published Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederick Handel (1760), Longinus provided his motto: “I readily allow, that Writers of a lofty and tow’ring Genius are by no means pure and correct, since whatever is neat and accurate throughout, must be exceedingly liable to Flatness.”27 For Claudia Johnson, Charles Burney’s Account of the enormous Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1784 “summarizes the attributes of the musical sublime” as they emerged through the eighteenth century: “bold designs, masses of harmony, contrasts, and constant resources of invention.”28 Epitomized by the choruses of Messiah, these qualities demanded the “powerful agency” of hoards of musicians—more than five hundred for Burney’s commemorations.29 Handel’s “rough” style and rough-and-ready handling of rules bespoke his monumental genius, and his memorializations grew correspondingly monumental.30 This is a well-known story. But returning to the well-trodden ground of Handel’s sublimity, we can underline the musical sublime’s emergence as a pre- or multidisciplinary as well as a multimedial phenomenon. Hill’s Civilizing Sublime

His own involvement with opera notwithstanding, Hill shared some of Dennis’s suspicion toward music.31 An early issue of his periodical Plain

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Dealer established its campaign for Addisonian politeness by dwelling on the need for a moral purge of opera, following a supposed affront offered to the English singer Anastasia Robinson by the Italian castrato Senesino (no.  7, 13 April 1724).32 According to Plain Dealer, “Musick’s soft God” himself would strip Senesino of his powers and banish his now “shrill, unnatural, ungraceful, Strains” from England (i.48–49). The castrato—an emblem of London’s elite music world—is a “poor Machine, of mean, delusive Sound” and “Foe to . . . God-like Sense” (i.48–49). Robinson’s lover Lord Peterborough had whipped Senesino to avenge Robinson.33 With Hill, music becomes the whipping boy of loose passions and gross corporeality; Mr. Plain Dealer’s attack on Senesino exemplifies his general attack on fashionable corruption in the capital. Nonetheless, the fact that the god of music himself punishes Senesino makes music the instrument of its own purification, a potential force of reformation. This dynamic characterizes Hill’s writings on music. In a later issue devoted to opera (no. 94, 12 February 1725), in a 1733 ode to Handel’s Te Deum, and in a verse petition to Prince Frederick, The Tears of the Muses (1737), Hill repeatedly called for musical reform and deplored both modern opera and music ungoverned by words: Near Opera’s fribling Fugues, what Muse can stay? Where wordless Warblings winnow Thoughts, away! Music, when Purpose points her not the Road, Charms, to betray, and softens, to corrode. Empty of Sense, the Soul-seducing Art Thrills a slow Poison to the sick’ning Heart.34 For Hill, music’s chief strength and chief danger lies in its power over the passions and will, and hence its ability to drive action and harmonize or disorder the body and the body politic. Opera epitomizes the social rewards and dangers of music, since ancient opera was music in toto—music properly understood as encompassing melody, verse, acting, and gesture.35 In some respects, Hill approaches Longinus’s understanding of music as cultivation of all the faculties through the muses (mousikê). And as for Longinus, cultivation has an ambiguous value for Hill. His sublime is “musical” in this holistic cultivated sense, while simultaneously flowing from native and inborn fire. We might say Hill kindles this natural fire within a sort of Dennisian bracket: a program of moral and social reformation through sublimity. Music most comfortably contributes to this program as poetry’s handmaiden, since, for Hill as for Longinus, words

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guarantee the proper direction of music’s energies. Only “Strength’ning, and strengthned by, the Poet’s Fire” can “Music’s meaning Voice exalt[] Desire”; can “Harmony” “not drown[], but quicken[], Thought; And Fools, unfeeling Words, by Notes [be] caught.”36 Nonetheless, there is more to Hill’s sublimes than harmonious reform through harmonized words and thoughts. The preface to Hill’s poem JudgmentDay (1721) made the sublime an experience that both exceeds cultured mousikê and exceeds language as a cultured curb for forces (like music) that threaten to “drown[]” “Thought.” The preface explains that “when we let our Fancy loose, on this frightful Discovery,” the Apocalypse, “we conceive an indistinct and astonishing idea of something, horribly prodigious and which is too mighty for our Grasp. . . . It bursts from our very Approach, and overflows Humane Thought, when we would draw it into Description.”37 In this sublime, when thought and “finite reason” fail, divinely inspired “Fancy,” alongside the senses that feed it, rises up. While music aided reasonable language like a servant in Tears, here music aids language like a benefactress. Imaginative sound and sight are the inlets of this apocalyptic sublime; for, unlike Cowley, Hill does not shy away from representing the Apocalypse: this subject “draw[s]” in the poetic fancy, even if it cannot be contained by fancy.38 Oxymoronic sounds hint at language’s incapacity to contain sublime sensations in the Apocalypse: God’s voice is “Soft, and yet loud” and rolls its own “Force along” with “solemn Sweetness” (s.xiii.1–5). As the medium of God’s “sublime,” “transporting,” sweet voice, sound “strikes chill Rev’rence” through listeners, while imparting “enliv’ning” heat to the cosmos and stirring the poet’s fancy (ss.xiii.4, xiv.1). The aural sublime is subtly distinguished from the visual by its greater openness and condescension toward human capacities. Towards the end of Judgment-Day, the apocalyptic vision withdraws, and the light of heaven “glides” upwards and away. Meanwhile, the sounds of “Heard Halleluja’s shake th’inferior sky!” and are “prolong[ed]” in “distant thrills” until they “die” “in gradual soft’nings” “with transporting fall of sound” (s.xvii.9–12). Heavenly music, like heavenly vision, ravishes, transports and elevates in the poem; but sound also descends and extends sublimely. Light rises and swiftly escapes the visionary, but sound is a mediatory power. Just as the verbal sounds of the poem remain as traces of the imperfectly rendered vision, angelic hallelujahs suggest a softening of the gap between earth and heaven. Simultaneously, song’s propagation by vibrations (“thrills”) might extend and transmit the sublime sensations of the poet’s revelation from ear to ear.

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As Judgement-Day suggests, Hill shared with Dennis not only an interest in sublimity as a force of moral reformation, but also in energy and transferal. Transferal becomes almost self-referential in sound: God’s voice is simultaneously a movement, the energy powering this movement, and a cause of movement in others—a self-propelling, “transporting Majesty of Sound” (s.xiii.1). Hill’s vocabulary of energetic shaking, trembling, heartstrings, vibrations, and thrills further implies that sublimity may be the effect of energy on a sensitive stringed instrument. With the rise of nerve theory later in the century, humans were increasingly imagined as such sensitive instruments, as we will see with Burke. Hill’s engagements with the sublime also infused his writing on biblical paraphrase and Pindarics in the 1720s. Hill discussed Pindar alongside biblical style in a preface “concerning the Sublimity of the Ancient Hebrew Poetry” to his Pindaric The Creation (1720). He marveled at “that Sublimity of Thought in the first Chapter of Genesis, where Moses, to express the Power of God, describes the Dawn of the Creation as starting into Being at a Word,—and God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light.”39 In English, only Pindarics “allow the necessary Scope, to so masterless a Subject, as the Creation, of all others the most copious, and illustrious.” 40 The argument reappeared in “Reflections” on the first book of his epic Gideon, or the Restoration of Israel (London, 1720). Why is the form of the Pindaric adequate to the sublimity of Creation, restoration or Judgment Day? Answering this question draws Hill into propositions about prosody that turn on music. “Reflections” begins with the common gesture of scorning modern poetry’s musicality, its facile combination of sweet sounds divorced from meaning and strength.41 “In common Acceptation [poetry] seems reduc’d to the Idea of a certain musical Cadence of Words; or plain common Sense rais’d to Harmony by Numbers.” 42 Identifying poetry with “this Ductility of Numbers” mistakes “the Means for the End”: in ancient Israel, music was simply the “Honey of Delight” by which “the first Divine Poets . . . convey[ed] the Bitterness of Instruction”; a “golden Pill” that “once swallow’d, dissolv’d” slowly “in the Heart” to reform the mind.43 Later, however, Hill moves beyond this commonplace to defend rigorous attention to one kind of music, rhyme, which he finds unjustly scorned as “Jingle and Chiming.” To justify rhyme, Hill granted independent value to music: “That which is Musick, even when not join’d to Meaning, can never become less when united to it. Musick is self-dependent, and wants not Words to recommend it. Words stand in need of the Assistance of Musick to enforce their Influence on the Memory. If then that most powerful Part of Poetry which consists

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in Numbers and Measure, does only by Virtue of Musick convey Ideas to the Mind with Advantage, why is Rhyme, the most apparent of all Musick, thought unworthy Commendation?” 44 Hill thus dissented from “Mr.  Dennis’s Argument” that “Rhyme is” not “Musick, because, says he, there is no Harmony in Unisons.” 45 Rhymes were not repetitions for Hill but chains of resemblances, harmonies indispensable to transmitting poetic force: rhyme lends poetry “vigorous Energy,” “Spirit,” and “Liveliness.” This was partly because for Hill, as for Longinus, modulated sounds have a direct mimetic effect on bodies. Thus in Tears of the Muses, Hill showed an Orpheus-like Terpsichore, Muse of dance, moving nature through musical ratios: “Tim’d to the tuneful Voice, each trembling Tree | Strain’d its tugg’d Root, and labour’d to be free.” 46 Rhyme is enlivening on cognitive grounds, too. Sonic resemblance “serves as a Chain to . . . bind together the Coherence of the Verses: The Memory catching readily at the Sense by Recollection of the Rhyme, which directs to it like a Clue, and leads along the Apprehension.” 47 Music thus helps create sense by transmitting and linking the discrete limbs of discourse. While resemblance lends poetry and the receptive mind coherence, the irregularity of Pindaric strophes lends poetry variety, guaranteeing complementary cognitive effects: variety “beat up, provok’d, and kept lively” our “Attention.” 48 So while couplets “satiat[e] the Ear” with “wearisome Equality” and “soften” sound, irregularity opens poetry to “wonderful or terrible” sounds. Like resemblance, variety is coded as musical: “The Latitude of . . . diversify’d Numbers allows a fuller Harmony than the common heroic Measure, and must consequently be as preferable to it as a Consort to a single Violin.” 49 Hill thus mandates a sublime music of concordia discors, where aural resemblance harmonizes with difference. The very power to create, navigate, and command the labyrinthine complexity of concordia discors displays sublime energy for Hill. His preface to The Creation gives an example via Psalm 104’s image of God making the clouds his chariot, and walking on the wings of the wind. For Hill, the psalmist makes God’s power over nature sublime by treating a confusing seeming-disorder as unified purposiveness—God controls “that rolling, and terrible Perplexity of Motions, which[,] we figure to our Imagination, form a Chariot of Clouds” (ix). Hill gives a vivid rationale for the sublimity many contemporaries perceived in Psalm 104: “Our Idea [is] heighten’d to the utmost, by reflecting on this calm, and easy Motion of the Deity, upon a Violence, so rapid, so furious, and ungovernable, to our human Conception. Yet as nothing can be more sublime, so nothing can be more simple, and plain” (vi).

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Neither simplicity nor complexity alone are sublime in this account. Labyrinthine complexity might figure something like the knotty and intervolved harmonies of concordia discors, but complexity also participates in a larger coordination of complexity with simplicity. We now often ally (positive) energy with (antiauthoritarian) disorder, but Hill’s sublime mingles two kinds of energy: the furious and multiplicitous with the calm and unifying. One and the same figure, the Pindaric reader, harmonizes these energies, first “totter[ing] strangely” like “a new Scater” with the new form. “But when many repeated Trials have embolden’d him to strike out, and taught the true Poize of Motion, he throws forward his Body with a dextrous Velocity, and becoming ravish’d with the masterly Sweep of his Windings, knows no Pleasure greater, than to feel himself fly through that well-measured Maziness which he first attempted with Perplexity” (xiv). This movement recalls again the “intricate, | Eccentric, intervolv’d” motions of planets and angelic dancers in Paradise Lost, “regular | Then most, when most irregular they seem.” Throughout his work, then, Hill grants musical concepts and practices strong regenerative potential. He seeks to unclog the source of opera, imagined as an ancient, unifying artistic practice, much as Dennis sought to revivify the ancient bond between religion and poetry in order to restore and reunify humanity in the sublime. In Hill’s poetics, as in Dennis’s, music helps structure the sublime as a concordia discors. But Hill further uses music to closely articulate the cognitive and emotional workings of poetic form. By “emotional,” I mean here less a delineation of particular feelings—although Hill’s sublime is marked by strong fear, terror, amazement, and pleasure—than a theorizing of movement, e-motion, a moving out from one place and body to another.50 Music provides energy to drive poetry into the mind with the force of Longinus’s thunderbolt and carry it away “like one of Homer’s Torrents, down the Sides of a Mountain, foaming, mix’d through the Valleys into the Ocean of Poetry, deep, rapid and sounding.”51 The self-referentiality or “sublime turn” associated with sound is significant. Music becomes more than the vehicle to transport essentially moral-philosophical ideas, because the ideas transported by Hill’s sublime poetic sounds are themselves ideas of transport and motion: God walking on the winds; “quivering” light that “shot” and “flew” in the fiat lux; humanity being formed from dust swept together “Swifter than Thought” in a “Whirlwind” from the four corners of the earth.52 If this is didactic poetry, then the musicalized medium is the message.

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Mitchell’s Imitative Musical Sublime

Hill’s message was amplified by his acolyte, Joseph Mitchell, in a Pindaric music ode described as sublime by Hill himself. Mitchell’s little-known ODE on the Power of MUSICK appeared in 1721 as both a free-standing print and a commendatory preface to a Treatise of Musick by the Scottish professor of mathematics Alexander Malcolm.53 This double publication suggests the enmeshedness of “literary” and “musical” genres in the musical sublime.54 Mitchell himself situated the free-standing poem within several contexts: the tradition of music odes by “the celebrated Dryden, Adison, Congreve, Pope, &c”; the “elaborate Treatise of Musick” and its “generous” author in Edinburgh, where Mitchell had studied; and Mitchell’s new friend in London, “the incomparable Mr. Hill,” whose “Pindaric Numbers” Mitchell “ follows at a Distance, and to whom he professes himself singularly oblig’ d.”55 Mitchell became renowned for his unyielding pursuit of patronage, and this early poem is an exercise in flattery and imitation with multiple targets. Perhaps counterintuitively, this makes it an illuminating source: in striving to imitate and summarize existing discourse, rather than innovate, the ode suggests a variety of normative understandings of the musical sublime. Mitchell had good reason to praise and imitate Hill in 1721. As an impecunious newcomer to London, he published Jonah, an epic biblical poem that borrowed from Young’s Poem on the Last Day (1713) and Hill’s Gideon.56 Hill met Mitchell’s overtures with social and eventually material support, and by promoting his poetry.57 Hill tends to present Mitchell, alongside the members of his circle Mallett and Thomson, as sublimely simple Scotsmen, worthy subjects of patronage by a refined metropolitan audience needing to be reanimated and even reformed by native British fire. This fire, as suggested already, was allied with passionate music. Such a framework explains Hill’s counterintuitive praise of Mitchell’s sublime simplicity in Plain Dealer 36 (24 July 1724), despite what we will see are the ode’s keynotes of learned allusiveness and highly wrought structuring. In an issue devoted to Mallett’s “Sublime” adaptation of the popular ballad William and Mary, Hill notes that “there was a charming, majestick Nakedness in that ner vous Simplicity, and plain Soundness of pathetick Nature, which went to the Hearts of our Forefathers, without stopping at their Fancy, or winding itself into their Understanding, through a Maze of mystical Prettinesses.”58 Such writing is now uncommon, yet “the Composers of our good Old Ballads, have left us some of the noblest Examples of the Sublime, in its most striking

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Energy. . . . Now and then, we start upon it in . . . our Modern Poets; as I did, . . . in an Ode, on the Power of Musick, . . . written by a young Scots Gentleman, who has conveyed, in a naked Grandeur, and in the utmost Degree of Plainness, the following aweful Thought, which carries a Terror, that will shake the Soul of every attentive Reader.”59 Hill then quotes Mitchell’s reworking of the musical Apocalypse in Dryden’s Song, “When Living die, and dead Men live” and a “dreadful Trumpet” sounds (s.xii.1, 5). By treating Mitchell’s paraphrase of Dryden’s imitation of Revelation as an instance of terrifying plainness, akin to folk song, Hill strategically associated the biblical sublime with the lessestablished sublime simplicity of ballads.60 That Mitchell’s ode treats music, the medium of ballads, is grist to the mill. The terror and supernatural visionary dimensions of Revelation are also convenient: Hill is claiming the supernatural vision of William and Mary—a ghost story that should ordinarily be dismissed as superstitious—as an example of a Dennisian sublime whose central passion is terror. Through the music ode, with its thematization of cosmic terror, Plain Dealer thus hints at a “balladic” or “bardic” strain of the musical sublime that would swell through the century. This sublime music is implicitly a simple, heartfelt song without complex harmonic accompaniment or polyphonic textures. Scorning “Maze[s] of mystical Prettinesses,” it contrasts Hill’s earlier alignment of the poetic-religious sublime with labyrinthine Pindaric music— an alignment nonetheless preserved in Mitchell’s ode. Mitchell himself deploys the sublime to quite different ends. He represents “great Hillarius” (Hill) as sublime through tropes borrowed from earlier music odes (s.x.3) and conversely adapts the tropes of music odes to Hill’s reforming religious sublime. The Ode begins with the trope of harmony’s power in Creation (ss.i–iii), and rehearses the Boethian musics of the cosmos, man, and instruments (ss.iv–vi). It praises music’s power over the passions through a catalogue of instruments and voice parts (ss.vi–viii), culminating in a paean to beauty and erotic love (s.ix), ultimately sublimated into religious ardor (s.x). This devotional stanza leads to reflection on death and the Apocalypse (ss.xi– xii), before a final section urges the cultivation of music and commends Mitchell’s fellow Scots, the singer Gordon and the theorist Malcolm (s.xiii). The free-standing ode then sings Malcolm’s praises as theorist, practical musician, and loyal friend. As Cecilia succeeded Timotheus, so Malcolm succeeds Cecilia; his theory inspires the author’s “Juster Muse” to “take[] Wing” and “tow’r[] sublimely high’r” than superstitious and mendacious poets (s.xiv.vii–viii). These stanzas bring into focus the poem’s Lucretian traits. Lucretius’s De rerum natura was the primary model for philosophical poems with a cosmic

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and synoptic scope. Lucretius’s own model was Epicurus, the teacher who brought light to superstitious minds and uncovered a vision of the cosmos with his “god-like mind” (divina mente, iii.15). Like a latter-day Epicurus, the “Godlike” Malcolm “brings to Light” all “The Principles of Musick” “from eyeless Shades of Night,” “And gives immortal Day” (ss.xv.i, xiv.ix–xii).61 From this perspective, the music ode becomes a genre not only of praise but also of sublime reform and enlightenment, a genre with pretensions to produce musical knowledge, just as Lucretius produced knowledge of the nature of things. The Lucretian horizon of Mitchell’s ode is confirmed by its epigraph in the free-standing print: “Divum Hominumque Voluptas” (delight of gods and men). Here applied to music, the phrase is taken from Lucretius’s famous praise of Venus and Calliope, symbols of the all-generating love of Nature and of epic poetry.62 The same phrase stands as an epigraph to Malcolm’s Treatise, where it appears before the work’s dedication to the (almost entirely Whig) directors of the Royal Academy of Music. The then infant academy’s activity was as a joint-stock opera company—with Handel as director of music—but Malcolm describes it much like the Royal Society, as a disinterested body of “Patrons and Encouragers of the Science,” exploring its “fundamental Grounds and Principles” (iv–v). Falling before the poem’s final stage of Lucretian enlightenment—and its knowledge-fueling sentiments of friendship, gratitude, and admiration— Mitchell’s cata logue of passions employs numerous tropes of sublimity from the music ode tradition. Music strikes, “ravish[es],” and masters the listener (s.vi.6, s.ix.11–12) like “Lightning” (s.vi.15–6) or Pindar’s river of song, “That, like a Torrent, sweeps o’er ev’ry Mound!” (s.ix.2).63 Inflation and elevation arrive as we rise “on Aether” “with the Organ,” “exulting in Triumph” (s.vii.16–17). With the “swelling” trumpet and drum, Mitchell like Dryden suggests a transformation of fear into self-approval and elevation over “Nature’s Bounds” (s.vii.11). Mitchell indeed works closely with Dryden’s music odes, borrowing the subtitle of Alexander’s Feast (the power of music), and generalizing Alexander’s changeability and “Madness” in shadow-fighting imaginary foes (l.69) with the claim: “With Sounds we love, we joy, and we despair, | The solid Substance hug, or grasp delusive Air” (s.vi.17–18). Mitchell’s framing stanzas on Creation and Apocalypse and central stanzas on the passions, culminating in a transition from earthly to sacred love, mimic the Song’s structure. Yet Mitchell undertakes a sort of polite Hillarian reform of Dryden, regularizing his unorthodox portrayal of Creation, limiting his intricate meter and rhyme scheme, and expanding elliptic syntax. In the opening, neat hymnal stanzas (akin to ballad meter) iron out the Song’s distended meter and rhyme

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scheme, and Lucretian “jarring Atomes,” with their atheistic connotations, are replaced by the metaphor of nature “in Embrio,” brought forth ex nihilo by God’s actions before “Things began to be.” The “AlIighty” replaces Dryden’s demiurgic “Harmony.” Mitchell simultaneously aligns his ode with the opening theme, meter, rhyme, and theology of Hill’s biblical paraphrase in The Creation, where “Almighty God, | Sending out his loud Decree,” “bid Being be!” (s.i.1–3): Mitchell, stanza 1 (spacing altered)

When Nature yet in Embrio lay, Ere Things began to be The AlIighty from eternal Day Spoke loud his deep Decree: The Voice was tuneful as his Love, At which Creation sprung, And all th’ Angelick Hosts above The Morning Anthem sung.

Dryden, lines 1–7 From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony This universal Frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atomes lay, And cou’d not heave her Head, The tuneful Voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. [Compare: atoms leaping to their stations, l.9.] [Compare: “The Spheres” singing “the great Creator’s praise | To all the bless’d above,” ll.55–58.]

Later stanzas soften Mitchell’s “reform” of Dryden (reintroducing, for instance, Dryden’s jarring atoms). Mitchell also amalgamates “tory” and “whig” visions of harmony, the former making harmony an elimination of discords (“Elements, that jarr’d before, | Were all aside distinctly hurl’d,” ii.13–14); the latter combining discords into a more Dennisian concordia discors. In keeping with his own and Hill’s political allegiances, Mitchell broadly favors this “whiggish” model. Music “makes ev’n Opposites combine | To be of Use to Man” as “Discords with tuneful Concords move | Thro’ all the spacious Frame” (s.iv.1–6); and “Tho’ diff’rent Passions strug gle in [man’s] Mind, | Where Love and Hatred, Hope and Fear are joyn’d[,] | All, by a sacred Guidance, tend | To one harmonious End.” (s.v.11–14)

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Mitchell’s ideological commitment to concordant discord among the passions, however, was hard to maintain in practice. This emerges in the difficult transition from earthly to heavenly love. Mitchell here compares music’s “charms” to those of “Aurelia,” the “dear distinguish’d Fair!” Whose Beauty, Musick in Disguise! Attracts the gazing Eyes, Thrills thro’ the Soul, like Haywood’s melting Lines, And, as it certain Conquest makes, the savage Soul refines. (s.ix.14–15, 19–22) This passage pays court to Eliza Haywood’s poetry and the unidentified “Aurelia” of the Hillarian circle, supporting the Hillarian ethos of building a polite, refined social space that explicitly included women.64 Mitchell reaffirmed this polite ethos when he revised his ode for a collection in 1729. By now, the Hillarian circle had disintegrated, following Haywood’s scandalizing portrayal of sexual intrigues between members of the coterie in Secret Histories (1724–25).65 Haywood is edited out of the 1729 ode. Her “melting Lines” become “sad Louisa’s Lines” (s.ix.21), a reference to Eloise and Abelard, a footnote explains. For those in the know, the story of Eloise, separated from her mentor-lover Abelard, might resonate with that of Eliza, suspected of an affair with Hill, but Mitchell pointedly avoids any contemporary referents. Haywood’s own odes to Hill, Christine Gerrard notes, had “redeployed the language of the high sublime and the ‘enthusiastick passions’ which characterizes Hill’s biblical paraphrases . . . , investing it with erotic and sensual overtones.” 66 This erotic sublime echoed the amorous excesses of libertinism, already fashioned into a homosocial discourse of sublime ravishment by writers like Dennis.67 The “high sublime” was thus already indebted to eroticized sublimity. Haywood’s sublime further seems to redeploy seventeenth-century Neoplatonic discourses of intimate friendship, which sought to separate carnal passion between the sexes from intense but nonpassionate “seraphic love” grounded in religious devotion.68 The alternatives to bodily and moving passions were always fragile. Friends professing seraphic love might be suspected of hypocrisy or adultery, just as writers drawing on libertine models of homosocial attachment risked association, in a period of increased anxiety about male-male sex, with “sodomitical” libertines like the Earl of Rochester.69 Among the Hillarians in the 1720s, the rising demands of politeness and reform of manners, alongside the extension of

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the libertine-friendship franchise to women, apparently undermined the sociability that intense feelings of friendship were meant to ground. Enthusiastic joys proved insufficiently insulated from disruptive passions. This tension is writ small in Mitchell’s ode. His rapturous praise of harmony’s power to “controul” and “refine” the “Soul”—a control exercised by aural and visual concord—relies on effacing the possibility that musical passions might overwhelm restraint and propriety (s.ix.11–12). In 1729, this effacement meant rewriting history, exchanging the exuberant passion of Eliza for the chastened, sanctified, distant literary love of Louisa. Preserved in the earlier versions of the poem, the female Hillarians Eliza and Aurelia fittingly presage the arrival of Hill in the next stanza. Here Mitchell turns from music’s power to refine earthly love to its supreme power to stir religious devotion. Hill appears at the pinnacle of sublimity, the kind of musical prophet-poet he himself evoked in Gideon: Musick religious Thoughts inspires, And kindles bright Poetick Fires; Fires! such as great Hillarius raise Triumphant, in their blaze! Amid the vulgar versifying Throng His, Genius, with Distinction, show, And o’er our popular Metre lift his Song High, as the Heav’ns are arch’d o’er Orbs below. As if the Man was pure Intelligence, Musick transports him o’er the heights of Sense, Thro’ Chinks of Clay the rays above lets in, And makes mortality Divine. Tho’ Reason’s bounds it ne’er defies, Its Charms elude the Ken Of heavy, gross-ear’d Men, Like mysteries conceal’d from vulgar Eyes. Others may that Distraction call, Which Musick raises in the Breast, To me, ’tis Ecstacy and Triumph all, The foretastes of the raptures of the blest. Who knows not this, when Handell plays, And Senesino Sings? Our Souls learn Rapture from their Lays,

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While rival’d Angels show amaze, And drop their Golden Wings. (s.x.1–25) Music’s power to exalt the initiated to the heights of religious ecstasy resonates with both the tradition of the music ode and the Hillarian sublime. “Musick religious Thoughts inspires,” for instance, recalls Addison’s 1694 music ode— where “Musick, Religious Heats inspires, | It wakes the Soul, and lifts it high, | And wings it with sublime desires, | And fits it to bespeak the Deity.”70 Hillarius’s superiority to “popular Metre” plays on Hill’s devotion to the difficult and flexible harmony of the Pindaric sublime. The close parallel between Hill’s high-brow versification (mimicked by Mitchell’s verse) and music’s inaccessability to “heavy, gross-ear’d Men” establishes a strong intersection between the music of poetry and the “practical” music of opera singers and choirs of angels. The musicians name-checked here, Handel and Senesino, were both prominent employees of Malcolm’s dedicatees, the Royal Academy. Handel notably appears as a “play[er]”: the cult of the performer migrated toward the composer and his work later on.71 But what might we imagine Handel and Senesino performing so sublimely? Mitchell’s first readers in February  1721 might have thought of performances of Handel’s opera Radamisto, revived and revised for Senesino in late 1720, where the composer had played one of two harpsichords.72 Its premiere on 28 December, attended by the recently reconciled king and Prince of Wales, was Senesino’s first appearance in a Handel opera and a landmark for the Royal Academy. Radamisto might be heard through several sublimes. It is an opera seria in the high style Dryden thought appropriate to opera, with an impressively large orchestra and brilliant instrumental coloring, its hero’s supernaturally high voice sitting in a chain of resemblances linking lofty matters (love and war) with aristocratic characters, and with the watching monarch in his royal box.73 New arias written for Senesino increased Radamisto’s heroic fieriness and displayed the spectacular agility and control that lifted the virtuoso above the vulgar throng.74 These arias also amplified the energy and wild contrasts in affect and texture that contemporaries associated with Handel’s (and Dryden’s) sublime.75 By contast, Radamisto’s most famous aria, “Ombra cara”—a plangent lament interweaving a rhapsodic vocal line with contrapuntal instrumental writing—might evoke the labyrinthine Pindaric sublime, or the lines and ellipses of Milton’s angelic music; hearing the aria in 1747, Charles Burney thought it seemed “the language of philosophy and science, and the rest the frivolous jargon of fops and triflers.”76

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Nonetheless, Mitchell had completed the poem and signed off his dedication to Malcolm on 19 December  1720, before Radamisto’s revival. Mitchell plausibly links Handel and Senesino emblematically, as the director of music and newly arrived first man of the academy. The ode is significant as an early document to so explicitly position Handel as sublime, yet in it he functions primarily as a parallel of, or proof for, the Hillarian sublime. This is puzzling if we imagine that a literary sublime preceded a musical one and slowly lent power to music: here Handel lends luster to poetry. Handel’s presence positions Italian opera as the most ravishing music imaginable and hints at the intimacy between this music and Hill. Just as the glory of ancient secular lyric can accrue to Cecilia in Alexander’s Feast, so the glory of Handel accrues to Hill’s religious-poetic sublime. An additional compliment may be implied: Handel makes Hill’s and music’s sublimity self-evident (“Who knows not this . . . ?”) partly because Hill had helped to create Handel’s sublimity in the first place. Yet such compliments could backfire—as Plain Dealer’s castigation of Senesino in 1724 demonstrates. Had Hill created a monster by fostering Italian opera, one succoring more “tuneful monsters”?77 Associating Hill’s religious sublime with opera stars rather than sacred music jeopardizes the ode’s already fraught transition from love of beauty and politely “melting” eros (s.ix) to the higher “enthusiastick Joys” of “religious Thoughts” (ss.x–xi). As if anxiously underlining music’s superiority to passions and the flesh, and so guaranteeing its place in a sublime shielded from vulgar enthusiasm and debasing passions, Handel’s appearance is preceded by a preemptive strike against critics of music: “Others may that Distraction call, | Which Musick raises in the Breast.” While for Addison music had raised “Religious Heats,” for Mitchell it raises “religious Thoughts”; his “Lyre” is struck by “meaning Masters”; Hill’s musical poetry soars beyond “Sense,” but “ne’er defies” “Reason’s bounds.” Haywood, Hurlothrumbo, and Handelians in an Uproar

Mitchell’s ode—polite, reforming, sublimatory—contrasts starkly with Haywood’s poetics. In a wittily enthusiastic Pindaric defending her coinage of the name Hilarius, Haywood imagines sublime power attaching to the physical sound of Hill’s ideal name. This hypothetical name shares some conventional non-semantic musical attributes, familiar from Albion and Albanius—softness, harmoniousness, adornment—yet is also “Solemn[]” and “lofty.”78 Moreover, exceeding the function of ornamentation, it would “thrill[],” awe, and “strike the heart | With rapt’rous Tremblings” merely through its sounding “Syllable[s]”

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(ll.46–48). Haywood’s rhetoric grants sublime power to harmonious sound and to sound’s effects on impassioned bodies. Hill’s name is also an unrealizable sound, sought in “vain,” Haywood concludes, unless we achieve ecstasy, flying “on a Beam | Of tow’ring Thought” through light that “dazzle[s] vulgar Sight” to heaven, where Hill’s “deathless Lays” are “cop[ied]” by “Angels” (ll.55–60, 70). Failing that, the name Hilarius, imperfect like all sensually apprehended names, stays. Sublime sound is playfully affirmed and denied, since Haywood would have to disclaim all art—everything sensually apprehended—to carry through on her ineffability topos and disdain for the flesh. Her rhetoric instead suggests the necessary presence of embodied, sensual passions within sublime sounds. Even Hill’s hypothetical-ideal name with its “Heaven-turn’d Notes” would interrupt the tranquillity of heavenly “Extacy” and unleash a new kind of feeling, an ecstasy “at Strife” between the intimate warmth of “Tenderness” and the distanced fearfulness of “Reverence” (ll.44, 49–50). Where Mitchell etherealizes opera, then, Haywood enfleshes heavenly lays. Mitchell’s strategies supported Hill’s and Dennis’s insistence that the sublime takes reason as well as passion to its apotheosis. Dennis held that “reason . . . hold[s] itself exalted” in the sublime “by the exaltation of the Passions, and in seeing those Passions in their fiercest transports, confin’d to those bounds, which [reason] has severely prescrib’d them.”79 But to make explicit this claim for sublime music in a polite literary culture whose musical metaphysics were in flux, which focused its adulation and blame on secular more than sacred music, and which was revising the roles, scope, and meaning of passions, demanded some “mystick Dances,” “eccentric” and “intervolv’d” indeed. In 1732, after the breakup of the Hillarian circle, Haywood was again involved in a parody of transcendent and disembodied sublimes. Haywood appeared at the Little Theatre in the Hay, acting opposite Samuel “Hurlothrumbo” Johnson in his madcap farce The Blazing Comet: The Mad Lovers; Or, the Beauties of the Poets.80 As its title hints, the play combines satires of metaphysical, cosmic loftiness, of passionate love, and of cant poetry in the sublime style. Johnson had earned his nickname as author of the first hit for the Little Theatre, Hurlothrumbo: or, The Super-Natural (1729), a melodramatic farce that included the sublime among its targets.81 The Blazing Comet, his second piece, features an impossibly altruistic ruler named Sublimo, and a hyperbolic dedication to the Duchess of Richmond, whose “sublime Example” fits her to ride on a “Throne of Taste” at the Apocalypse, “blown on amain by the chaunting Breath, proceeding from the Sound of Angels Harmony.” The duchess’s husband, a governor of the Royal Academy and opera lover, “travels in the

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Paths of Purity,” undefiled with mortal “Clay,” and makes us “think sublime of Love Divine!”82 In the play, Haywood played Lady Flame to Johnson’s Wildfire. Their would-be lofty love affair draws attention to the fine line separating enthusiastic passion from wild lust, and thus pointedly mocks false sublimity. At one point, Flame sings to Wildfire, offering to let him into her room “at Midnight”—to “talk sublime | Of Love divine.”83 In a ridiculous literalization of loftiness, Wildfire eventually climbs in at Flame’s window after serenading her atop a pair of stilts and delivering an incoherently passionate speech in the sublime style (“Tremendous Thunders bellow’d: Both ends of Heaven roar’d: Fire ran along the Sands of the Desart, the Air was all in a flame, Horror seized the Minds of Mortals, the Dragons were touch’d with Remorse”).84 Wildfire and Flame’s aspirations to transcendence and seraphic love are constantly thwarted: “Don’t you think this Love of the Spirit,” Flame finally asks, “has a great mind to end in the Flesh?”85 Wildfire demurs, yet his efforts to give up things fleshly and rise to Elysium (where he might finally enjoy Flame) lead to the couple giving away their clothes to the poor and preparing to run about the stage “stark naked.”86 Music is closely involved in Johnson’s satire, whether in evocations of chaunting angels, figurings of the high style as sound and fury (signifying nothing), or in interpolated songs—possibly with tunes by Handel’s rival Bononcini, since Johnson mentions the Beggar’s Opera, with its borrowed melodies, as a model for his play, and describes himself as “translat[ing]” Bononcini’s “Sounds into our own English Language.”87 A few years later, Johnson wrote a pamphlet now well known in studies of the musical sublime, Harmony in an Uproar (1733/4).88 The pamphlet intervenes in rivalry between Handel’s academy and the new Opera of the Nobility. Without explicitly calling Handel sublime, it associates him with bold strokes, irregularity, superiority to rules, astonishing loudness and dramatic contrasts. Claudia Johnson called this the first application of the sublime “to an exclusively musical context,” and it played a key role in her argument that British “music critics” gradually imported “truisms about the sublime in literature” into music.89 We have already seen much earlier evocations of the musical sublime and recognitions of music’s “stature.”90 Harmony in fact continues Johnson’s existing practice of mentioning Handel’s loftiness: Hurlothrumbo’s epilogue predicted that “Handel himself shall yield to Hurlothrumbo, | And Bononcini too shall cry—Succombo”; Blazing Comet conflated Handel’s style and physical size (he is “a very big Man, who writes his Musick in the HighDutch Taste”).91 Harmony itself, rather than making novel claims for the

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sublimity of music, uses established tropes of musical furor, enthusiasm, overwhelming power, and rhetorical and physical height. We hear, for instance, that the “Sound” of a supernatural voice crying, “Arise, Musick is at her last Gasp!” “rous’d all [Johnson’s] Faculties to a divine Energy, and made every Artery a Hercules; at once transporting me to the twenty-fifth empyreal Region of the blue-mantled Sky; a thousand Years Journey further than Mahomet ever flew on his Prophet-bearing Ass.”92 Handel’s greedy arrogation of sublimity to himself is at issue, rather than novel qualities of sublimity in music. Handel’s enemies do arraign him for sublime daring: unlike the academic composers Drs. Pepush and Green, he is “a declar’d Foe to all the proper Modes, and Forms, and Tones of Musick, and scorn[s] to be . . . ty’d up by Rules, or have [his] Genius cramp’d.”93 But Handel’s enemies also deny him features of sublimity: the composer Porpora (“Porpoise”) “finds you deficient in Roughness,” and Green “roundly asserts” he is “quite void of Spirit and Invention.”94 Recontextualizing Harmony in an Uproar as the work of Hurlothumbo Johnson helps to revise our picture of the disciplinary location of the musical sublime, its supposed emergence as music writers borrowed from literature. Johnson was not a music critic but a dancing master, musician, playwright, satirist, and actor. His pamphlet appears in a milieu that undermines divisions between “exclusively musical” and nonmusical contexts: the dramatico-musicopoetic context of the Little Theatre in the Hay, situated opposite Handel’s opera house and home to versatile performers and writers like Haywood and Johnson himself. Like Mitchell’s ode—oriented simulta neously toward a social coterie, a Restoration literary tradition, and an Edinburgh milieu of music theory and performance, written for a mathematician who himself looked toward London’s Academy of Music—Johnson’s pamphlet indicates the dense network of agents sustaining the musical sublime, and their wide field of pursuits. Indeed, although activities such as playing instruments, developing vocal technique, and mastering knowledge of musical notation, physics, or metaphysics are distinct skills, music is not well understood as an independent sphere of activity and knowledge. When music is defined relationally (for example, in relation to other arts and sciences or to noise and silence), and understood as a discursive and social practice dispersed in different ways across cultures, it is unsurprising that there was no straightforward translatio imperii of the sublime from literature to music. Eighteenth-century metaphors of translatio and competition between the arts should not be granted excessive weight here, instructive as

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they are. This point is underscored by one further example from midcentury Britain, which once more draws together Handel and Dryden. Musicologists are familiar with a controversy between Newcastle-based organist and composer Charles Avison and William Hayes, professor of music at Oxford.95 Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (1752) included an apparent slur on Handel and prompted Remarks on Mr. Avison’s Essay (1753) from Hayes, an avid Handelian. Avison’s subsequent Reply included a somewhat mollifying sketch of Handel that, according to Claudia Johnson, “picked up on the Longinian lead that the sublime is our access to the divine” and so “granted a dignity to Handel which no previous composer had ever enjoyed.”96 “Mr Handel is in Music,” the Reply affirmed, what his own Dryden was in Poetry; ner vous, exalted, and harmonious; but voluminous, and, consequently, not always correct. Their Abilities equal to every Thing; their Execution frequently inferior. Born with Genius capable of soaring the boldest Flights; they have sometimes, to suit the vitiated Taste of the Age they lived in, descended to the lowest. Yet, as both their Excellencies are infinitely more numerous than their Deficiencies, so both their Characters will devolve to latest Posterity, not as Models of Perfection, yet glorious Examples of those amazing Powers that actuate the human Soul.97 In England, earlier composers such as Purcell and Blow had in fact been credited with access to the divine, if not so explicitly through Longinian tropes.98 More significant for an appreciation of the disciplinary character of the musical sublime is that the Reply was the work not of a lone organist and music critic but of what Avison called a “Junto” of “learned Friends,” probably including the cleric and poet William Mason and Thomas Gray, one of the best-known poets of the sublime, both of whom wrote music, and music-related, odes.99 The Reply’s characterization of Handel clearly draws on the Pindaric sublime, and understandably so, given Handel’s setting of Dryden’s Pindaric music odes in the 1730s and earlier views of Handel’s Pindaric-like scorn for rules. Alongside its appeal to irregularity, the Reply engages with the Pindaric in suggesting a genealogy that transfers loftiness and force from one agent and generation to another.100 Gray drew strongly on Pindar’s use of genealogy and history in his own poetry. His Pindaric ode The Bard (1757)—apparently inspired by hearing a blind Welsh bard—pits the contested line of the British monarchy against an always legitimate “succession of Poets,” leading from the medieval Welsh

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bards whose lyres were silenced by English conquest to the modern heirs of Milton.101 Gray’s Progress of Poesy (1751–54) similarly imagined a stream of song flowing from an originary “Aeolian lyre” in ancient times all the way to the irregular and fiery Dryden, down to himself.102 We might call this succession of poets sublime, especially since Gray glossed his lines on Dryden as reflecting the fact that “we have had in our language no other odes of the sublime kind, than that of Dryden on St. Cecilia’s Day.”103 In Avison’s Reply, sublime genealogy has a particularly forward-looking logic: Handel’s “Excellencies” are not to be blindly admired or copied (as Handelians supposedly desire); they should convey “to latest Posterity” the “amazing Powers” of “the human Soul” and so kindle new flames of genius. The logic of sublime energy moving from Dryden to Gray, or Dryden to Handel, has a crucial further step—backward to Timotheus. By 1753, Dryden’s prowess was often evoked via the musician-rhetor of Alexander’s Feast.104 In Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), to take a prominent example, music was not only Dryden’s subject but also a passion-raising force within his ode. Hearing the ode’s language, “The Pow’r of Music all our Hearts allow; | And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.”105 Sublime music flows—not without strife—from Timotheus to Cecilia, Timotheus to Dryden, from Dryden to Gray, or Dryden to Handel. In Avison’s Reply, then, what looks like a translatio imperii from poetry to music always already relies on a translation from musician to poet.

Coda: Burke’s Anti-Musical Sublime The best-known writer on the sublime in eighteenth-century Britain is undoubtedly Edmund Burke. Alongside some seven thousand English copies of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757/9) printed by Burke’s death in 1797, there were translations and extensive reviews in German-speaking lands and elsewhere in Europe.106 Yet Burke’s treatise is not itself central to the present book. Burke is significant to the task of resounding the sublime given, first, his influence for later writers such as Herder and De Quincey and, second, his empirical account of sublimity as the effect of thrumming nerves. Sublimity issues from a “tension, contraction, or violent emotion [i.e., movement] of the nerves”; it helps to “brace[] and strengthen[]” them, while more “gentle vibratory motion” causes “relaxation” and accompanies beauty.107 Burke was not the first to connect sublimity with vibration or nerves. Avison, for example, called Dryden and Handel “ner vous

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[i.e. nerve-filled], exalted, and harmonious.” Hill saw “ner vous Simplicity” in Mitchell’s sublime music ode. Nonetheless, by mid-century nerves were achieving new prominence and were increasingly conceptualized as solid, stringlike entities that carried all sensations to the sensorium, displacing animal spirits flowing through the blood or nerve tubes.108 In 1753, Burke’s physician and father-in-law published an essay that argued for solid nerves and posited “Vibration, Pulsation, and Oscillation” as “the principal causes” of “animal Function.”109 In this he followed the famous British propagator of nerve theory, David Hartley, in Observations on Man (1749)—although Hartley himself discouraged excessively close analogies between nerves and strings, since nerve impulses were carried by transverse waves, while strings vibrated in standing waves. Following Hartley, his followers, and others, nerves could become the foundation of all ideas, and so of human identity and consciousness. Since sound was already understood to function through vibration, and could be observed to do so in strings and membranes, sound became an increasingly powerful and intuitive model for perception in general. Thus, in a key passage detailing the mechanical workings of sublimity, Burke explains that the effects of indefinite repetitions and vibrations are “rather more obvious in the sense of hearing” than elsewhere. For “when the ear receives any simple sound, it is struck by a single pulse of the air which makes the ear-drum and the other membranous parts vibrate. . . . If the stroke be strong, the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of tension” (IV.xi.265). If the stroke is “repeated pretty soon after,” the tension is compounded, physically by the “united forces of the stroke” and psychologically by the “expectation” of another stroke, uncertainty about its timing, and “surprise” at its appearance. The compounded tension eventually rises to “the sublime” (IV.xi.266). Sonic stimuli are easily understood as strokes, most basically in the sound of the “successive firing of cannon” shots. The multiple acoustic impulses within each shot mimic the succession of shots themselves and are in turn mimicked by vibratory “convulsion” within the ear when each blow arrives (IV.xi.266). Sounds tremble through the air onto the “ear-drum”—a “membran[e]” that could itself process the beats of drums and visible vibrations of violin strings. The hidden structure of sensation and perception is thus shared with the manifest and pervasive workings of sound. What many German readers valued in Burke were empirical observations and examples like these. Theorists including Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder agreed that aesthetics was grounded in immediate empirical sensations; rejecting straightforward idealism and rationalism (like that explored in chapter  3), they believed aesthetics stayed with

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material sensation, so to speak, rather than rising above it to sublime reason, abstracted forms, or divine transcendence. This is an index of an increasingly experience-based and empirical approach to the sublime, a development linked to the emergence of modern aesthetics and to rethinkings of passion.110 While in 1721 Mitchell saw divine music transporting Hilarius “o’er the heights of Sense”—beyond the bounds of corporeal sensations—for Burke, “when we go but one step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth” (IV.i.243). Empiricism placed severe limits on knowledge for the latitudinarian Burke. The sublime marked the boundary of human understanding of ultimate realities and laws, confirming the obscurity and unimaginable nature of the biblical God, while reflecting light back on human nature. Meanwhile, what some German readers of Burke questioned were his reductively physicalist account of taste, his reduction of the sublime to fear, shock, obscurity, power, privation, and finally the diametric opposition he proposed between sublimity on one hand and beauty, love, sociability, order, comprehension and harmony on the other.111 The German writers in the following three chapters have very different approaches to music and to empirical sensations. But none divides the sublime from the beautiful and perfect as Burke does. Theorizing the sublime before Burke, Bodmer and Breitinger epitomize a rationalism shaped by Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, where overwhelming complexity and harmony go hand in hand. Herder’s explicit rejection of Burke emerges against this larger tradition, even though Herder would question many of its tenets, and although his celebration of music and sound clashes with the antimusical stance of the first German-speaking champions of the sublime. This brings us to a second key observation about Burke. While providing rich material for sonic- and vibration-centered accounts of the sublime, he makes no space for a musical sublime. Burke imagines music as harmonious, sweet, orderly, and sociable, and he excludes these qualities from the sublime.112 He sees “almost infinite” scope for sonic sublimes, but these wholly concern the violent sounds of nature or weaponry (linked with force); intermittent sounds like clocks striking in the night (linked with obscurity and suspense); shouting crowds (linked with sublime unification and the overpowering of individual wills); and cries of pain (linked to passion and terror) (II.xviii–xx). This is very different from the sonic sublimes recognized by Hillarians and Handelians. With Hill and Mitchell, music played a key role in social reform achieved through the sublime. Sociable opera and orderly music theory could both epitomize an enlightening sublime. Music had cognitive effects in leading the mind through the concordia discors of the Pindaric sublime. What Burney called

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“masses of harmony” and Avison “ner vous, exalted, and harmonious” composition could transport and elevate the listener. Music’s affective, metaphysical, and religious dimensions allowed it sublimely to connect and transfer energy or height between agents (as, for example, between Dryden and Handel). Finally, in the literary culture examined thus far, music’s power over the passions connected it with both extreme passion and movement, and with exceeded passion, the kind of tranquillity associated with the Lucretian sublime and Boethian harmonia mundi. In essentially excluding music from the sublime, Burke is something of an outlier of this tradition. Passion is a final point of contact between Burke and the tradition outlined in this chapter. Burke assumes that talking about taste means talking about passions, and that the science of taste adumbrated by his treatise will help “any whose business it is to affect the passions.”113 Yet like many writers on music, Burke develops a sublime that teeters between passion and an intense nonpassionate state. The weight of Burke’s account falls on extreme fear, terror, pain, and shock. Strength of passion implicitly makes sublimity superior to beauty: “Whatever . . . excite[s] the ideas of pain and danger . . . is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those . . . of pleasure” (I.vii.58–59). But pain itself cannot explain why we desire and enjoy the sublime. So, crucially, Burke invents a new category, “delight,” which lies between pain and “tranquillity” (a lack of sensation or movement) and constitutes the sublime’s affective fingerprint (I.ii.211). While tranquillity is not explicitly linked with Lucretius, the revised edition of the Enquiry does cite the famous passage of De rerum natura where Lucretius “supposes the whole mechanism of nature laid open by the master of his philosophy,” whereupon “his transport is overcast with a shade of secret dread and horror” (Divina voluptas | . . . atque horror) (II.v.121).114 Whereas the music ode tradition linked visions of the cosmos to ordered sound and mental clarity, however, Burke’s emphasis remains on the dread caused by power and on the obscurity and powerlessness that meet the empiricist’s and the humble Christian’s attempts to know “the whole mechanism of nature.” The tensions in understandings of the passions explored so productively through music, then, are shared by Burke’s music-lite treatise. Within British thought, these tensions were exacerbated by Lockean empiricism, which led to a questioning of complex taxonomies of feeling inherited from scholasticism and Neoplatonism. But the tensions were already present in musical culture, which played off music’s power to “raise” passion against its power to “quell” it.

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This returns us to foundational questions about the nature of the sublime. On one hand, passionate excess is linked with ecstasy and bodily transport, states that are like but excluded from the sublime for Longinus and are connected with the suspicion of the body and loss of control evident in Longinus’s treatment of music. Yet, on the other hand, exceeding passion by achieving self-controlled tranquillity or reaching Dennis’s “enthusiastic Passion” might fail to capture the dynamic, self-moving, self-exceeding, more-than-rational dimension of sublime experience, a dimension repeatedly evoked through music. In the Germanspeaking lands, keen readers of English literature and criticism were grappling with similar problems as they developed their varieties of the sublime. The following chapter introduces a pair of theorists who, like the Hillarians, identified the sublime with violent feelings and equally, if perhaps counterintuitively, with polite improvement and reform. Still more than Burke, Dennis, or Longinus himself, these writers attempt to exclude music from the sublime or to scapegoat music in the sublime. By doing so, they bring home the intimate antagonism between music and the sublime, the ineradicable sonic dimensions of sublimity.

chapter 3

Reforming Aesthetics Bodmer and Breitinger’s Anti-Musical Sublime

Prelude: A Word Without Songs One clear night in the 1740s, visiting the estate of his friend “Demaratus,” the critic, poet, pedagogue, and scholar Johann Jacob Bodmer makes the uncharacteristic decision to visit a nearby wood.1 Here, according to legend, the old Helvetians used to make blood sacrifices to their pagan gods at a stand of ancient oaks. More recently, villagers have heard strange singing coming from a gash in the rocks by these same trees; even Demaratus has heard the songs, and he suspects them to be in Alemannic, the dialect of the medieval Swabian courts and their legendary Minnesinger. This is a subject of some antiquarian interest to Bodmer, but he is dubious until Demaratus shows him his record of the “content” of the songs (he “has not forgotten the thoughts, despite losing the actual words,” 476–77). His skepticism “shattered” by the “elegant thoughts and wellornamented formation” of the précis, Bodmer determines to hear the singing for himself. He takes as a lure some new poetry in the same light, stylish, “anacreontic” manner that pervades Demaratus’s notes (478–79).2 Seated under an oak, Bodmer sings a few verses “with as sweet a melody as ever [he] could” (480). Sure enough, an invisible voice soon replies with its own verses of love song in Alemannic. Now a poetry competition begins, with the snatches of verse transcribed exactly for the reader, though without any indication of their melodies. The invisible voice from the gash in the earth suddenly materializes as “a short man, hardly four spans tall,” with “fiery eyes and manly brown cheeks” and a “curly, dense” “red beard” (482). Clad in elaborate antique garb, his head

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crowned with flowers, the little man strides toward Bodmer and declares: “The violence of your song forced me forth from the mist that I had thrown around me as a cover, and which hides me from the eyes of all mortals” (482). Bodmer’s anacreontics, set to an improvised melody merely to imitate the invisible voice, hold for the dwarf a “Gewalt” (violence) with a particular charge: they compel the intangible aural traces of the past to be bodied forth and made visible by the earth mannikin himself. Music is forceful, working like an invocation or summoning spell; yet it curiously works against itself, to replace sound with sight, and music with speech. The earth mannikin is a relic of the days of the Minnesinger, whose “life” was once “a constant song” but who retreated to the mountains in the “inharmonious times of barbarism” (485). But he is much more, for Bodmer, than a mere remnant of oral culture: he is a custodian of ancient writings.3 So when Bodmer asks to transcribe his songs, the earth mannikin reveals instead their already-written source. Taking him into his wondrous underground chambers, the mannikin shows him “a great book . . . lying on a lectern; it was bound in the finest leather, with golden clasps struck on the corners” (497). Opening it, Bodmer sees “that it was written on vellum; it was all Minnelieder by more than one hundred authors; and all were from the century of the Swabian imperial dynasty. Before each poet was a painting in magnificent colors. . . . Over the pictures were curtains of delicate silken material, red, green, yellow or blue” (497–98). This magisterial volume, replete with all the trappings of age, costly production, and the authority of its many, neatly labeled authors, is the largest known corpus of Minnelieder: the Codex Manesse. The tale belongs to Bodmer’s campaign to publish the codex and revive the “golden Swabian age” of poetry with its native German refinement and spirit.4 Publication is apparently on the dwarf ’s mind, too. Astoundingly, on the strength of Bodmer’s modern anacreontics and an old dwarfish prophecy about the return of the golden age, the dwarf hands over the codex to Bodmer. Though living and singing from underground, he is committed to bringing Minnelieder to light. Having substituted aural song for a materialized body, and now for the more original body of the text, the dwarf replaces his cape of mist and vanishes. Bodmer is left with the codex and a mandate to publish. Bodmer edited, translated, and printed parts of the book and attempted to make a virtual facsimile of its beautiful illustrations (damaging them in the process), but he never discusses melodies for what are repeatedly represented as songs.5 This partly reflects the materials available. The Codex Manesse does not contain recognizable notation; its music is understood to have been semiimprovised, changing with different performers and migrating between songs.6

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Nonetheless, the treatment of music in “Das Erdmännchen” is not simply a response to the absence of notation. It is an index of a mistrust of music and sound more generally, shared by Bodmer and his close collaborator Johann Jacob Breitinger. Bodmer shows little interest in imagining Minnelieder as musical performances. Attention is instead lavished on the earth mannikin’s physique, dress, and dwelling, and on the book’s physical appearance. The musical part of the story is what attracts the locals and rouses superstitious speculation about ghosts and pagan sacrifices. When the expert steps in, his job is to move from music to words, words to correct and authoritative source text, and so to educative dissemination. He searches out the crucial imagery, sensibility, and thoughts of the golden age (its “Schildereyen und Gemüthes-Gedanken,” 495). Oral dissemination is superseded by textual dissemination, music by words and still more so by images and ideas. This hierarchical ascent from music and sound to words, images, and ideas is fundamental to the work of Bodmer and Breitinger, standing as they do in a Reformed theological tradition marked by deep suspicion of music, in a rhetorical culture that tended toward the anti-rhetorical, and a Leibniz-Wolffian philosophical movement that understood elevation as a progression from obscure sense perceptions to ever more distinct concepts.7 Against this background, this chapter analyzes the role of music in Bodmer and Breitinger’s landmark Germanophone theorizations of the sublime, focusing on Breitinger’s influential Critische Dichtkunst (Critical Poetics, 1740). The antagonism between the sublime and music is nowhere clearer than with these writers. They formulated a veritable anti-musical sublime. Yet their theories are also perversely intimate with music, both because music is closely connected with rhetoric or the body of language (something requiring precise regulation and explanation) and because music embodies harmony. Theirs is a harmonious sublime that works through strangeness and obscurity toward perfect beauty, reason, and determination. Unlike Kant, the Swiss theorists would not see our failure to sensually perceive the perfect harmony of a totality as a blockage to aesthetic pleasure and an occasion for the sublime as a negative pleasure, since for them true perception and judgment are cognitive: aesthetic pleasure is realized in thought, and realization is its pleasure.8

Anglophilia and Musicophobia in the Swiss Sublime Little read in the Anglophone world, Bodmer and Breitinger were indefatigable polemicists and pedagogues who shaped the intellectual and cultural life of

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mid-eighteenth-century Zurich and left a permanent mark on Swiss and German culture through their writings, students, and the literary pilgrims who visited them.9 Both were professors at Zurich’s Carolinum and were involved in artistic-political societies and periodicals. Breitinger was also a philologist, educational reformer, theologian, and canon at the Großmünster (the minster, closely associated with Zurich’s Reformation), devoting considerable energies to the cause of rational orthodoxy against free thinkers and deists. His more gregarious and charismatic colleague came closer to courting controversy, with sympathy for free thinkers like Rousseau, patronage of later-exiled figures like Lavater, and a cautious stand for republican principles against the town council’s censorship and authoritarianism. Bodmer’s projects ranged from biblical epics, satires, translations, plays, and publishing to a scheme to train a modernday wandering rhapsode, whose edifying declamations (especially of Bodmer’s own poetry) would give rural areas better entertainment than mere “food for the ears, as with music.”10 Bodmer and Breitinger were not the first to discuss Longinus’s sublime (let alone loftiness or Erhabenheit) in German-speaking territories. But their work represents a significant shift in approach, away from the scholastic Latin reception of Longinus within the genera dicendi and toward a recognition of the text’s distinctive Greek theory of hypsos, marked by poetic inspiration and greatness of soul.11 While the genera dicendi figured the grand style as a full, thick covering for the body or “soma of the logos,” hypsos emphasized “the psyche of the logos” and its ascent.12 This shift away from the grand style chimed with the French neoclassical sublime. But it also belonged to a broader desire to integrate elite culture with practical arts, the sciences, and politics, and so to reform German language and life.13 Britain emerged as an especially rich model for this reform. From the early eighteenth century, the Hanoverian dynasty strengthened political and cultural ties between English- and German-speaking lands. Links were also seen in the Germanic roots of the English language—thus Bodmer edited collections of Old English as well as Old Swabian ballads (1780, 1781). Britain’s relative cultural, political, and economic centralization, at a time when there was no German state, appealed to many. For republicans of the Swiss federation, there was a special attraction in the vaunted association of the English political settlement with democratic freedom and progress, benefits both magnified by and reflected in the genres of satire and criticism, more heavily censored in Germanspeaking lands, not least in Zurich. Here, Puritan, Dissenting, and other English writers were also cultural allies as Calvinist-influenced Protestants in a

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European sea of Lutherans and Catholics, and as models of independence against larger cultural rivals (both in France and in more powerful German states). Tellingly, Bodmer and Breitinger’s earliest publication not only translates substantial portions of Peri hypsous but also reveals Bodmer’s reading of Christian Wernicke, a former student at groundbreaking lectures on Longinus in the 1680s, who traveled to England and introduced Dryden’s satire MacFlecknoe into German culture.14 Anglo-German exchanges were pervasive in the Swiss writers’ discourse on the sublime. They drew particularly on ideas of sublimity surrounding Paradise Lost—which they translated and defended—and mined the Spectator’s discussions of Milton, imagination, and the connection between classical epics and the “majestick Simplicity” of vernacular ballads.15 More broadly, the Zurich writers identified their project with an English culture of literary and social criticism, with its combination of observation, spirited heat, and cool reflection.16 Zurich in turn influenced English conceptions of sublimity, especially through Bodmer’s student Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), whose dark grotesques for some epitomize the sublime in painting.17 Two musicologists, Hartmut Grimm and Laurenz Lütteken, have recently addressed Bodmer and Breitinger’s relationship to music. Both ask after their influence on eighteenth-century composers and music writers but reach opposing conclusions about whether they praised music, or never mentioned it, contributing only indirectly to the musical sublime.18 This chapter moves in the opposite direction, reexamining the work of music within Bodmer and Breitinger’s literary-critical writings. It comes to very different conclusions: the Zurich critics neither praised nor ignored music. To deepen Lütteken’s foundational work on the musical sublime, we can return to Bodmer and Breitinger’s Sitz im Leben, and to Lütteken’s offhand remark that it “is idle to seek” reasons for their silence about music “in something like confessional conditions,” since simple material circumstances meant they “probably never once had the opportunity to see an opera.”19 Confessional conditions did mean that operas were never performed in Zurich: following the Zwinglian Reformation, only unaccompanied hymn singing had been permitted in Zurich’s churches, and there were still no theaters or opera houses.20 But this did not mean a silent town, or silence about music. Zurich had three musical societies, although, lacking church or court institutions to maintain musicians and composers, the performers were amateurs, traveling players, or invited guests: frequent, regular, professional events were difficult to organize.

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Popular music, meanwhile, was subject to strong and volatile elite attitudes. Visiting Zurich in the late eighteenth century, the music critic Johann Friedrich Reichardt thought it a touching sign of natural musicality and religiosity that, when he asked locals for “genuine old folk songs,” they often sang him psalms.21 Ironically, this was likely the result of elite attempts to suppress folk song through simple psalm settings in the seventeenth century.22 But for visitors like Reichardt, the noble simplicity and piety of Swiss music sprang from plain rural life, shaped by the sublime surroundings of the Alps. Reichardt’s description of homophonic psalm singing in Zurich’s minster suggests that for him its monumental simplicity raised pathos to a sublime degree: readers in Germany will “hardly be able to imagine the dignity and power of such church song, sung in four parts by many hundreds of people of every age . . . I was really in a completely new state; my heart was so full and yet my breast so tight; I was glad and I wept bright tears.”23 Just such a connection of emotion, simplicity and sublimity had been championed by Bodmer and Breitinger. Decades before Reichardt’s visit, in the 1760s, Bodmer and Breitinger’s student Johann Caspar Lavater, the composers Johannes Schmidlin, Johann Heinrich Egli, and others championed a revival of Swiss folk song, publishing several successful books of newly composed Schweizerlieder and citing Bodmer as an inspiration for their patriotic-republican efforts.24 While lauding the primitive Swiss virtue expressed in folk song, they also intended the Schweizerlieder to “suppress” “vexatious” and “seductive” “plebeian” folk songs sung in “simply unrespectable” dialect.25 Bodmer was a prestigious but not very active member of the society that sponsored the Schweizerlieder, and apparently he took little interest in this musical project.26 Much earlier, in his twenties, he had shown tangential interest in folk music. He implored his friend Zellweger to send him Alpine Kuhreihen (cow-herding songs) in order to prove Addison’s maxim, regarding the English ballad, that “Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures; and whatever falls in with it, will meet with Admirers amongst Readers of all Qualities and Conditions.”27 But, as in his encounter with the earth mannikin, Bodmer was interested only in words—what he called “the Kuhreihen itself.”28 If the Kuhreihen is “only a melody” to which shepherds attach “home-spun words without meaning,” then Zellweger should look out for “another song” where the “voice of nature speaks with its own eloquence.”29 The same letter discusses Bodmer’s Milton translation and an intriguing opera with songs that are not to be sung, which Bodmer has sent to Johann Ulrich König, the Saxon court poet and librettist.30

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Such moments not only show changing tastes in Zurich over the course of the century, they also remind us that material circumstances alone did not determine Bodmer and Breitinger’s suspicion of music: the two explored contacts with centers for opera like Dresden; many in their milieu enjoyed and promoted music; and later praise for Swiss music like Reichardt’s plays on notions of noble simplicity and heart-stirring pathos that Bodmer and Breitinger themselves placed at the center of the sublime. Nor did these theorists “remain tenaciously silent” about music.31 They remained loquaciously uncomfortable. A closer look shows that their discomfort played a sustained role in conceptualizing the sublime.

Searching for Harmony: Leibniz-Wolffian Aesthetics Although Bodmer and Breitinger wrote extensively about the sublime, there is little consensus about what they took it to be: a violent emotion; a valorizing of imagination; an experience of religious ascent; a turn against beauty or reason toward an aesthetic of terror; or a rhetorically oriented theory focused on poetic production.32 Their sublime is in fact eclectic, situational, and contested across and within individual texts.33 It can point in different directions as it draws on classical rhetoric, Italian poetics, French neoclassicism and sensualism, English criticism, and German rationalism. Nonetheless, we can gain a general picture of Bodmer and Breitinger’s sublime, not in order to reveal coherence under superficial fragmentation, but to see the musical cracks in their sublime, which become more visible against the kind of smooth, coherent surface they often strive to present. Most simply, Longinus is consistently positioned as the origin of the sublime. Bodmer and Breitinger’s earliest publication, Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Krafft (On the Influence and Use of the Power of Imagination, 1727), translated numerous passages from the “great” critic and announced itself as beginning a larger series—Reasonable Thoughts and Judgments on Eloquence—whose fifth volume would treat “the highest degree of perfection / to which the soul can rise in the point of eloquence / namely the sublime in writing: Here I examine chapter by chapter the tract of Longinus / the only one / who has written about this subject.”34 The projected volume was never published, yet this basic classification holds for their later writings. Sublimity belongs to imagination (as per the book’s title), lying in the province of the arts of language (eloquence) because it is aroused by these arts, but is

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identified less with a quality of language than with a movement of the soul to its “highest degree.” This height, even when it approaches ecstasy and enthusiasm, remains assessable by reason.35 In short, this entails a rationalist psychology focusing on aesthetic effects more than production. In line with contemporary theory, Bodmer and Breitinger’s most immediate and vivid movements of the soul are passions: thus the sublime is aroused through a “heart-stirring writing style” (herzrührende Schreibart), although passions are only sublime if they raise the soul.36 Key passions are astonishment, strong aversion (fear and terror), and strong attraction (like sympathy).37 This emphasis on affect—and indeed on the sublime—might seem to signal a move away from rationalism.38 Yet as movements of the soul, passions are not irrational but rather “indistinct [cognitive] representations of good and evil,” and are spurs to further thought.39 In this understanding of passion, Bodmer and Breitinger follow the rationalist psychology associated with Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the prolific phi losopher who reformulated and popularized Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716) thought. This single-faculty psychology describes an ascent from klar (clear) to deutlich (distinct) to ausführlich (extensive or developed) to vollständig (complete) concepts. Passions are vivid but incompletely realized concepts. For enlightening rationalists in the mold of Wolff—to whom the Swiss writers’ Reasonable Thoughts is dedicated—sublime-inducing passions should respond to empirical qualities of objects.40 Accordingly, in his Critische Briefe (Critical Letters, 1746) Bodmer insists on the mighty sources of the sublime, in effect promoting Longinus’s first source of sublimity: lofty matter or thoughts. The sublime is prompted by the “great and uncommon” (94), largely as these are found in language—though, crucially, in its matter rather than its manner. Language is central because its imaginative representations can outstrip empirically experienced nature or human action. Almost all humans fall within the “mean,” never truly horrifying or astonishing us. And while all God’s works point to their maker and so logically cause “admiration,” God designed that almost none should cause the “sudden” “astonishment” and “enchantment” of the sublime, since other wise we would spend our lives in a continual state of helpless rapture (97–98). So astonishment is mostly aroused by nonhuman “free beings,” mostly encountered in art: angels and demons (hence the sublimity of Paradise Lost), or fictional beings in poetry and tales (98–101).41 An elitist strain emerges here: what the plebs find great or uncommon is not truly sublime; the ignorant can find anything strange and respond with simple amazement and “gawping” (Angaffen). Only admiration flowing from wisdom and deepening upon reflection is sublime (95–96).

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These themes are elaborated in Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst (1740). Breitinger’s key term is the Wunderbare, the wonderful, miraculous, or marvelous. Found at the extreme edge of the “new,” the wonderful forms the source for the “poetically beautiful.” 42 But just how close are the wonderful and the sublime? The question has generated debate because it concerns the compatibility of theology, rationalism, and modern aesthetics (with its attention to worldly sensations) and, more specifically, the reception of Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy by Bodmer and Breitinger, and so their part in a history of German aesthetics germinated, according to Ernst Cassirer, by Leibniz and flowering with Goethe.43 Some passages on the wonderful in Dichtkunst closely resemble Bodmer’s discussions of the sublime, and the Wunderbare recalls a synonym for sublime in the title of Boileau’s translation, the merveilleux.44 Yet the terms need not be collapsed. We might say that as the wonderful is the uppermost limit of the new, generating the poetically beautiful, so the sublime is the uppermost limit to which the soul rises through poetic beauty. The poetically beautiful remains a formal phenomenon, the sublime a psychological effect, and the wonderful its mechanism. The virtue of the wonderful—something “true” or “possible” yet so novel that it “seems to conflict with our usual concepts”—is to add deep and improving cognitive delight to our simple pleasure in novelty: “a pleasant and admiring confusion ravishes” us away as we struggle to integrate the strange with the already known.45 The orientation of the wonderful toward Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy emerges here, in relation to possibility, perfection, and harmony. As Jill Kowalik has shown in relation to possibility, Breitinger responds less to Leibniz’s infamous idea that ours is the “best of all possible worlds”—central to Leibniz’s theodicy—than to Leibniz-Wolffian ontology, or what we might call knowledge creation. For Leibniz, fully realized concepts are literally more real than vague or confused ones, themselves closer to being only possible. Objects perceived by the senses exist in a kind of shadow world: while their qualities are immediate and non-delusive, they are in a sense mysterious and “occult,” like the knowledge a blind man receives from his stick.46 Since sense perceptions are just a species of concept—consisting of representations by the mind to itself— they must be fully realized and brought into harmony with all our other concepts to fully exist. Only then are perceptions truly harmonious or beautiful. For Breitinger, the wonderful in poetry has a prominent role in actualizing possible knowledge, in transforming vague, confused sense perceptions into precise concepts, fully and complexly related to our growing stock of other, more perfect concepts.47 The wonderful is like a “strange but transparent mask”

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of improbability stimulating our “desire for knowledge.” Delight arises when we “penetrate[ ]” behind the mask, “and discover[ ] agreement and perfection in the apparent contradiction” (i.130). Genuinely new discoveries can be wonderful, but so can the everyday, whose “hidden and unknown” wonders must be reactivated as part of our proper knowledge of creation and admiration for the creator. Thus the “majestic silence of the sun” in a physico-theological poem by Heinrich Brockes makes strange and perversely eloquent a lack of sound that we take as given. Tellingly, silence is a virtue: provoking “charm, pleasure, and awe,” the sun models an ideal communication without speech (i.385–86). Because wonder can pervade everyday or realistic representations, Breitinger can maintain that “every well-invented poem is . . . a history from another possible world.” 48 In fact, the poet deserves his classical name, “creator,” purely “ because he not only conveys visible bodies to invisible things”—like Milton’s Satan—but also, as with the conceptualization of the sun’s silence, “creates things which are not for the senses, that is, carries things over from the state of possibility [Möglichkeit] into the state of actuality [Würcklichkeit]” (i.60). The poet’s histories are not scenarios from less perfect worlds that God decided not to make (this would damn art from the outset) but counterfactual histories that actualize concepts in our world. Through the wonderful, then, poetry creates new knowledge from sense perception and imagination, and it draws us toward that highest knowledge comprehended by God—perfect harmony. But perfection and harmony often seem incompatible with the sublime. Surely “the sublime, the violent, the wonderful, the new, the strange,” means “anything and everything that is pleasing because it transcends and even violates law, regularity, and harmony”?49 Not for Bodmer and Breitinger. The sublime is the soul’s “highest perfection,” and the wonderful shows the “harmony of the whole,” making even apparent dissonance reinforce harmony.50 When Breitinger calls a poem “a new ideal world or a new Zusammenhang [connection, combination, cohesion] of things,” this world is necessarily harmonious, with diverse events and circumstances all pleasingly interconnected, and all serving one purpose, the “perfection of the whole” (i.426–27). As a principle of connection, Zusammenhang closely resembles the sublime power of verbal arrangement that Longinus compared with musical harmony. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a detailed positive treatment of music appears in this context. One should not worry, Breitinger writes, that unity will be “monotonous”: just as “in music a lovely harmony arises from the connection of endlessly different tones; so this unity of effects must be promoted and maintained through the artful connection of endlessly different impressions” (i.427).

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This musical principle also exists in creation, as is evident in the divinely ordained coherence that our minds are constituted to perceive in manifold sense impressions (i.428). The harmony of impressions has its foundations in unifying fundamental laws that also govern the “delightful mixing of tones in music.” The effect of “every separate tone receives its power to delight only from its artistic connection with other tones, yet every connection must have its particular foundation, partly in the nature of tones, partly in the intention of the virtuoso.” Just so, individual impressions in life or a beautiful poem must be woven together and ordered according to principles of time, space, coherence, and so on, in order to achieve their powerful, elevating effect (i.428).51 In Breitinger’s poetics, then, the soul’s ascent in the sublime meets a philosophical ascent to perfection. Experience of music—as a “delight” for listeners and as an art practiced by virtuosos—confirms the harmony of the divine plan with empirical nature and with our perceptual apparatus, apparently offering a welcome proof for a rational aesthetics, most sublime when it is most harmonious. And yet music is not a touchstone of Bodmer and Breitinger’s sublime. It is more typically a problem, an art whose differences from language define the boundaries of the sublime, but whose commonalities with language point to more fundamental problems in their aesthetics. Why is this?

Dissonances: Sounding Bodies and a Zwinglian Sublime Breitinger’s praise for the “majestic silence of the sun” speaks to the Swiss writers’ anti-sensualist, anti-rhetorical, and self-consciously enlightening or reforming bents. These were lent particu lar intensity by Zurich’s Zwinglian heritage. It led Bodmer and Breitinger to radicalize—to the point of paradox—both Longinus’s suspicion of music and Boileau’s rejection of the sublime as high style. Intersecting with seventeenth-century ideals of sublime simplicity was a “plain style” discerned in early Christianity, perhaps especially by Reformed writers.52 Lofty matter was regarded as most aptly clothed in humble speech, as God had been clothed in humble flesh among obscure people. Boileau himself had favored the “short, simple, and noble” language in which Genesis narrated “the wonders of Creation” and “made known to man the author of those wonders,” preeminently in the fiat lux.53 Others went further in promoting what Chapin calls “the hard kernel of the French neoclassical” sublime, where “the means of production are to be kept minimal to ensure the maximum effect of the communicated message.”54 For one of Boileau’s contemporaries, the fiat lux

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indicated not only the performative power of God’s word but also the inadequacy of any sensuous image of this power: “God certainly has no lips to move; God does not strike the air with a tongue to draw sound from it; God only has to wish something in himself, and everything . . . is accomplished.”55 In 1712 Addison—like Brockes turning from the creation of light to the way light itself communicates—had celebrated the “bold and sublime manner of thinking” in Psalm 19, where “The Heavens declare the glory of God” without “speech or language,” and he had paraphrased the psalmist in an ode where the sun “published to every land | The work of an Almighty Hand,” “singing” “In reason’s ear” despite having “no real voice nor sound.”56 Even set in this context, Bodmer and Breitinger are unusually thoroughgoing in their suspicion of sound and excoriation of music. They followed the tone set by Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), who had spearheaded Zurich’s Reformation from the Großmünster where Breitinger and his forebears were also clergy. Despite, or because of, his own musical talents, music for Zwingli meant the perils of the flesh and worldly pomp. Zurich’s “musicoclasms” were among the most radical of the period: organs were dismantled, choir books were ripped apart and sold, and music in church was banned.57 Zwingli intensified Erasmus’s complaints about “degrading,” “chattering,” “theatrical musical” in church.58 True music, Zwingli concluded, was the private and inaudible praise of God, the music of the heart. Audible music was coded as hypocritical, Jewish, female, unclean, and fleshly. The “moaning” and “mumbling” of the psalms by ignorant nuns was set against reading, opening out, and seeing the “beautiful meaning of the holy Spirit.”59 Silent hermeneutic clarity opposed noisy ritual performance. Ceremony and pomp are frequent targets in the Dichtkunst when Breitinger critiques poetry’s “musical” dimensions. Thus prose with excessively marked rhythms is like alarums on brass instruments: such “magnificence” goes against the seriousness and morality of prose (ii.441). Slightly worrying, however, is that poetry is characterized by pomp: its various meters are like the different characters in a “festive procession,” with stylized gestures, clothes, and gait (ii.441–42). The explicit moral is familiar from Horatian poetics: it is apt in rituals like coronations, liturgies, or military parades that people perform differently according to their social roles, and therefore apt that poetry uses different meters. Yet if noisy social rituals are less serious and moral than silent private pursuits, then poetry appears less serious and moral than regular prose—a problematic implication for the Critical Poetics and its claims for the wonderful in poetry. We might say that music is scapegoated to help protect verbal arts

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from charges that cannot be completely refuted, or to discursively separate language from formal and material qualities that cannot be completely purged. A similar strategy appears in Breitinger’s “Three Speeches” marking educational reforms in the 1770s.60 The reforms will cast off dry, forbidding pedagogy and develop children’s natural taste, working from the arts to more abstract studies. Children’s innate love of “symmetry, harmony, symphony and order” is instrumental (80). But it is deftly separated from love of worldly pleasure and pomp, aligned with music: One year ago, I say, I had the occasion at a similar solemnity, which then, because of the extraordinariness of the same, was accompanied by a festive music (which, however, engrossed the whole attention of most of those present; and so deprived the weak orator almost completely of it), to supply this solemn panegyric, with some important psychological observations on how the slumbering feeling for the beautiful and good can be awakened in the young, and fixed upon that which deserves to be called truly beautiful and good in the arts and sciences. (82–83) Breitinger’s distracting parenthetical anecdote about the “festive music” performs the same disruption as the music that stole his limelight. It is a specter at the feast, warning that taste, however natural, demands learned cultivation. Some naturally enjoyable things—music, celebrating—do not deserve “to be called truly beautiful and good.” Stronger scapegoating of music emerges in Bodmer’s Critische Briefe, whose fourth letter discusses the sublime in language. Bodmer here radicalizes the anti-rhetorical strands in Longinus’s sublime and the French neoclassical sublime. Sublimity is not just not the high style, it is not a matter of style at all. Style should take care of itself, being generated directly by sublime subject matter. The letter begins by rejecting the notion “that speech contains a particular sublime, consisting in a happy choice of well-appointed and comprehensible words” that convey the utterance’s meaning “briefly, clearly and emphatically” (103), a neoclassical-sounding idea associated in the letter with Longinus (104). Even such a pared-back aesthetic attributes sublime power to language “in itself.” This resembles Longinus’s admission of rhetorical tricks into the arsenal of the sublime. Apparently thinking of the fifth source of the sublime, Bodmer complains that Longinus granted “almost magical power” to “mere words” and their “magical arrangement” (104–5).61 This was incompatible with

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true sublimity: “If something lofty does reside in the sound of words, then the ear must be its judge; but my sublime binds the external senses in ravishing the mind” (104). The false sublime—corporeal, external, and rhetorical—is again figured by music. Admittedly, “a musical power lies in words, when the multifarious sounds of the syllables are mingled with measure and pulse; but this symphony” only causes “pleasure, even at its most terrifying,” and even “lessens” “the sublime, which astounds and sinks one in thought” (104–5). “Its effects are primarily on the body and its movements,” writes Bodmer, silently echoing Longinus’s condemnation of instrumental music (xxxix.2). “There are people who very deftly imitate the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, the hissing of snakes, the clapping of storks, or the whinnying of horses; the lovers of imitative sounds should go and learn from them,” he concludes (104–5). Bodmer may draw here on the apparent source of Longinus’s critique of music as a bastard imitation of persuasion, Plato’s Laws 2.669d–e, which describes compositions scorned by the Muses, since they are wordless “and us[e] the bare sound of harp or flute, wherein it is almost impossible to understand what is intended . . . or what noteworthy original it represents.” 62 Bodmer’s animal simile picks up on the continuation of this passage: “Such methods . . . are clownish in the extreme. . . . [T]hey exhibit an excessive craving for speed, mechanical accuracy, and the imitation of animals’ sounds.” 63 Arguably, then, Bodmer outdoes Longinus’s Neoplatonic suspicion of music. More generally, the Zurich writers distanced themselves from Longinus despite detailed engagement with Peri hypsous.64 The central problem was apparently Longinus’s tendency, exacerbated by translators Heineken and Boileau, to regard “everything . . . preeminent in speech” as sublime (Dichtkunst ii.324). The sublime would be primarily “the well communicated,” as Gilby argues was indeed the case for Boileau and his contemporaries.65 Unmoored from genuinely elevated subjects, the sublime threatens to dissolve into pure rhetoric, a movement of the soul without foundations in mind, matter, or meaning, riveted to the vehicle of moving sounds, heedless of proper goals—God, wisdom, perfection. The metaphysical coherence attested to by aesthetic pleasure in Breitinger’s treatise threatens to evaporate. In other words, even a simplicityoriented rhetoric that minimizes focus on the means of communication can start to look like a postmodern sublime of pure movement or force. As we will see in the next chapter, postmodern critics have discerned just this kind of sublime in the poetics of Bodmer and Breitinger’s successors. Remaining with the Swiss theorists, it is clear that even for them rejecting attention to rhetoric and linguistic sound is easier said than done. Bodmer’s

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fourth letter in fact advocates principles of aptum, though not fit between high matter and high style. He cites Boileau’s best-known examples of verbal concision and simplicity ( fiat lux, qu’ il mourût), and he adopts terms from the related German rhetoric of argutia, which valued epigrammatic acuteness, emphasis, and brevity.66 “Brevity and clarity” conveyed through “light,” “simple,” and “common” words are often “simply” “necessary” to sublimity (105–7). All the more reason to align rhetoric with a foreign art form, music. Much like Longinus, Bodmer evokes music to split language, analyzing it into components of sound and meaning, sign and signified. Music apparently proves that this split can be performed: it is difficult to imagine a thought without material signifiers, but we can imagine musical stuff without an accompanying thought. This strategy creates language as the union of sense and sound, and music as sound without meaning, a kind of “empty signifier.” 67 In Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst, too, dismissing the material, rhetorical, mechanical elements of poetry associated with music goes hand in hand with close attention to policing matter and sound. The irony seems characteristic of much Reformed thinking: what should be simply dismissed requires detailed control (fasting does not matter, so you must not not eat meat during Lent; outward ritual is irrelevant, so you must not sing polyphony in church). Yet the Dichtkunst deploys music constructively as well as in this “scapegoating” mode, relying on the double coding of music discussed earlier. Pointing beyond Zwingli’s heritage, as we will see, this deployment of music witnesses to the ambivalent position of art in Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy. Also significant is the social position of Bodmer and Breitinger as leading professors at the Carolinum, Zurich’s higher-education foundation, set within a small, largely rural canton governed by the city’s patrician elite. Pedagogy and reform are central to their sublime. The Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy of ascent from confused sensory perceptions to intellective perception of harmony means that the imaginative arts— appealing to the senses and imitating experience—are only ever the starting point of genuine aesthetic pleasure. Beyond engaging our attention, Beiser notes, the arts in this schema appear “dispensable”: “All the knowledge they merely suggest and adumbrate is more accurately developed by the sciences.” 68 The pleasure of art is thus partly the pleasure of supersession, as sense perceptions pass away and naked ideas are uncovered. Breitinger explicitly frames poetry in this way as a Wolffian ars popularis that exists “to direct the great mass of people toward abstract truth” (i.3). He consequently both celebrates and denigrates poetry’s sensuousness. Art must be powerful and valuable to attract

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and educate the populace but be weak and dispensable in order to be cast off by philosophical “sublime spirits” (i.125, also i.5). The wonderful, as a mechanism that stimulates knowledge of the possible and leads us to penetrate poetry’s mask of improbability, can only partly reconcile the sublime as intellectual loftiness with the sublime as a poetics of ascent. For poetry is entirely superfluous for those “few spirits sublimed above the common lot of humankind in understanding, knowledge and deep insight;” spirits “capable of higher, nobler delight, completely abstracted from the senses. The naked truth is for them so attractive that they necessarily find it irksome when her beauties are whisked from their sight and hidden, even if this should happen through the magnificent decoration of clothing” (i.125). Breitinger’s navigation between popular and elite, body and spirit, poetry as sublime and as what the sublime leave behind, is aided by the double coding of sound and music. Compared with other sense perceptions, sound is almost incorporeal; compared with other elements of poetry, sound is grossly physical. The dialectic emerges in Dichtkunst’s first chapter, a comparison of painting and poetry. While visual arts enter the eye instantaneously, discursive arts have greater force (Gewalt) and represent a wider range of objects (i.17). For while images must be transformed into ideas, words enter our minds directly, carrying things too “delicate and intangible” for the senses (i.20). Breitinger takes the example of birdsong, inaccessible to painting but not to poetry (i.17–24). This ethereal music conjures up the fantasy of hearing as a non-sensual sense. Yet sound is also the meaningless matter (resonating again with birdsong) that passes away in understanding: for the senses, words are “empty tones”; only for the mind are they the “signs of thoughts and the colors of things” (i.20). The treatise’s final chapter, “On the Construction and Nature of German Verse,” drives the point home. On one hand, attention to the sounds of rhymes, meters, and verbal arrangement is debasingly corporeal. Poets here “abase[] themselves most deeply, and have not been ashamed to extend their diligence even to sheer mechanical production. This is verse, which without doubt among all the aids of [the poet] has the most corporeality about it, and betrays its craftsman most clearly” (ii.437). On the other hand, the poet as craftsmanmechanic works with “one of the finest among corporeal things”: Töne, tones or notes (ii.438). Tones, an almost lyrical moment explains, are “something invisible, are delicate movements of the through-flowing air [durch-rinnenden Luft] perceptible to us only in hearing and in speaking, wherefore the anatomy of tones is exceedingly difficult, multifarious and deceptive” (ii.438). We turn in an instant from sound as the epitome of the basely physical to that which

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most escapes the physical, and then back to baseness: music’s invisibility becomes deceit. Treating the “duty of the poet to promote the physical delight of the ears” (ii.435), this final chapter is not “essential” or part of Breitinger’s ergon proper. It is merely its “seal,” needed to “exhaust[]” the topic of poetics (ii.437). Like Derrida’s parergon, this one is paradoxically central.69 Seals grant documents power, guaranteeing their credibility with recipients and effectiveness in the world. Breitinger’s use of the term Erschöpfung (exhaustion) is also significant here, where we might expect something like Vollendung (completion, perfection): this chapter is about pushing creation (Schöpfung) to those limits where it threatens to undo itself. So, Breitinger’s poet is least creator, most mechanic, when he attends to the music of verse. He deigns to concentrate on it for the same reason anyone concentrates on the material world, we might surmise. The body is half the human and deserves to be served along with the spirit; and poetry, after all, serves the “corporeal mass of humanity” (ii.438) who are least spiritual to begin with. But, implicitly, if poetry achieved its goal and educated the uneducated, it would disappear. Poetry as an institution will exhaust itself in completing itself, just as good poetry eventually sheds the physical matter that forms it, and as which it transports ideas to the mind. In terms of poetics, in subordinating music and pushing it to the margins, Breitinger gives over to it more than half the kingdom (for it reaches the “mass of humanity”) and associates music with poetry’s sine qua non: as an ars popularis, poetry is defined by materiality. Philosophers could provide poets with ready-made content; only poets construct verse.

Music and Resemblance Why does the music of language as found in verse move the “mass of humanity” in the first place, let alone so strongly that poetry is the chief locus for the sublime? This question about music—turning on fuzzily defined qualities of symmetry, harmony, relationship, connection, proportion—returns us to Longinian tensions between nature and art, simplicity and cultivation in the sublime and takes us to the center of an enlightenment anthropology. The real strength of music for the Dichtkunst is its association with harmony, similarity, “relationship,” and “proportions” (ii.449). Music and verse, Breitinger writes, share “a certain pleasant symmetry” arising from “the secret relationship . . . that all proportions have with our mind [Gemüthe]” (ii.449). This justifies the classical doctrine that a “similar[ity]” connects particu lar

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musical modes, particular passions, and the habitual dispositions or ethos of particular peoples (ii.444–45). Symmetry is at once an internal characteristic of patterned sound, a link between different forms of patterned sound (music, poetry), and a property of correspondence between patterned sounds, bodies, and minds. Through closely honed symmetries, Breitinger admits, music can afford even higher “pleasure” than verse (ii.449). Yet the strength of symmetry is also a threat. We must “save verse,” Breitinger insists, from excessive sameness, “from the homophony into which symmetry can collapse, and which indeed would be as irksome as chaconnes [als die Chaconen]” (ii.450). He is glossing here a passage from the Parisian belletrist Antoine Houdar de La Motte that he has already translated at some length and seconding La Motte’s attack on the “repulsive monotony” of unvaried alexandrines in epic poetry and drama (ii.447).70 Given the differences between Parisian and Zurich music cultures, and between French and German linguistic theory on issues like vocal “inflections” (are they inherent in words, or flexible? how closely do they reflect the speaker’s passions? ii.450), Breitinger perhaps predictably seems to mistranslate and misconstrue La Motte on several points.71 In particular, La Motte had aptly compared epic six-beat alexandrines to the chaconne, an expansive triple-time, ground bass dance form common in French opera. He imagined the tedium of an entire opera “where the symphonies, and the songs were nothing but one continuous chaconne” (dont les simphonies, & les chants ne seroient qu’une chaconne continuë). In his gloss, however, Breitinger seems to consider “chaconnes” “irksome” in themselves.72 But Breitinger’s underlying point is that aural repetition and resemblance are dangerous as well as unpleasant. This belongs to a much larger anxiety about policing harmony, stemming from what we can term an “anti-Scholastic” or “enlightening” rejection of metaphysical resemblances and analogies as occult. In place of the Boethian musical resemblances that had grounded relationships between the cosmos and well-ordered human beings—or between matter and soul, sounds and listeners—eighteenth-century thinkers could offer a range of explanations. Relationships might be established by divine fiat (as in Leibniz’s predetermined harmony between body and soul). They might be illusions projected by the superstitious mind. Or they might be determined materially and empirically—in extreme scenarios entailing that matter governs and generates thought and emotion, working through commonalities between experienced objects and the human body. Breitinger’s own explanations are eclectic. All assume that aural “symmetries” and their relationship to humans have nothing to do with Boethian or

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Neoplatonic metaphysics (only “lovers of darkness” claim with Plato that “the soul is a harmony, or has a harmony,” ii.443–44). Breitinger replaces musica mundana with Newtonian physics. Just as “gravitation” had been proven by mathematical and empirical “experience” even though it still escaped mechanical explanations, so too humans experience aural pleasure in “symmetry” (in the rhythms of horse beats, hammers, flails) without being able to explain it (ii.443). The occult and mystical give way to an assertion of empirical factuality, accompanied by a refusal of further speculation: “It’s enough to say that the reason for our love of symmetry . . . is found in the bond by which we are joined to one another” (ii.444). The nature of our common condition, then, our resemblance to each other, grounds the power of sound. According to an unnamed French theorist quoted in the treatise, all humans are “like the same instrument, strung with as many strings as there are passions,” and resonating in sympathy with their fellow instruments (ii.358). While Breitinger rejects the music of the spheres, then, the workings of the cosmos still parallel those of music, and correspondences persist between audible harmonies and harmonies in and between humans. Elsewhere, Breitinger explains the connection between verbal sounds and meanings via an adaptation of Leibniz’s divinely predetermined harmony between body and soul. Just as there is no interaction between body and soul in humans, so there is no real interaction or correspondence between physical sounds and meanings in language (ii.13–14). Only human intentions (pre)determine these relationships. Nonetheless, this sits within the larger schema of our own divinely predetermined love of harmony. Human nature leads us to attempt to establish nonarbitrary “harmony” between sounds and ideas, as in onomatopoeia (ii.23–24). Material resemblances or harmonies between sounds and humans thus creep back into discussion, often drawing on classical rhetoric. The agitation of sounding objects resembles the way sense perceptions agitate our animal spirits. The sense organs of different nations harmonize with their physical terrains, customs, and temperaments and in turn with the music these nations enjoy. A natural “harmony” between ear and mouth means that the sounds a nation enjoys speaking, it also enjoys hearing. Sound thereby helps along sense, since things enter our minds easily if they are easy on the ear (ii.21). Breitinger even entertains Alexander Pope’s idea that dialects with more resonance or a “higher sound” (created when vowels separate consonants) improve thinking itself, through aural “completeness” and “similarity” (ii.28–29).73 Higher dialects with more distinct sounds that heighten cognition—is this a sonic stimulus for a sublime characterized by ascent, fullness, determination,

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and clarity? No. Tellingly, Breitinger edits an extended quotation from Pope to remove its strongest praise of music. He translates Pope’s reflection that Homer combined words from different dialects to ensure his sound always echoed his sense, creating a “Harmony, which makes us confess he had not only the richest Head, but the finest Ear in the World.” He omits Pope’s conclusion: “This is so great a Truth, that whoever will but consult the Tune of [Homer’s] Verses even without understanding them (with the same sort of Diligence as we daily see practis’d in the case of Italian Opera’s), will find more Sweetness, Variety, and Majesty of Sound, than in any other Language.” 74 Breitinger concedes to traditional rhetoric that sounds have “power . . . to elevate the beauty of thoughts,” but this “musical power” is strictly “limit[ed]” (ii.22). Turning to Longinus, he maintains like Bodmer that “the harmony resulting from joining” words and clauses cannot lend “loftiness to lowly thoughts” or trigger the sublime (ii.38–39). Dichtkunst, then, treats older explanations of harmony’s power in the sounding arts as magical or occult. At the same time, it maintains some distance from what might be taken as demystifying materialist explanations, which threaten the freedom and superiority of mind over matter, by evoking Leibnizian predetermined harmony, alongside the brute “experience” of human pleasure in symmetry. Conceptually dissonant, these arguments also tend to reaffirm the centrality of music to human experience and improvement, despite the barriers Breitinger places between harmonious sound and that ultimate poetic effect and index of improvement, the sublime. If the Dichtkunst’s sublime belongs to a larger project of creating an enlightened poetics, then music highlights one of the tensions within this European project. The simplicity and naturalness it enjoins are only partially reconcilable with its goals of improvement and cultivation. For Breitinger, music exemplifies cultivation because it is a cultivation of sound: verbal sounds are “simply given, as is” (einfältig von sich gegeben); musical notes are “complexly turned and polished” (vielfältig gezogen und geschleifet, ii.449). Unlike, say, Herder or Rousseau, who place music at or near the origin of language, Breitinger imagines music to refine the preexisting sonic matter of speech. Refinement can be an index of enlightenment, significantly represented by England: English spelling reveals traces of the language’s original harshness, but its current pronunciation is soft and cultivated because, over generations, Englishmen’s refined customs modified their organs and allowed gentler sound production that suited gentler ears (ii.19–20). Gentler sounds could in turn improve national customs. Sound and harmony thus undergird an anthropology of verse, a

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theory of national difference in literature, and a vision of national improvement through poetry. But refinement can equally be enervating and decadent, a nemesis of enlightenment. One of music’s roles is to separate bathetic overrefinement or oversensitivity (Überverzärtlichung, ii.427) from positive ascent—be that the general social-intellectual improvement of the populace promoted by poetry or, in its most acute form, the soul’s ascent in the sublime. Thus the more “musical ear” of the Italians and French turns out to make them inferior to the Germans, who with their tough climate and rudely healthy way of life can bear “so-called cacophonies and homophonies . . . which softer [organs] cannot stand” (ii.471). The Alpine Swiss, sneered at for backwardness, were particularly well placed to exploit this Tacitean stereotype of German primitiveness, increasingly linked with sublime simplicity as the century progressed. Breitinger’s ideal reader will therefore follow the well-read yet earthy hero of the German poet Canitz’s fifth satire, a hero “no less enchanted” by “bagpipes” striking up in the “pub” than by a poetic “Bellerophon singing of his love” (ii.471). Musical refinement is the pampered scapegoat for the arts in general, and its sacrifice—or at least chastening—gives the impression that the theologian-pedagogue has created a prudent antipoetics. This reaffirms the treatise’s avowed raison d’être, easily forgotten in its elaborate technicalities: poetry is a practical and popular art, its highest effects of sublime wonder and elevation directed toward the improvement of the majority.

Receptions: Transforming the Reformers Efforts like Bodmer and Breitinger’s to construct music as a kind of “empty signifier” ironically help music become an ideal within later discourses of the sublime. Typically in Romantic and post-Kantian thought, normal signification becomes a blockage to unmediated knowledge or experience, and idealists and sensualists from their different perspectives make music epitomize the sublime. Some of these developments are taken up in the following chapters, where we see Klopstock and Herder firmly rejecting aspects of Bodmer and Breitinger’s aesthetic. But it is worth emphasizing that celebrations of music did not depend on any straightforward rejection of their theories. The critics’ friends and wider networks often saw music as sublime without distancing themselves from the Swiss writers. Few music theorists mentioned Bodmer and Breitinger.75 A prominent exception is Christian Gottfried Krause, son of a town musician and secretary to

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one of Frederick the Great’s generals, who refers to Breitinger several times in his important Von der musikalischen Poesie (On Musical Poetry, 1752).76 In addressing the sublime, Krause asks “whether the so-called sublime sensations of the mind [erhabenen Gemüthsempfindungen] also occur in arias,” and he cites Breitinger as representative of “teachers of art,” who all “give as a central characteristic of the [sublime] that it must be expressed without any art or ornament” (252–53). This apparent consensus bolsters Krause’s argument that swiftly delivered and pared-back recitative is more sublime than the “rambling” text setting of arias, since sublimity is necessarily terse, showing a heart overpowered by passion “draw[ing] together all its powers at once” (253). Breitinger’s positioning does not suggest the Swiss theorists were fundamental to Krause’s conception of the sublime, nor that Krause would have minded about whether they themselves countenanced a musical sublime. Theories of sublime simplicity were widespread, and Krause may also have associated the idea with Boileau, with Baumgarten, whose lectures he attended, and others.77 Krause’s apparent indifference to Bodmer and Breitinger’s denigration of music repeats a pattern observable in the absorption of Burke’s anti-musical sublime into musical culture and, later, in the way readers of the third Critique like Reichardt and Michaelis applied Kantian philosophy to music, despite Kant’s steady coolness toward the art. This is a reminder of the transformations and mutability of musical sublimes in the long eighteenth century, and that straight lines of influence are not the norm in the sublime’s reception and dissemination. Counterintuitive appropriations of Bodmer and Breitinger’s sublime also draw attention to the eclecticism of the Swiss pair’s own comments on music. A selective reading of their texts could well make their sublime seem compatible with music. For instance, in praising the poetry of the Hamburg luminary Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747), whose long series of English-influenced physicotheological poems are credited with inventing the “terrifying-sublime” in German poetry, Breitinger often singled out the musicality of aural patterns and mimetic effects.78 Contemporary composers now associated with a musical sublime, like Georg Philip Telemann, also saw Brockes’s poetry as exemplarily musical.79 Brockes himself rarely if ever associated music with the sublime—its “pleasant horror” (angenehmes Graun) is reserved for floods, earthquakes, mountains, and the like. Yet the Basel administrator and poet Carl Friedrich Drollinger, an admirer and friend of both Bodmer and Brockes, applied Brockes’s tropes of sublimity to the Hamburg poet himself in an ode that presented Brockes as a Davidic poet-singer.80 Drollinger’s sonnet hails the “sublime Brockes” as “compelling” us “with lovely power”; his “song” creates “pleasure

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and horror” (Lust und Grauen), “contenting and terrifying” us in order to “awaken something divine in our breast” (ll.11, 1–4). The divine is reached through the pure force of music—angels as well as mortals hear Brockes’s songs of praise, which link heaven and earth—but also through the kind of enlightening wonder that Bodmer and Breitinger saw in the sublime. Brockes “uncovers the wonders which surround us”; once hidden by our “blindness,” they now grant a “foretaste of heaven” (ll.6–9). It is no surprise that some of these tropes recall the English music odes examined in earlier chapters. Drollinger was a keen Anglophile and translated Pope’s Essay on Criticism, with its paean to the “power of music” in Alexander’s Feast, for a collection edited by Bodmer.81 Drollinger also wrote his own music ode, then an uncommon German genre.82 Its tropes overlap significantly with his ode to Brockes and with English odes to St.  Cecilia. Drollinger’s ode begins with an invocation: “lively strings” (muntern Saiten) are exhorted to bestir themselves and “inflame” the poet’s spirit, so that he might bring music a “worthy sacrifice” (ll.1–4). As in many English odes, music is the only agent powerful enough to inspire and fuel its own praise.83 This reflexivity also implicates language: the poem aspires to embody the inspiration of the Muse, and so itself become musical. The next lines describe the pervasive powers of music, irresistibly moving every person, breaking through the “depth of our senses” with its “heavenly voice” (ll.6–7). Music becomes overwhelming, submerging listeners in a flood of “bliss,” ravishing them, transporting them they know not where, and exploiting every passion, every impulse (ll.5, 8–10). A series of ejaculations and admiring questions runs the gamut of music’s sublime powers as they appear in the English music Pindaric tradition from Dryden to Congreve and Pope.84 We see sublime astonishment, ravishment, and transport; music’s shattering and penetration of the senses; flood imagery; a stress on music’s control of every passion, and rapid alternation between passions. And like Brockes’s sublime poetry, Drollinger’s music teaches us “through pleasure and horror” (durch Lust und Grausen, l.21). Still more elaborate and effusive images of the poet as sublime musician appear in the writings of the Halle Pietists Samuel Gotthold Lange (1711–1781) and his friend Jacob Immanuel Pyra (1715–1744), again strongly influenced by Bodmer and Breitinger. Pyra had made fragmentary translations of Longinus as a student and seems to have seen in Peri hypsous something that could reconcile piety and poetic engagement.85 After Pyra’s untimely death, Lange approached Bodmer with poems commemorating their friendship, eventually published through Bodmer as Thirsis und Dämons freundschaftliche Lieder (Thyrsis and Damon’s Songs of Friendship, 1745). In these poems, the Zurich

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writers’ emphases on loftiness of soul, the sublimity of God, and the shaking of the heart are taken up into a poetics where outpouring of passion is combined with the expansiveness, classicizing postures, and ornate rhetoric of the Pindaric. The freundschaftliche Lieder are suffused with musical conceits, as in this lament for Pyra: Du aber, deutscher Pindar, singst in Ruh; Nun hört dich Gott, du göttlich hoher Sänger; Aus deinem Antlitz strahlt ein heitrer Glantz; Aus deinem Mund erschallt die reinste Stimme; Die Rechte schwebt auf hochgestimmter Harf, Die Linke greiffet drein, und Gott Hört dich; dich hört die Schaar der Engel, Und steht entzückt, und sieht und schweiget.86 [But you, German Pindar, now sing in peace, | Now you are heard by God, you divinely lofty singer; | From your visage streams a joyous glow; | From your mouth peals the purest voice; | Your right [hand] sweeps a high-tuned harp, | The left grasps it, and God | Hears you; you are heard by the host of angels, | Who stand enchanted, and watch and are silent.] Literalized spiritual loftiness mixes here with Pindaric elevation, with tropes of Longinian sublimity (ravishment, sublime silence), and with the high style: note the apostrophe, unusual syntax, formulaic high-register descriptors, the classicizing absence of rhyme, and rhetorical devices like chiasmus (höret Gott/ göttlich hoher), and the final line’s ascending tricolon. If Bodmer and Breitinger’s wariness of music belongs in part to their attempts to repress rhetoric, then this is a veritable return of the repressed. Whether or not contemporaries found such odes sublime, they certainly recognized how often Pyra and Lange deployed music as a marker of poetic, religious, and social loftiness, and how open it left them to satire.87 Thus Pyra and Lange’s musical conventions became fodder in the literary war between Zurich and Leipzig, home of the Swiss writers’ chief rival, Johann Christoph Gottsched, and his followers. One of these, the Leipzig mathematician and epigrammist Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, offers a glimpse of this fractious culture in a 1755 satire, “In the Name of a Village Youth, When His Fellow Chorister Moved to School at a Princely Residence”:

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Du, unsrer Fluren Orpheus, singst nun dort, Dich hört der Fürst, du fürstlich hoher Sänger, Es höret dich die Schaar der Capellisten Und steht erstaunt, und sieht, und schweigt.88 [You, Orpheus of our meadows, now sing there, | You are heard by the prince, you princely lofty singer, | They hear you, the host of choristers | And stand astonished, and watch, and are silent.] Hypsos becomes bathos as Lange’s lamenting faux shepherd, Damon, becomes a real shepherd, puffed up by the unimaginable grandeur of the court whose manner he apes, and by his enthusiasm for his own poetic enthusiasm. The rural Orpheus is no bard-like noble savage for Kästner, just a poor bumpkin dazzled by the bright city lights in the republic of letters. The rationalist Kästner mocks not only the pretensions of music to elevate its practitioners but also the pretensions of sublime silence—the eloquence of the ineffable. Does the astonished silence of the choristers really testify to the sublimity of the village choirboy, or are they speechless with embarrassment or scorn? This skepticism about what we might call the epistemological power of music—its ability to indicate anything reliable about the nature and quality of things—is not so far from Bodmer and Breitinger’s stance. Kästner’s rustic imagery resonates, too, with Breitinger’s scorn for “rhymesters” (i.99) whose poetic ideal is repetitive sound, likened to villagers clapping their hands in time at a country dance, or Bodmer’s mocking of imitative poetry as the “barking of dogs” and “crowing of cocks.” The relationship between music and the sublime traced in this chapter is intimately antagonistic. Music’s exclusions shored up the shape and nature of the true sublime; but, as a rationalist aesthetic of ascent to perfection and complexity, the sublime included the ideals of harmony and interrelatedness epitomized by music. Moreover, as a phenomenon triggered predominantly by poetic language, and existing to enlighten the common people, the sublime was articulated in relation to both the sensual effects and pleasures of patterned sound— associated with music’s power over the body—and the refinement of matter into more ethereal or immaterial forms—tones—testifying again to music’s double coding in the discourse of the sublime. Finally, in the hands of their early readers and colleagues, Bodmer and Breitinger’s sublime could be linked with music in the ser vice of sublime simplicity (Krause), “pleasant horror” (Drollinger), or a pious-heroic high style (Pyra and Lange). A matrix of sociocultural, literary-critical, philosophical, and theological contexts shaped Bodmer

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and Breitinger’s suspicion of music. It is particularly telling that writers who unselfconsiously combined the Swiss theorists’ sublime with music were frequently Lutherans: Krause, Brockes, Drollinger, Pyra, and Lange would have had musical educations and experiences very different from those found in Reformed Zurich. One of the most fascinating and sustained transformations of Bodmer and Breitinger’s (anti-)musical sublime came from another Lutheran, arguably the most influential German poet of his generation. This young disciple “devoured” the writings of the Swiss pair and “yearned” for their “promised essay on the sublime.” He praised their translation of Milton that “let the flames kindled by Homer flare up high and led [him] to sing the heavens and religion.”89 And he made a pilgrimage to Zurich to meet the aging Bodmer—before ultimately parting ways with the Swiss theorists. This was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the subject of my next chapter. Before examining Klopstock’s poetry and poetics, a task that again draws us to Leibniz, it is useful to sketch something of the broader relevance of the philosopher to the discourse of the musical sublime.

Coda: Leibnizian Concordia Discors Leibniz is foundational to modern aesthetics and contemporary thought in diverse and still puzzling ways. He looms large in Beiser’s history of a rationalist aesthetics overshadowed by Kant, provokes Deleuze’s meditations on the “fold,” and grounds Menke’s account of the twinned origin of aesthetics (and so modern philosophy) in sensation, the center for Baumgartian aesthetics, and force, the concept on which Herder “refound[s] aesthetics.”90 I have outlined the importance of Leibniz-Wolffian possibility, perfection, harmony, and ascent to the Swiss writers, and later chapters return to this heritage. One facet of Leibniz’s philosophy helps to clarify the versions of the musical sublime explored there.91 It can seem that aesthetic rationalism must be founded on integration and harmony, and that aesthetic theories and practices that value dissonance, “the new, the strange, the wonderful, and the violent,” or their psychological cognates— fear, horror, surprise, and tumult—must have “broke[n]” “with their rationalist heritage.”92 Yet writers maintaining strong links with this heritage repeatedly imagined a particular, now marginalized, kind of sublime that feeds on Leibnizian harmonious, fully conceptualized wholes: a sublime not of obscurity and vagueness but clarity, distinctness, complexity, and determination. This is understandable given that dissonance can have a prominent, even constitutive,

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role within harmony, as Leibniz suggests in his own deployment of musical harmony in his theodicy. Leibniz’s justification of evil as necessary to the best of all possible worlds was formulated cautiously, since it could easily have pushed him into claims that denied free will or made God culpable of evil. As others have noted, it led Leibniz to suggest that harmony, even as enjoyed by God, involved a concordia discors.93 Musical analogies appear relatively frequently, giving apparently conventional musical ideas subversive applications.94 One posthumously published text insisted that “taken together with punishment or atonement, sins are good, i.e., harmonious. For there is no harmony except as a result of contraries.”95 Another explained: “Just as a musician does not seek dissonances per se but only per accidens, when, through these very dissonances, subsequently resolved, a more perfect melody is created than would have existed without them, similarly, God does not want sins, except under the condition of punishment that corrects, and per accidens only, as a requirement for completing the perfection of the series.”96 A musical analogy here helps to deride the orthodox theological argument, derived from Augustine, that sin is simply the absence of good. The problem Leibniz sees is that sinners cannot be responsible for sins if they do not exist: lousy musicians might as easily claim that they are “only the cause of the violin bowings and drumbeats and not the resulting dissonance.”97 Dissonances are not caused by taking away some note in a perfect harmony; they have their own constitution as non-harmonious ratios between notes. Ratios ground a second reason for Leibniz’s turn to music: musical harmony works through mathematical proportions and concerns relationships of similarity and difference, identity and diversity, that are basic to Leibniz’s thinking. Thus in Confessio philosophi, following a passage on the necessity of mathematical facts, Leibniz writes that “harmony and discord . . . consist in the ratio of identity to diversity, for harmony is unity in multiplicity, and it is greater in the case where it is a unity of the greatest number of things disordered in appearance and reduced, unexpectedly, by some wonderful ratio to the greatest symmetry.”98 Superficially at least, this harmony resembles the sublime pleasures Breitinger discerned when apparent dissonances are resolved and we harmonize the wonderful and improbable with the known. When music is considered phenomenologically as a succession of chords, dissonances pass away in concordant resolutions. The more radical implications of Leibniz’s arguments emerge when we consider harmonies less as a succession of chords than as a set of sounds, a musical system (as harmony has often been treated since classical antiquity). A full mathematical set or system holding “the greatest number of

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things”—be that a scale, a musical work, or creation—necessarily includes individual parts that are dissonant with one another. To contain consonant major triads on C (C–E–G) and G (G–B–D), a musical set must include the dissonant intervals of a semitone (B–C) and major seconds (C–D, D–E). Following Leibniz, such a set would be better than a less complete one without any potential dissonance, for the simple reason that his harmony is unity in diversity and becomes more perfect as it includes ever more diversity.99 Perfect harmony will be a single whole (infinity) that integrates all possible parts (an infinite number of parts), and so includes maximal dissonance. But to stand back for a moment from these intricacies: what emerges more broadly from this chapter are some of the key methodological claims of Resounding the Sublime. Bodmer and Breitinger cultivate a curious variety of the sublime, both ultimately harmonious and resolutely silent. Only apparently anomalous, their cognitive emphasis might remind us of the Longinian sublime as the “echo” or “resonance of a noble mind,” evoked by the sublime silence of Homer’s Ajax as he broods in Hades.100 Furthermore, despite the status enjoyed by Bodmer and Breitinger among younger writers, their anti-musical sublime was received in selective and eclectic ways, within what is always a variegated and multivocal discourse. As we have seen, they epitomize the intimate antagonism between music and the sublime, rooted in particular musical cultures and particular “literary” (rhetorical and poetic) traditions that exist relationally, even where music seems to be simply neglected. Finally, the Leibniz-Wolffian aesthetics outlined here—contrasting starkly with twentieth-century images of the sublime as irrational, violent, even incipiently dictatorial—give us an opening into the harmonious and sounding sublimes explored in chapters 4 and 5, where the musical sublime again raises questions about the limits of knowledge and the relationship of experience to belief, imagination, and reason.

chapter 4

Klopstock, Rustling, and the Antiphonal Sublime

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) was virtually unrivaled as the German eighteenth-century poet of the sublime. Whether he “sang” bardic “chants” and “hymns in the spirit of the psalms,” or “stirred the lyre” to “songs of friendship and German patriotism,” “every thing Klopstock sang” was “sublimely mighty”—he was “higher . . . than Homer, higher than Milton; a true wonder of our century.”1 His strains reached Britain, where translations from his Messias appeared in the 1760s, and Coleridge and Wordsworth knew to visit the aging poet in their German pilgrimage at the turn of the century.2 According to Drake’s Literary Hours, while Italy and France provided “no competitors” to English “sublime ode[s],” “among the Germans indeed some powerful candidates have lately started, and Klopstock is renowned for the spirit and sublimity of his lyric effusions.”3 For a poet so often figured as a singer, Klopstock’s engagements with music are surprisingly contentious. From one perspective, his interest in and exposure to music are indisputable. At Schulpforta, an elite humanistic high school, and as a student of Lutheran theology at Leipzig and Jena, Klopstock practiced singing and received instruction in a celebratory theology of music.4 He went on to write numerous odes about music and published a collection of hymns whose preface distinguished between beautiful Lieder (songs) and sublime Gesänge (chants).5 He sought out composers including Telemann, Hasse, and Gluck to set his poetry, wrote an ode for C. P. E. Bach, director of music in Hamburg when Klopstock moved there in 1770, and later composed his epitaph.6 He promoted acoustically engineered Singhäuser to improve the cultivation of spoken German and spent happy hours with “a delicious little gathering of musicians”

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who “read out melodies,” wrote texts for instrumental pieces, and played with contrafacta.7 Yet the very proximity of music to rhetoric and poetry for Klopstock—his minute attention to harmony, rhythm, and tone or his claim that “real music is declamation”—can make music seem to disappear into language.8 Alongside an ambivalent attitude toward instrumental music, this has contributed to assessments of Klopstock as “at best an unapologetic dilettante in things musical,” “long ignoran[t] in musical” matters, or as “domesticat[ing]” music and “incorporat[ing]” it into poetry.9 This chapter instead argues that music makes language strange for Klopstock, heightening or “subliming” verbal communication and its communicants.10 Nor is music typically incorporated into poetry; adopting the humanist genre of rivalry between the arts, the paragon, Klopstock frequently sets music both in league and in competition with its sister art.11

Klopstock’s Lyric Agonism There is in Klopstock’s musical sublime a kind of Pindaric agonism: a gathering of contestants that is also a formation of community.12 Its bond relies on competitive discord and a to-and-fro between voices and arts. So in Klopstock’s Der Bund (1800) poetry and music exceed the “hermits” painting and sculpture by forming the ode’s titular “union” or “league.”13 Through “the mystery of unification,” poetry and music “shatter every depth of the heart” (ll.11–12). They moreover exceed their own apparent limits, appropriating the powers of the visual arts “so that the hearer also became a seer” (l.4). Sound here activates a Longinian phantasia that foreshadows Romantic synaesthesia. The play on Seer (viewer/prophet) indicates that the audience of the hyper-art of Der Bund is equally overtaken and elevated by prophetic inspiration, “streamed-through [durchströmte] with lasting fire” and given insights beyond those granted by the arts in isolation (l.3). Crucially, the league remains competitive, for perfection “seldom smiles on the peaceful” (l.20). The “uppermost step” of beauty, “perfection” is “achieved” (errungen, from ringen, to struggle, grapple, compete) only when “the Poem raises itself so high that Chant | Can scarcely follow, immediately ignit[ing] a heated | Battle” (ll.14, 17–19). Music is an underdog but not an underling. As Der Bund suggests, Klopstock took much from Bodmer and Breitinger’s sublime. His sublime is aligned with perfection, although not wedded to

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Leibniz-Wolffian rationalism. Like Bodmer’s sublime, Klopstock’s often involves “the hugely and terrifyingly beautiful,” which “bring[s] us with speedy power [Gewalt]” to “cry out, rejoice loudly; remain profoundly still, think, fall silent; or grow pale, shiver, weep.”14 It galvanizes all the faculties, while centrally stirring the heart, and has spiritual improvement as its highest goal. It “raises us above our short-sighted way of thinking” and “powerfully reminds us that we are immortal” (**2v). “The final and highest effects of the work of genius are to move the whole soul,” Klopstock affirms in the preface to the first volume of Der Messias. “We can ascend here some steps of stronger and the strongest sensations [Empfindungen]. This is the theater of the sublime” (**2r). Yet Klopstock differs from his Swiss mentors in believing that ascent through art does not mean ascent above the matter that makes it. Scorn for matter and anxieties over music do not influence this pietistic Lutheran as they did the older Zwinglians. This underlying distinction can be seen in the eventual rift between them. When Klopstock visited in 1750, Bodmer expected to meet a spiritual son. Instead, he found a very incarnated young man: Klopstock neglected his poetic vocation to undertake “avantures”; “eating here or there at lunchtime, often for dinner”; “going to bed late and getting up later”; drinking; meeting girls; and bringing “two new coats and a red summer suit. . . . There are two people in one body,” Bodmer lamented, “the Messias-poet and Klopstock.”15 The agonism within Klopstock’s sublime, and between Klopstock himself and the theorist of the sublime he most admired, also marked his keen engagements with Britain. Klopstock’s life’s work, Der Messias, was modeled on Paradise Lost (encountered through Bodmer’s translation). Its preface praised Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, then in vogue in Germany, as peerless in the “higher poetry” of the “Christian” “sublime” (**2v). Klopstock exchanged affectionate letters with Young, yet his stance toward him in his poetry verges on aggression.16 Thomas Weiskel suggested that in the Romantic sublime a one-onone strug gle between individual and sublime object was preceded by a desire that such an object appear from a chaotic, shapeless infinitude of stuff.17 Young and English poetry answer a similar desire for an adversary in Klopstock’s poetry and are summoned up for races, contests, and murders in Die beiden Musen (The Two Muses), Wir und Sie (Us and Them), Überschätzung der Ausländer (Overestimation of Foreigners), Unsere Sprache (Our Language), and, not least, An Young (To Young). “Die, prophetic old man [Greis], die!” begins the ode to Young—an exhortation that escalates and twists the repeated desire for death articulated in Night Thoughts.18 Few would have thought to compliment Young by approving

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his death wish, especially since Night Thoughts ultimately rejected melancholy to affirm a religious sublime, effected by God’s superiority to death and misery. In one sense, in Klopstock’s ode Young himself replaces God as the sublime object: the older poet appears as a religious teacher who elevates his protégé through terror and astonishment, and whose death might herald Young’s translation from Klopstock’s rival and superior to his elevating muse: “Die!” Klopstock’s ode concludes, “you have taught me, that the name of death, | Sounds like jubilation . . . | But remain my teacher, | Die, and become my genius!” (ll.13–6). The strangeness of this homage-cum-curse is amplified by Klopstock’s representation of the poet as musician. Young’s reader fühlts, Daß dein tiefer Gesang drohend des Weltgerichts Prophezeyung ihm singt! fühlts, was die Weisheit will, Wenn sie von der Posaune Spricht, der Todtenerweckerin! (ll.8–12) [feels it, that your deep song, threatening Judgment Day, sings a prophecy to him! feels it, what Wisdom desires, when she speaks of the trumpet, that awakener of the dead!] For Klopstock, Young is not only muse but also singing teacher. We might guess that part of what he “teaches” Klopstock is this ode’s tricks of enjambment— orchestrating the unfolding of sentences in a way that delays semantic closure over line and stanza breaks, or that obscures semantic order for the sake of sonorous assonance (Daß, dein, tiefer, drohend; was, Weisheit, will, Wenn) and meaningful metrical emphases (like the miniature revelations on “Prophecy” [Prophezeying] and “Speaks” [Spricht]). Just as the speaker “feels” rather than hears Young, so too his prophecy conveys an utterance—Wisdom’s speaking about the trumpet—that is to some degree nonverbal, transformative, and elevating (raising the dead) without having precise propositional content. The confusion of faculties, senses, and passions in this musicalized poem tends to desemanticize language, while attributing to it meanings unreached by normal speech. Singing arguably becomes the medium of the sublime here because music both interrupts some of language’s dominant operations and is language potentialized or “potentializing.”19 Allowing language to reach its full potential

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also means approaching its limits, perhaps transgressing them, so that the hearer also becomes a tactile senser and seer. The remainder of this chapter develops these ideas by discussing language and sound, two phenomena richly intermingled with music in Klopstock’s oeuvre, focusing on the aural experience of Rauschen and the structure of antiphony. The first section pans out from Klopstock to set him in the broader context of eighteenth-century theories of the aural sublime. The second relates Klopstock’s musical sublime to Anglo-German scholarship on biblical parallelism and to circles promoting sublimity in northern German music.

Rauschen Klopstock’s epigram “The Fine Ear” mocks pedantic, academic attention to sound: “Gleich dem thatenlosen Schüler der Ethik, | Hörst du in der Poetik | Gras wachsen; aber hörest nie | Den Lorber rauschen in dem Hain der Poesie” (“Like the lifeless student of ethics, | You hear in poetics | Grass growing; but you’re never free | For the laurel rustling in the grove of poetry”).20 All poets prefer laurels to grass, but what is the force of rauschen here? Why does the true poet attend to it, and what makes it hard to hear? Rauschen is prominent in recent discussions of sound and sublimity.21 Related to terms for noise (Geräusch), intoxication (Rausch), Rauschen (the rustling, the rushing sound) can act as something of an umbrella term for sounds resistant to meaning or representation, especially those evoking or accompanying movement—roaring, booming, hissing, swishing, buzzing, crackling. Criticism sometimes invests the word itself with the aura of elusiveness and indistinctness it is understood to hold in the eighteenth century. Erlmann has argued that for early Romanticism, Rauschen held “less crisply circumscribed (and hence perhaps less readily translatable) meanings” than everyday usage would now suggest: “Hovering . . . between a whole range of aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific projects,” its “polyvalent meanings mirror the era’s complex and fluctuating relationship with the unencoded, the unknowable—in short, with Kant’s noumenon.”22 Rauschen lends itself to two models of sublimity. Within a physiologicalaural sublime, characterized by directness, it is an overwhelming sensation that breaks through the thresholds and filters of normal perception and cognition (like categories and forms) to let in the “real” and unencoded. The anti-Kantian Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803) offers an example of this sublime, as we will see.

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In a second model, characterized by indirectness, Rauschen becomes what Christian Friedrich Michaelis (1770–1834) called “material for the [Kantian] sublime.”23 For this eclectic Kantian, the “constantly changing movements of a downward-rushing [herabrauschenden], foaming waterfall, or in a flooding sea, also in wild music, steadily surging up and down, tear our imagination along with such a power [Gewalt] that it cannot grasp any totality, but instead, driven to and fro, as it were, floats in the infinite, and raises reason to the thought of eternity.”24 Such Rauschen does not signal an inletting of the noumenal or infinite but indirectly triggers an idea of infinity, raised in a faculty not concerned with grasping sound—although as an aesthetic experience it still depends on the transport of imagination (torn along by sound). Postmodern theories of weißes Rauschen (white noise) have echoed this Kantian sublime, exploring what lies under the thresholds of perception and cognition. Theorized in the twentieth century, weißes Rauschen is a subdued signal with a dense (potentially infinite) number of frequencies of the same intensity, where no identifiable pitch emerges. Itself meaningless, it theoretically holds all the frequencies for meaningful signals or determinate sounds. White noise is experienced as a screen of silence against which voices and sounds appear more clearly. Our ears strain to hear and interpret it an sich, just as we strain to imagine an infinity that is nonetheless, for Kant, the measuring stick for all our finite measurements, and strain to understand the transcendental subject that underwrites all conscious thoughts and sensations. Like the ideal children in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, engrossed by the television’s “waves and radiation,” those who listen for weißes Rauschen have learnt the postmodern truth that the medium is the message—its message: pure movement, aimless circulation, exhilaration.25 Such late twentieth-century reflections have influenced debates on Klopstock.26 And they are themselves influenced by certain Enlightenment theories of language as a channel for thoughts. Paradigmatic is John Locke’s characterization of language as “the great Conduit, whereby Men convey their Discoveries, Reasonings, and Knowledge.” Those who abuse language, by lying or using rhetoric, “break or stop the Pipes” that carry knowledge.27 Ideal language is uncluttered, unrustling; rhetoric and poetry, which fail to convey knowledge of “Things” in the most direct way possible, become by implication a distracting rushing in the pipes. But if such “rushing,” like white noise, in fact makes signification possible, then Locke’s model with its “semiotic Puritanism” is subverted.28 Poets like Klopstock can be enlisted to this postmodern subversion. Writing on the poetics of movement in Klopstock’s famous ice-skating odes,

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Winfried Menninghaus provocatively concludes that “the euphoria of movement on a depthless (ice-)surface . . . , with a hardly concealed indifference towards its respective substrate, even allows Klopstock to appear as an early ‘postmodern.’ ”29 The skating body and poetic sounds, on such a reading, refuse to deliver knowledge of things—a substrate of meaning, a signified—and instead celebrate a rush of movement. Klopstock’s poetics do chafe at the boundaries of the self and of language. But does Klopstock end by transcending surface-substrate models of meaning altogether? As Mark Amtstätter notes, Menninghaus “negates Klopstock’s traditional debt to . . . humanism or classical rhetoric, and perhaps also to the humanistic affect theory well-known from music theory, which equates meaning with pure sound [Klang].”30 The extent to which music is directed toward meaning is crucial here. To intensify expression, Klopstock harnessed what he called Mitausdruck (co-expression), elements of poetry like syntax, melody, euphony, rhythm, and duration, which aided expression without having definable independent meanings.31 Do these often “musical” elements remain subservient to signification or become ends in themselves, moving the speaking voice or the passions for no more reason than the reason the blade rasps as it skates across the ice? If these movements and sounds are elevating, do they carry us somewhere particular or become a self-justifying end, a rushing transport whose sublime object is itself? Similar questions are raised by explicit discussions of Klopstock’s sublime. While Kevin Hilliard argues that Klopstock’s sublime, anchored in a humanistic outlook, always has God as its object, Dieter Borchmeyer suggests a continuum between Klopstock’s deployment of music and Wagner’s sublime.32 This sublime tends toward the non-referential, indeterminate, and absolute and, especially in Wagner’s later work, tends to locate sublimity in heroic acts of self-inflation (or immolation) in a world with no external guarantors of meaning. Borchmeyer and Menninghaus’s readings, however different, thus point in the same direction—or to the same lack of direction. Such arguments tend to set semiotic, Cartesian, cognitivist views of language against the sublime or music. Language means meaning; the sublime, and especially the rauschende musical sublime, derails meaning by detaching language from clear signifieds, and so from specific ends. Accordingly, some commentators assume that Rauschen was ignored or reviled until Romantics recuperated it by valorizing the meaningless and chaotic. Erlmann suggests that only after Kant can music become “the most sublime of the arts,” and then only because music “aspire[s] to the condition of Rauschen, disrupting the dual

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Cartesian system of exchange, representation, and error-free thinking.”33 He lists Klopstock alongside Haller and Goethe as writers disgusted or frightened by the desolate Rauschen of Alpine waterfalls, and connects their discomfort to a stronger rejection of Rauschen in pre-Romantic music. Yet music theory in fact had diverse approaches to Rauschen, and literary writers were drawn to the Rauschen of waterfalls.34 This is not because they were proto-Romantics but rather because Cartesian and semiotic language theories were not the only or dominant eighteenth-century theories.35 Frequently, then, a dichotomy between the exchange of mental representations through signs (language) and its interruption (by non-signifying sounds like Rauschen) does not hold. In Klopstock’s sublime, Rauschen blurs into language and music, and all three participate in an interplay between direct and indirect communication, encapsulated by neither meaningless movement nor error-free message delivery. Klopstock’s poetry, then, will suggest less a music aspiring to the condition of rushing or rustling than a music belonging to blended musico-linguistic communication. While eighteenth-century theorists doubted music’s imitative and referential powers, as Downing Thomas has shown, music strongly intersected with language understood as a broader social practice with performative, pragmatic, expressive, affective, phatic, and other dimensions. Music belongs to “discourse” here in the sense that it “leads the listener to a self-consciousness that is defined as the awareness of the presence of another being,” a definition linked to a shift in “the focus of the verbal paradigm . . . from representation as reproduction to representation as a form of communion.”36 This returns us to physiological-aural “rushing,” where sound overwhelms the subject and exceeds the need for and possibility of subjective filtering of the “real.” A desire for more immediate forms of communication, not structured and limited by representation, had particular strength in the wake of Kant, and one cultural move accompanying idealism was a contrary—though not always oppositional—interest in the material basis of the transcendental subject and its modes of organization and communication. The long-standing association of hearing with immediacy and the bypassing of reason appeared as a resource here. A prime example is the nerve theory of physiologist Samuel Sömmerring (1755–1830). No nerve, he wrote, “is so directly, so nakedly and starkly in contact with the moistness of the brain-cavities” as the “auditory-nerve,” “and consequently also so directly touches the common sensorium.”37 The musical sublime’s associations with fluidity, familiar from Pindar’s roaring torrent of song, can now receive a material foundation. Sound lies close to that which allows communication (and so makes the sublime as transfer possible), and which

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underwrites a common humanness (guaranteeing that the sublime’s significance is generalizable and shareable within a science of man). For some theorists, the sublime’s generalizability might lie in the universal effect of the passions, or the common denominator of reason and ratio; following Sömmerring’s logic, it would lie in the “common sensorium,” a material soul, itself “contained in moistness.”38 The Rauschen of waterfall, ocean, and storm offers rich opportunities for overwhelming aural immediacy.39 Yet under these circumstances, the modern sublime might lose its characteristic piquancy—its aporias and modicum of reflective distance—resembling less the rush of a wave toward a barrier and then back upon itself, and more a wave breaking over barrages and engulfing the lands beyond. Rather than a productive encounter with limits, the barrier would simply turn out not to have been one. Sömmerring’s friend Wilhelm Heinse, an author, musician, and admirer of Klopstock, evoked this scenario: “Whenever the surges crash into the harbor and roll themselves up on its high wall, over the roofs of the houses . . . , and the foam and sea streams down again like a cloudburst, and, slapping, whirls itself into dust with the newly rushing-by [herbeyrauschenden] tumult: how nature lives in my senses and seizes my being with its music!” 40 This passage celebrates the overpowering ocean and overpowering of the boundary between subject and “nature.” But it holds a submerged threat of solipsism, the flipside of many attempts to collapse the subject-object divide, for the only thing the sea really thrashes against and unites with is itself. Erlmann calls Heinse’s sublime here “the suspension of the principium individuationis, the letting go of the self in fits of religious rapture.” 41 Yet in such suspension, sublimity perhaps ceases to be the relevant category of analysis: pure ecstasy and enthusiasm come into their own. Klopstock skirts around this extreme of Rauschen as communion or possession, and the solipsistic implications of Heinse’s writings suggest why one might want to do so. Nonetheless, even Heinse is not as bacchantic as Erlmann’s reading suggests. Significantly, the image of being seized by the waves’ music is immediately preceded by the observation: “I now grasp how Columbus found the courage . . . to trust himself on the inhospitable oceans, like a god who . . . can find his bearings in their hideous wild play.” 42 Heinse maintains a tenuous dialectic between self-possession and self-loss, as he did in a parallel evocation of the Rhine Falls—stupendous waterfalls at the threshold of the Alps that Heinse called “the highest force, the most furious storm of the greatest life that human senses can grasp,” where “thunderous booming” roars “through bone and marrow,” and one “does not hear and feel oneself anymore” and “just lets an impression be made upon” the senses.43

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With his reputation for libertinism and for rejecting Christianity as inimical to the flesh, Heinse seems a world away from Klopstock. But they in fact shared close personal networks and friendships.44 They also shared in the tradition of aesthetic pilgrimage to the Rhine Falls. Klopstock encountered the waterfalls in 1750, on his way to visit Bodmer. He penned an excited note early that morning, anticipating not only a natural wonder but also a literary-mythic ritual, a symbolic crossing in Klopstock’s journey from his childhood home to his mentor-idol in Zurich: he had “vowed to the nymphs of the Rhine Falls to drink wine on their banks; soon [he] will fulfil it.” 45 This faintly tongue-incheek literariness dries up in the letter’s continuation, a performance of effusive, pietistic testimony written while still “opposite the Rhine Falls.” 46 This section is one long, multidirectional exclamation. “What a great thought of nature is this waterfall!” Klopstock cries. “I can now say no more about it, I must see and hear these great thoughts.—Greetings! Torrent! you who raise mist and thunder between the hills . . . be thrice, O creator! adored in your glory!” 47 In the presence of the Rhine Falls, “in the Gestöse [roar, bluster] of its mighty Brausen [boom, roar, shower],” Klopstock greets his absent friends, wishing they could all gather to live and die on this spot, “so beautiful it is,” and greeting, especially, the country he is about to enter (“you worthy land . . . !”), before closing “in the name of all these friends: Amen! Hallelujah!” 48 Sound stages immediacy and immersion: noise reaches out beyond the waterfall itself, allowing Klopstock to describe himself as within the roaring and bluster while seated safely at some distance on a pleasant “shady hill.” 49 This is a classic position for the sublime, promoting a play of distance and immersion, ecstatic speechlessness and articulate utterance, self-abasement and self-exaltation. In this sublime, Klopstock encounters nature’s audible “thoughts.” Like instrumental music, the falls communicate no separable denotative content but impress on Klopstock the proximity or “presence of another being”—or several others: the torrents themselves, nature the craftswoman or orator, God the creator, Switzerland the promised land, and himself as the inadequate, engrossed reporter. They also leave an awareness of the absence of others, one recuperated in Klopstock’s claim to speak for and so embody a community of friends through the affirmative, sanctified communal “Amen! Hallelujah!” Locating the speaker in time and space, within a network of actors and forces drawn together in the mimetic utterances of the respondent, the soundthoughts of the waterfall form a particular identity and affective profile for the poet. Such language use might be termed a performative deixis, in that while not denotative (like Rheinfall, Zurich, Sulzer), it establishes positions and iden-

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tities of things relative to one another (like your, now, tomorrow, that, or whose). Such deixis is important to Klopstock’s music-themed odes, helping to create ambiguities that allow the powers or qualities of one substantive to be implicated with others. We might say it functions as a kind of co-expression resulting from word choice and arrangement (linked, as we have seen, with Longinian harmony). This begins to suggest how a broad communicative Rauschen like that depicted at the Rhine Falls meets Klopstock’s own local manipulations of language, a process exemplified by his famous poem Die Frühlingsfeyer. First published in 1759, nine years after his visit to the Rhine, his astroand physico-theological Die Frühlingsfeyer (Spring Celebration) testifies to the fondness Klopstock had for Rauschen.50 The term appears six times in the ode, helping to weave together its moments of wonder at creation, abasement before the Creator, and final reconciliation and exaltation. The ode contemplates God through creation: the thought of the cosmos’s immensity reveals the immensity of God’s grace in creating and caring for Earth and its inhabitants; the unfathomable smallness of a passing insect prompts ruminations on the immortality of the nonhuman creation; finally, God is recognized in a storm breaking through the woods. Die Frühlingsfeyer functions as a synoptic progress poem, reaching from the skyscape and its intimations of infinity (a telescopic moment) to the world at its most fragile, though perhaps still immortal (a microscopic moment), and its most violently powerful (the entire landscape set into motion, into narrative). Die Frühlingsfeyer combines imaginative ranging over the infinitely great and small with several interlocking theological narratives. These map the pattern of Klopstock’s sublime, describing repeated movements from God’s judgment to mercy (ss.6–8, 16–19, 24–27), and from the poet’s astonishment and self-abasement, mingled with wonder (ss.1–5, 11–13, 16), to reconciliation and elevation (growing especially through ss.17–23). The natural phenomena in the poem unfold in tandem with biblical allusions, moving from the night sky and creation, when the “drop in the bucket” that is Earth “ran from the hand of the Almighty” (s.2); to Exodus, when God passes over the “hut” of his chosen ones, while the storm rages (s.25); to Elijah’s charging with prophecy, when the storm abates and Jehovah appears in a “quiet, soft soughing” (stillen, sanften Säuseln)—the stilles, sanftes Sausen of 1 Kings 19:12—along with a “bow of peace,” the reminder in Genesis of God’s covenant after the Flood (s.27). The interruption of biblical chronology by the appearance of the rainbow of Genesis at the poem’s end suggests a typological and reiterative understanding of biblical narratives and their movements from judgment to mercy, death

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to resurrection. Die Frühlingsfeyer implies that judgment and mercy are only partially and subjectively separable at all, since God’s attributes are all eternal: even what looks like wrath is in fact grace. This a-chronology is emphasized by the opening allusion to Creation, made not through Genesis but through the book of Job, which falls later in the canon than the ode’s other intertexts. Allusively anticipating the ode’s storm, in Job God demands from the tempest whether Job was present when Earth was created and “mich die Morgensterne miteinander lobten und jauchzten alle Kinder Gottes” (the morning stars together praised me and all the children of God rejoiced, Job 38:7). Klopstock’s “musicalization” of his sources begins with this book, a locus classicus of the eighteenth-century sublime.51 He explicitly presents the praise of Job’s morning stars and children of God as song: it is Jubelchöre (choirs of jubilation) who “adore” God and dissolve in “ecstasy” as they witness the emerging cosmos, an experience later mirrored by the human speaker when he calls on his “harp” to “praise the Lord!” in response to the “omnipotence!” and “miracle!” of the terrestrial creation (ll.1–4, 54–55, 60–61). The first appearance of Rauschen in the poem occurs directly after this singing, and indeed triggers the song of the Jubelchöre: in a volcanic melding of light and water imagery, “torrents of light” “rushed” (rauschten) as they “welled up” and “ran” from God’s hand to form a cosmic “ocean of worlds” (ll.15–18). The pairing of torrents and choirs of praise draws together the sound of creation (Rauschen) and sound at creation (jubilant song). Klopstock’s Lutheran education is likely in play here. For Luther, a central vocation of creation was thanksgiving; psalming God becomes not only a fitting response to the act of Creation—epitomized in the poem by God’s free outpouring of rauschenden worlds—but is also integral to creation fulfilling its vocation.52 As in Klopstock’s scene at the Rhine Falls, communicative praise can elevate subjects without exchanges of signifiers and signifieds. Thus when in Die Frühlingsfeyer the thunder cries “Jehova! | Jehova! | Jehova!” (ll.119–21), this figuring of sound as speech suggests less a decoding of natural signs than a pragmatic speech act, a gesture of recognition of God from nature, and announcement of God’s approach to nature. Communicative sound here is a “Zeuge des Nahen” (witness to approach, or to the near-one, ll.81, 93). The combination of light with water in this Rauschen is also illuminating. The biblical tradition often sets light, land, and order against water, darkness, and chaos.53 But Klopstock’s ode insists on God’s continual grace, and that the whole creation (including what looks like evil) is a blessing. The order/disorder duality does not quite hold, and apparently unordered sounds like Rauschen,

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Getöse, Brausen, and Säuseln become compatible with ordered music. Torrents are not swaddled and bound as they are in Job, but well up (l.11) with the good things that fill the world when God opens his hands.54 Later, when night falls and the storm rises, Klopstock’s speaker asks: “Are you wrathful, Lord, because night is your garment?” The speaker answers immediately: “This night is the blessing of the earth! | You are not wrathful, Father!” (ll.88–90). The appearances of Rauschen in the storm function in this context, tying the sounds of creation in the earlier verses to destruction—the wind that smashes the woods and parallels the slaying of the firstborn in Egypt. Twice, the winds rush (rauschen) as the storm rises and then roar through (durchrauschen) the forests; this is hailed as “the eternal” made “visible” (ll.77, 113, 80–81). The claim for God’s immanence and pervasiveness is balanced by the imminent verb “kömmt” (shall come, l.76). God is visible in the paradoxical sense that wind is visible. After the Rauschen of divine winds that stir up the landscape, the landscape itself takes on the power of Rauschen: “heaven and earth” like one entity “rushes” (rauschet) with “gracious rain” (ll.127–28). The earth is “refreshed,” and the heaven “unloaded” of its “abundance of blessings” (ll.129–30). The rushing of wind, forest, thunder, and rain thus work to translate elements of God’s attributes and power to his creation. Power, unification, and blessings are the equivalents of elevation in this sublime. Not only are heaven and earth unified with the storm’s overwhelming creator; they are also unified with each other, as the singular verb “rauschet” indicates, even while they continue to act as reciprocal entities, one unloading blessings, the other soaking them up. The music of Jubelchöre in stanza 1 is the most explicit music in this sublime, but the receptive acclamations of nature, and Klopstock’s ode (ᾠδή, song) itself, take up the choirs’ burden by the end of the poem. This reading of “rushing” and music in Die Frühlingsfeyer suggests that they work to unify opposites—heaven and earth, macro and micro, judgment and mercy—while also articulating differences and proportions between them. If there is a link between sound and the interruptions of chronology noted in the poem, it is perhaps that both create resonances that yoke together moments and actors not other wise contiguous, orchestrating typological relationships and correspondences. Music was still linked with such operations in the Lutheran tradition, where the metaphysics of medieval music theory remained in play, although more broadly in eighteenth-century culture music was increasingly treated as a purely human art. These issues are played out in Klopstock’s brief ode Die Musik (1796).55 The poem focuses on rebutting the idea that “Mortals alone” enjoy “music,” asking how we know that “the trickling [rieselnden]

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brook” is not “tuned” to “the noise [Geräusch] of the grove, and the west wind’s | sighing [Säuseln]”; whether there are not “accords” (Einklänge) between the “thunderstorm” and “world-sea” with its “thousand-voiced choir” (ll.1–2, 15–18). Combining contemporary theory on the plurality of worlds with traditional religious musical topoi, the poem closes by assuring us that music “pleases not only in the [inhabited] stars” but “Also in heaven” (ll.19–20). While in Die Frühlingsfeyer “rushing” linked heaven to earth, here “music” joins humanly created musica instrumentalis to the half-heard music of nature, to alienly created music on other planets, and to unheard celestial harmony. By connecting different orders of reality, music might also form a rauschende conduit from the lower to the higher. This is one reason that Klopstock’s poetry suggests, not a view of music aspiring to the condition of sublime and asemantic Rauschen, but rather a music belonging to a blended, and emphatically resounding, musicallinguistic mode of communication.

Antiphony “Accords” and correspondences between terrestrial and heavenly harmonies make antiphonal music extremely powerful in Klopstock’s sublime. Klopstock’s ode Die Chöre (The Choirs, 1771), situated within a theological, aesthetic, and musical context rich in antiphony, articulates what we can call an antiphonal variety of the musical sublime through a dizzying array of parallelisms. In Die Chöre, musical parallelism effects the sublime because it transfers power, elevation, and identity between actors. Where for Boileau the “energetic littleness of words” propelled such transfers, for Klopstock they are more closely allied with the energetic immensity of songs and the resonances songs set up between bodies. In narrative terms, Klopstock merges Longinian movements from astonishment to elevation with biblical narratives of conversion, visions, and, most important, with the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. In other words, Klopstock offers a paradigm of the religious sublime so widespread in the long eighteenth century, and that we see in very different modes in other chapters. Within these theological narratives, parallelism—a broad structural category— often appears as antithesis, reversal, or chiasmus. We might take as its paradigm 1 Corinthians 15:22: “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (a verse Klopstock set himself to consider when he translated the libretto of Handel’s Messiah).56 Where Longinus’s listener is elevated through identification with the sublime orator, Klopstock’s is elevated through participative

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identification with the Mediator, Christ, as Davidic singer.57 Finally, in epistemological terms, I will suggest, this antiphonal sublime positions poetry between skepticism and enthusiasm. These arguments locate Klopstock’s musical sublime between humanistic and proto-postmodern readings. On one hand, the idea that language, music, and sound are actions, connecting humans with God and creation, gives an alternative account of features that Menninghaus saw as promoting “postmodern” movement for its own sake. On the other, the stability that accrues to Klopstock-as-humanist is disrupted: rather than Klopstock domesticating music through classical rhetoric and humanist sources, I suggest that the same tradition sheds light on the way music makes language strange. If, as Hilliard suggests, language is a human creation for Klopstock—a secure edifice where music can be safely housed—then “consecrated music” threatens to shake and destroy this “temple made with human hands” and transform it into a new, more lofty one, “not made with hands.”58 Biblical Parallelism

Reliving a recurring “Golden dream,” Die Chöre begins with hopes of resurrection and ascent and ends with their assurance, guaranteed by the very offering of songs of praise that the poem has practiced and described.59 Narrating transformative interchanges between the ode writer, congregations, heavenly choirs, and Christ—actors who psalm together and in alternation, singing to, of, with, and for each other—this poem abounds in tropes of the sublime. We find lofty flight, thunder, divine fire, and raging torrents (ll.21, 58, 16, 50), alongside extreme feelings of “bliss” and “enthusias[m],” music “rais[ing]” us “to tears” or filling “the spirit with terror! | Or with heavenly earnestness” (ll.18, 14, 42–44). The poem evokes a mixture of spontaneity with reflective, shaping power, as heavenly music “streams” “as if artlessly from the soul,” although in fact conducted “within banks” “by masters” (als ob kunstlos aus der Seele | Schnell sie ströme! So leiten Meister | Sie, doch in Ufern, daher, ll.38–40). Finally, the ode combines sublime simplicity with the heart-stirring effects advocated by Bodmer and Breitinger, as when the “heart’s | Simplicity unites with the simplicity of song! | And more loftiness than all the world has” (ll.29–31). These tropes are given distinctive shape by poetic parallelism and musical antiphony. Parallelism had established connections with sublimity in later eighteenthcentury Europe. Klopstock knew at least secondhand Robert Lowth’s famous Praelectiones de sacra poesi Hebraeorum (Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the

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Hebrews, 1753).60 Drawing on a longer tradition, Lowth argued that the grammatical structure of parallelismus membrorum (parallelism of members) in the psalms was both central to the biblical sublime and the essence of the previously indecipherable form of Hebrew poetry.61 He thus offered an appealing solution to the perennial problem of identifying metrical regularities in “poetic” sections of the Bible such as the psalms.62 For Lowth, a paucity of words in primitive Hebrew enforced sublime “brevity and simplicity” on Old Testament utterances.63 Combined with urgent thoughts and prolific imagination, this created a style where simple near-repetition (parallelism) was the central means of poetic ornament and emphasis, and obscure yet fiery metaphors and parables abounded. The journey from here to a musical sublime is short. Parallelism was most evident in the psalms, universally thought to be poetry, and thought to have been sung antiphonally from the days of the Temple into the Reformation.64 Claims that parallelism was sublime flowed into earlier views of the psalms’ sublimity. Boileau’s analogy between Pindar and David’s fiery irregularity had a prehistory stretching back to Jerome, who likened Pindar’s difficult meters to the mixed meters he found in the psalms.65 Addison took up the strain in his Spectator essays on the psalms.66 Die Chöre firmly directs attention toward parallelism and its musical counterpart, antiphony: he knows Not what it is to lose oneself in bliss! Who has not felt religion, accompanied By consecrated music, And by the psalm’s holy flight! [Who has] Not softly trembled, when the hosts in the temple Sang in celebration! and, if this sea became quiet, Choirs [sang] down from heaven! (ll.17–24) Parallelism appears prominently, often commencing lines and sometimes emphasized by ellipsis so that parallel “members” share a “head.” Religion is accompanied (the verb is shared) by consecrated music and by the psalm’s holy flight. He who has not felt parallels he who has not trembled (the subject and auxiliary are shared). Read in Pauline terms, this already hints at how ascent through parallelism should work: members of the church are part of one body because they

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have the same head; as a hymn paraphrased in Klopstock’s Geistliche Lieder (1758) put it, “Lässet auch ein Haupt sein Glied, welches es nicht nach sich zieht?” (Does a head leave its limb/member without drawing it after itself?)67 In rhetorical terms, “B” clauses here intensify “A” clauses. Trembling is a more exquisitely sensitive form of feeling; “the psalm’s holy flight” is a more elaborate, specific, grammatically complex form of “consecrated music,” with superadded senses of elevation, power, and movement. A more elaborate relationship is suggested by the parallel: the hosts in the temple || the choirs of heaven. The temple’s congregation is not equal to the angelic choirs; the logic of the parallel is that, should the lesser choir fall silent, the greater will take up God’s praise. The choirs seem quite distinct at this early moment in the poem (ss.5–6), although angelic musicians are clearly attentive toward Earth: the heavenly music is not run-of-the-mill constant praise directed toward the throne of God but a response to human silence, directed down (hinab) to the temple. This detail, and the sharing of a predicate, initiates the process developed throughout the poem, whereby these radically different groups do not merely run in parallel but touch and finally become interchangeable, the lower participating in the higher through joint song. A graded narrative of sublime elevation and participation emerges through the poem. First, the Son “sings his people,” and the earthly choir responds with tears, bliss, and elevation (ss.8–9). Next, the heavenly choirs begin a “psalm” “above” which is “led . . . down” to earth (s.10) and stirs listeners’ hearts (s.11). These listeners are unspecified, allowing slippage between actors in the poem, and indeed between them and the reader-as-listener. A parallel “heavenly earnestness” then resounds upward (herab) from the earthly choirs, and explicit antiphony begins (s.12): “choirs alternate with choirs.” The interplay is thickened by a reminder that all are singing “the song of the Son,” and by the appearance of a soft individual voice and harp, which begin a hymn immediately continued “more powerfully in the choir,” making the congregation “quiver[ ]” and “glow[ ]” with divine fire (ss.13–14). Choirs of angels and humans now become indistinguishable: “choirs are now in the torrent of chant!” (s.14). They are joined by a “thunder[ing]” “trumpet,” heralding a consummation expressed in the unstable tense characteristic of apocalyptic time: the “triumph of all the choirs has already pealed out [erscholl] | Peals [Schallt], so that the temple trembles at it!” (s.15). Just when it seems triumph has arrived, the poem returns to the language of proximity and imminence. In sight of a eucharistic “chalice of union,” we hear cries (from the speaker? the heavenly choirs? Christ?): “Not long now! . . .

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hurry, hurry! | Surge [Strömt] in the choirs’ triumph!” (s.16). The analogy between song and watery fluidity and transport—water’s ability to merge separate currents, and its powerful surging—are turned to pious ends here, although with associations similar to those deployed in the sensualist sublime of Heinse. Heinse’s encounter with the Rhine Falls ended with frustration (he “becomes impatient at being such a small fixed mechanical fragile thing, [who] cannot get in”).68 By contrast, Klopstock’s narrator sinks back from the heights of sublime expansion and immersion only to reaffirm his expectation of future elevation, and the imaginative or existential fruits harvested from the sublime. If his bones one day rest in the temple, wo der Chorpsalm den Gemeinen Tönt; so bebet mein Grab, und lichter Blühet die Blume darauf, Wenn, an dem Tag’, als aus dem Fels der Entschlafne Strahlte, der Preis in dem Jubel sich ihm nachschwingt! Denn ich hör’ es, und: Auferstehung! Lispelt ein Laut aus der Gruft. (ll.65–72) [where the choral psalm tones to the congregation; then my grave will tremble, and the flower on it will bloom more brightly, || if, on the day that the departed one shone forth from the rock, the reward [or: praise] in the jubilation vaults after him! For I heard it, and: Resurrection! whispers a sound from the tomb.] These difficult closing lines reiterate, for the individual speaker, the move that aligned moments of communion and apocalypse with the choirs’ unification in song. The passage also evokes the earthquake (Erdbeben) imagery of Matthew 27–28, widening the musical sublime’s torrent metaphorics to the turbulent movement of Beben. As Langen observes, beben belongs to Klopstock’s “typical vocabulary,” designating both “real movement” and “bodily-psychical expression of affect.” 69 In the biblical passage Klopstock alludes to, earthquakes connect Christ’s Resurrection to that of individual mortals. In Matthew 27, Christ’s death is accompanied by an apocalyptic tearing of the veil of the Temple, an earthquake, and the splitting open of rocks (Felsen), from which arise “saints which slept,” foreshadowing the general resurrection. (Appropri-

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ately, the epithet for Christ here is Entschlafne, evoking sleep as well as death.) In Matthew 28, a “great earthquake” marks the appearance of an angel who reveals that Christ is no longer in his new grave, hewn in the rock (Fels). Sitting on the tomb’s sealing stone (or, in other gospels, inside the tomb), the angel announces that Christ is risen (auferstanden), the news Klopstock condenses into the exclamation or declaration: “Auferstehung!” Trembling thus accompanies both death and resurrection, and the raising of both God and humankind. Earthquakes belonged to the stock of the natural sublime, and the cataclysmic 1755 Lisbon earthquake (the “great European earthquake,” as Klopstock called it) occupied Burke and Kant among other thinkers on the sublime.70 It might seem stranger at first sight to connect earthquakes and music. Earthquakes were in fact represented in sacred music and in operas appealing to the sublime.71 More significantly still for the present discussion, within the resonance paradigm—where aurality depends on vibrations passing through matter—tremblings of skins, strings, of the air, inner ear, spirits, or aural nerves, were all integral to music. C. P. E. Bach, whose agitated empfindsamer (sensible/ sensitive) style has suggestive connections with contemporary nerve theory, was known for his liberal use of Bebung, trembling vibrato achieved on the clavichord by rocking a finger on one key.72 In Die Chöre, trembling physically grounds the sublime’s transferals of power, feeling, sanctity, and height. Klopstock underlines the sense of an aural transmission of loftiness by using the verb sich nachschwingen, associated with reverberation (Nachschwingen) but literally conveying the idea of vaulting after Christ along with the rising sounds of jubilation. Vibrations suggest a nonimitative model of mirroring and communication: they travel between bodies and transform them into images of one another. Beben has another function in establishing resonances and parallels through the poem. The word occurs three times, describing first the listener’s responsive feeling upon hearing lofty sacred song; next the quivering of the temple to the pealing of all the choirs in concert; and then the trembling of the individual’s grave, caused perhaps by the ascending jubilation of the choir, perhaps by their object of delight—the splitting of the rock as Christ emerges from the tomb in a telescoping of Resurrection, Second Coming, and general resurrection (ll.22, 60, 67). Beben, then, draws into alignment a physiologicalaffective response to music, descent into death, and rising. The inevitable death of Christ and the speaker (imagined as already in his grave) are transformed

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into a “proof ” of the believer’s inevitable resurrection. Structurally, music’s raising of affective pitch prefigures these soteriological movements: by raising the heart to rapturous devotion, the oscillations of music rehearse the sublime power of Christ’s death and Resurrection. Perhaps it pushes the boundaries of the device to describe this recurrence of trembling as parallelism. Yet a poem with such expansive typology invites an expansive reading of its rhetoric. Klopstock’s culture moreover tied parallelism to salvific structures of reversal and paradox, type and antitype, prophecy and fulfillment, death and resurrection, subjection and elevation (recall 1 Corinthians 15:22 or Dryden’s antithesis, “The Dead shall live, the Living die”). The poem itself ties antiphony to such pairings when it depicts the climax of the exchanges between heavenly and earthly choirs: Prophecy! and Fulfillment! Choirs exchange with choirs. Grace! They then sing, and Judgment! (ll.46–48) These lines stage a delicate dialectic of similarity and difference: prophecy and fulfillment are complementary, like call and response; grace could mitigate judgment or belong to it; and fulfillments of prophecy might resemble grace or judgment. These lines encapsulate the way antiphony enacts Klopstock’s religious sublime, by both establishing antitheses between low and high, abject and lofty (parallelism as opposition) and then inverting or overcoming those antithetical “blockages” (parallelism as resemblance). The passage also foregrounds the importance of parallelism to eighteenthcentury understandings of prophecy. For John Milbank, biblical parallelism as Lowth encouraged his contemporaries to read it is not only common in prophetic texts but itself a figure of prophecy, looking back to the history of Israel and forward to its future.73 Drawing also on J. G. Hamann’s language theory, Milbank deploys Lowth in an anti-Derridean polemic, sketching out an eighteenth-century vision of language that does not begin with a search for absolute beginnings, nor end by obfuscating the supplement at the origin, but instead has a double, parallelistic origin, one always looking forward and backward, where future-oriented fulfillments of prophecy are also rereadings of the past— and where script parallels voice.74 Without suggesting direct connections between such ideas and Klopstock’s sublime antiphony, we can place Klopstock within this larger framework, cutting at a slant to deconstructive readings of eighteenth-century thought. At first

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sight, Klopstock’s emphasis on sound and the sung word has much in common with the metaphysics of presence Derrida deconstructs, epitomized by Enlightenment narratives of vocal immediacy lost in epigonal writing.75 Yet, as indicated above, Klopstock emphasizes proximity and approach in aural communication, and neither denigrates writing nor equates sound with perfect communion and presence. Similarly, looking to the music-language dyad, Klopstock glorifies song without insisting that it or some proto-music precedes language: music accompanies, animates, raises, and serves language in Klopstock’s odes; its emotive, transportative, and transformative energies are not signs of its temporal or existential priority over language’s more determinate and alienated forms. Music sublimes language without becoming either superior and prior to or a mere component or domesticable creature of language. Even the humanistic assertion by Klopstock that “real music is declamation” (eigentliche Musik ist Declamation), wordless music imperfect and weak, must be weighed against his later praise of instrumental music.76 His 1791 epitaph for C. P. E. Bach calls the composer great in music led by words greater in bold, wordless [music] and credits him with “raising” music “to perfection.”77 Music’s place among the arts is volatile but by no means domesticated. This does not necessarily mark a deviation from Klopstock’s humanist education. After all, from as early as Petrarch, a so-called “ father” of humanism, poetic vocations were justified by the argument that all theology (including liturgy and scripture) was poetry, and poetry in turn a kind of theology: humans’ natural desire to express “homage” to God or gods expressed itself in “songs of praise, sacred hymns remote from all the forms of speech that pertain to common usage . . . in a manner artful and carefully elaborated and a little strange.”78 Northern German Polychoral Traditions and C. P. E. Bach

Spending most of his professional life around Hamburg and the Copenhagen court, where musical culture was linked with northern Germany, Klopstock inhabited a milieu steeped in a sacred polychoral tradition. The poetics of parallelism

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here intersects with a particular musical practice. Cultivated by seventeenthcentury German composers including Praetorius, Schein, Scheidt, and Schütz, polychoral music involves alternations between choirs and sometimes instrumental groups, each singing homophonically or in polyphony, and at times joining together. Strongly influenced by Venetian music, polychoral composition was also an extension of antiphonal singing in the liturgy and alternatim exchanges between organ and choir, long popular in Germany. In a passage foreshadowing Klopstock’s ode, Praetorius called polychoral music “the really heavenly way of music-making.”79 He pictured both angels singing antiphonally in the Sanctus (drawing on Isaiah 6:2–4, where antiphony makes the threshold tremble [beben]), and a choir of angels singing “alternatim . . . as in a concerto” with a “choir of the chosen blessed” (recalling Revelation 14:1–4, where the 144,000 blessed, firstfruits of Christ’s redemption, sing with a voice like rushing waters and loud thunder).80 As Praetorius’s intertexts suggest, sacred polychoral writing was not simply a formal structure but a material approximation of the music of apocalyptic prophecies, and a mode that drew attention to sounding bodies, “amplif[ying] music’s identification with its sensuous sounding and effect.”81 As Praetorius’s vocabulary also suggests, polychoral genres overlapped with the exchanges between soloists, choirs, and instrumental groups in the concertante style and concerto genre, widespread in eighteenth-century music. Thus Handel in his Concerti a due cori (1747) created instrumental concertos explicitly modeled on exchanges between two “choirs” and borrowing liberally from his own choral writing. Hamburg—where Handel worked early in his career—had been a center for the performance and printing of polychoral repertoire, which was still flourishing in the late seventeenth century.82 Klopstock’s school, Schulpforta, also had strong ties to polychoral music. Erhard Bodenschatz had produced his influential anthology Florilegium portense (1603–18) there, and in Klopstock’s era every student at the school still received a copy of his smaller Florilegium selectissimorum hymnorum (1606).83 Largely consisting of double-choir motets, the Florilegium portense was seemingly used in northern German territories into the mid-eighteenth century, including by J. S. Bach in Leipzig when Klopstock was a student in the town. Before the vogue for the Longinian sublime, polychoral composition had been sometimes associated with the genera dicendi’s sublime style. For the theorist-rhetorician Jacob Burmeister, the stylus sublimis was exemplified by Lechner, Utendal, and Knöpfel, all of whom used then-novel polychoral tex-

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tures.84 Associated with high ceremony, polyphonic compositions generally demanded significant choral and sometimes instrumental resources, a large enough physical space in which to set choir against choir, and large purses. Later in the eighteenth century, funding for church music shrank, and performances grew rarer.85 This makes the efflorescence of polychoral music in Hamburg under C. P. E. Bach all the more striking. Connotations of stylistic grandeur and “newer” conceptions of the sublime found common ground here, with Bach’s work being strongly received through the sublime.86 In 1776, Bach gave the first performance of his elaborate double-choir work Heilig alongside an imposing double-choir work by his father. By the 1770s the ideal of the sublime touched musical thinking from Hamburg to Berlin, Halle, and Leipzig, and spread much farther through networks of publishers, letter writers, and travelers. A Handelian cult from England also flourished strongly in Hamburg, where Handel had held his first professional post. Musicologists have suggested that Klopstock’s Die Chöre influenced Bach’s polychoral sublime; if so, the influence did not run only from literature to music. An ode Klopstock presented to Bach, Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste (Morning Song at the Festival of Creation, published 1782, performed 1784), illustrates the way composer and poet reciprocally intensified polychoral textures and parallelisms.87 Recalling the choric celebration of creation referred to in Job and reimagined in Die Frühlingsfeyer, Morgengesang is set just before daybreak and hails the “Holy! Highly Sublime! First One!” who created the sun and who promises its daily “resurrection” along with that of his other “children,” the poem’s speakers.88 Klopstock divided the ode’s nine stanzas into those for two voices (1–4, 6–8) and for “all” (5 and 9). The latter repeat the text of stanzas 4 and 6. A dual original song (in duet form) is thus amplified by polychoral exchanges (duet and chorus) and by verbal doublings around the central verses. If the first stanza is recognized as a kind of exordium (“She is not yet here, the Sun, God’s messenger,” l.1), a strong chiastic structure emerges in the poem. Two sets of three stanzas (2–4 and 6–8) are each followed by a restatement of the central acclamations of resurrection presented in stanza 4—Herr! Herr! Gott! barmherzig, und gnädig! (Lord! Lord! God! merciful, and gracious!)— and stanza 6—Halleluja, seht ihr die strahlende, göttliche kommen? (Hallelujah, do you see the shining, divine one coming?). The last stanza thus returns us to and “resurrects” the poem’s center. This is Lowthian parallelism as utterance followed by sublime reiteration.

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Stanza 1.

Klopstock A

Bach 1-voice

2. 3. 4.

B C D

1-voice 1-voice 2-voices

5.

D (all)

all

6. 7. 8.

E F G

2-voices 1-voice 1-voice

9.

E (all)

all

In his setting, Bach reinforced both the poem’s chiastic parallelism and its imagining of polychoral interchanges. He added a solo voice (like the single voices in Die Chöre) who opens the poem and then, in an “aria-like” setting, delivers the first two stanzas.89 Duets are reserved for the first appearances of the texts D and E, creating chiasmi around verses 2–4 and 6–8, and amplifying the increase in vocal forces that Klopstock specified for this material. Klopstock’s musical sublime, this brief reading suggests, was both generative for musical culture and grew from a rich interchange between the arts—one recalling the exchanges of polychoral music itself. We can ring one more change on this material by reflecting on the epistemological dimension of Die Chöre. I suggested earlier that the musical sublime with Klopstock involved intimating “awareness of the presence of another”— combating skepticism and solipsism—without quite endorsing communicative communion or absolute presence.90 But surely Klopstock’s effusive, rapturous verse is ultimately enthusiastic? Surely his religious conviction, for all its vaunted humility, pushes him toward what J.  G.  A. Pocock described as “the mind’s identification with the ideas in it, these in turn defined as correspondent or identical with the substance of reality”?91 Klopstock was often charged with dangerous enthusiasm (Schwärmerei).92 Yet in these odes, imaginative flights arguably are positioned as just that: imaginative, metaphorical, and poetic. In Die Chöre, sublime transferals of affect and elevation are played out within the framework of a “Golden dream,” implored to “return” to the speaker’s “drunken” sight in stanza 1 (ll.1–4). Stanza two asks, almost plaintively,

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whether “the dream’s heavenly image” of resurrection will be “transform[ed]” “into existence” (ll.5–8). Later, the speaker entreats the dream to “long deceive” him—before, perhaps surprisingly, comparing the dream with the appearance of the risen “Jesus” to “Kephas before the five thousand” (ll.25–28). Luther’s translation of Acts 10 did call Peter’s encounter with the risen Christ a rapt (entzückt) vision (Gesicht) rather than an encounter in the flesh. The epithet “Kephas” for Peter, however, in conjunction with Jesus’s appearance to “more than five hundred brothers,” occurs in 1 Corinthians 15:5–6, a passage exhorting the Corinthians to keep their faith, strengthened by the wealth of indisputable, physical, non-visionary witnesses to Christ’s Resurrection. The possible logics of Klopstock’s lines could be played out at length, but what perhaps emerges most strongly from them is a taut interplay between declarations of certainty and of fervent vision-like desire, alongside a commitment to living within a world framed by that desire. Truth claims here are not quite enthusiastic but concerned with mediated knowledge, informed by (biblical) narrative, imagination (dream), art (song), liturgy, and desire. Antiphony seems a particularly useful way of suggesting this stance, between the position of an atomistic Cartesian self, separated from any real knowledge of what is “outside,” and its antithesis, all-encompassing monads that comprehend reality within themselves. This is not only because antiphony implies contrast and in-betweenness. Antiphonal choirs must hear each other, however imperfectly, in order to respond; distance between “self ” and “other” is genuine, yet also necessary to harmony. Leibniz and the Flexibility of Musical Models

The broader relevance of musical antiphony to epistemological problems involved in the sublime can be highlighted through a closing comparison with Leibniz. His monadology and theory of preestablished harmony between the physical and spiritual had been the subject of debate for almost a hundred years when Klopstock wrote Die Chöre. In a letter of 30 April 1687, Leibniz explained his hypothesis that God preordained that body and soul should work in perfect harmony without ever directly communicating with each other.93 The “concomitance” between body and soul was “like many different bands of musicians or choirs, playing their parts separately, and so placed that they cannot see or even hear each other, but who can nevertheless harmonize perfectly, by each one merely following his notes, with the effect that the listener finds them all in magnificent harmony, which is much more surprising than if there were a

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connection between the performers.”94 This polychoral scenario, entailing no “awareness of the other,” is almost the perfect inverse of Klopstock’s sublimely communicative choirs. Leibniz further imagines a musician who “could hear his own [choir] without seeing it and could see the other without hearing it,” and who by habit eventually comes to fuse sight and sound, “no longer think[ing]” of his own choir, or else “consider[ing]” it “merely to be an echo of the other.”95 Only in “certain interludes,” where the two choirs have different “rules of harmony,” or perhaps when one choir is silent, does he even remember there are two choirs.96 This musician-observer is like the observing mind, forgetting the arbitrariness of its harmonizations with the body and thinking it causes or is in unison with bodily movements. The letter’s analogies sit well with the textures of polychoral music practiced around Leibniz, but oddly with the phenomenology of performing such music. In performance, one’s own choir often makes no sense except in relationship with the other(s). Interludes where one choir is silent, for example, or intricate to-and-fro between parts would be disjointed and baffling without at least minimal communication. Distant choirs in resonant buildings cannot generally stay together without an active director, a kind of interventionist God rejected by Leibniz.97 It is moreover difficult to imagine physical spaces where choirs could not see or hear each other yet are audible and visible to a spectator—at least before Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet.98 Leibniz’s deaf body and blinkered mind, in other words, would arguably not make sense to themselves, and would falter and lose the thread of their own operations. As separate entities each would fail to be “conciliated to itself.”99 Evidently, Leibniz is not making an analogy from the observable world for metaphysics but making an analogy from metaphysics for metaphysics, already assuming monadological choirs, immune to time and space as well as one another. This is not to say that Klopstock’s use of sublime antiphony trumps the incoherence and dualism threatened by Leibniz’s model. The point is that their different positions mirror their methods. Klopstock cannot logically, but only by force of imaginative persuasion, banish the possibility that the “dream” of proximity to God in the musical sublime is delusive. The very force of imaginativemusical persuasiveness might undermine its credibility: for Longinus, after all, music’s excessive control over the body and psyche made it a counterfeit of persuasion and a liability for the true sublime. Nor can Die Frühlingsfeyer exclude the possibility that in its storm we are merely close to brute, destructive air and its collateral sounds. From one perspective, Leibniz’s analogy is not undermined

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but reinforced by its phenomenological implausibility: it works through a mixture of astute parallels with musical practice and counterintuitiveness. The theory of preestablished harmony explores the possibility of something so distant from everyday understanding as to be wondrous and “surprising.” In Leibniz, the disorienting aspects of his analogy support his case that preestablished harmony reflects more rather than less glory on God, in his scenario a bewilderingly ingenious and subtle composer.100 This comparison underscores the malleability of polychoral music and antiphony as models. Where Leibniz trades on challenging verisimilitude and empirical (illusive?) experience—worrying away at the gap between reality as our naturalized representations of things to ourselves on one hand and reality as speculative truth on the other—Klopstock’s musical sublime trades on the possible continuity between wondrous biblical-metaphysical narratives and everyday aesthetics, everyday perception. Klopstock works from the starting point of a phenomenological experience of hearing and common understandings of resonance, vibration, and emotional responsiveness to music, in order to remake perception in his own way, transforming what looks to others like “a great theater of rubble” into “a majestic temple” and “stage of the sublime.”101 Once again we see music’s key position in the contests fought in the arena of sublimity.

Conclusion Klopstock’s odes reveal the importance of antiphony in imagining the mechanics of the sublime—the ways astonishment, power, and elevation are transferred from one body to another. Sound is a motor of movement but also its corollary and index, as the poetics of Rauschen suggest. That Rauschen sits on a continuum with music and language for Klopstock—ordering, pointing to, and relating things, as well as interrupting normal communication—shows the limits of reading Klopstock’s sublime according to either purely semiotic and referential or purely amimetic and non-referential language theories. These discussions highlight interactions with English sublimes (Young, Milton, Lowth) as well as Klopstock’s transformations of Bodmer and Breitinger’s aesthetic around the axis of music. Comparisons with Sömmerring, Heinse, and Leibniz indicate music’s role in developing and contesting models of knowledge and communication. These models could be predicated on the immediate physiological sensations of a fluid, trembling body—a model tending toward enthusiasm, overlapping with but not fully endorsed by Klopstock’s work—or, at the other

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extreme, could be predicated on isolation, distance, and reflective mediation—a model tending toward skepticism about the credibility of habitual, naturalized interpretations of experience. Klopstock’s musical sublime belongs to a broader project of trying to steer between these specters. Within the broader methodological program of this book, antiphony exemplifies the fact that the discourse of the musical sublime is made of up discursive acts or utterances that include the verbal but also go beyond it, including playing, singing, and listening. The acoustic effects, sonic structures, and musical practices of polychorality do not simply reflect this discourse but participate in it. Equally, a poet like Klopstock is participating in “musicking” when he writes about antiphony or rauschen. Antiphony, and writing about it like Klopstock’s, reminds us of the need to adjust our disciplinary boundaries to accommodate more complex understandings of music and sound, as well as the sublime. This chapter has not exhausted Klopstock’s musical sublimes, of course. There is more to say, for instance, about Klopstock’s mythological bardic odes and their setting by the opera reformer Gluck—facilitated by the German translator of Ossian, Michael Denis—as well as Gluck’s curious reluctance to transcribe his compositions.102 This reluctance fed directly into E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck (1809/1814), a novella that stages a post-Kantian musical sublime and foregrounds the problem of giving form to the infinite within a finite world.103 Yet the religious odes tell their own, not unrelated, story. Feeding off medieval and Lutheran metaphysics of music, poems like Die Chöre activated features of parallelism running through the psalms and heightened by the tradition of interpreting their composer, David, as a type of Christ. Klopstock is not unusual in connecting parallelism with the psalms, biblical style, or the sublime. But he is distinctive in his insistence on and multilayered elaboration of the musical nature of sublime parallelism. Die Chöre was received warmly by many contemporaries, from loyal supporters like Rochlitz and Reichardt, editors of the earliest music periodicals in Germany, to readers generally more critical of Klopstock’s effusions.104 I now turn to one such reader, Johann Gottfried Herder.

chapter 5

The Beauty of the Infinite Herder’s Sublimely-Beautiful, Beautifully-Sublime Music But what a shame that Burke could not pursue his experiences of feeling in general into their thinner threads of finer and more specialized feelings! What a shame that he did not have enough music or artistic experience altogether. . . . Reverberation [Schall], sound [Laut], screams [Geschrei]—now those are his favorite objects. . . . From the deep, wild groves of nature, then, the Briton broke his laurels . . . the crowns of flowers from the smoother regions of beautified nature—more precise, more careful German! they still wait for their darlings, and there, too, there still hangs a crown for the philosopher of euphony! —Johann Gottfried Herder, Viertes kritisches Wäldchen

So far, this book has not foregrounded the most familiar figures in histories of the sublime: Burke and Kant. The decentering is intentional, as well as being guided by the limited light that their writings shed on music. The following chapters, however, focus on two responses to these canonical theorists. They also turn to more familiar concerns with limitlessness, transgression, and the unrepresentable. Herder and, in the next chapter, De Quincey both drew on sonic figures (resonance, vibration, reverberation) to develop varieties of the musical sublime pointing in opposite directions—affirming either the beauty

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or the sheer terror of the obscure and infinite expanses of the universe, and of the human subject, dwelled on in Romantic-era thought. Johann Gottfried Herder drew deeply on Anglo-German discourses of the musical sublime. At first glance, the passage above suggests a preference for cultivated musical beauty over a savage “British” sublime. But Herder in fact developed a fine-grained account of the musical sublime. Its logic, tropes, and narrative structures cross his writings in fields ranging from literary criticism, represented in this chapter by a review of Klopstock (1773), to language philosophy in the Essay on the Origin of Language (published 1772), to theology in his essay on sacred music, Cäcilie (1793), to aesthetics, in his late treatise Kalligone (1800). Music is prominent in scholarship on Herder. Critics often note that hearing is the most sublime sense for Herder and sometimes examine his musical sublime in more detail.1 Seen outside the longer history of the discourse, Herder’s musical sublime can appear to be an innovation, developed in response to an ocularcentric Enlightenment, or part of Herder’s contribution to a Counter-Enlightenment.2 Yet recruiting Herder to an “irrational” Counter-Enlightenment is highly problematic.3 This chapter places Herder within the broader history of the musical sublime and by doing so within a broader and more plural Enlightenment.4 While Klopstock’s musical sublime inhabited a kind of middle ground between enthusiasm and skepticism, Herder uses hearing to mediate between such extremes. For Herder, hearing is the “middle [mittlere] of the human senses,” which receives its data “immediately” (unmittelbar).5 Mediation is central to Herder’s musical sublime—whether imagined as a musical dialectic, a function of harmony, measure, or as the crossing of impasses by surging melodies or by the very medium of sound, vibrating air. Trained, like Klopstock, in Lutheran theology, and conversant with theories of musical reconciliation, or mediation, between humans and God, heaven and earth, and between human faculties, Herder can seem old fashioned, his writings like a last rendition of the pre-Kantian sublime.6 Nonetheless, the relevance of Herder to Kleist’s musical sublime, the parallel emphasis on dialectical reconciliation in the sublimes of Schiller, Mörike, or Nietzsche, and the adherence to measure and reflection in the sublimes of Hölderlin, Tieck, or the physicist Helmholtz all make this much more than a dying strain of the discourse.

Sublime Censure: Music and Criticism In an early review of Klopstock’s Oden (1771) for the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (1773), Herder attempted to demonstrate Klopstock’s sublimity performa-

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tively, textually enacting its transportative impact on the critic-reader.7 As discussed earlier, such “sublimity upon sublimity” was modeled by Longinus and elaborated by early modern critics.8 Herder, who set himself against rulebound taxonomies, would likely share Jonathan Lamb’s view that, for neoclassical critics, sublime citation merely embodied “a priori rules” established by “divine agency.”9 Yet Herder does not adopt the alternative “libertarian” position described by Lamb, of “usurp[ing]” Klopstock’s power, “converting the servitude of reading into the mastery of writing.”10 Herder’s sublime criticism need not be usurpation, since reading for Herder is not passive “servitude” or blind enthusiasm, and since rules can be sui generis rather than a priori, exemplifying a bountiful, freedom-granting “divine agency.” Music is intimately involved in this approach. Performing Klopstockian sublimity means adopting and reworking Klopstock’s musical themes and metaphors. “Klopstock is always a master,” Herder enthuses, of “living sound,” “the musical agreement of words with meter” (119). Describing a set of monostrophic odes with newly created meters, Herder marvels that auch die verflochtensten, sich stemmendsten Strophengänge sind hier theils mit einer Macht durchgetrieben, daß die Worte mit ihrem Klange gleichsam wie Orpheus Steine und Fels folgen müssen: theils auch so tief in den Inhalt gewebt, daß wir z. E. jenem Sylbenmaasse unter den Gestirnen (S. 59.) jenen zwey letzten so künstlichen, knotenvollen Zeilen der Stintenburg (S. 237.) der Barden S. 232. den Zeilen der Ode, unsre Fürsten (S. 223.) unsre Sprache (S. 241.) des Schlachtgesanges (S. 205.) des Eislaufs u. s. w. gut werden, weil uns die Materie entschädigt und gleichsam über Stock und Stein gewaltig mitreißt. (119) [even the most intertwined, halting [literally: self-stemming] strophes here are partly pervaded by a might such that the words with their sound must follow, just as Orpheus [was followed by] stones and rock: partly, too, so deeply woven into the content that e.g. those meters in the Stars (p. 59), those two final and very artificial, knotty lines of Stintenburg (p. 237), the Bards (p. 232), the lines of the ode Our Princes (p. 223), Our Language (p. 241), Battle Chant (p. 205), Ice-skating, etc., please us because the material makes amends and at the same time violently ravishes us with it over hill and dale [literally: stick and stone].]

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The vocabulary and tropes of the sublime—difficulty, transport, violent ravishment, elevating flights, the river-like force dragging everything with it—are connected here with a kind of mimesis of Klopstock’s sonic power. Herder’s rhetoric in this lengthy sentence invites comparison with a famous passage in Pope’s Essay on Criticism, where Alexander’s Feast was used to spell out the maxim that “the Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense”: Hear how Timotheus’ various Lays surprize, And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise! While, at each Change, the Son of Libyan Jove Now burns with Glory, and then melts with Love, Now his fierce Eyes with sparkling Fury glow; Now Sighs steal out, and Tears begin to flow: Persians and Greeks like Turns of Nature found, And the World’s Victor stood subdu’d by Sound! The Pow’r of Musick all our Hearts allow; And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.11 Like Pope, Herder uses music to evoke a particular version of aptum, a “musical agreement” of sound and sense. Klopstock is to Orpheus, we might say, as Dryden is to Timotheus. Yet where for Pope sound must echo sense, Herder’s sounds come closer to propelling sense. And where Pope favored straightforward grammar and a clearly signposted argument, Herder presents performatively “knotty” prose. Pope imitates the sublime simplicity, clarity, and distinctness he attributes to Dryden’s contrasting musical effects and passions. Herder by contrast turns his pen to Klopstock’s sublime complexity and difficult entwining of rhythm, sound, and sense.12 For instance, the awkward and dense s-sounds of sich stemmendsten Strophengänge (most self-stemming strophes) convey a concentrated image, elaborated elsewhere in the review, of Klopstock’s meters as flowing powerfully yet irregularly, obstructing their own course like a river that threatens to flood its banks and halt its own path. The passage is also marked by rhetorical emphasis or condensation, and hyperbaton or syntactical transposition, a grammatical form of transport important to Longinian lyric disorder. Tellingly, Herder’s allusion to Orpheus consists of just one phrase, essentially a chain of nouns (Orpheus Steine und Fels) whose relations need reconstructing to unpack the simile. The verbs that define their proper relationship must be imported from the previous clause (“words and their sound must follow”). Although lying in the mythological

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past, Orpheus’s Steine und Fels are thus transported into the present indicative (stones and rocks must follow), and the flexibility of German syntax allows Herder to transport the sequacious stones to follow Orpheus, making syntax imitate sense. But who exactly is Orpheus here? The obvious answer is Klopstock, the “master” poet. Grammatically, however, Orpheus-Klopstock does not lead words and sounds to create a poem. Nor do words lead echoic sounds, as in Pope’s poetics. Rather, the metrical course of each strophe (the Strophengang) carries along individual words and sounds. In other words, one sonic structure or patterning leads another, and leads words. One hesitates to say that music leads sense, since poetic meaning in the review is positioned as the combined effect of words as sounding matter, and words as conveyers of “content.” Nor can we say that one half of poetic “music,” metrical rhythm, leads the other half, the melody of individual words and phrases, since some of Klopstock’s meters have “a melody” “in and of themselves” that “must elevate even the most songless reader” (117). Music thus seems self-moving and self-harmonizing in a holistic, reflexive sense. This reflects Herder’s expressivist or organicist aesthetics—music expresses itself rather than being governed by external rules or forces—but also the longer-standing cultural habit of positioning music as self-reflexive and self-powering. As argued in earlier chapters, this reflexivity connects music particularly closely with the “self-mimicry” or “resonance” characteristic of the Longinian sublime, the quality that makes it so difficult to separate the sublime as an object of discourse from the discourse of the sublime. The review also makes more limited, strategic uses of music. First, “harmony” can name the meter of each strophe, repeated vertically down the page. “Melody” describes the “succession” of words as the poem unfolds (118–19). So where Bodmer used the concept of music to divide language into nonmusical meaning and (denigrated) sound, music here divides poetry into two musical elements. Within this poetics, music’s usefulness lies in its coexisting verticalstructural and horizontal-successive elements, and in its ability to clarify the complex temporalities of poetry. Herder adds another layer to the metaphor by identifying “melody” with the unfolding “song of the soul” and “tremblings of the heart,” against the arithmetic design of harmony (119). This suggests a division between harmony as form/order/reason and melody as content/changefulness/ passion, recalling the traditional double coding of music as harmonious order and passionate tumult. Herder thus not only mimics Klopstock’s musical sublime to convey its effects and his own admiration but also integrates a musicopoetics into his method, making music a tool of analysis.

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Herder’s praise for Klopstock’s overwhelming power and his adoption of Klopstock’s methods border on enthusiasm and in doing so raise a number of questions about Herder’s conceptualization of the sublime and his critical method. Why, for instance, does Herder insist that a reader’s “sympathy” is not a result of Klopstock’s power but instead a prerequisite for an enthusiastic response? For Herder’s rhapsodies on Klopstock are prefaced by a wry analysis: “Klopstock can primarily and perhaps only work upon those who sympathize with him; . . . insofar as you read me as a poet, you must at least want to sympathize with me, i.e. put yourself in my position, my way of thinking and feeling. . . . Let the author think what he will as a human being, a coreligionist: as a poet you must believe him. And beyond the poem mightn’t there be as many unbelievers in [the poet] Rammler’s Friedrich [the Great] as in Klopstock’s Jesus Christ?” (111–12). Moreover, if Herder uses the vocabulary of the sublime to convey the strengths of Klopstock’s odes, why does he write that moving from Klopstock’s treasured “new meters” to his “purely Greek” odes is like “emerging from an admittedly sublime, but too artificial, dark and enormous Gothic vault into a free Grecian temple, and there into a melody as if transformed into a beautiful regular colonnade” (121)? The answers lie partly in a mediation between sympathy and distance, resistance and engrossment, in Herder’s method, similar to the dynamic he maintains elsewhere between enthusiasm (Begeisterung) and reflection (Besonnenheit). This means, not rejecting the excesses of the sublime for classical measure, but recasting the sublime as enthusiastic reflection. Proper criticism and sublime poetry, in this schema, share a “musical agreement” of passion with order. Accordingly, Herder begins with the rubric by which the “coldest critic[s]” judge odes: odes are “nothing but one whole series of highly lively conceptions, a whole outpouring of an enthusiastic [begeisterten] imagination, or an excited heart, nothing but a highly sensuous utterance about an object” (109). Judged by this rule, Klopstock’s odes are “models of their kind” (109). Yet the cold rationalism of the rule-oriented critic implicitly condemns the fiery enthusiasm of the ode he defines into existence. Klopstock’s odes would be “nothing but” untrammeled streams of passion—artless songs—simultaneously perfect odes and deficient artworks. The end of Herder’s review partly admits this criticism but also implies a critique of the rationalistic judge: “Clearly whoever seeks mere pensées would have the worst part of the great soul of Klopstock!” (123). The rule-oriented critic who strictly separates “enthusiastic” method from poetic “object” or “pensée” misses the point. Criticism, Herder implies, neither reaches absolute, impartial judgments and maxims nor entirely throws in its

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lot with its subject. If he identifies too enthusiastically with his subject, he becomes an impotent partisan whose criticism merely reiterates the already-said. If he is too dispassionate, approaching his subject through abstract generic ideals, he misses the particular that redefines the rule and opens up new reflections on the genre. Klopstock’s odes open up such reflection for Herder, offering a new “theory of the ode” (114). Going beyond sensuous lyrical effusions, Klopstock’s best odes “interweave[] thoughts with the outpouring of sensations” “in the flight of phantasy” (122). In direct opposition to the spectral neoclassical critic, Herder defines the ode as following no prescriptions. It is not that odes are formless or governed by Boileau’s “beautiful disorder” (114) but that each specimen has its own particular form, determined by the particular “flight” of imagination that created it. This theory resembles the later account of genius in Kant’s third Critique, in which works of genius appear innovative and unique because they are not governed by prior rules of art but rather show nature giving the rule to art.13 Separating the theories is, first, Herder’s Leibnizian commitment to particularity and determination and, second, the way the review makes particularity musical. It is as an oide (song) that the ode possesses “something of its own [Eigenes], originary [Ursprüngliches] and embedded in the mind [Eingegeistetes],” just “as in nature every herb, plant and animal is given a form, sense and mode that is individual and its own” (112–13). To spell out the logic: in a song, music fits and intensifies verbal meaning and form. In wholly verbal songs like Klopstock’s, fitness lies in the multifaceted harmony or “agreement” of sound and sense. Like a natural organism, the ode is conciliated to itself.14 No external rules determine its harmoniousness. Herder makes this argument through Klopstockian vocabulary, appropriating the flute-girl figure in the poem Teone, an allegory about writing, declamation, and music. Declaiming all of Klopstock’s “songs” according to any “single, given, antique or modern flute-mode” would denature them. To sing a particular song, one must obviously use its particular “mode”— other wise one is not singing the song. The reader who insensitively ignores this will never discover whether the songs “really contain a lot of sensitivity” (114). The connection between music and particularity in this poetic reappears in the context of acoustics in Kalligone, theology in Cäcilie, and anthropology in the Essay. It indicates just how far Herder stands from models of the musical sublime as indeterminate, infinite, and irresolvable. Herder’s rejection of a Burkean sublime—dark, indeterminate, privative, painful, threatening—is implicit when he compares moving from Klopstock’s Germanic strophes into

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classical meters to “emerging from an admittedly sublime, but too artificial, dark and enormous Gothic vault into a free Grecian temple.” For Herder, the Burkean sublime is only part of the true sublime, which encompasses a progression from darkness to illumination. We might expect this to involve moving from sound to sight. Yet Herder recurrently describes the whole drama of the sublime in aural terms: a raw aural sublime is taken up into a musical sublime. Herder’s progressive, stadial sublime appears clearly in Cäcilie, in a passage describing humans’ natural impulse to sing hymns. First, “completely surrounded by the monstrous power and superiority of creation, so that we seem to float like drops in the ocean,” the “wildest nations” instinctively cry out the hymn: “monstrous power, do not crush me! help me!” (296). As humans begin to gather observations and to reason, they increasingly find in the dark sublime of raw nature “rules of wisdom, a process of order that can serve [them], and that [they] must serve . . . , laws of benignity and mildness” (297). This moves humans closer to praising the creator of those laws; hymns thus help “raise” humans to the true sublime and “highest ideal of creation, to God.” The hymn’s final form is a plea for sublime unification with God. Kalligone’s account of sublimity begins with a substantial series of such narratives, explicitly distancing the treatise from Burke.15 Alongside a retelling of Genesis, a history of magic and knowledge, and a developmental narrative about a child’s changing understanding of the heavens, Herder reminisces about a storm at sea in terms familiar from Heinse’s sublime. Initially, his “gaze lost itself in the unmeasured heights and depths” of the sea’s “Unendingness,” but as the storm rose to a crisis, the “sublime in a higher order” emerged: a “thousand waves” rose and fell “with One blow” to the “pulse [Takt] of the multivoiced harmony [Accords],” describing “all the curves and lines of beauty.” The ship rocked “unanimously [gleichstimmig] with the great elements,” revealing an “ordered republic, where All hangs on One call [Ruf ],” “all [is] weighed, measured, reckoned according to form, time, and place” (iii.24–25). A narrative pattern of the musical sublime—moving from obscurity to light and particularity—thus runs from Herder’s early work to his final treatise, Kalligone. It also informed his famous Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Essay on the Origin of Language), as we will now see. Here, music is associated less with reasoning and ratio than with expression of passion and particularity. While Kalligone shares with Kant a desire to reconcile the infinite and finite through the sublime, the Abhandlung shares with Herder’s former teacher an attempt to use this aesthetic to reconcile human freedom with material nature.

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Sublime Origins: Language as Song Herder’s arguments that song was natural, original, and particular may raise eyebrows among modern readers. They indicate music’s central role in highly suspect aspects of Herder thought about the essence and organic origins of particular nations, harnessed to aggressive chauvinistic nationalism in subsequent centuries.16 Positioning music as natural also raised problems for Herder himself. Music becomes embroiled in tensions between nature as freedom (liberty to fulfill our natures, emancipation from the artificial) and as subjection (determination by mechanistic nature or animal instinct). This tension runs through Herder’s influential prize-winning answer to the question set by the Berlin Royal Academy of the Sciences in 1770: “Could human beings, left to their natural abilities, have invented language for themselves?”17 Herder answers: yes. A simple divine origin for language would entail the existence of an instructor God, intervening in an imperfect creation for which the logos is always a foreign object. Standard arguments for the divine origin of language are thus “ungodly” (123–24). Herder’s somewhat counterintuitive solution is that humans come to language both directly and through divine mediation.18 The academy’s question was not new, nor was its connection with music. Condillac and Rousseau, among others, had made language’s origin a natural communicative cry or passionate interjection that was, or became, a protomusical discourse, giving language a kind of nonlinguistic supplement at its origin.19 For Rousseau, when language and music parted ways, language grew more arbitrary and referential (more semiotic), its sounds colder and more articulate, while music refined its passionate cries into non-referential pitches and timbres expressing emotion. Rousseau’s arguments targeted the composer and theorist Rameau, who held that music’s origins lay in a harmony inherent in superhuman physical nature. If Rameau threatened to dehumanize music, making it unfree, a mechanical corollary of our physical constitution rather than a passionate communication, then on Herder’s account theorists such as Condillac and Rousseau fall prey to similar problems: the passions might easily belong to the blind workings of matter. As Rousseau himself saw, existing theory begged the central question of how humans come to attach intentions and reference to others’ noises, transforming cries into signs. Freedom must come from another source. Enter the sublime. Herder’s essay begins with a Rousseauian scenario, rehearsed as a kind of sublime drama, before revealing its falsehood and positing a second origin for language. In this larger drama, the proto-musical vocal origin of language is

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reconfigured as the first moment in the sublime, marked by astonishment, overpowering, and subjection. This moment comes first not in chronological terms but in the processes of the speculating anthropologist, considering in turn various elements of language, and hypothesizing about elements necessarily copresent at the point of origin.20 The end of the essay’s drama is a moment of resolution: the harmonious linguistic human emerges, marked inalienably by passion and reflection.21 Here is the opening hypothesis: “Even as an animal, the human being has language. All weighty [heftigen] and the weightiest among the weighty, the painful sensations of his body, all strong passions of his soul, express themselves directly in the cry, in tones, in wild, inarticulate Laute” (5). Laute, here designating sounds or vocables, can also mean “lute.” A metaphor of the human as stringed instrument in fact runs subtly through this section of the Abhandlung. A venerable figure of social and personal harmony, gentle sociability, and responsiveness to stimuli, the lute here evokes pain and shock, the body’s helpless vibrating responses to nature’s overwhelming blows. The human in a state of nature feels “pain and misery,” “rage, desperation, fury, terror, horror” as he is assaulted by “overpowering” “storm[s],” “flood[s],” “sea[s],” or “attack[s],” “furrow[ing] the soul” (6–7). Only from such pains do sociability and humanity emerge. By a law of Nature red in tooth and claw but also strikingly provident, the constitution of our “instrument” gives us a sympathetic understanding of similar instruments. We begin like Aeolian harps: even alone on a “desert island,” every “animal” or man in “pain” will cry out, “as if [he] sighed away a part of his pain and, from the empty space of the air, at least drew into himself new power to overcome pain by filling the deaf winds with groans” (5). Even “unconsciously,” even when we think we are self-motivated, the “whole play” of our “finest strings” is inherently “directed towards . . . expression[s] for other creatures” (5). Herder links this instrument-model with mechanism in an ostensibly apologetic parenthesis: “I must make use of this simile, because I know none better for the mechanism [Mechanik] of sensitive bodies!” (5). Mechanism will soon become a real problem for freedom, showing that nature has in some way played humans. For now, the logic of the lute seems elevating. Because the “struck string does its natural duty: it sings, it calls a similarly feeling echo,” sound naturally creates communication and community. “Nature” gave creation a “law” that is also a “blessing: ‘Your sensation shall sound uniquely to your race and so become sympathetically perceived by one and all!’ ” (6). This sympathetically resonating system identifies us within the stupendous physical world, which

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first seemed only to wound and threaten: “No longer touch its strings, this weak, sensitive being! As alone and single and prey to every inimical storm of the cosmos as it seems, still it is not alone: it stands in league with the whole of nature! Tenderly strung, but nature has hidden in these strings tones that, stimulated and enlivened, awaken in their turn other similarly tender creatures, and, as if through an invisible chain, can communicate sparks to a distant heart” (6). Singing “sparks” (Funken) become the agent of universal communication, making the great chain of being a kind of universal instrument like those envisaged by seventeenth-century esoterics.22 If these “sparks” work like Longinus’s lightning-fast transport, then perhaps nature resembles the sublime orator who makes us feel we have spoken what we only hear. Our speaking is an echo of the resonant voice of the cosmos, “stimulat[ing]” our “strings.” In Herder’s schema, this sublime identification is partially justified: when we cry out at the blows of sensations on our strings, we really do (re)speak what we have heard and feel what others felt. Herder’s association of music with unmediated mediation surfaces here: we “directly” possess a sounding “language of sensation” (6), but only insofar as we receive and transmit stimulus from elsewhere; we immediately understand another’s cry, but only through the medium of sound moving through the air to agitate our strings. Herder’s playing out of this logic unmasks a flaw in the account he associated with Condillac and Rousseau: it makes humans passive instruments. Despite Rousseau’s interest in melody, genuine communication and participation in a sublimely powerful cosmos appear as functions of unconscious, inescapable mechanistic resonance. Herder concludes: “If we then want to call these immediate sounds of sensation language, then I . . . consider [language’s] origin to be very natural. It is not merely not superhuman, but rather obviously animal: the law of nature of a sensitive machine” (16). To leap from this so-called language to human sign systems would require an unacknowledged “qualitas occulta” (24), banished from modern knowledge. In its place, Herder sets a second origin: Besonnenheit, or reflection.23 In recompense for our comparatively weak instincts, and the consequently underdetermined goals of human life, we have this originary “Ersatz[]”: thought, self-reflection, self-determination (25). In Herder’s account, Besonnenheit is more inclusive than reason and understanding, but like them is allied with logos, and so with what distinguishes humans from animals as imagines dei. If each created thing has a unique “sound” in an ontological sense, then reflection is ours.

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Reflection is a power for noting what is distinctive about something, separating it from the “ocean of sensations” by some “marker” (32); uniqueness and particularity are thus its keynotes, as they were in the origin of the primal cry. The establishment of a marker constitutes language even without speech (33). It is therefore tempting to see silence and reflection—associated with light, clarity, and awakening (23, 59, 61)—outstripping sound and passionate sensibility, just as reason outstrips sensuous imagination in Kant’s sublime.24 Yet reflection does not supersede sound. It is present ab initio for humans, since only by virtue of Besonnenheit can we be called human. And reflection’s markers are primarily and most naturally aural: sound best captures a thing’s uniqueness; accordingly, Herder’s paradigmatic sign, “sheep,” is first mentally marked as “the baaing one” (33). Herder moreover identifies hearing as the “middle” sense here, and so the ideal medium for a sign system covering all sensations and communicating all experiences (57–61): “Feeling overwhelms, vision is too cold and indifferent; the former penetrates us too deeply to become language, the latter remains too peacefully before us. The tone of hearing penetrates so deeply into our souls that it must become a marker; but not, however, so deafeningly that it cannot become a clear marker” (59). We generally associate sublimity with excess. Yet the mean is crucial to transport and communication in the Abhandlung, and so to its sublime. The double origin of language in the essay indeed suggests that humanity is marked by its harmonizing of extremes, especially reflection and feeling. Since language itself is mediatory, reason is, too: all thought is linguistic, Herder maintains, the fruit of reflection, sensation, and passion. “Whoever thought without words would have to be the darkest enthusiast or a beast [Vieh], the most abstract visionary [Götterseer] or a dreaming monad. As audacious as it sounds . . . : the human being feels with his understanding and speaks in thinking”; even the “sublime Klopstock” in Der Messias builds “his heaven and hell from sensuous materials” (71). Herder here participates in wider attempts to separate the sublime from abstract transcendence and unreflective enthusiasm. Further allusions to the sublime and Longinus reinforce the importance of mediation and doubled origins. Ancient Israel, Herder writes, possessed few words but an intense need to communicate, and intensely interrelated, untrammeled faculties of imagination, passion, and perception. Their “raw sublimity of fantasy” generated “strong, bold” metaphors that energetically transported meanings between wildly different fields (63, 66). Biblical psalmody is likely at the forefront of his mind here, since Herder supported Lowth’s identification of the psalms as sublime songs and knew Luther’s praise of the psalms as reposito-

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ries of intense passions.25 These assumptions about ancient psalmody clarify the difference between the “raw sublimity” of primitive languages and the merely false sublime of animalistic cries. For “the tradition of antiquity says, the first language of the human race was song,” not a cry (51). Herder’s dictum paraphrases another British scholar warmly received in Germany, Thomas Blackwell. His Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer cites “the ancient Opinion, ‘That Poetry was before Prose.’ ”26 The conflation of Blackwell’s “Poetry” with “song” by Herder is characteristic of his interest in music but also in keeping with Blackwell’s preceding remarks: the ancients expressed themselves “in a much higher Note than we do our Words,” so that in uttering a series of “vocal Marks,” “they wou’d seem to sing,” and words that “signified at first simply to speak” now mean “to sing.”27 Blackwell next refers to Longinus, “admired Judge of the Sublime,” who wrote that rhythm “personates the various Passions and their Language . . . which naturally produce Numbers and Harmony: ’Twas for this reason, that the ancients in their ordinary Discourse delivered themselves rather in Verse than in Prose.”28 Longinus thus becomes the unlikely authority for Herder’s claim that ancient speech was poetry, and poetry a kind of song.29 Now, this song incorporated rather than replaced the passionate cry at the origin of language. Herder concedes that “Condillac, Rousseau, and others have come halfway here in deriving the prosody and song of the oldest language from the cry of sensation” (52). Without this physiological-affective cry, humans’ speech might be a purely ratiocinative, Leibnizian-mathematical “music” where notes act like arbitrary ciphers, or an equally mechanical, “glockenspiel”-like “aping” of birds or other natural sounds (51). Neither imitation nor the working out of preexistent mathematical laws within sound would qualify as humans “inventing” human language for themselves: man had “a song as natural to him, as appropriate to his organs and natural drives, as the nightingale’s song to itself . . . and that was—precisely our sonorous [tönende] language” (52). On the other hand, human language needed to be more than a non-semantic expressive cry. It needed reflective marks that mediate between impressions and expressions, in order to communicate with others and form an image of the world, with markers for everything humans encounter. This occurred in Adam’s “naming of every creature according to his language”: “Then the whole of nature sang and resounded, and the song of the human being was a concert of all these voices, insofar as his understanding used them, his sensation grasped, his organs could express them.—There was song, but neither nightingale song nor Leibniz’s musical language, nor a mere animal cry of sensation:

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expression of the language of all creatures, within the natural gamut of the human voice!” (52). As in the Rousseauian drama sketched early in the Abhandlung, here humankind is first distinguished from a multifarious, powerful nature and then reintegrated with it. Where the essay’s opening identified the creature with creation only through the brute facts of physical resemblance and resonance, reflection makes humans active participants in overwhelming nature. Humans are now identified with sublime nature, and its creator, through reflection and utterance: humans sing their own response to the whole of nature but are no longer constrained to re-sound nature like Echo or like reeds blown in the wind.30 This sublime is doubly aural, moving from initial terrifying sounds of power and pain—if music, then a music that might swallow the subject even as he utters it—to a harmonious song in which recognizing an invincibly powerful cosmos is complemented by a realization of the subject’s own particular powers and particular species of elevation.31 This passage holds a final hint toward Longinus’s sublime: “There was song” (Es ward Gesang) echoes the fiat lux, “es ward Licht.”32 As divinely ordained re-creators of the world in song, humans are allusively identified with God, the most sublime object in Herder’s scheme. This hint completes Herder’s recasting of the origin of human language, integrating the proto-musical origin posited by (his version of) French theory into a conception of our linguistic origins in reflective sign and passionate expression. The first language is a song whose self-determined particularity, and reconciliation of differing elements, mirrors the accord between melody and harmony in Herder’s Klopstock review. Whether in 1770 Herder identified this logic and its narrative pattern with the sublime is debatable. By 1800, he does so very explicitly.

Kalligone: The Fullness of Sound and Emptiness of Kant Does Kalligone represent a noble swansong or an embarrassingly vampy reprise in Herder’s career? Certainly English-language scholarship marginalizes this bulky treatise, received poorly by contemporaries and often echoing theses in the fourth of the Kritische Wäldchen (c. 1774), a shorter, earlier fragment unpublished in Herder’s lifetime.33 Norton’s sketch of Kalligone’s genesis even allows us to picture the work signing Herder’s death warrant. Mounting a doomed “campaign against Kant” and other “more successful” intellectuals, Herder embarked first on the unpopu lar Metacritique of Pure Reason (1799) and then on Kalligone, his dismal reply to the third Critique: “Embattled, embittered,

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overwrought, and isolated, Herder died three years later, at the age of sixty.”34 Kalligone nonetheless holds his most comprehensive theory of the sublime and vividly stages the conflicts between his sublime—with music at its center—and those of Kant and Burke. The following therefore charts the rhetoric, topics, and argumentative strategies of Herder’s last sustained intervention in the febrile aesthetic debate around 1800. In Kalligone, music sits at the foundations of humans’ basic knowledge of the world, as well as reaching its pinnacle in what, following Herder, we can call “sublimely-beautiful, beautifully-sublime” perception (erhabenschöne, schönerhabene, iii.26). Around 1800, Herder’s position on music was threatened from two sides. For some, like Kant, music almost fails to qualify as a beau art and might reasonably be considered merely a pleasant one, gratifying the senses.35 For others, music was sublime because, like Kant’s infinite, it lacked concrete images and concepts, elevating listeners through immeasurable, obscure feeling.36 But for Herder, music remains an art of measure and order: “To think any kind of art or sensation in human nature without measure and limits destroys all art, just as it does all sensation, not to mention the arts of tones and poetry, whose essence is measure, as all their denominations (metrum, modi, modulation . . .) tell us” (iii.127). This does not mean closing music to the infinite, however. Herder’s infinite cosmos, quite unlike Kant’s, is experienced as the creation of a benevolent God who grants partial, analogical understanding of its infinite order. We cannot think nature’s totality, but we can perceive part of its infinitude of beautiful forms, ratios, and relationships. As it was for Leibniz, for Herder the infinite is measureful: “In nature everything is ordered by relationships,” although these relationships are infinitely complex. All finite human activity involves encountering an infinite creation and “lay[ing] measure” over it (i.112, iii.135–36). Aural arts like music, “whose essence is measure,” thus become paradigmatic for human action. Traditions of music as an art of ratios mingle here with Herder’s distinctive attitude toward aesthetics and perception. While no strict rationalist after the stamp of Wolff, Bodmer, or Breitinger, Herder does not follow Kant’s turn against Leibniz-Wolffianism. The tenets of rationalist aesthetics resonate strongly with Kalligone: we can give reasons for aesthetic judgments; these reasons partly concern the empirical features of objects, including perfection or harmoniousness; aesthetic plea sure involves cognition and the perception of some degree of perfection in an object.37 Herder’s sublime is the “height” of perfection and beauty, and he explicitly rejects the dichotomizing aesthetics of Burkean sensationism and Kantian idealism.38

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Herder and Kant employ British empirical psychology to radically different ends. Rejecting rationalist aesthetics, with its continuum between the faculties, the third Critique made aesthetic judgments immediate reflective responses to sense perceptions and their presentation by imagination. Since our finite senses cannot apprehend infinity, Kant accepts Burke’s association of sublimity with darkness, violence, and formlessness. This is not because Kant thinks the infinite is formless (this is undecidable, given his strictures on metaphysics), or completely unknowable (it can, after all, be totalized by reason), but because infinity must appear formless insofar as we can approach it sensuously as an aesthetic object. Kant makes obscurity produce knowledge only by maintaining something of a firewall between imagination and reason. Herder refuses this approach. Clarity, distinctness, comprehensiveness, and completeness—rationalism’s ascending virtues and keys to ascent toward godlike perception—remain virtues within Kalligone’s sublime. Obscurity does not emerge from pondering an objectively disordered cosmos, nor from pushing the limits of perception to infinity; obscurity is merely the starting point of perception. The “raw-sublime dreams of our childhood,” dreams of giving “borders to the immeasurable” and “comprehending the cosmos” with our “eyes,” give way to an immeasurability displaying “order,” comprehended by the “mind [Geist],” whose thoughts follow God (“the world’s orderer”) to reach “simultaneously the most beautiful and the highest” (iii.21–22).39 For Herder, this entails that human activity is grounded in finite, anthropomorphic measures—not, as Kant suggested, in the impossible presentation of the totality of nature as an absolute measure for all other quantities.40 Put simply: “the unreachable admits no presentation, and the great without measure has no magnitude” (iii.128–29). This may misread Kant’s subtle, even paradoxical characterization of the sublime as a negative representation of the idea of totality as if it were an object comprehended by imagination. What is presented to us vividly and sensuously in Kant’s mathematical sublime is precisely the inability of sensuous forms to present ideas of reason—that is, those ideas that are the true source of sublimity.41 But it is just such philosophizing that Kalligone denounces as “empty” sophistry (iii.128). The contrast between emptiness and fullness is central to Kalligone’s rhetoric. Herder develops it through discussion of the aural sublime in connection with the concept of Vollendung (“full-ending”), completion or perfection. The aural sublime grants Vollendung in myriad ways. Several involve the closure and relief characteristic of the final stage of the sublime—figured by music’s Schlüße (closes or cadences), where turbulence and dissonance resolve into harmony

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(iii.126). Such closure is the product of poetry’s and music’s successive temporality: parts resolve into a harmonious whole when seen from their final moment. Thus a “sublime conclusion is the highest goal of art, in One moment granting us everything” (iii.126). To suddenly, immediately deliver everything is a hallmark of the Longinian sublime, “strik[ing] everything like a bolt of lightning, and present[ing] at once all the force of an orator collected together.” 42 Herder’s concentration on unity, immediacy, and emphasis also admits brief sounds, like those Burke identified as sublime—a bell in the night, thunder, a trumpet. By suddenly “awaken[ing us] and demand[ing] action or great expectations,” they give “much with little, in the most powerful way . . . all at once proclaiming a great deal” (iii.122–23). Idealism for Herder is antithetical to this emphatic, full sublimity. Proceeding from his account of aural sublimity, the climax of Kalligone’s sections on the sublime begins: “The Sublime in Knowledge . . . is not ‘transcendence,’ ”—Herder’s scornful misnomer for Kant’s transcendental method—“whose sublime gives us little with much, noisily impotent, empty schemata and forms” (iii.148). Humans, Herder suggested, do not find supersensible truth by transcending the husks of signs and phenomena but rather go into this sensuous stuff, immersing themselves in sonorous matter.43 For Herder, Kant presumed to think without the mediation of sensuous human expression, and so behaved as if he could think with pure concepts. Ironically, this led him to think with pure words, often words of his own devising that correspond to no things. By ignoring the indissoluble place of language in thought and attending insufficiently to sound, Kant overstepped the limits he himself had placed on philosophy. In response, Herder underlines thought’s embedding in language, treating words and their etymologies associatively and creatively. He begins with a tour of Kant’s philosophical “Pandemonium” (iii.148). The allusion to Satan’s palace in Paradise Lost recalls Kalligone’s earlier arguments about the aural sublime, which criticized partial understandings of Milton’s sublimity: while Burke cherry-picked “obscure” images of Satan or Death, “the true sublime really rests on the whole, progressive effect of the poet,” on Vollendung.44 “Whoever . . . tarries in Hell, and . . . can’t get enough of Pandemonium, the bridge over Chaos, the form of the fallen spirits . . . without noticing the subordinate place which this abyss has in the poet’s whole artistic edifice, how far he is from the true sublime of Milton” (iii.133). The reader of the third Critique must tarry in a Pandemonium imagined as a gothic-mythological castle. Milton’s gatekeepers, Death and Sin, are replaced by two “blind intuitions,” perhaps recalling the Graeae who directed Perseus to

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Medusa, but without their single shared eye (iii.148). Inside, in an eerily empty hall, “shadow tables” showing Kantian “schemas” stand where we might expect chivalric coats of arms, genealogies, or trophies. Next, “a sharp winch of ‘paralogisms’ draws us . . . through winding cloisters of ‘antinomies’ into the empty hall of ‘empty reason,’ where, after long awaiting, the empty sound, ‘thou shalt,’ resounds from the absolute nothingness. The echo resounds the absolute ‘shalt’ [Soll] backward very perceptibly in the word ‘loose’ [or ‘fate,’ Los]; for whatever was bound Unconditionally [Bedingungslos] by supersensible-absolute duty, can be loosed again Unconditionally by supersensible-absolute freedom” (iii.148– 49). A plethora of aural terms and allusions in this passage makes the entire gothic edifice of Kant’s philosophy resemble a shadowy echo chamber, full of sonic phantoms without substance, rebounding on and canceling out an everdispersing whisper that is itself a trick of the ear, arising from, and returning to, nothingness. Unwieldy parallelisms and close repetitions of words like “empty” and “sounds” join the explicit wordplay on Soll and Los. Given Herder’s reading of Pope, the passage might recall the moment in his satire the Dunciad where the cry “God save King Colley [Cibber]!,” abbreviated to “Coll!,” “echoes” backward as “God save King Log!” 45 We also hear a parodic echo of Christ’s words to Peter in founding the church, in the self-defeating power of Kant’s supersensible-absolute to bind and loose absolutely (alles, was du auf Erden binden wirst, soll auch im Himmel gebunden sein, und alles, was du auf Erden lösen wirst, soll auch im Himmel los sein).46 While Peter the Rock prevails against “the Gates of Hell,” the supersensible-absolute unwittingly stands within them, inside Pandemonium. The obscure, mock-sublime band of figures and scenes summoned up by Herder’s allusive style contributes to the sense of Kant’s philosophy as an echo chamber. So do extended and associated meanings of words: los (loose, free) takes on a plangency from its role as a suffix meaning “without.” Connotations of freedom are thus colored by connotations of denial, stripping, and privation—a sublime quality for Burke, but not Herder.47 This echoes through the passage in the repeated and unusually capitalized word Bedingungslos (unconditionally; literally be-thing-less, a key Kantian term). A network of sounds and associations thus lies dormant in the terms Kant uses, try as he might to redefine and limit them. Awakened by the hapless visitor straying into his palace, these sounds are both uncontrollable and entropic. But Kant’s weakness becomes Herder’s strength. For a writer who affirms the power of sensuous sound within thought, these echoes are telling, eloquent, and resonant, compactly performing their author’s condemnation. This deconstructs

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Kant’s discourse in the sense of turning it against itself, suggesting its tendency to undo or set “loose” everything it wants tied up. Two homophones in the passage connect this deconstruction with its inverse: a constructive account of sound’s emphatic fullness. Kant’s “empty hall” (Halle) is a homonym for “empty echoes”; “empty sound” (Schall) recalls the semiotic model where a “kernel” of meaning is surrounded by a disposable exterior “husk” (Schale), a sound or sign. A dialogue in Kalligone’s first volume rejected this common model: A. When things around us want not to indicate but proclaim their interior [Inneres], how does this happen? . . . C. Through an empty sound [leeren Schall]? A. Through a not-empty sound: for every sound is expressive. . . . It presses something interior out; it moves something interior. (i.100) The exchange marks a transition from discussing light and sight to what one dialogue partner fears is the “dark world” of sound: “We are descending into a Tartarus” (i.99). But this fear is fantasmic. The friends have turned to sound for enlightenment, having encountered in conversation the curious “medium” that separates our eyes from objects, and separates sight from immediate senses like taste and touch (i.98). They add sound to light to “get to know” this “powerful medium . . . showing in itself the rule in accordance with which our organ is formed”; examining sound promises to greatly “illuminat[e]” concepts of beauty and sensation (i.98).48 This makes good sense. Light’s operations were mysterious, but sound was known to travel in waves through air. Since light partially fits the wave model, hearing offers at least an analogical basis for understanding sight.49 Moreover, Kalligone shows nerves, and so all sensation, working like sounding bodies— like strings, struck and vibrating in wave patterns. Burke, we saw, had applied nerve theory to aesthetics, suggesting sublime terror was positive because it tensed the nerves, toning up the strings, while beauty relaxed them. This aspect of Burke’s thought was what initially appealed to Herder: Burke approached aesthetics through empirical observation and sensationist theory, encouraging an alignment of aesthetics with the Newtonian principles governing the whole universe—repulsion/terror/tension/self-preservation and attraction/ love/relaxation/sociality.50 More explicitly than Burke, Kalligone deploys nerve theory and resonance to position hearing as sublime. Sound works through violent blows: whereas

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light is “softly-charming,” sound is “shocking [shattering, erschütternd], arousing” (i.106), being in essence “the voice of all moved bodies . . . their suffering, their resistance, their aroused powers announcing themselves” (i.101–2). The astonishingly direct transport of the sublime resembles the immediate effect of sound waves on the ner vous system: sound does not represent but conveys the “interior” of an object to the interior of a listener, precisely because sound’s form is identical to the form of vibrating nerves; this form continues in the transporting waves of passion that music arouses (i.100–114). Burke’s sublime noises are in this way transformed into a philosophy of musical harmony. Mimicking the way sounds passed between bodies will reverberate and modify each other, the dialogue form of this section of Kalligone echoes and amplifies Herder’s arguments. The speakers move from sound waves to an account of music, from “single tones” to “sustained notes,” melodies, dynamics, tempi, and rhythms, all patterned on a wavelike “rising or sinking” (i.115–16). This iterative method extends to conclusions about the soul: B. Nothing in nature expresses itself more strongly than a shocked power [erschütterte Macht]. A. A blow shocks the body; what says its sound? B. “I am shocked; so all my parts vibrate and restore themselves again.” A. Do they also say this to us? B. We are elastic beings through and through; our ear, the sounding chamber of our soul is . . . an echo chamber of the finest sort. (i.115) Not only ears and souls but the universe, too, is an “echo chamber of the finest sort,” continually reverberating as each shocked body communicates shock waves to other bodies, which then resonate in sympathy, if only subconsciously: “Our co-understanding, our co-sensing of the voice of living co-creatures can surely not be doubted,” since all “nature,” set vibrating by constant blows, “speaks to harmonious beings through sound” (i.103–4). In play here is Rameau’s influential theory of the corps sonore (schallenden Körper, i.106), which described multiple overtones, normally inaudible, that surround and contribute to our perception of any audible fundamental tone.51 Extending Rameau, Herder presents all created things as participants in the same infinite overtone series, each with its individual fundamental tone and timbre (i.102–6): “With every ringing [klingenden] tone, everything similarly formed sounds together [tönt alles Gleichförmige mit]; to an unreachable height and depth, consonances sound after and to one another. High law of unchange-

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able nature! An Odeon, a hall of eternal harmonies, in which, to an imperceptible, untraceable degree, we live” (i.108). Through such adaptations of contemporary theory, the scientifically defunct music of the spheres is transmuted into a natural cosmic music, one that preserves the medieval musical analogy between macrocosm and microcosm. (As Herder wrote in an earlier essay, he was “really not at all afraid of the old expression that the human being is a little world.”)52 By the same stroke, Kant’s “empty hall” of entropic echoes becomes “a hall of eternal harmonies,” full of energetic reverberations. This is Herder’s ultimate refusal of the split between the worlds of sensible appearances and supersensible things-in-themselves that motivated Kant’s sublime. Kant’s split made sight the basis of the sensible: appearances, Anschauungen, are literally things looked at. Grounding empiricism in sound, Herder insists that neither empirical impressions nor artistic productions need be ghostly representations whose limits are revealed in the sublime. Sensations are energetic and revelatory (if also dauntingly shocking or painful) acoustic events—“sublimely-beautiful, beautifully-sublime” soundings of the infinite.

Representing the Infinite: Cäcilie In Kalligone Herder responded to conceptions of music as an obscure art of the infinite by literally rearticulating the infinite and making musical measure epitomize our sublime encounters with infinity. This leaves unresolved questions about the relationship between music, infinity, and representation—art’s raison d’être for much of the eighteenth century. “Everyone grasps that objects that enter the soul through hearing need a different measure to visible objects,” Herder wrote; the real “question” was what kind of measure this is (iii.119). Scattered through Kalligone are various inconsistent half answers to this question, attempts to define music’s measure without depriving music of its claim to surpass finite, tangible, representational arts (especially iii.120–24). Kalligone thus maintains both that “music would cease if it did not give the unmeasured an outline, boundaries, determination, measure” and that the “invisible world” of music has no “form, outline, figure” (iii.127–28, i.99–100). Perhaps the questions were unanswerable. Herder had attacked imitative theories of art from early in his career, notably using the ode to promote art that expressed or embodied rather than copying nature.53 But can a finite human art embody the infinite any more than it can imitate or represent it? And why, given that Herder resembles Romantic post-Kantian writers on the sublime in

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resisting imitation, does he not like them elevate amimetic instrumental music above vocal music?54 A 1793 essay on sacred music, Cäcilie, tackles some of these problems. The essay seeks to redescribe musical representation, positioning the human voice and logos, not wordless music, as paths to reconciling the infinite and finite. Cäcilie’s titular figure, a figure for music, flags the theme of representation in its various senses. First, following thinkers such as Wolff, we might say representation gives an image of something absent and points to it, offering an object for speculative knowledge or enjoyment. Second, representation means being part of something, endowed with power to act for it and so mediate between it and others. The first representation is compensatory (replacing the thing), imitative and objectifying; the second claims to be participative. The saints, the church, and Christ in Cäcilie are imagined to be representative in this second sense, as mediators (Mittler) and intercessors (Fürsprecher) in whose exalted bodies the congregation participates through sacraments and song. How could the holy mystery . . . of a God who dwells with the church, filling her and becoming her participant [theilhaft werdenden] in the sacrament . . . be celebrated other wise than with the intonations of a divine presence and enthusiasm? Hence the high and deep accents in consecrations and in the moment of the miracle [at the Eucharist]. . . . The whole idea of the Christian church in itself—that she is a Single, general congregation joined among herself by One Spirit—made chant, prayer, blessing, intercession, into a general sacrifice, a worldwide hallelujah. (302) Herder describes worship as the action of a speaking body moved to the heights and depths of passion. Its music is elevating partly in the sensualist-rhetorical sense that music constitutes a departure from the even keel of discourse, elevating speech and making it move, even transport, bodies and minds. Sacred music also elevates by unifying the congregation with an infinite creation and the most sublime of objects, God; for the “worldwide hallelujah” resounds not only from the church, but to the church, and to God, from the whole of creation. Citing passages in the liturgy drawn from angelic song and positioned as joining the congregation with heaven and earth (the Sanctus, the Gloria), Herder writes that Christianity “conceived the whole creation, and even the joys of heaven itself, as a Temple song and song of praise, as an eternal hallelujah,” and that “in

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caves and temples the congregation was a soft or loud echo” of the song of creation (299). The infinite diversity of creation thus finds its mean in the human vocation of singing, which, as in the Abhandlung, also represents all creation as humans encounter it. With Lowth and Klopstock—whose ode Die Chöre the essay invokes— Herder sees this “Temple song and song of praise” as parallelistic: “With the parallelism of its short verses,” the Psalter brought into Christianity “the two voices . . . the antiphons” (306, 299). We see again the emphasis on parallelistic antitheses explored with Klopstock, where antiphonal music acted as a mediating channel, structuring the sublime’s transport from low to high, abjection to elevation. A reference to Klopstock’s “golden dream” precedes the claim: “The deepest humility . . . before God, all exhortations to consolation, hope and joy, those outbreakings of faith, of hope, question and answer, doubt and assurance, care and comfort, curse and blessing are to be found in the rich strophes [Sätze] and antistrophes [Gegensätze] of the choral language of the Old and New Testament” (307–8). The resonances of Satz and Gegensatz are illuminating here. Most straightforwardly, they refer in poetics to the strophe and antistrophe of classical choric compositions, including Pindar’s odes. Describing, in Thomas De Quincey’s words, the steps of the chorus “unw[ea]v[ing] through the antistrophe every step that had been mystically woven through the strophe,” this structure had been used in the music ode tradition to figure the contrary yet concordant motions of the spheres, and poetic order in contrariety.55 In purely musical terms, a Satz can be a movement within a longer work like a sonata; a musical phrase; or the mechanics of counterpoint, a “strict” technique closely associated with “the old masters” of Renaissance music, and eventually with the sublime.56 A Gegensatz is correspondingly a countering phrase or stanza, or a countersubject in fugues and other contrapuntal forms. Suggestively, the final section in a tripartite composition involving a Satz and Gegensatz can be termed a Nachklang (reverberation) or Vermittlung (mediation).57 In philosophical contexts, Satz (thesis) and Gegensatz (antithesis) conjure up dialectics, with its strong if complex connections to parallelism and paradox.58 As the beautiful and sublime became more distinct over the eighteenth century, the sublime was increasingly construed in dialectical terms. Friedrich Schiller’s On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795–96) drew on the contrast between beauty and sublimity to contrast plastic (visual) with dynamic (aural) arts, and naivety with sentimentality.59 Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1871/86) elaborated a dialectic between Apollo (form and image) and Dionysus (energy

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and sound) in dialogue with Wagner’s music. Wagner himself described a dialectic between beautiful visual arts and sublime music, synthesized in the Gesamtkunstwerk of opera. Characteristically, however, Cäcilie’s own “dialectic” of Satz and Gegensatz is internal to music. Herder’s dialectics also differ from both Scholastic and Hegelian dialectics in interesting ways.60 While he did not present a unified theory of dialectics, there is a suggestive congruence between the kind of mediation performed by musical Sätze and Gegensätze in Cäcilie and a passage in Kalligone. Day needs night, Kalligone proposes, just as “an antithesis belongs to a thesis, as two extremes [belong] to a mean [Mitte]” (i.97). The antithesis, if this comparison holds, is less the opposite of the thesis than itself a dual construct, presupposing and reflecting its contrary. The thesis sits in the middle of an antithetical structure, mediating between extremes. Within Cäcilie, the resonances of Satz and Gegensatz hint at an association between dialectical mediation and the stark, energetic simplicity of ancient antiphony, alongside the complexity of early modern contrapuntalism. Note against note (counterpoint), subject against countersubject, choir against choir: all involve doubling and reflection. The associations, if broad, are nonetheless significant, as the trope of musical doubling connects sublimes as different as Dryden’s, Pope’s, Hill’s, Breitinger’s, and Klopstock’s. Herder explicitly cast both the simplest song and complex meters like Sapphics and choriambics as doubled. Responding to Lowth’s writing on parallelism, Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83) called elaborate classical meters “artful curvatures, beautifully woven wreaths of words and tones,” like the “labyrinth dances of Daedalus or Theseus.” The rustic ancient Hebrews worked with the same “two strings of pearls” as the Greeks, but instead of “wind[ing them] into a single wreath” let them “hang simply against one another” in the most fundamental parallelism.61 From this perspective, two kinds of sublime music encountered in earlier chapters—sublimely simple and sublimely complex—appear as two expressions of sublime parallelism, both working through mechanisms of transport and mirroring. The psalms have a more specific role in Cäcilie, as a mechanism enabling mediation between the infinite and the finite. Since, for Herder, God is the ultimate infinite and sublime object, music is sublime if it allows humans to participate in divinity. As indicated earlier, Herder’s stadial anthropology sees the hymns of primitive societies dimly approaching God, in a kind of Burkean sublime that acknowledges an unending and fearfully powerful cosmos. The hymns of cultivated peoples recognize order and reason in the cosmos and address the author of that order, finally expressing humans’ natural desire for unification

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with God: “From You, through You, in You I am; to You I return again. You are everything, You have everything, You gave me everything; give me that which is noblest, to be like You” (297). Yet God is manifold as well as one, “a sea in which all perfections flow together; a midpoint from which all spokes stream” (297). Psalm singing reproduces and in a sense represents this concordia discors between infinite variety and simplicity, streaming-out and gathering-in, since humans both “pour out their hearts and gather together their reason” in song (297). Even in this sense, in the faculties that psalm singing unites, psalms begin to enact the reconciliatory elevation for which they plead. But to achieve sublime elevation requires a specific kind of music. It cannot be narrowly particular, like “theater” music representing particular people, words, or passions, and self-servingly staged to “make [worshippers] themselves visible” before a real or metaphorical “theatrical screen!” (314–15). It must model the harmony of infinite particulars that constitutes the All. In other words, sublime music is not “directed toward dramatic presentation [Vorstellung].” In church music there are “no persons, here nothing is represented [repräsentiert]”— with the Frenchified term marking a rejected version of representation (314). Music must represent believers to God in their capacities as general humans, not social personae or actors, so they can participate in a single glorified body. In sacrificing narrow representation, music gains generality: “It is voices that make themselves heard, and not persons; but all the voices of the world, from the voice of God, to the cry and sigh of every heart” (308). Not only does the depersonalized voice in worship speak for “all the voices of the world,” in worship God constantly addresses creation (309). Music again becomes a kind of unmediated mediator, being the way God speaks to the creature through the creature. Representation is transformed: without simply pointing beyond itself, music re-presents the congregation to God by standing for and offering that which is human or creaturely. Vocal music becomes “sacred music” only when performances representing an “individual person” (say, “Peter” or “Mary”) “become general chant, a word to all human hearts” and thus an infinite word of instruction or consolation, “God’s voice” (314–15). In some respects, Herder may seem surprisingly close to Kant here. The truly and specifically human—what Kant calls “personality”—is identified with a general capacity of each human, not the quirks and foibles of individuality.62 But while Kant aligns human personality with nonanimal qualities, Herder would extend personality to our bond with other creatures, as part of a song of creation. Cäcilie’s sublime also resembles Kant’s narrative economy, where imagination—an implicitly visual faculty of representation—is “sacrificed” to

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allow our brush with the infinite, an encounter that elevates the human as a whole by revealing his “supersensible vocation.” 63 But where Kant exchanges the products of imagination for a supersensible “negative presentation” of infinity, Herder exchanges negatively coded visual representations for sublime representations that participate in the infinite through sensible music.64 This chapter has emphasized sounds’ sublime particularity for Herder, showing why the musical sublime does not depend on music’s conceptualization as vague or indeterminate. But Cäcilie underscores the complementary importance of generality for Herder. Sound’s generality means freedom from fixed, concrete visual forms: theatrical music has “visible determination” but loses the “invisibility” that allows voices to “speak unmediatedly with our spirit and heart” (314). Sublime unification and generality are one side of a dialectic, already seen in the Abhandlung and Kalligone, where the fact that every body resounds uniquely meets the fact that every body resonates, to its own degree, with the whole universe.

Conclusion: A Dying Strain? Resonances with Herder from Hölderlin to Helmholtz The strange twists and turns of mediation are keynotes of Cäcilie. Cecilia, according to Herder’s essay, became a “sublime, respectable saint” only through a textual confusion in the Legenda aurea about music at her wedding, and the misguided ministrations of guilds of musicians, offering her “sacrifices that she would not have accepted on her wedding day, and as a saint of heaven could accept even less” (294, 292). These sacrifices culminated in myths of the music ode genre—about Alexanders, Timotheuses, and Orpheuses. Although still less truly Christian than the music guilds’ offerings, “Dryden’s, Pope [sic], Addison’s, Congreve’s odes for Cecilia’s Day” are nonetheless “masterpieces” that draw us toward the single, “sublime, enveloping enjoyment which only pure sacred music holds for our souls” (294–95). Historical and linguistic mediation create an ironic, indirect, and complex path to sublimity. The essay was influential. Apparently bouncing off Herder, Kleist’s novella St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music: A Legend (1810) famously revolved around the creation of a musical saint’s legend—this time concerning not Cecilia’s own music making but the violent conversion of four early modern iconoclasts, while listening to music in a cloister dedicated to the saint.65 Disturbed by his reading of Kant, Kleist presses harder than Herder on the tension in the sub-

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lime between mediation on one hand, and allegedly immediate and irrefutable experiences that envelope the soul on the other. His focus on the epistemologically unsettling power of legends and music (should they produce faith or skepticism about transcendent power?) might imply either his misreading of Herder as an enlightenment myth buster or his more pointed post-Kantian resistance to experiences that seem irrefutable and direct and to discourses that seem to inspire trust or even certainty. As this example suggests, the reception of Herder’s musical sublime was itself complex and mediated. The following sketches a little further the range of interactions and resonances with his work. Herder appended to Cäcilie his own music ode. It had first been published in Reichardt’s Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, appearing alongside Reichardt’s report on heart-shaking hymn singing in Zurich and a discussion of C.  P.  E. Bach’s sublime polychoral composition Heilig.66 Reichardt dreamed of a performance of Heilig to match that of Handel’s Messiah, as he had heard it in Westminster Abbey at Burney’s monumental Handel commemorations.67 Two numbers later his magazine featured a glowing review of Herder’s bête noire: Kant. Reichardt reproduced excerpts from the newly published third Critique and reflected on his personal debt to the philosopher (who for several years had educated the impoverished boy for free) and the Critique’s revolutionary potential for music.68 Reichardt reported that Kant had flatteringly “exhort[ed]” him to apply critical idealism practically to the arts.69 Whether Kant suspected music would yield a theory of the sublime is questionable. Yet Reichardt was not alone in making Kant’s chariness of music less an embargo on the musical sublime than a summons to music-critical exegesis and elaboration: four years later, Christian Friedrich Michaelis began to publish his sprawling, eclectic monograph Ueber den Geist der Tonkunst mit Rücksicht auf Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft (On the Spirit of Music with Reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgment), sometimes regarded as the first theorization of a Kantian musical sublime. If a Reichardt or Michaelis would likely resist Herder’s thinking, Herder’s stress on harmony and the mean, and uses of rationalist aesthetics, nonetheless resonates with other writers. In a series of aphorisms written around 1799, Friedrich Hölderlin elaborated elements of Peri hypsous consonant with classicizing technê or art, and at odds with Longinus’s dominant reception as an advocate of natural genius.70 Hölderlin presents the sublime as combining enthusiasm and feeling with sobriety, reflection, and measure, into a harmonious, explicitly musical whole.71 One impetus for his idiosyncratic sublime may lie in Schiller and Goethe’s warnings to him against losing his balance.72 But Hölderlin might equally be cast in a larger tradition of sublime moderation and

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harmony including Herder (whom Hölderlin met and read), Bodmer and Breitinger, and Schiller himself.73 The young Ludwig Tieck similarly argued that feeling was subordinate to self-reflective and unending thoughts in the sublime, an experience compatible with passions only when they remained within certain limits.74 E. T. A. Hoffmann took for granted the importance of reflection to the musical sublime.75 And while Herder’s accounts of mediation and “dialectics” are idiosyncratic, his desire to reconcile dichotomous aesthetics through music was shared in different ways by writers like Schiller, Nietzsche, and Eduard Mörike. The latter’s Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart on the Journey to Prague, 1856) turns on the pairing of the receptive beauty Eugenie, poised on the brink of married bliss, and the sublime creative genius Mozart, composing Don Giovanni in the shadow of death. Mörike’s novella, true in many ways to post-Kantian aesthetics, stressed sublime transgression, violence, and “self-destruction”: Mozart’s opera and its hero “tear” us “beyond” “the limits of human imagination . . . where we see and hear the supersensible.”76 Herder’s emphasis on peace, order, and particularity in the sublime continues to resonate with figures such as the groundbreaking acoustician Hermann von Helmholtz. In an 1857 lecture “Ueber die physiologischen Ursachen der musikalischen Harmonie” (On the Physiological Causes of Musical Harmony), Helmholtz tracked precise differences in “timbre” back to “differences in the form of soundwave” and investigated the way that a compound wave met the “bodily ear” as pulses, was analyzed into its component waves, and then represented to consciousness as a number of distinct sounds by the “mental ear.”77 This is precisely the sort of empirical analytic foundation for music aesthetics hoped for by Herder. Helmholtz quite explicitly inducted his popular audience into the wonders of acoustics through the sublime. Imagine, he invites us, “the overlapping of many different systems of waves” seen from the “most sublime” perspective of “a high point on the coast.”78 From “the distant horizon where, first, emerging from the steel-blue surface, white lines of foam betray the oncoming trains of waves, to the beach below our feet, where they mark their curves on the sand,” there “unfolds before the viewer a sublime image of immeasurable power and ever-changing diversity. Yet this does not confuse, but instead chains and raises the mind, as the eye easily recognizes in it order and law.” This is how we must imagine “the air of a concert hall or ballroom,” “intersected by a particolored throng of crossing wave systems” still more complicated than those the eyes could discern. Helmholtz’s rhetoric of sublime particularity involves detailing for his audience the “wide six-to-twelve-foot waves” of men’s

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voices, the “one-and-a-half-to-three-foot” waves of women’s voices, and the “ little curls” raised by the “rustling of skirts.” 79 This is Kalligone’s “sublime of higher order” shifted from the sea storm to the salon. This larger context casts into relief not only the flexibility of the musical sublime as a discourse but also the deep roots and high stakes of Herder’s denunciation of the Kantian sublime through music. Just as Bodmer and Breitinger’s essentially anti-musical sublime was transformed by writers like Klopstock, so too Kant’s indeterminate, unrepresentable, unmusical sublime indirectly helped music become “the most romantic of the arts, because only the infinite is its object.”80 Grounded in a substantial tradition that already made music sublime, Herder’s work—itself sometimes transformed beyond recognition by later völkisch enthusiasts—reminds us that, if Kant laid the foundations for the dominant subsequent discourse of musical sublimity, then it was only on top of the rubble of imposing edifices he could not quite obliterate. That is, not only was Kant’s sublime transformed in its reception; it also never succeeded in monopolizing or refounding from scratch the discourse of the sublime. We still too often accept Kant’s terms of reference, particularly in aligning the empirical and representable with the visible. If Kant’s subject enacts a kind of “iconoclasm” in the sublime, leaving behind “presentation” and the “rubble of the empirical” to soar with reason, then the empirical must be synonymous with the visual and iconic.81 The aural would be neither here nor there, Herder’s critique largely irrelevant. By making sound paradigmatic for empirical sensations, Herder more radically undermines Kant’s sublime. Herder’s insistence that music is an art of measure, order, and form unsettles the very meaning of terms like iconoclasm and idolatry, pointing to a world where breaking visual images does not quite mean breaking the eidos, the form or shape. The centrality of sound to Herder’s epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, and aesthetics, then, underpins Herder’s sublime and its intervention in contemporary debates. Within these debates, Herder forms a fulcrum between two dominant conceptions of music. As a “science of good measuring,” music articulated relationships and mediated between different orders of things.82 A newer view valorized music’s nonimitative status: unattached to particular verbal or visual referents, music becomes a sign of an obscure infinite—uninterpretable, unthinkable, and therefore sublime. The best music was “pure” or “absolute” instrumental music, freed from the bondage of rhetoric and representation. The musical sublime clearly includes and exceeds this model: music in the long eighteenth century could be sublime because it articulated relationships within the infinite, rather than dissolving them; because it expressed and clarified human

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passions and, indeed, allowed “things” to sing themselves, communicating as rapidly and irresistibly as Longinus’s bolt of lightning, rather than leaving experience obscure and indeterminate; and because it modeled resolution and harmony, not irresolvability. Herder’s writings thus illuminate important alternative histories of music and the sublime. In turn, his musical sublime helps question the “myth” that Herder belongs to an “irrational” Counter-Enlightenment. Herder worked to counter polarizations of rationality and passion, self-isolation and enthusiastic self-dissolution. Music is for him an art of mediated immediacy, of measure in the humanly immeasurable cosmos, and of beautiful sublimity. It stands at the foundation of our knowledge of the world as reverberating bodies, and at the ends of our knowledge in reflective enthusiasm for the “erhabenste Schönste” (sublimest most-beautiful-one), the maker of the “hall of eternal harmonies.”83

chapter 6

The Terror of the Infinite Thomas De Quincey’s Reverberations Some minds stand nearer to . . . the original nature in man, are truer than others to the great magnet in our dark planet. Minds that are impassioned on a more colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, and more extensive in the scale of their vibrations . . . will tremble to greater depths from a fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of undulations. —Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de profundis (1845)

The late Romantic Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) had an abiding fascination with “stunning” blows “com[ing] round again and again by reverberating shocks,” with “vibrations,” “undulations,” and oscillations running through trembling bodies, and through “dark,” “colossal,” obscure spaces. His evocations of sublime violence, darkness, and obscure grandeur, coupled with nervelike vibration, indicate how entrenched a Burkean sublime had become in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. But De Quincey’s promiscuous imagery of oscillations in planetary and animal magnetism—or in water, paths of labyrinths, birds’ flight, mathematical curves, tendrils, swings, careering mail coaches, and, of course, in music—also testifies to the prevalence in nineteenth-century science and culture of “energetic wave-movements,” movements “that fill the whole of space and make only a gradual distinction” between fluid and “solid bodies,” interiors and exteriors.1 As we have seen, since the seventeenth century

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music had been crucial in formulating such wave models, and in imagining them not merely as energetic but sublime. In light of this long history, this chapter examines musical motifs, models, and memories in De Quincey’s sublime, focusing on the 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and its 1856 revisions; The English Mail-Coach: Or the Glory of Motion (1849); and Suspiria de profundis (1845). Recently identified as a music reviewer for the Edinburgh Saturday Post in 1827–28, De Quincey engaged more deeply with music than current scholarship might suggest.2 His evocations of aural reverberation in particular speak to three concerns of this chapter: to interrogate the function of repetition in the musical sublime; to explore how sublime music figures and triggers the workings of memory and dreams in De Quincey’s vast autobiographical project; and to use his “reversionary interests” in his own and others’ pasts to review the Anglo-German discourse of the musical sublime that this book has traced over the long eighteenth century (xv.173). De Quincey bears close comparison with the focus of the previous chapter, Johann Gottfried Herder. Taken together, they represent diametrically opposed responses to infinity during the period that this concept became indispensable to the sublime. While for Herder infinity was infinitely beautiful (and therefore sublime), for De Quincey it raises sublime terror. An avid if horrified reader of Kant and a self-styled connoisseur of German literature and philosophy, De Quincey largely subscribed to the sublime from which Herder dissented: a post-Kantian sublime in which both the cosmos and the transcendental subject are infinitely obscure, unrepresentable, and irresolvable.3 He also inherited that view of music as amimetic and indefinite with which Herder struggled in Cäcilie. For De Quincey, like many post-Kantians, a terrifying infinity of power, darkness, space, time, and in his case guilt and suffering both triggers and characterizes the sublime. Since the whole problem with infinity for empirical subjects is that they cannot apprehend it except as an indefinitely large “shock” to their finite capacities, these experiences of vastness and excess are tied up with what Burke called the “artificial infinite,” an indefinite “uniform succession” of impressions which the Enquiry approached through sound.4 De Quincey helps us to play out the musical implications of this artificial infinite. Indefiniteness is profoundly sublime for De Quincey: “No dignity is perfect,” he explains, “which does not . . . ally itself with the indeterminate and mysterious”; and perfect dignity invests its bearers with “seasonable terrors.”5 Music frequently evokes indeterminate power and succession. So in the Confes-

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sions, the “Pains of Opium” are exhibited by a dream commencing with familiar music, a music like the opening of [Handel’s] Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march—of infinite cavalcades filing off—and the tread of innumerable armies. . . . Somewhere, I knew not where—somehow, I knew not how—by some beings, I knew not whom—a battle, a strife, an agony was conducting,—was evolving like a great drama, or a piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I . . . had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. . . . Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened.6 After much tumult, De Quincey glimpses, and must immediately part with, obscurely identified loved ones: “Everlasting farewells! and with a sigh, . . . the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!” (ii.74). Music has a cascade of overlapping roles here: summoning up a specific piece associated with venerable vastness, with national and religious grandeur; forming an analogy for the indecipherable yet pregnant nonverbal logic and narrative shape of dreams; conveying the irresistible sympathy with power characteristic of the sublime and congruent with the action of sympathetic strings; imagining the indefinite transmission and repetition of impulses through the phenomena of echo and reverberation. The dream escalates Burke’s artificial sublime, seeing us tortured not simply by an indefinite series but by an indefinite series of things themselves “eternal.” The infinite’s connotations of unresolved unendingness are confounded with connotations of absoluteness, a kind of finality. Such difficult relationships between repetition and finality are key to this chapter. Although bound up with indefiniteness and obscurity, De Quincey’s musical sublime also complicates the post-Kantian sublime. Alongside obscurity, music stages moments of infinite clarity, discovery, and revelation. These moments, which would be sources of pleasure and elevation for Kantian Reason, are frequently filled with a terror equal to that accompanying obscurity and overmastering. Thus at the conclusion of The Mail-Coach, in a dream that strikingly recalls but reverses the emphasis at the close of Confessions, an apocalyptic scene unfolds: “Then rose the agitation, spreading through the infinite cathedral, to its agony; then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The

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golden tubes of the organ . . . threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir and antichoir were filling fast with unknown voices. Thou also, Dying Trumpeter! . . . didst enter the tumults: trumpet and echo—farewell love, and farewell anguish—rang through the dreadful sanctus” (xvi.448). Music now offers the possibility of “complet[ion],” of unifying opposites in all-encompassing harmony, much as it had for Herder. Choir answers antichoir, and the very lack of clear representation that makes the individual voices in each choir “unknown” might also make the voices represent all creation, as in Herder’s Cäcilie. The trumpet call of “farewell love” is answered by its inverted echo of “farewell anguish,” resembling antiphonal pairings like Klopstock’s song of “judgment” and “mercy.” But where Klopstock paired God’s paradoxically complementary actions in salvation history, De Quincey emphasizes paradoxical human “passion”: the feared end of the passionate bond of love also implies the desired end of passio (suffering). Meanwhile, the shadowy “everlasting farewells” of the Confessions become “farewell love.” The phrase is ambiguous, meaning either a kind of love (the love of parting) or an action performed upon love (farewell to love). On either construction music in this passage aspires to totality and singularity. The trumpet ringing through “the dreadful sanctus” signals finality, or at least the sense of an ending, transforming the horn of the text’s eponymous mail coach into the apocalyptic last trump—a music that has resonated through this book from Dryden’s “last and dreadful hour” in chapter 1. The trump heralds a totalizing moment of revelation and completion. And yet—to listen to the “whisper[]” of dissent that De Quincey identifies with his own “Pariah heart” in this scene (xvi.448), and that is rarely absent from his writings—the passage nonetheless disturbs the traditional conclusion of sublimity in inflation and relief. It remains an “enter[ing]” into barely contained dread, threat, and agitation, a melodramatic glut of passion more than passion exceeded. Complicating still further this picture of a wavering tumultuous sublime, as we will see, music in the Confessions also triggers and models a second variety of the sublime, a pleasurable harmony resembling the super-passionate tranquility explored in Chapter 2, or Herder’s beautiful sublimity. The post-Kantian or Romantic sublime is thus eroded from without and within by music. The question remains open as to whether the unruly sublimes sounding out against each other in De Quincey’s texts ultimately subsist in a paradoxical concordia discors, or whether some only apparently sublime motifs are simply countersubjects of the true sublime, feinted at, superseded, or swallowed up in the final restatement of one triumphal theme. De Quincey’s unstable coordination of

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different varieties of the musical sublime—drawing as it does on a contested preexisting discourse—offers a fitting emblem of, and conclusion to, Resounding the Sublime.

Passionate Vibrations: Suspiria and The English Mail-Coach The first section of this chapter focuses on two oscillating aural lines in De Quincey’s writings, the sound wave (in Suspiria) and the melodic lines of the fugue (in The Mail-Coach), reading them in relation to an indefinite sublime that constructs an indefinitely reverberating autobiographical subject. The wavy lines that pervaded nineteenth-century thinking drew in important ways on eighteenth-century imaginings of beauty or life as a curving line. In music, Burke and others saw beauty in the pleasingly gentle undulations of melodic lines.7 In art, William Hogarth influentially made the ogee “line of beauty” and “line of grace” cornerstones of pleasure. “By its waving and winding at the same time different ways,” Hogarth’s wavy line “leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety,” and “by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (though but a single line) varied contents.”8 The paradox of stable change or continuous variety that Hogarth identified in his wavy line also marks De Quincey’s evocations of music, and his descriptions of ambivalently sublime dreams and memories (Kantian and anti-Kantian, triumphant and irresolute).9 By the time De Quincey began writing, the logics of wavy lines had already been elaborated by writers such as Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, and German Romantic theorists of arabesque, digression, and irony.10 English Romantics, too, seized on the subversive potential of wavy lines of beauty, transforming them into dizzying, infinite lines of sublimity.11 This transformation coincided with an increasing pathologization of strong vibrations around 1800, a pathologization that conflated overstimulation of the nerves with the frenetic movement of modernity, and that generated anxieties about “ner vous music.”12 This is De Quincey’s inheritance. De Quincey’s sublime wavy lines vividly illustrate Erlmann’s thesis that aural vibrations on one hand threatened the autonomous “modern” subject supposed to compose itself in distanced reflection, and on the other hand modeled reflection and subjectivity themselves.13 Figures recalling undulating musical runs or sound waves allow De Quincey to both articulate the delightful terrors of and stage a tenuous solution to problems of subjectivity in post-Kantian and Romantic thought: problems about creating an autonomous subject who is still

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connected with something other than itself; one whose belief in material causes and history does not condemn it to determinism and repetition, and whose belief in moral freedom has some grounding in observable phenomena.14 Kant valued the sublime precisely because it promised to indirectly represent such a subject, to grant aesthetic knowledge of our connection to an other wise imperceptible and indemonstrable sphere of morality and freedom. Yet while Kant’s sublime reaches a firm conclusion, the “both/and” construction of the sublime analyzed in this chapter seems characteristically De Quinceyan, keeping various positions in play because each holds its own pains and its own pleasures. Wavy lines, interpretable as swinging wildly between mutually exclusive poles or as subsuming opposites into a single form, are well placed to figure this approach. Explicit evocations of sound and music in this context belong to a family of sound-wave-like lines that are used to characterize De Quincey’s psychology and autobiography, exemplified by the colossal “vibrations” of “truer,” more “original” minds from great blows in Suspiria, and the “longer curve of undulations” by which these minds “come round” (xv.129). In the scenario presented in this passage, every part of a long life—its apparently random events and selfchosen paths—might resolve into that long “curve of undulations” by which the mind returns to itself. This offers a comforting unity in diversity, perhaps. Nonetheless, such all-encompassing unity might also deprive the subject of liberty and deny him the chance of change (how do we escape from the return of shocking memories?). Moreover, De Quincey’s imagery paradoxically makes the truest and most original minds those most easily altered and displaced; those, following nerve theory, that vibrate most when struck; in short, the least self-consistent. Can such subjects, displaced by vibrations and traveling forward along time’s line, ever fully “come round” to themselves? The peaks and troughs of this kind of curve, we are told, structure De Quincey’s entire autobiography: “Fast as you reach the lowest point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of corresponding ascent” (xv.169). This “fiery course” is, of course, a sublime one, moving through autobiographical moments of abject astonishment, transport, and elevation, tying together pain and pleasure. Within this sublime, music mirrors opium’s role as an overwhelming yet ultimately elevating sublime power. During De Quincey’s first opium dreams at Oxford, “the agitations of . . . childhood reopened in strength” and “swept in upon the brain . . . under the separate and the concurring inspirations of opium” (xv.169). The text maintains that opium did not create these glorious dreams

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but was only the “coefficient” of mental records and powers (xv.169). Yet this limiting of opium’s powers does not quite regain agency for the narrator: his childhood agitations were caused by his sister Elizabeth’s death—in its way as foreign and murderous as opium but equally woven into the fabric of the narrator’s subjectivity—and it is these agitations that, as if of their own volition, “reopen[] in strength” and overwhelm his mind (xv.169). External yet internal, excluded from and reincluded into the subject, this power parallels the relationship between music and the sublime in the long eighteenth century. Appropriately, music in these opium dreams sits somewhere between a created, conceptual analogue for the experiences of shock, grief, and elevation surrounding Elizabeth’s death, and a given, empirical memory of those experiences, heard in the music of the funeral liturgy. In recounting Elizabeth’s funeral, Suspiria’s narrator called for one funeral sentence always to be sung, “and by the full choir.” This was Revelation 14:13: “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth blessed are the dead.” The apocalyptic interjection into the liturgy and the heavenly voice within it were an “awful burst of heavenly trumpets” with “a sublime effect” (xv.154).15 Music here has a sacral function, heightening, solemnizing, and dramatizing the connection with the divine promised by the funeral liturgy as a whole. Music with cognate effects reappears in De Quincey’s opium dreams: “Once again, arose the swell of the anthem—the burst of the Hallelujah chorus—the storm—the trampling movement of the choral passion—the agitation of my own trembling sympathy—the tumult of the choir—the wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now in Oxford, all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze” (xv.170). To stage its strange mediation between the given and created, self and other, this passage activates the well-established sublimity of Handel, whose “concluding Chorusses” in the Messiah “fill’d” the ear “with such a glow of harmony, as leaves the mind in a kind of heavenly extasy.”16 The Hallelujah Chorus seems like an intervention from another world, sweeping in with “wrath” and “trampling,” and changing “I, that wallowed” into “he that rose up.” The music’s ravishing, violent movement leaves ambiguous the place of the listener in relation to sublime power: Is he trampling or trampled? Expressing wrath or subject to it? The logic of resonance helps create this ambiguity. De Quincey’s “trembling” cannot be understood only as fear and trembling in response to death or to the Messiah: as “trembling sympathy,” De Quincey’s response is also a participation in power,

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recalling the vibration of sympathetic strings on specially framed instruments like the viola d’amore, which resonate without being struck when another string is plucked.17 Transformed into a vibrating string by the agitations of heavenly music, it is no wonder that De Quincey, like Klopstock’s liturgical subject in Die Chöre, “rose up” with this music “to the clouds.” Notice that the climax of elevation and union in this passage shifts to visual vocabulary (“sunny,” “haze”), as if implying that music, as a progressively unfolding form, cannot describe a static moment or totality. Yet more subtly the unfolding musical narrative of Messiah remains in play. De Quincey’s final vision is of the living and the dead united through their common reception by “heavenly beings,” who “sympathize equally with sorrow that grovels and sorrow that soars.” This union and elevation echoes the Hallelujah Chorus, which announces the unification of dead and living, heaven and earth, when “The kingdom of this world . . . become[s] the kingdom of our Lord” at the end of time (Revelation 11:15). This narrative and the musical dimension of De Quincey’s elevation are amplified by an association with the funeral sentence earlier identified as “sublime,” the only funeral sentence taken from Revelation, the final book of the Bible and its vision of finality. This is not to say that totality has the final word. The point is that the relationship of music to sublime totality in De Quincey’s opium dream is ambiguous. Through its spread-out musical associations and explicit reminders of repetition (“Once again,” “Once more”), Suspiria sets elevation and unifying resolution in the context of an unresolved recurring pattern, a dizzying series of “reopened” sublimes. These are positioned as “remould[ings]” of an originary childhood scene, when De Quincey fell into a “trance” upon seeing Elizabeth’s corpse (xv.170). The scene itself only becomes originary when it sprouts its apparent repetitions: incurring debt at a bookshop; the loss of Anne, his companion in London; “tamper[ing]” with opium at Oxford; new deaths and debts, repeated agitations and vibrations in the narrator’s lifeline (xv.169). The hesitation between musical resolution and irresolution in this sublime is heightened a few years later in what De Quincey’s calls a “Dream-Fugue” on the “theme of sudden death” (xvi.442) at the close of The English Mail-Coach (1849). “Fragment of music too stern,” he demands, “heard once and heard no more, what aileth thee that thy deep rolling chords come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after thirty years have lost no element of horror?” (xvi.443). The fragmentary theme referred to derives from an experience around 1806, when the narrator patronized mail coaches—vehicles carrying people,

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private news, national victories and defeats, and glorious state power in the Napoleonic Wars. One night, the coach almost runs down a young woman and her beau. Like the couple’s carriage, “all alive with tremblings and shiverings” “from the thundering blow” the mail coach gave it—“as if it sympathised with human horror”—and like the woman who “rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose,” this event is a blow to the narrator’s mind that reverberates through his dreams (xvi.442). This reverberation is figured as a fugue. Deriving from fuga, “flight,” the fugue runs on the principle of the chase—an accidental chase in The MailCoach—with a statement of a theme by the dux (leader) repeated by its comes (followers).18 When De Quincey describes the young woman being “followed” through the “persecutions of fugues” in his dreams, he is making a Latinate play on the involutions of fugue form and the complications of guilt in his own text. The root of persecute is persequor, to follow along, meaning the woman is pursued (followed) through the pursuits (persecutions) of a pursuit (fugue); sequor is, moreover, a deponent verb, passive in form but active in meaning, mimicking the narrator’s paralysis as he hurtles toward the victim of the mail, a sublime and nationally unifying organ whose violence the narrator discovers that he has assumed along with its power. An imposing, venerable musical form for nineteenth-century audiences, the fugue combines analyses of a theme and strict rules of note-against-note counterpoint with notable freedoms. In contrast to relatively closed forms like ternary arias or minuets, fugues are open-ended. After an initial exposition, restatements, fragments, and potentially endless metamorphoses of the theme can occur at any time and in any voice, interspersed with as much or as little foreign material as desired, in an indefinite number of episodes. Fugue-style writing can also appear anywhere in larger compositions, as, for instance, in the Hallelujah Chorus, where interjections of homophonic “hallelujahs” and rising and falling lines of unison melody are interspersed with contrapuntal fugal writing. We might say that the Dream Fugue’s structure—a numbered series of reworkings of a theme—recalls the fugue’s rigorous episodic structure, while the theme’s place in De Quincey’s wider life (its eruption “at intervals” over “thirty years”) works like the unpredictable reemergence of themes or of fugal writing in a larger work. Strict determination and indeterminacy thus intermingle. While the extent of successive fugal interjections is indefinite, their single theme offers a way of imagining unification. The Mail-Coach also imagines an end to the series: in

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a climactic dream of celebration and averted sacrifice, De Quincey claims that the “fugues and the persecution of fugues; . . . dreams, and the dreadful resurrections . . . in dreams” are only precursors to the moment when God finally “record[s] and emblazon[s] the endless resurrections of his love!” (xvi.449). This places indefinite repetition under the sign of ultimate apocalyptic resurrection.19 Still, a needling uncertainty remains in the plural “resurrections”: are endless resurrections really more final and singular than the “dreadful resurrections” of dreams that we’ve just read? Such compounded uncertainty is unsettling but also productive in De Quincey’s writings. In his texts, harmony, rest, coherence, and the overmastering power of totality are frequently just as problematic as dissonance, restless movement, or incoherence.20 At the opening of the Dream-Fugue, for instance, the young woman’s “rapture of panic” is a horrible stasis: her “Ionic form . . . with arching foot,” “eyes upraised,” and “clasped adoring hands,” is like a basrelief figure on “tombs,” “praying, for the trumpet’s call to rise from dust for ever” (xvi.443). The horror of frozen life “wait[s]” to be released and redeemed by music and movement. Yet the very next sentence recoils from such unceasing, uncontrollable energy: the vision “start[s] back,” “reel[s] away—like a shrivelling scroll . . . before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind” (xvi.443). The need to flee, the helpless “reel[ing],” the overwhelming speed of the pursuing fire, make stasis devoutly to be wished. Now we desire an end to the fugal principle that means a “fragment of music” cannot “die” but rises and sinks interminably with all its “horror” (xvi.443). Moments of sublime unification and clarity are terrifying in The MailCoach because unified power turns out to be unified violence, and because these moments reveal the victims and collateral damage of sublime power, and our inevitable culpability if we identify with it. English music—Handel’s Coronation Anthems, the Messiah, Anglican funeral music—belongs to this terrifying sublime as much as do English sovereignty and English letters. In the Napoleonic period about which De Quincey so frequently writes, and in the music of Handel which he evokes at such crucial moments, it is tempting to call both English music and English sovereignty Anglo-German. However we locate this sublime in (trans)national terms, in temporal terms it has clear affinities with the twentieth century. The violence and terror adhering to unity, consonance, and clarity give this sublime an affinity with postmodern sublimes, which, framed by the Kantian sublime, typically construed harmony as a violence against difference. But, as we shall see, echoes of earlier and contrary engagements with sublime harmony are equally crucial to De Quincey.

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Dreadful Harmony: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Toward the climax of “The Pleasures of Opium,” De Quincey goes to the opera. In his early days, he explains, he timed his “debauch[es] of opium” to coincide with Giuseppina Grassini’s performances at the King’s Theatre (ii.47). “The choruses were divine to hear: and when Grassini appeared in some interlude, . . . and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache, at the tomb of Hector, &c. I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the Paradise of opiumeaters, can have had half the pleasure I had” (ii.48). A florilegium of musical opinions is grafted onto this anecdotal stock, followed by the claim: “A chorus, &c. of elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life—not, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed” (ii.48). Three elements in this passage, one of De Quincey’s fullest declarations on music, need to be unpicked: the vision of “hazy abstraction”; the appearance of Grassini; and the music theories between them. What kind of sublime emerges here? De Quincey’s richly worked musical tapestry (the “arras”) clearly resembles the “sunny glorifying haze” and “unity” of his music-infused opium dreams in Suspiria. Where my analysis of Suspiria focused on the instability of this unity, given its narrative position within an indefinite series, the following analysis emphasizes De Quincey’s reactivation of the rhetoric of harmony and stability within the discourse of the musical sublime. These, I think, are two sides of one (counterfeit) coin, the first side displaying a patina of difference covering the base metal of unity, the second scratches of difference under the golden haze of unity. Both scenes recall a period c. 1804–6, and they betray similar uncertainties about the temporality of perfect elevation. Is diachronic sound superseded by synchronic vision in the moment of sublime mastery? That is, is hearing sacrificed to sight in a way parallel to Kant’s sacrifice of imagination to reason, and mimicking Kant’s sacrifice of those lower sensual data presented by imagination (here: music; the female singer portraying Andromache; empirical anecdote) to the ideas of reason (here: the visual “text” of the tapestry; the male listener portraying his own life; abstract transcendence)? Or, on the contrary, does musical listening—and especially “elaborate harmony,” which presents multiple notes and melodies simultaneously, like threads snaking through a textile—spill over into visual phantasia, enlarging the domain of hearing and

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fusing the arts, as in Klopstock’s Der Bund? The parallels with Kant’s sublime are compelling, and the passage plausibly plays with the nexus of femaleness, music, temporal flux, and matter outlined above. But I incline to read this passage as concerned with incursions of time into space (and vice versa), and with a related mingling of change and tumult with stasis and peace. Music’s double coding, its association with both sensuous feeling and supersensible harmony, is instrumental here. Speaking in favor of this reading, which resists equating sublimity with visuality and transcendence of the flesh and history, is one small textual detail. The listener’s life is not abstracted in the sense of being purely a schema or distanced object; rather, it is “incarnated” by music. Only painful “incidents” are abstracted, perhaps being schematized and re-presented to the subject as pleasing discords within the harmony of life. Alongside connotations of sacredness, “incarnation” of course emphasizes physical perception and presence. This helps make the presentation of life in the opera scene an aesthetic presentation, in the empirical and post-Kantian sense, not simply a concept or idea. Like a Kantian aesthetic judgment, De Quincey’s experience of music claims to reconcile immediate, “empirical” perception (including perception of suffering) with supersensible ideas (like that of unity). It also fuses the given (sound) with the made (music), creating a version of the Romantic dialectic between what we “halfcreate, | And what perceive,” a dialectic preserving the subject from solipsism at one extreme and heteronomy at the other.21 Yet where Wordsworth discovered a “sense sublime” of “the still, sad music of humanity” in apparently solitary, visual contemplation of the “green earth” (“Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” ll.95, 92, 106), Confessions twists the Wordsworthian sublime. It stages a literal hearing of music, occasioned by the most refined-cum-corrupt artificial pleasures of London. Its sublime reconciliation of reception and creation is aided by opium, which “greatly increas[es] the activity of the mind,” and is enacted in music, a phenomenon generated, according to De Quincey, by “the re-action of the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind)” (ii.45–46).22 If we imagine the visit to the opera in extended conversation with De Quincey’s Romantic elders (and sometime friends and mentors), the passage and its situation in “The Pleasures of Opium” open up further. De Quincey’s presentation of music as an intellectual pleasure recalls Coleridge’s then-recent Biographia literaria (1817). Coleridge wrote that followers of Hartley had extended Hartley’s stringlike nerves to describe all consciousness as resulting purely from external physical stimuli. Hartley thereby (unacceptably for

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Coleridge) reduced thought to a passive byproduct of sensation. Hartley’s followers, Coleridge continued, had now abandoned this materialist and heteronomous model in favor of a theory congruent with the creation of music by the aeolian harp: consciousness was “a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp: though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous.”23 Coleridge’s own rejection of Hartley was more radical: “For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?”24 The form perceived by the active mind in music was thus identical with its ontological status as music. Note the shifts here: from music as vibratory matter acting on vibratable nerves (music as overwhelming sensuality), to music as interplay between matter and mind (music involving relationship or reconciliation), to music as essentially mental (music as perceived ratio). These deployments of music to imagine consciousness underscore once more music’s flexibility in modeling perception and subjectivity in the long eighteenth century—and so in the discourse of the sublime, as earlier chapters have noted. Coleridge’s interest in German idealism is also evident in his favored perception-based definition of music, something shared with De Quincey. Interestingly, Kantian influence was equally evident in Coleridge’s rejection of Herder’s sublime. Around 1804 Coleridge wrote in a copy of Kalligone: “We call an object sublime, in relation to which the exercise of Comparison is suspended; while, that object is most beautiful, which in the highest perfection sustains[,] while it satisfies[,] the Comparing Power.”25 Since no harmony exists without comparison or relationships, there is, implicitly, no musical sublime in this phase of Coleridge’s thought, and merely a Burkean-Kantian aural sublime. This is borne out by Coleridge’s account of Christmas in Germany in 1798: “There was a storm of wind; during the whole night, such were the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice, that they have left a conviction on my mind, that there are sounds more sublime than any sight can be, more absolutely suspending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing the minds self-consciousness in its total attention to the object working upon it.”26 It should be said that engagement with German idealism did not necessitate such thinking. Henry Crabb Robinson, who undertook perhaps the most extensive study of German philosophy among English Romantics, recorded in his lecture notes on Schelling’s lectures on the Philosophy of Art a variant of the well-known Leibnizian dictum, “Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animae” (music is a secret arithmetic activity of the soul which is unaware that it is counting).27 Robinson’s variant, “Musica est raptus

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animae se nescientis numerare” (music is a rapture of the soul which is unaware that it is counting), hints lightly at the vocabulary of the sublime, and of the elevation of the soul through number that had been a feature of Neoplatonic and rationalist musical thought.28 De Quincey, like Coleridge, differs from Herder and was drawn to idealism. But he does not share Coleridge’s emphasis on the cognitive “brain freeze” of the sublime or pit harmony against sublimity. Indeed, the Confessions marks its distance from Coleridge as well as Wordsworth, even at the cost of consistency. De Quincey dissembles his connections with any contemporary musical thinking, insisting on his independence (“I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature: it is a passage in the Religio Medici of Sir T. Brown,” ii.48). Moreover, he self-contradictorily distances himself from the view that music is necessarily an immaterial mental pleasure, as Coleridge had implied: “Music is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure,” he claims, “according to the temperament of him who hears it.” This claim strategically separates De Quincey’s opium pleasures from the externally identical, purely physical pleasures of opium-eating Turks or “Barbarians,” a burden of this section of Confessions. But the claim furthermore resonates with contemporary equivocations about the nature of music, like Kant’s hesitation in the third Critique. Rather reluctantly including music among the beaux arts, as opposed to sensually pleasing arts, Kant reflects that only our pleasure in the subconscious activity of synthesizing the manifold pulses of musical vibrations into a single musical sound could really justify this categorization. Yet, he notes, one cannot easily verify that our basic pleasure in music truly derives from subconscious activity, not from passive physical reception.29 Such uncertainties are useful to the Confessions. Its ironic tone and waverings between celebration and condemnation of the confessing subject, and of opium, thrive on the sense that music (and with it opium) may be a basely luxuriant physical pleasure after all, and that a grave—if sublime—transgression is committed by the opium-eating operagoer. Still stronger than De Quincey’s appropriations of Coleridge are those of Wordsworth, a trenchant deplorer of opium eating. De Quincey first buys opium on Oxford Street “near ‘the stately Pantheon,’ (as Mr Wordsworth has obligingly called it),” a phrase from Wordsworth’s “Power of Music” (1806) quoted four times in close succession (ii.42).30 As Grevel Lindop observes, the quotations align opium with music.31 Extending his observation, we might read De Quincey’s defense of his opiated opera pleasures, just slightly later in the Confessions, as belonging to a subterranean riposte to Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s ode plays on music’s legendary powers in order to depict a group of

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working-class listeners irresistibly drawn to a blind fiddler.32 Its register sits awkwardly between, on the one hand, condescending sympathy with the simple listeners—virtuously “deaf ” to the “roar” and acquisitive rush of the city surrounding them, almost like aesthetic subjects absorbed in non-utilitarian, disinterested pleasure—and, on the other hand, suspicion of the seductive “sway[]” of music: workers are “caught” in a “net,” and their “time runs to waste”; the absorbed listener is easy prey for “a thief ”; the “one-pennied Boy” profligately (or charitably?) spends his penny on the fiddler (ll.41–43, 6, 18–20, 23, 28).33 Above all, music robs the audience of agency. Suspending their tasks, listeners stop in their tracks as if “in a dream,” or involuntarily bend their bodies to the fiddler’s tunes (l.42). The parallel idea that opium makes us passive is precisely what De Quincey sets out to disprove in his opera reminiscence: “It will be seen, that . . . opium did not move me to seek solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or . . . torpid . . . self-involution” (ii.47). In this context, the broader role of music in the Confessions comes into focus. Arguing against common opinion that opium cannot “intoxicate” like alcohol—while “wine disorders the mental faculties, opium . . . introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony” (ii.44)—De Quincey draws on the tradition of a harmonious musical sublime. Like John Dennis’s sublime, De Quincey’s opium effects a “healthy restoration” to “antediluvian” spiritual and bodily “equipoise” (ii.44). In summing up his case after the opera scene, De Quincey admits that “in the divinest state” of opium enjoyment even music, most ethereal of physically derived pleasures, becomes “too sensual and gross” (ii.50). What replaces audible music can be read as a kind of allegory of music, an evocation of harmony resonating with musica mundana (cosmic music) and musica humana (music in man). In this scene, the summative passage in “Pleasures of Opium,” De Quincey watches the sea and the distant town of Liverpool and sees in “reverie” the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. . . . [T]he tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended. . . . Here were . . . motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms: infinite activity, infinite repose. (ii.51)

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De Quincey’s speculative music here is structured by paradoxical concordia discors, and recalls the super-passionate, stable pleasures of the Lucretian sublime familiar from earlier chapters. Granted, this is not an audible sublime, but it is arguably a musical one nonetheless. The scene replays in a new, inaudible key the “hazy” harmony of individual life experienced in musica instrumentalis, in visits to the opera, where life’s “passions” were “exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed.” The scene risks undoing De Quincey’s earlier claim by revealing the opium eater in solipsistic “solitude” and “inactivity,” like the “stupid” opiumeating “Turks” (ii.47). But the intervening scene of constructive mental pleasure at the opera helps to deflect this conclusion, not only by distracting us from the text’s near-contradictions, but also by evoking through music a theory of stillness that is not “torpid,” and of solitude not “self-involut[ed]” but aesthetically, physically, and metaphysically engaged with the world. This move strategically appropriates older discourses that passed easily between music as physical sound and as ratio. The opera scene had praised Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (c. 1635), “remarkable for its sublimity” of style (ii.48). Browne claimed in the relevant passage that even secular music filled him with “devotion.” He then evoked a version of musica speculativa, calling music a “Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, . . . such a melody to the eare, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God. I will not say with Plato, the Soule is an Harmony, but harmonicall, and hath its neerest sympathy unto musicke.”34 In De Quincey’s opera pleasures, the subject enjoys music as the supersensible in sensible form; his solitary “reverie” offers the more divine pleasure of supersensible harmony. The fantasy is that such a sublime reconciles empirical nature (perceived through sight in De Quincey’s reverie), a harmonious soul, and harmony in the order of thing, raising us Scipio-like above local moments in order to enjoy all of time in its plenitude, yet apparently without mystically or enthusiastically escaping history.35 The emphasis in the Confessions on harmony, sensible or supersensible, may seem incompatible with a modern sublime of discord, irresolvability, and indeterminacy, and to appeal instead to beauty—characterized for Kant by harmony between the faculties and apparent harmony between nature and mind. But within the longer history of the musical sublime, we can see De Quincey drawing on different strands of the discourse to make sublimity a meta-aesthetic domain. Where beauty is instantly harmonious, this sublimity includes consonance and dissonance, absorbing discord into a super-harmony like the concor-

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dia discors. Music in the opera scene and surrounding passages aestheticizes and so claims to redeem life, giving back a sequence of disparate experiences in the shape of a unified whole (the chorus’s “elaborate harmony”); “subliming” passions to grant disinterested pleasure in one’s own sufferings; and suspending the action of life in a way that allows an infinite play of thoughts and feelings unattached to determinate concepts. From this perspective, De Quincey’s aestheticization is exemplarily “modern”: music by 1821 had become an aesthetic object par excellence, its weakness in Cartesian semantic theories and imitative artistic paradigms being recuperated as post-Kantian strength. What seems distinctive in Confessions is the intensity with which this meta-aesthetic sublime with its super-harmony at once promises and undermines totalization: the “reverie” is the conclusion to “The Pleasures of Opium,” but its counterpart, “The Pains of Opium,” undercuts its conclusiveness, incorporating tranquil meta-harmony into an even larger concordia discors including the agitated dream of Handel’s Coronation Anthem and its “everlasting” reverberations of “farewells.” Or, worse still, perhaps the “Pains of Opium” does not form a paradoxical unity with the earlier section but supersedes it, demonstrating the irrevocable progress of time. Perhaps pain, tumult, and discord win: following the “Pleasures” in biographical and narrative terms, “Pains” overwrites musical stability with musical tumult. As De Quincey reflects in a later essay laden with musical tropes, “all” “matches” against “time” “are memorably unfair”: time takes “upon himself, with his villainous scrawl, to correct all the fair proofs of nature,” never granting a jubilee when “his corrected proofs might be liable to supersessions by revises, such as I would furnish, down the margin of which should run one perpetual iteration of ‘stet., stet.’ ”36 Here, reviewing life makes one a “fiery” “selftormentor” (xvii.146). The torment takes musical form that recalls the intensity of De Quincey’s passionate or unresolved sublimes and, like them, spills over from hearing into vision and ritual: “Touch but some particular key of laughter and of echoing music, sound but for a moment one bar of preparation, and immediately the pomps and glory of all that has composed for me the delirious vision of life re-awaken for torment; the orchestras of the earth open simultaneously to my inner ear; and in a moment I behold, forming themselves into solemn groups and processions, and passing over sad phantom stages, all that chiefly I have loved” (xvii.146). Music triggers and then figures fierily tormenting memories, in a scene mingling immediacy with nostalgia and distance, sound with visual phantasia, and artificial staginess with the kind of natural origin (the orchestras of the earth) that eighteenth-century writers had often

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associated with sublimity (here given Tartarean colorings by the proximity of fire, earth, openings, and phantoms). The circulation of these topics around memory invites further discussion. Music has strong connections with memory in the European philosophical tradition, particularly via harmony and resemblance: before associationist nerve theory imagined that vibrations could trigger memories of earlier, similarly formed vibrations, Neoplatonism saw in musical pleasure a sign of the soul’s memory of the heavenly harmony that had formed us and was obscured in the Fall.37 To explore this theme, I return to the Confessions’ unusually specific memory of Grassini, and to the “revises” of her role in the 1856 Confessions. This memory concerns a historical moment—the French wars—intensively commemorated by De Quincey. His autobiographical reflections sit within wider European practices of commemoration, nostalgia, and sometimes anxious searches for origins initiated by what many scholars see as an epochal rupture in historical sensibility and memory that attended the Revolution and prolonged wars with France.38

Remembering Hearing Grassini De Quincey might have banked on his opera scene ringing a bell for at least some of his first readers. Grassini’s appearances as a mourning Andromache had been celebrated, repeated, and documented in press reports, reminiscences, and at least one novel.39 From late May, the Morning Post advertised that, at the end of a benefit concert on 13 June 1805, Grassini would perform for one night only “a Grand Scene, representing Andromache weeping over the Tomb of Hector, . . . composed for her by the celebrated Zingarelli.” 40 Repeat performances “at the request of several People of Distinction” were also advertised in advance.41 Since unannounced interludes, insert arias, and salon appearances were common, Grassini may have performed the scene more often. But it is other wise rather elusive—and, as I discuss elsewhere, almost certainly not attributable to a portrayal of Andromache by the Neapolitan composer Niccolò Zingarelli.42 We can nonetheless make good guesses about how Grassini was heard. Giuseppina Grassini (1773–1850) was an Italian contralto who sang at the King’s Theatre between 1804 and 1806, and again in 1814. Central to her public persona were a grace and femininity that attracted powerful men—before and after her first seasons in London, Grassini was reportedly the lover of Napoleon,

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and she later conducted an affair with Wellington.43 Adding to this erotic and political charge, Daniel O’Quinn shows, were the repertoire and personal dynamics of the King’s Theatre. Grassini was seen as a rival to the honored English soprano Elizabeth Billington—unusually, in fact, the two were sharing the position of prima donna—and as a first woman in turn-of-the-century opera seria, she often played roles that cast her as a sexually available and vulnerable maiden in times of war and conflict.44 During the Napoleonic Wars, and in remembering them from the perspective of 1821, London audiences might easily conflate erotic, theatrical desires played out on the opera stage with military, nationalist ones—not least De Quincey, with his predilection for complex national allegories and selfidentifications, as O’Quinn suggests.45 Andromache is a particularly charged role here.46 Widow of the Trojan hero Hector, she could stand as a paradigmatic mourner of the Napoleonic Wars and even, perhaps, a surrogate Britannia.47 This possibility is heightened by parallels drawn at the time between Troy and fortress England (in summer 1805 anxious about invasion from France), and, after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in October 1805, between Hector and Nelson, in contemporary imagery mourned over by Britannia. In the rich stage and opera tradition surrounding Andromache, and drawing on the Andromache of De Quincey’s beloved playwright Euripides, this Trojan woman is more than a simple widow: enslaved by the Greek Pyrrhus, Andromache is forced to choose between marrying her captor and loyalty to her husband’s memory, which will come at the price of sacrificing her own son.48 Andromache’s heft as a tragic heroine would have been compounded by Grassini’s vocal profile. “The richest of contraltos” (ii.224), her voice was received in London as at once limited in range and flexibility, powerfully “deep,” even unsettlingly “masculine,” and charged with sublime pathos and deep natural emotion—a quality particularly prized by British Romantic critics wary of artificial virtuosity.49 It was a voice well suited to raising up receptive listeners through depth and grief. In sum, as I argue elsewhere, Grassini was received through a pathetic sublime that, in the case of her performances as Andromache, could trade off sympathetic identifications with nationalistic undertones (Andromache as Britania) but that also included an element of disturbing power strong enough to provoke, not merely self-pity or prurient desire in the listener, but the sublime as an encounter with an overwhelming object.50 In this light, Grassini-Andromache is a composite figure: passionate mourner, sexual victim, and volatile mother, facing a dilemma carrying inevitable guilt and betrayal, turning on child sacrifice and desecration of memorials. These associations

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suggest that we can include Grassini-Andromache within De Quincey’s pantheon of mythical or mythicized figures evoking fear (a cruel nurserymaid blamed for his sister’s death, the goddess Levana, Medea) and self-identification (as a trespasser in his dead sister’s room, a sacrificing priest, a sacrificial victim, a suicide), and not infrequently both at once. De Quincey’s opera pleasures thus map onto the repeated narrative pattern of his sublime: grieving abjection converted into elevation. This pattern, as De Quincey tells it, originates in what we would now call childhood trauma, a deeply embedded and in this case aural memory. According to Suspiria, it began when De Quincey slipped guiltily into his dead sister’s room and rose from her bedside in a “trance,” from the depths of grief into the blue sky outside, endlessly rising as he pursued the endlessly fleeing throne of God (xv.144). Crucially, the trance “instantly” followed a sound: wind rushing. “Mournful,” a “vast Aeolian intonation,” “a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries,” a “hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell: it is in this world,” he pronounces, “the one sole audible symbol of eternity” (xv.144). Invoking the harp of Aeolus, god of the winds, and the famous sounds mysteriously emanating from a statue of Memnon in the Theban Desert—and perhaps recalling, too, the sighing of Milton’s Sin as she bears and names Death (dreamed about in Confessions, ii.74) alongside the resurrectionary winds that sweep over the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 (De Quincey’s “fields of mortality”)—this scene sets a pre-musical or proto-musical soughing at the origin of the origin of the sublime. The associations of sublime origins with proto-music and rushing are inherited from eighteenth-century auditory culture, but they were transformed in the nineteenth century. On one hand, new explorations pushed further back into the origins of cultures, like the military-archaeological expeditions that brought an ancient statue of the “Younger Memnon” to the metropole. On the other hand, new scientific apparatuses emerged for seeing further into the infinite, like the telescope in which De Quincey saw a nebula that reminded him of both Memnon and Milton’s Death.51 The connotations of proto-musical rushing sounds were also shaped by acoustic research and popular science. In the case of Memnon, such research could suggest the infinite translatability of one kind of energy and one context into another: the transfer of the sun’s heat energy into the statue’s sound energy (the sounds occurred at daybreak); or, according to one popular work, the perfect analogy between Memnon’s “musical sound” in distant Egypt, “the Eolian harp” of ancient Greece, and the “singing noise” of a “teakettle” in the British home.52

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De Quincey was fond of such dreamlike analogies and translations of energy, exemplified by his transporting of the exotic drug of opium into the safe domestic space of the British tea table in Confessions. The literary culture of the sublime from Boileau and Addison onward is recurrently concerned with the economy of transferring power, from divine to human, unknown to known, foreign to domestic, and word to reality. Yet in De Quincey’s writings sublime transferals become distinctly troubling: potentially endless, involuntary, incriminating, denaturing. This gives a strong allure to an apparently single, nontranslatable origin for sublime power, such as the sound heard at Elizabeth’s bedside. De Quincey’s variation on the theme of sublime “rushing” positions the sublime music of anthems, operas, and orchestras as echoes, memories, or reverberations of its “audible symbol of eternity.” Like the image of reverberation with which this chapter began, this suggests an acoustic figure for the relationship between different experiences of sublimity: the natural-unnatural wind strikes the listener and stands at the center of an expanding set of reverberations of the sublime that ripple through his life. While Christian Neoplatonists saw in musical pleasure a faint reminiscence of prelapsarian harmony, blessedness, and unity with God, De Quincey’s primal scene is one of guilt. The sound remembered marks an original sin, desolation, and distance from God. It nonetheless involves a kind of reminiscence, returning De Quincey to a neoEvangelical starting point for elevation: rediscovering in himself the original transgression and fallibility always lurking below consciousness. The elevation triggered by the rushing at Elizabeth’s bedside is itself bleakly inconclusive, curtailed without resolution as the “frost” of a “Sarsar wind of death” “repel[led]” the boy’s flight (xv.144). But it is repeatedly revisited and revalued, not least in scenes where music effects a sublime simultaneity (a concordance of different actions and motions) or a sublime harmony, where musical harmony figures an attempt to draw together and make conclusive the indefiniteness of our being in time. Thus during childhood reveries in church, while “sublime memorials” of the deaths of martyrs “held on as the deep chords from an accompaniment in the bass” in his mind, De Quincey sees white “beds” of dying children rising through the “azure depths of the sky” outside, and he simultaneously feels “the blare of the tumultuous organ [work] its own separate creation”: Oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir—when it rose high in arches, . . . surmounting and overriding

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the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into unity—sometimes I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those clouds which so recently I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate sorrow . . . under the transfigurations of music I felt of grief itself as a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief. (xv.149) There are resemblances here to Aaron Hill’s Pindaric sublime or Herder’s beautiful harmony in the storm at sea. Although De Quincey’s staging of victorious ascents is much more aporetic than his predecessors’, all allude to God’s chariot of clouds and walking on the winds, and harness the passionate “strife” of multiplicity to the “fierce yet melodious” power of unity. Whether at the opera or in church, then, De Quincey’s repeated musicalizations of sublimity do not simply rely on stock nineteenth-century associations between music and indefiniteness, grandeur, foreignness, or nonrational states. They also recall the long tradition associating musical sublimity with definiteness, unity, clarity, reconciliation, control, and reflection. The model of sublime reverberation is pervasive with De Quincey, perhaps especially in texts circling around the Napoleonic Wars and the period surrounding Trafalgar, a particularly intense moment during his early years of opium use. In The Mail-Coach, reverberation contributes to the sublime and obscure work of the national war effort against France. The mail ser vice, figured as “some mighty orchestra” conducted by shadowy state powers, conveys the “vibration” of distant battles around the body politic, communicating the psychic “tumults” of the war via the “incarnated” speed and “thrilling” vibrations of the mail-coach horses’ bodies (xvi.409, 417). As this suggests, reverberations may center on humans and be central to them, but they are always beyond the subject’s control. They exist by passing between bodies—acknowledging, like other wave motions, “only a gradual distinction” between fluid and solid, interior and exterior—and threaten to return to the individual in fabulously magnified and distorted forms. Thus De Quincey describes (rather fancifully) the operations of the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s, where the “softest whispers” spoken at one end of the gallery “reverberated” “as a deafening menace in tempestuous uproars” at the other. Standing in St. Paul’s “pretty nearly on the very spot where . . . Lord Nelson was buried” and viewing the flags of enemy ships captured in military battles, the child De Quincey saw the Whispering Gallery as a model of the unpredictable and irrevocable ramifications of actions and

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words; remembering the scene as a troubled adolescent preparing to flee boarding school, the experience “reverberat[ed] from the sound-board” of his terrified “conscience.” Returning to Grassini, the sense in which her voice might cause sublimely sympathetic vibrations of the kind that tone up the body politic in the war effort is very real. So too, though, is the sense in which her performances might spill, backward and forward, into unintended implications, and into layers of memory that are allusive and intertextual as much as empirical or historical. I close with this intertextual and discursive dimension of memory— specifically, memories of musical discourse. In 1856, De Quincey revised his Confessions. He added to his opera scene a multifaceted passage that reinforces its connection with a reverberatory sublime: “Thrilling was the pleasure with which . . . I heard this angelic Grassini. Shivering with expectation I sat, when the time drew near for her golden epiphany; shivering I rose from my seat, incapable of rest, when that heavenly and harp-like voice sang its own victorious welcome in its prelusive threttánelo— threttánelo” (ii.224). The listener’s vibrating sensations make a prelude for the “prelusive,” stringlike vibrations of the voice, to which the listener in turn resonates in sympathy. Alongside the embodied and sentimental underpinnings of this passage, the revision also underscores a high aesthetic argument in Confessions, in that it heightens the presentation of Grassini’s voice as nonrepresentational, self-referential, self-contained, super-terrestrial. Grassini is an “angelic” instrument, appearing from nowhere in a “golden epiphany” to sing her own welcome, much as older music odes asked Cecilia to sing her own praises. This points back to De Quincey’s meta-aesthetic sublime, where artistic creation (the harp-like voice) sublimes painful experience (Andromache’s loss) into “victor[y].” Lest this sublime seem too refined and spiritual, De Quincey also adds an ironic streak, nodding to the non-angelic, all-too-human associations of “golden” with money. Grassini’s huge fee in London was reported in the papers before she arrived.53 The 1856 Confessions reports in a bitter footnote that she “went off to Paris” only “when gorged with English gold” (ii.225n*). Even Grassini’s “prelusive threttánelo—threttánelo” can read as a hymn to money, the overwhelming power that truly runs the opera world. De Quincey takes the word from Aristophanes’ comedy Plutus (ii.224). Here, threttánelo is the farcical refrain of a song by Cario, a slave rejoicing to the chorus that his master has discovered Plutus, god of wealth.54 Cario’s cry is itself a quotation, mimicking the noise of the lyre as it was clumsily imitated by a cyclops in a poem by

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Philoxenus. In the person of the cyclops Polyphemos, Philoxenus’s poem apparently satirized the tyrant of Syracuse, who had banished Philoxenus in jealous rage when they both fell in love with the same courtesan.55 Might we hear distant echoes of the tyrant Napoleon’s affection for the courtesan Grassini? Whatever the case, embedded in De Quincey’s revision is that ancient suspicion of music not as self-referential but as meaningless, bestial, and degrading. Cario wanted to imitate the cyclops’ bacchantic revels, stamping to the lyre like the anti-sublime slaves of music in Peri hypsous.56 As the refrain “threttanelo” passes between slave and chorus, musical rejoicing becomes goatish lasciviousness and Circean swinishness, and the chorus threatens to blind the soon-to-bewealthy Cario, just as Ulysses blinded Polyphemus.57 This intertext returns us to the founding myth of the Trojan Wars and their aftermath, but with a cynicism about the thrilling pleasures of opera as a consumable commodity, and about the insights (or blindness) that music grants. It is as if Virgil’s Andromache had turned from Hector’s monument, not to faint at the sight of Aeneas and his surviving band of Trojans, but to touch him for a fiver. Old uncertainties about music’s status as the basest or most rarefied art—raising mortals to the skies or drawing angels down—continue to ruffle the feathers of the midnineteenth-century musical sublime, pulling sublimity between immanent, sensuous stimulation and angelic transcendence.

Conclusion: Varieties of the Musical Sublime The rapture of life . . . does not arise, unless as perfect music arises—music of Mozart or Beethoven—by the confluence of the mighty and terrific discords with the subtle concords. Not by contrast, or as reciprocal foils do these elements act . . . but by union. . . . These mighty antagonists do not put forth their hostilities by repulsion, but by deepest attraction. —De Quincey, Suspiria de profundis58

De Quincey takes to fantastic levels a model of sublime “rapture” as a musical concordia discors, a model that was present from the beginnings of the early modern vogue for the sublime. What he wants is crucially a rapture of life, not rapture from life. As we have seen, rapture in the sense of disembodied ecstasy, enthusiasm, or transcendence is problematic from at least the late seventeenth

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century onward and is increasingly excluded from the category of the sublime by writers from Dennis to Herder. Indeed, the appeal of the sublime in the long eighteenth century lies partly in its ability to muscle out ecstasy and create a category of rapture only tinged at its edges by transcendence, given a transgressive frisson by its proximity to proscribed “mystical” experiences. Yet to successfully situate the sublime—and the subject it grounds— between mundane materialism and overreaching transcendence is no mean feat. The variety of sublimes experimented with and shuffled through by De Quincey is comprehensible not least on these grounds. One way to describe the range of De Quincey’s varied musical sublimes is to make concordia discors its overarching theme, encompassing a concept of music as passionate tumult and its opposite, music as harmonious tranquillity and composure. This secretly gives the upper hand to union and concordia (making union both an element in the set and the set itself). This is insufficient, insofar as a paradoxical structure like that welding together “discords” and “concords” needs equal partners to make its “attraction” binding, but also insofar as, for De Quincey, excess concord often tips over into unalleviated horror. His musical sublimes, then, should be imagined not only as a concord of discords or a single harmony of many diverse parts but also as oscillating motion. Oscillating waves can be visualized as a single, continuous line; yet, according to nineteenth-century acousticians such as Hermann von Helmholtz, they reach the ear as a sequence of discrete shocks and can be recomposed by the brain into several different sounds—or, here, different sublimes: a passionate discord, a tranquil harmony, and a concordia discors. On this reading, De Quincey shifts from the terrors of resolution and consonance to the terrors of irresolution and dissonance, experimentally subsuming them into a third, concordantly discordant “music” that might turn out to feel simply like a larger and more inescapable cage. However we configure the different strains of De Quincey’s musical sublime, I hope it is clear that they rehearse familiar motifs, within the changed harmonic language of post-Kantian aesthetics. This language makes music an agent and model of an indefinite series of castings down and elevations. Whereas Kant celebrated our inability to imagine an infinite cosmos as a single totality—and our corresponding ability to conceive of this totality as an idea—De Quincey’s sublime of the sublime leaves us uncertain as to whether the peaks and troughs of reverberating experience can be thought as a totality or not, and uncertain as to whether resolution or irresolvability would be more terrifying. His musical sublime in turn forms a subject who is partly a sympathetically reverberating entity, determined by what it hears, and partly an

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agent analyzing, pursuing, and composing itself from fragmentary themes or memories. While De Quincey’s writings bring much to a literary history of the musical sublime, the discourse in turn opens a new perspective on De Quincey and his status within “idealizing” or “materialist” readings of late Romanticism.59 It can seem that music serves purely symbolic, structural, or allegorical purposes in the sublimes of The Mail-Coach, Confessions, or Suspiria, with its main purpose being to abstract life; that De Quincey’s music is idealized and idealizing. Nineteenth-century culture doubtless idealized and abstracted music, associating it with vagueness, infinity, spirituality, feeling, and so on. Yet this chapter indicates the importance of particular aural events, compositions, and techniques to interpreting De Quincey’s sublimes, and the importance De Quincey’s own writings attribute to musical particularity and immediacy in triggering the sublime. Quite particular musical features solemnized and elevated the “seasonable terrors” of private and state funerals, national and personal defeats and resurrections. Following the logic of De Quincey’s autobiographical model, we might say that the empirical aural timbres of these events literally stamp them on the memory. The attention De Quincey gave to history and memory on one hand and his reception of empiricist theories of sound on the other suggest that he should be read within “material” as much as “idealist” traditions. There is a reciprocity, then, between memories of music and the figuration of memory as music in De Quincey’s sublime. So, too, there is a reciprocity in De Quincey’s writings between music and theories of the sublime. Post-Kantian and Romantic thought did not simply provide inert theories of the sublime that De Quincey applied to music or to his autobiography. In an essay on Kant and German literature, he presents his youthful experience of encountering Kant within the “ocean” of German books as itself a sublime shock (x.162). Philosophical theories involving the sublime, this rhetoric might suggest, are themselves received and remembered through the tropes of sublimity, tropes that we have seen are also shaped by the resonance model of sound. Reading Kant, in De Quincey’s account, coincided with opium dreams at Oxford, trips on the mail coach in the Napoleonic Wars, and visits to the opera. Explicit philosophies appear less plausibly as the driver of and key to the musical sublime here than as something like telegraphic exchange points in a transformative network: the oscillating signal can pass indefinitely, though not without distortion, between musical pleasures, Kant, Wordsworth, childhood loss, theology, London, war, and so on.60 In this way, De Quincey speaks to my general argument that music is not a supplement to philosophical or literary critical writings

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on the sublime but played an active role in creating and transforming the discourse. Finally, extending De Quincey’s image of Kant as a sublime shock emanating from Germany and resounding in Britain, we can place the musical sublimes explored in this chapter within a discourse of the musical sublime that reverberated back and forth between Germany, Britain, and farther afield from the seventeenth century, into the nineteenth century, and beyond.

Conclusion

Chapter 11 of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) sees Fanny Price and Mary Crawford locked in a wrestler’s embrace, fighting—if almost imperceptibly, even to those involved—for the heart of Edmund Bertram. The women could almost be sisters: both raised as virtual orphans, dependent on the whims of rich, unreliable relatives; both with adored brothers; both intelligent, careful, observant. Yet their differences cut deep. The battle between Fanny’s shy integrity and Mary’s self-assured charm is also a battle between nature and artifice, solitude and sociability, country and town, and, not least, between two sister arts, poetry and music. As Mary “falls in” with her hosts’ “inclination” to play a “glee,” leaving Fanny and Edmund alone, Fanny “turn[s]” to the window—to “all that was solemn and soothing, and lovely,” in the night sky—and turns rhetorically to what Anne Janowitz calls “poetic commonplaces of the sublime universe.”1 “Poetry only,” Fanny enthuses, “can attempt to describe” the “sublimity of Nature,” the skyscape Edmund once taught her to read: “Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind. . . . Here’s what may tranquillize every care, and lift the heart to rapture!”2 Edmund, recalling the names of the stars and his “apt” little astronomy “scholar,” suggests venturing onto the lawn for some real stargazing.3 Then, ominously, “the glee began.” “We will stay till this is finished, Fanny,” said he, turning his back on the window; and as it advanced, she had the mortification of seeing him advance too, moving forward by gentle degrees towards the instrument, and when it ceased, he was close by the singers, among the most urgent in requesting to hear the glee again. Fanny sighed, alone at the window[.]4 Austen’s set piece epitomizes a common view of music in the long eighteenth century. If later in the nineteenth century all art aspired to the condition of

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music, it can seem that all eighteenth-century music aspired to the condition of muzak. Music is light, sociable, superficial, artful, instrumentalized. Nature’s “tranquil[]” “rapture” is met by music’s “glee.” Poetry carries us out of ourselves to “contemplate” the dark immensity of nature and Longinus’s “fires of Heaven,” while music draws us back to Longinus’s “ little fire we kindle for ourselves”—to the lit drawing room, filled with deceitful creatures, and our own self-deceiving passions.5 Whatever we learn from the sublime skyscape (for Longinus, that nature appoints us “creature[s] of no mean or ignoble quality,” whose thoughts “pass beyond the bounds that confine us,” xxxv.2–3), we forget by the keyboard. If we took this novel at its word, we might imagine the musical sublime emerging sometime in the nineteenth century—perhaps with the late Beethoven, or Wagner—upstaging poetry and nature like some arriviste visitor to a country house party, outshining its hosts on their own instrument. This book presents a very different chronology and relationship between the arts. Dryden, Dennis, Bodmer, and Breitinger show music’s involvement in the sublime from the beginnings of its revival in English and German literary cultures. Music and the arts of language have been too closely entwined to shrug each other off in the history of the sublime. There has been an antagonistic intimacy between the sister arts, but an intimacy, and a formative one, nonetheless. Insofar as it positions music against poetry-nature, and aligns the latter with the prosaic insights of the novel itself, Mansfield Park’s discourse on the sublime might be said to promote the exclusion of music—as physical sound, as artificial rhetoric, as specious harmony—from elevating literature, and thus to bear the fruits of arguments against music such as Dennis’s, Bodmer’s, or Breitinger’s. Yet there is no simple progression or continuity. Traces of the musical sublime remain even in the novel’s anti-musical tropes, pointing to the long Longinian tradition where the sublime wrestled with music. Edmund’s praise of Mary, “There goes good humour,” has what John Wiltshire calls an “antiphonal” reply in Fanny’s exclamation over nature: “Here’s Harmony!” 6 The sublime that “leave[s] . . . all music behind” is thus evoked through a primarily musical metaphor, potent in Longinus’s treatment of verbal arrangement as it is in Burke’s psychology of the sublime. The scene also plays on music’s irresistible power, seen when Edmund “advance[s]” in time with the music, “moving forward by gentle degrees towards the instrument.” For Longinus, as for Dryden’s emperor or Klopstock’s worshipper, music wielded wonderful power over the body and the passions. Just as Fanny sighs over music’s dangerous hold on Edmund’s reflection and will, Longinus and many of his successors recoiled from music as something

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overstepping whatever thresholds circumscribe the sublime, especially the boundary between persuasion and involuntary movement. Of course, this is a strange charge against music, since Longinus’s sublime is not about everyday persuasion but about its overthrow: the sublime raises “admiration, mingled with astonishment and with surprize, which is quite another thing than simply . . . to persuade.” It is a “bolt of lightning”; “an invincible force.”7 If this language—like that deployed by Dryden, Dennis, Burke, De Quincey, and even Herder—suggests that the sublime is violent, then Longinus positions music as something that does violence against the sublime. And if the sublime exceeds limits, then music threatens the sublime’s own limits and, in our recoil with Longinus, teaches us to set the true sublime against the false. This complicated and equivocal deployment of music is hardly surprising given music’s own mixed constitution, a constitution that helped make it productive in such different ways for such different sublimes. Coded as harmonious (tranquil) or tumultuous (passionate), and as sensuous (immediate) or supersensible (intangible, invisible, ephemeral), irrational or superrational, music spoke to the mixed constitution of the eighteenth-century sublime—an affective mixture of “terrible Joy,” a cognitive movement between astonishment and higher comprehension, or an epistemological magic trick that told empirical subjects something supersensible without going “one step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things.”8 Alongside arguments about the chronology and disciplinary character of the musical sublime, this has been my third guiding argument: music gives rise not to one variety of the sublime but to a variable and contested discourse. In Heinrich von Kleist’s Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik (eine Legende) (St. Cecilia or the Power of Music [a Legend], 1810), the contest becomes particularly ferocious. Written soon after performances of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Musique in Kleist’s milieu, the novella bears witness to the Anglo-German exchanges described in this book.9 At its climax, Kleist’s sixteenth-century Mother-Detective approaches the manuscript of an ancient mass reputed to have caused the miraculous conversion to Catholicism of her four Protestant sons—or, from another perspective, their sudden insanity. She beholds a series of “unknown magical signs”: “It was as if the whole terror of music [Schrecken der Tonkunst] that had ruined her sons drew rushing over her head; she thought she would lose her senses just looking at it, and after, quickly, with an unending movement of humility and submission to divine omnipotence, she had pressed the page to her lips, she sat herself back in her chair.”10 This fleeting encounter with the overwhelming agent of her sons’

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“ruin,” the score of the ancient mass, persuades the mother of its divine imprimatur. Yet the story gives countless hints that material, political, and social trappings are in fact what endows music with its legendary power or violence, the second possible translation of the title’s Gewalt. For one thing, the ascetic existence of the sons after their conversion is punctuated by musical devotions so material as to test the definition of music both as an art and as a primarily audible rather than kinetic or visible manifestation of energy.11 “Now suddenly the hour of midnight strikes;” a witness tells the mother: “Your four sons . . . begin, with terrifying and hideous voice, to intone the gloria in excelsis. Leopards and wolves might sound that way when they howl at the firmament in icy winter: the pillars of the house, I assure you, shook, and the windows, hit by the visible air of their lungs, threatened, as if one had thrown handfuls of heavy sand against their panes, to shatter” (223). The brothers seem “content” (228), but to onlookers their music sounds like punitive noise, “roaring . . . from the lips of eternally damned sinners” (223). Meanwhile, the musicians who caused their conversion—nuns in a convent threatened by the Protestant brothers’ iconoclasm—experienced the musical mass “as a wonderful, heavenly comfort,” the return of peace in the face of awful tumult (218). Much like the subject in Kant’s dynamical sublime, roused by an overwhelming physical threat to recognize his superiority to sensible nature, the nuns find that “the anxiety in which they found themselves itself contributed to leading their souls, as if on wings, through all the heavens of harmony” (218). If any or all of these moments are musically sublime—the mother’s self-abasement before a musical relic, the brothers’ conversion, the sisters’ ascent—then the nature and valence of that sublimity is exemplarily elusive. Does it indicate our supersensible vocation or our irreducibly sensible, physically and socially conditioned, condition? As Kleist’s story reminds us, music is too flexible to be the marker of one particular variety of sublimity. When the sublime bleeds into traditions of religious epiphany or enthusiasm, as for writers from Dennis to De Quincey, music stands waiting as a traditional handmaiden of religious elevation. When sublimity blends into the high style, as with Dryden, language about music offers rhetorical terminology for describing “high” sounds, mimetic sonic effects, syntactic harmony, or ravishing sonorousness. And when theorists fret over the sublime’s shaky grounding in truth or goodness, as they have since Longinus, music’s lack of semantic content can epitomize this problematic grounding. Finally, when, in Kleist’s novella, the sublime raises the question of whether experiences of excess are ultimately consonant or dissonant with our inherited ways of representing the world to ourselves—whether sublimity can accommodate

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the individual to a totalized social or mental order, or is permanently in revolt against the absolute—music’s modeling of harmony and its others points the question. Die heilige Cäcilie refuses to resolve questions surrounding the sublime. The object at its center, the mass, is a kind of Kleistian factum and Leerstelle, at once a brute “fact” around which action moves and a “gap” or “void” provoking conflicting interpretations.12 Not only is the brothers’ crucial experience of the mass left unnarrated. The very medium of the novella seems to make music an unrepresentable “gap” in a silent verbal text. At least in this early nineteenthcentury configuration, musical sound and musical notation are tantalizingly other to prose literature. The mother’s encounter with the undecipherable score is emblematic: accounts of sublimity such as Kant’s turned on the buckling of an implicitly visual faculty for representation or imagination; here, by contrast, the score is overwhelming and transporting partly because it cannot be audiated. While it is visible, it remains unrepresentable by the mother’s aural imagination. In other words, sound is the “beyond” for the prose text, and so can be made to indicate the “credible God term,” the “meaningful jargon of ultimacy” that representation cannot contain and that “[a]ll versions of the sublime require.”13 Although Resounding the Sublime has moved between discourses like Kleist’s and ones like Dryden’s—where boundaries between literature and music are much more porous and audiation is understood to belong more straightforwardly to language—it is concerned throughout with how the Gewalt of music exemplifies the power of the sublime within literary traditions. How might larger narratives about the long eighteenth century map onto the contrast between a sublime where language includes music (and sometimes needs to be purged of music to reach true sublimity) and a sublime where language is other to music (and sometimes needs to denature itself to reach music’s sublimity)? The following briefly considers three pertinent metanarratives about music, sound, language, and meaning making in the eighteenth century, intersecting narratives concerning a demise of rhetoric, sound, and resemblance; and the rise of a certain kind of philosophy and science, sight, and representation. First, we might see the beginnings of Austen’s and Kleist’s separation of music from language in Cartesian and other semiotic theories, and their culmination in what Katrin Kohl identifies as the anti-rhetorical, “philosophically dominated period” of Idealism, a period identified as beginning around 1800, and as only recently giving way to a resurgent rhetorical tradition, signaled by

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such diverse phenomena as the popularity of Nietzschean poststructuralism and performance poetry, and perhaps by sound studies within academia.14 According to such a reading, the valorizing of sublime instrumental music from the late eighteenth century onward would not mark the new beginning of a genuine musical sublime but would rely on music’s exodus from the literaryphilosophical sublime. Ironically, this exodus would reposition music as the impossible object of desire for language, the condition to which language aspires within an aporetic post-Kantian sublime. We might see traces of the antirhetorical period living on in exhibitions like a recent homage to Britten at the British Library—“Poetry into Sound: The Music of Benjamin Britten” (31 May– 15 September 2013)—as if poetry were not in sound until sublime geniuses like Britten reconcile the estranged sister arts. One problem with this metanarrative is precisely its meta scale: it is hard to verify the domination of silent philosophy across an entire period, especially if this period was also marked, for example, by the development of recording technologies, fervor for operas, engrossing philosophical engagements with music, vogues for highly pitched or “musicalized” declamation in drama, and schools of poetry interpretation that worked through reading aloud, and that waned only with the dominance of modernist poetry and New Criticism.15 What marks these phenomena as countercultural rather than establishment? A slightly different understanding of changes in the discourse of the musical sublime is offered by the beleaguered idea of the Enlightenment as ocularcentric.16 Appealingly, an ocularcentric Enlightenment would explain the marginality of music and sound in theories of the sublime like Bodmer and Breitinger’s or Addison’s, and the discomfort with music of Dennis or Burke. Their texts would appear as characteristic of eighteenth-century conflations of vision and reason, rather than as precursors to some turn against sound around 1800. An ocularcentric Enlightenment could account for scenes like Austen’s in Mansfield Park, and for the neglect of music in most twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury scholarship on the eighteenth-century sublime. (On this reading, contemporary critics who gesture against Enlightenment bifurcations might instead perpetuate them—for instance, in giving poetry collections titles like Joining Music with Reason.17 Poetry joins music with reason only if music is unreasonable and reason unmusical.) Nonetheless, as Jonathan Sterne argues, the idea of ocularcentrism unwarrantably reads “the history of the senses as a zerosum game, where the dominance of one sense by necessity leads to the decline of another sense.”18 Despite an interest in sight, eighteenth-century readers might have been surprised to hear that their experience of literature was a matter for

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the eye and not the ear, and parliamentarians might have balked at the idea that reason was a visual and not a sonic practice.19 In imagining sound more generally, as Penelope Gouk, Veit Erlmann, and others show, acoustic resonance was important to supposedly ocularcentric natural scientists, philosophers, and artists, and resonance served as a model for reason as well as for passion, sensation, and irrationality. The Hillarians, Burke, Klopstock, and Herder all attest to the fascination of resonance within the eighteenth-century sublime. A third and more involved metanarrative would connect the vicissitudes of the musical sublime to the decline of the music of the spheres as a literal model for the order of things during the seventeenth-century scientific revolutions, and the spheres’ hollowing out even as a metaphor in succeeding centuries. The musical sublime is at first chained to analogical hierarchies of being (harmony in sound, in the human, in the cosmos) that offer loftiness by way of a ladder leading from material to conceptual harmony. Ascent is made by steps of resemblance— from high-sounding dialects, perhaps, like those that made ancient Greek more like song than modern languages, up to the well-ordered, lofty soul within humans, all the way to insights into the sublimity of nature and its maker. Only with a breaking of the supposedly contained, music-box-like set of crystalline spheres in the Copernican revolution, and the new infinite cosmos of Newtonian physics, could music free herself and become the practical and passionate art she always was.20 From here on, music can become sublime by virtue of a rupture between its operations and those of language—recognized as an arbitrary sign system rather than any kind of imitation of things, characterized by differences rather than similitudes. Music does not present visual imagines to imagination or the counters of words to reason. It thus sits outside representation and discourse. No longer modeling the cosmos or connecting its supposed order with sublunary orderings, music is sublime because it escapes all those artificial orders that shape and filter the raw, unordered infinity surrounding us. This is the world in which E. T. A. Hoffmann can call “instrumental music” “the most romantic of all the arts,” “ because only the infinite is its object.”21 Although it is debatable to what extent the early modern music of the spheres was ever, generally speaking, a literal model in the way that we now understand literalness—recent scholarship stresses that audible music was only ever one, contested element in this model, which kept its creative impetus even for Newtonians well into the eighteenth century—it is nonetheless undeniable that concepts of resemblance and similitude shifted over the long eighteenth century.22 And the sublime unquestionably profited from and transformed itself through these shifts. The Burkean sublime, for example, was fertile for Kant

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given the blockages Kant had erected between sense perception, conceptual understanding, and supersensible truth: no analogies can easily cross these boundaries, because no resemblances can be assumed between the known and the unknown, appearances and things an sich. Yet the long eighteenth century did not quite witness the death of resemblance or mimesis. From Dryden’s phantasia-raising music, to the Klopstockian music that makes the “hearer” into a “seer,” to Hoffmann’s ideal music, which imitates the infinite and generates a colorful array of “figures,” landscapes, and dramas found in musical listening—not to mention Herder’s infinite, anti-Kantian universe of interrelated sounding bodies—musical sublimes hint at the mimetic power of music on one hand and the continuation of musical models for the universe on the other.23 We cannot so easily slip the chain of resemblances or the connections between mundane music and whatever is posited as the height of knowledge, being, or experience, to which past listeners gave the name “sublime.” To give one example of the continuing influence of the music of the spheres: the first edition of Eduard Hanslick’s 1854 essay on the musically beautiful—often regarded as a paradigmatic defense of pure, “absolute,” or amimetic music—closed with the reflection that man “does not experience music merely as bare and absolute through its own beauty, but simultaneously as a sounding image of the great movements in the universe. . . . Just as the elements of music—sound, tone, rhythm, strength, weakness—are found in the entire universe, so man rediscovers in music the entire universe.”24 The persistence of resemblance and the involvement of music in the mechanics of imitation and representation—and especially in sublimely energetic, lightning-fast transmissions of ideas, images, and energy—are the final points I want to underscore. My arguments about representation resonate with recent understandings of sound as neither essentially imitative nor essentially amimetic but an “effect[] of intermedial forces,” a changeable “configuration” of sonic, visual, verbal, and other data.25 More broadly, my arguments about resemblance follow recent scholarship examining the persistence of similitude through and beyond Foucault’s “classical” (or post-Renaissance) era. Scholars in diverse fields are revising Foucauldian and other emphases on the enlightenment demise of resemblance and similitude.26 The account by Foucault of the changing relationship of resemblance to knowledge, it should be said, was subtler than that of some of his followers. For a Hobbes or Hume, he wrote, “similitude” was “a spent force, outside the realm of knowledge.” Yet it remained “an indispensable border” and precondition of knowledge.27 While the “earth” no longer “echo[ed] the sky,” resemblance remained as “that rudimentary relation

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which knowledge must overlay . . . , but which continues, indefinitely, to reside below knowledge” like “a mute and ineffaceable necessity.”28 Not mute, but sounding, music embodies this kind of resemblance at a number of points in the literary discourse on the sublime. Remember John Dennis’s blithe assertion, in discussing “enthusiastic Passion,” that “all who are acquainted with Poetry or Musick” simply “must be . . . sensible of ” the fact that discord produces psychical harmony, and that harmony augments discordant passion, producing the concordia discors of the sublime. Knowledge of enthusiastic passion builds on this precondition, this indisputable and unfathomable experience of concordant discord. Remember, too, Joseph Mitchell’s rhetorical question “Who knows not this”—that music and poetry are sublime “foretastes of the raptures of the blest”—“when Handell plays, | And Senesino Sings?” And recall particularly Breitinger’s grappling with that pleasure in harmony or “symmetry” that underpins the effects of sublime poetry: only “lovers of darkness” would claim with Plato that the “soul has a harmony or is a harmony,” and yet the grounds of our pleasure admit of no alternative explanation. “It’s enough to say that the reason for our love of symmetry . . . is found in the bond by which we are joined to one another.” As a marker of resemblance, relationship, and nondiscursive immediacy, the effects of music in Breitinger’s treatise lie beyond dispute and below the threshold of knowledge. Music forms a “natural” bedrock for analogically understanding the workings of poetry. Attempt to bring it to the surface of knowledge and make it fully articulate, and music often appears uncanny, occult, magically powerful.29 None of the metanarratives touched on here convincingly contains the multiform discourse of the musical sublime. Foucault’s lines on the subterranean persistence of resemblance offer a more promising model of the kinds of strange continuities and changes traced in the preceding chapters. Still closer to this book’s approach is a recent methodological reflection by historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. “In contrast to the static tableaux of paradigms and epistemes,” they promote “a history of dynamic fields, in which newly introduced bodies reconfigure and reshape those already present, and vice versa.”30 “Imagine new stars winking into existence,” they suggest, “not replacing old ones but changing the geography of the heavens.”31 “You can play an eighteenth-century clavichord at any time after the instrument’s revival around 1900—but you cannot hear it after two intervening centuries of the pianoforte in the way it was heard in 1700. Sequence weaves history into the warp and woof of the present: not just as a past process reaching its present state of rest— how things came to be as they are—but also as the source of tensions that keep

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the present in motion.”32 This analogy for networks of ideals, imaginaries, practices, and assumptions needs a few qualifications to suit the musical sublime as I have tried to present it—as a past discourse practiced and transformed by speakers whose orientations conditioned their utterances, and as a discourse heard, and inevitably echoed and changed, by auditors in the present. Some stars, like the sun, are so bright and so close to us that, when we are turned toward them, other stars become invisible. Herder’s musical sublime was harder to see by the light of Lyotard’s sublime than in the darkness we are sometimes told is spreading “after theory.” We need to be standing in the right hemisphere, and clear from the smog, to see particular constellations. We also need the right attitude: we need to be looking up to see new constellations. Approaching the clavichord, too, we can have more or less attuned ears, and more or less exposure to various instruments. Although we cannot delete the years 1700–1900, we can get unused to the pianoforte and to equal temperaments, as many early music enthusiasts do. We place instruments in spaces with different (mental) furniture and so different acoustics. And although, as Kant complained, we cannot have closed ears in the way we can have “downcast eyes”—the ear is in this sense more vulnerable and less biddable than the eye—we nonetheless mentally filter and construe sounds, and—especially relevant for delicate instruments like the clavichord—we can still reorient ourselves to have upturned ears.33 Thomas Mann’s touching of the trembling chords of Klopstock’s sublime after two centuries offers an exemplum of the coexistence of older and newer stars, and the conditions of their visibility. When Mann’s Faustian composer, Adrian Leverkühn, sets Klopstock’s Frühlingsfeyer to music on the eve of the First World War, he moves from Klopstock’s radiant astral sublime, with its pious astonishment at the night sky, into an imagined submarine sublime, where slimy, all-too-human monsters of the deep swarm like disorderly stars around a steel shell, the “bathysphere,” which separates the artist from the world he perceives.34 For the post-Kantian Leverkühn, as for De Quincey, listening to the sublime means sounding and re-sounding the depths of human experience. Klopstock’s agitated exultation at the infinite smallness of our world (a “drop in the bucket”) within God’s infinite creation (the “ocean of worlds”) is transformed into Adrian’s unfathomable delight at the oceanic universe itself. His delight seems composed in equal parts of precise mathematical speculation (the “pathos” of science, set antiphonally against the “highly tuned, roaring pathos of religious-hymnic praise” in Klopstock’s ode); a knowledge that such speculation has no foundational power in a universe not only infinite but indefinitely

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expanding; and an obscure schadenfreude at the pious distress felt by his humanist-scholastic friend, the novel’s narrator, in the face of Leverkühn’s apparently impious, even nihilistic mental soaring (“Can any performance be appealed to as a work of God,” his friend complains, “to which one can just as easily say ‘so what’ as ‘Hosanna’? . . . I can see no reason at all to sink adoring in the dust before a quinquillion”).35 The composer’s uncanny prowess and pleasures might remind us of Horace’s ode on Pindar, a touchstone of the music ode genre, in which Pindar soars into the clouds and his voice roars like a river, rolling beyond its banks to cast out new words and rhythms. But it is unclear whether the modern composer is a Pindar or an epigonal overreacher, one of those who flies with waxen wings and will “give his name to a glassy sea.” Perhaps these oppositions have no hold in Leverkühn’s atonal “cosmos of tones,” where up and down become purely relative, and the meaning and ratio of each note is at once ironically indefinite, and infinitely determined.36 Mann’s composer seems to have come a long way from the seventeenth-century Pindaric music ode or from Klopstock’s “enthusiastic awe.”37 Yet when Mann makes music the site of an encounter between the dizzying expanse of the cosmos and the limits of human imagination, between reason, feeling, and morality, he is ringing another change on the long history of the musical sublime.

notes

introduction 1. Boileau-Despréaux, Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours (1674), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Escal and Adam. 2. Here I closely paraphrase Ashfield and de Bolla, eds., Sublime, 2. 3. Influential studies on the emergence of “autonomous” music include Hollander, Untuning of the Sky; Dahlhaus, Idee der absoluten Musik; Neubauer, Emancipation of Music from Language. 4. Longinus xxxix.1–2. 5. Longinus i.4, trans. Russell, in Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime, ed. Halliwell et al. 6. Dennis, “Turin,” 139. 7. Advancement 23–25. 8. KU §§51–52, 324–25. 9. KU §27, 258. 10. Compare the “intimate animosity” between reason and sound. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 12. Where animosity suggests enmity, antagonism suggests community formed by strug gle. Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry. 11. On the term, see Gallie, “Art as Contested Concept.” 12. Augustine, De musica 1.2.2. 13. Trower, Senses of Vibration, 8–9. 14. Abrams, Mirror and Lamp, 92–94; Monk, Sublime; Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”; Kivy, Osmin’s Rage. 15. On these pressures, see, for example, Hollander, Untuning of the Sky; James, Music of the Spheres. 16. See Addison’s essays on imagination between Spectator nos. 411 and 421 (21 June to 3 July 1712), iii.535–82; Batteux, Les beaux-arts réduit à un même principe; Twining, “On the Different Senses of the Word, Imitative, as Applied to Music by the Antients, and by the Moderns.” 17. Quintilian, Instit. 1.10.9–33. 18. Boileau, Traité, in Œuvres complètes, 341–42. 19. Herder, Cäcilie, 298. 20. Small, Musicking. 21. Born, “Relational Musicology”; Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime, 16; Halliday, Sonic Modernity, 3. 22. For the literature of power, see especially DQW xvi.336–39. 23. Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, 54–56, also insists on “varieties of sublimity”; for recent defenses of variety, see Fitzgerald, Variety; Regier, Exorbitant Enlightenment, 1–30.

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24. Concordia discors is classically associated with aesthetic and philosophical composure but can usefully indicate a less stable compound in our period, as in what Norbrook calls the “precarious asymmetries” of Milton’s republican sublime (associated with “Longinus’s resistance to easy harmony”), or the tension in Hogarth’s and De Quincey’s writing between stressing variety-in-unity or unity-in-variety. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 138; Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty; for further literature, Stanyon, “Serpentine Sighs.” 25. Butler, Bodies, 39. 26. Studies from literature, art history, history, or sound studies include Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, 101–21; Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 167–68; Jones, “Sounds Romantic”; Purkis, “Listening for the Sublime”; Jones, “Beethoven and Revolution”; Shaw, “Cannon-Fever”; on lyric, with its vocal emphasis, Maxwell, Female Sublime. An exception in terms of period, and in focusing on religious music, is Hache and Favier, À la croisée des arts, which is now joined by the broader collection, Hibberd and Stanyon, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture. General studies of the sublime typically ignore music. See recently Gracyk, “Sublime and Fine Arts,” 220–21, 227–28; Doran, Theory of the Sublime. 27. See especially Sisman, Mozart, 13–20; Fend, “Literary Motifs”; Brown, “Sublime, the Beautiful and the Ornamental”; Thomas, “Opera, Dispossession, and the Sublime”; Bonds, “Symphony as Pindaric Ode”; Webster, “Creation”; Richards, “Automatic Genius”; Fend, “Die ästhetische Kategorie des Erhabenen”; Garratt, Palestrina, 53–57, 221–22, 228–30; Rumph, Beethoven After Napoleon, 35–57; Gess, Gewalt der Musik, 243–353; Richards, “Enduring Monument”; Dolan and Tresch, “Sublime Invasion”; Stefaniak, “Robert Schumann.” The pre-Romantic sublime receives more sustained attention in Larsson, “The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque”; Waldvogel, “Eighteenth Century Esthetics of the Sublime and the Valuation of the Symphony”; Garda, Musica sublime; Schleuning, Sprache der Natur, 13–18, 49–58, 86–126; Lütteken, Das Monologische als Denkform, 118–208. The “sublime” appears more loosely in Jaeger, Magnificence and the Sublime; Clement and Jas, Josquin and the Sublime. 28. See to date Chapin, “Classicist Terms”; Chapin, “Scheibe’s Mistake”; Chapin, “Sublime Experience”; Chapin, “C. P. E. Bach”; Hibberd, “Cherubini’s Médée”; Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime.” On Seidl, see Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime, 98–103. 29. Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 100–109; Dahlhaus, “Hoffmanns Beethoven-Kritik.” 30. Dahlhaus, Idee der absoluten Musik, especially 58–62. 31. Pederson, “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ ”; Taruskin, “Speed Bumps,” 188–89. Further Bonds, Absolute Music; Chua, Absolute Music. 32. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 270. 33. Johnson, “Giant HANDEL,” 518. Johnson drew on Kivy, “Mainwaring’s Handel.” Kivy, however, saw Handel’s sublimity in a longer tradition of “true English” musical license and freedom (174). 34. Johnson, “Giant HANDEL,” 517, 520, 523. 35. Hill, Plain Dealer no. 94 (12 February 1725); repr. in Plain Dealer (1730), ii.313–16. 36. Webster, “Creation,” 57. 37. Ibid., 60. 38. Webster, “Creation,” 61–63. See Michaelis, Ueber den Geist der Tonkunst mit Rücksicht auf Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft (1795–1800); Michaelis, “Ueber das Erhabene in der Musik” (1801); Michaelis, “Einige Bemerkungen über das Erhabene der Musik” (1805). 39. Allanbrook, “Is the Sublime a Musical Topos?” 40. Ibid., 263.

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41. Ibid., 279. 42. KU §28, 262–64. 43. Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), 617–18. 44. Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime, 20, 139–72, and elsewhere. On listening sublimely, also Fink, “Beethoven Antihero.” 45. Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime, 2, 15–16. 46. Ibid., 2–6. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. On an aporetic Romantic sublime, compare Lönker, “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik”; Stanyon, “ ‘Rastrierte Blätter.’ ” 49. See de Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 14–15, 93, 295. 50. Compare Noggle, Skeptical Sublime. 51. Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, 1–4, 57–58. 52. Boileau, preface to the Traité, in Œuvres complètes, 337. 53. Townshend, “Ode to Music” (1791), 38, s.ii.8–11. 54. De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 12–13. 55. For example, Porter, Sublime in Antiquity; Hardie, Lucretian Receptions; Hoffmann and Whyte, Beyond the Finite; van Eck et al., Translations of the Sublime; Janowitz, “Sublime Plurality”; Till, Das doppelte Erhabene; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 18–19, 137–39, 212–21. 56. Sakakeeny, “Music,” 122. See further, for example, Leach, “Revisiting Old Work”; Smith, “Echoes in Print,” 342–45. 57. See Tenney, History of “Consonance” and “Dissonance”; Ballstaedt, “ ‘Dissonance’ in Music.” 58. Campbell et al., Musical Instruments, 457. 59. Ibid. 60. Attali, Noise. Further Heller-Roazen, Fifth Hammer. 61. Schwartz, “On Noise,” 52; Bailey, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” 23. Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound, 240, notes that the sonic motto in fact predates Douglas’s formulation. 62. Compare Thompson, “Rough Music.” 63. Taruskin, “Resisting the Ninth,” 249. 64. See, for instance, Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity, 1–8, 76, 124. Bowie’s account, moving from Haydn to Beethoven, Wagner and Schoenberg, coexists with an attempt to counter the sociopolitical reading it normally accompanies: progression from Beethoven to Schoenberg inextricably bound to movement from Romanticism to fascism, where fascism takes Romanticism to its (il)logical conclusions. 65. See Schmidt, Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens. 66. Adolf Hitler, “Die Kunst im Dienste der Wiedergeburt des deutschen Volkes” (separate publication of a speech at a party meeting, Nuremberg, November 1933 (Leipzig, 1933), 21), translated in Brinkmann, “Distorted Sublime,” 45. 67. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), 3; Berlin, “Three TurningPoints.” As Regier, Exorbitant Enlightenment, 19, observes, a recent alignment of German Romanticism with fascism and “anti-intellectual” “irrational[ism],” appears in Reed, Light in Germany, 2–3. 68. Spectator, iii.535–82. 69. Mathew, “Beethoven’s Political Music.” On the Behemoth trope, see Grillparzer’s Rede am Grab, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Frank and Pörnbacher, 881–85.

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70. Damrau, The Reception of English Puritan Literature; Kämmerer, “Nur um Himmels willen keine Satyren . . .”: deutsche Satire und Satiretheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts im Kontext von Anglophilie; Maurer, Aufklärung und Anglophilie; Sauerländer, “Sind Briten hier?” 71. Regier, Exorbitant Enlightenment, 1–69, describes Anglo-German networks in eighteenth-century Britain and amnesia about them since the 1790s. Further Jefcoate, Deutsche Drucker und Buchhändler in London; Ashton, German Idea; Davis, German Thought. 72. Neill, “Art and Emotion,” 423. 73. DQW xvii.146.

chapter 1 1. Longinus xxxix.3. 2. Plato, Laws 669e. 3. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, in Works ii.6, l.16. 4. Longinus i.4, translation following Boileau, Traité, in Œuvres complètes, 342. 5. For the phrase “credible god term,” see Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 36. 6. See Augustine, Confessions, book ix.4. Commitment to Boethius waned in the seventeenth century, especially in practical manuals, but was alive in wider understandings of music. Gouk, “Music and the Sciences,” 135; Herissone, Music Theory, 1–2. 7. On court culture, see Cowart, Triumph of Pleasure, 1–40; Edmunds, Piety and Politics, 58–60, 127–29, 160. 8. For an overview, see McGuinness, “Writings About Music.” 9. Gouk, “Music and the Sciences,” 136. See also Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy; Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic. 10. Collier, “Of Musick” (1695), 19–20. 11. Gouk, “Music and the Sciences,” 137. Descartes’s L’ homme, published posthumously in the 1660s, helped disseminate the resonance model. Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 131; Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 29–68. 12. Kassler, Inner Music. 13. On the ancient models and their reception, see Plato, Phaedo 86a–d, 88d; Calogero, Ideas and Images of Music, 65–75. 14. On the image of the piper, see McGuire and Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan.’ ” 15. Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 194–222; Jenkinson, Culture and Politics, 11; Keay, Magnificent Monarch. 16. Lamb, “Longinus,” 546–52. 17. Ibid., 551. 18. Turner, “Libertine Sublime,” 103. See also “ ‘Thy Lovers.’ ” 19. On whig- and tory-oriented sensibilities, which might or might not align with allegiance to the Whig and Tory parties, see Bowers, Force or Fraud, 4–7. See also Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture. On concordia discors, seminal studies are Spitzer, “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony”; Wasserman, Subtler Language, 53–168. 20. Compare Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 175–80; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 137. 21. Walkling, “Apotheosis of Absolutism”; Jenkinson, Culture and Politics, 181–95. 22. Dryden, Works xv.336–37.

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23. Newcastle to the Prince of Wales, Royal Letters in BL, Harl. Ms 6988. Quoted from Keay, Magnificent Monarch, 208. 24. Pepys, Diary, 83. 25. Newcastle to the Prince of Wales, in Keay, Magnificent Monarch, 208. 26. Pepys, Diary, 84. 27. Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth, 342. 28. Longinus viii–ix, iii.1–2, xxviii.1–2, xxxix.1, xxviii.1. 29. Arieti and Crossett translation, note on Longinus xxxix.1. 30. Compare Lettgen, “. . . und hat zu retten keine Kraft”: die Melancholie der Musik, 185. 31. Arieti and Crossett translation, 195. Compare Halliwell, Ecstasy and Truth, 337–40. 32. Hertz, End of the Line, 1, 14, 3. 33. Lamb, “Longinus,” 546. 34. Ibid., 547. 35. Arieti and Crossett translation, notes at 195. 36. Ibid., notes at 9–10. 37. Boileau, Traité, in Œuvres complètes, 341–42, 394. 38. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 33–34. On opera and the querelle over the sublime, see Bussels and van Oostveldt, “ ‘One Never Sees Monsters,’ ” 139–56. 39. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 33–36. 40. Ibid., 42–45. 41. On sound and energy, compare Doody, Daring Muse, 174–78, 211, 255–64. 42. Boileau, “Réflexions X” (c. 1710), in Œuvres complètes, 543–58, at 550, trans. Gilby, Sublime Worlds, 1. 43. Ibid. 44. Monk, Sublime, 32. Compare Saccamano, “Sublime Force,” 83. 45. Monk, Sublime, 43–44. 46. Dryden, Works xii.87; Huntley, “Dryden’s Discovery.” 47. Dryden, Works xii.97. 48. Dryden, Works xv.3. On the opera, see White, “Grabu’s Albion”; Jenkinson, Culture and Politics, 207–11; Harth, Pen for a Party, 254–68; Hammond, “Dryden’s Albion”; Price, Henry Purcell, 3–6, 265–70; Price, “Political Allegory”; Hume, “Politics of Opera”; Winn, “When Beauty Fires,” 254–73. 49. Grabu and Dryden, Albion and Albanius, 124. 50. Dryden, Works xv.11. 51. Grabu and Dryden, Albion and Albanius, xv. 52. Ibid. 53. Dryden, Works xv.8–9. 54. Ibid., xv.9. Dryden’s editors cite a sixteenth-century treatise on this point (Works xv.365), but much seventeenth-century theory allowed sevenths. Klaus-Jürgen Sachs and Carl Dahlhaus, “Counterpoint,” and Claude Palisca, “Consonance,” in Grove. 55. Winn, “Dryden’s Songs.” 56. Dryden, Works xv.3. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. These odes are often connected with Dryden’s sublime, but curiously not the musical sublime. Recently, West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 94–129, insists on reintegrating political and musical dimensions of the odes, interpreted in terms of enthusiasm.

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60. Significant studies include Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry; Weinbrot, Britain’s Issue, 329– 403; Revard, Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode; Hamilton, Soliciting Darkness; Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode. 61. Quintilian, Instit. Orat. 10.1.61. 62. Horace, Carmina 4.2.1–8, 10–14, 18, 23–27, in Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Rudd, 221–23. 63. Boileau, “Discours sur l’ode” (1693), quoting his own L’art poëtique, in Œuvres complètes, 227–29. 64. See Dryden, Works iii.459–60; Maccubbin, “Critical Study”; Husk, An Account of the Musical Celebrations. 65. Motteux, Gentleman’s Journal 1 (1691–92), 4. 66. Cowley, Pindarique Odes (1656), in Poems, 21, s.ii.1–4. 67. Ibid., s.ii.7–10. Compare Dryden’s Song, Works iii.466; Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi . . . historia (1617–21), 90. 68. Cowley, Pindarique Odes, 21, s.iii.9–10. 69. Mace, “Musical Humanism,” 267. 70. Dryden, Works iii.200–203, l.1. 71. See Coltharp, “Raising Wonder,” 6–8. 72. Longinus vii.2, trans. Russell, in Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime, ed. Halliwell et al. 73. See Augustine, Confessions, books iv and xiii; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 26–61; Harris, Transformations of Love, 158–60. 74. Rogers, “Theories of Style,” 377–78; Webb, Ekphrasis, 85–86. Longinus’s key term was phantasia, not enargeia. 75. Dryden, Works xii.93. 76. Dryden, preface to Sylvae, Works iii.17–18. For West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 111–12, this “musicality is not so easily associated with judgement or restraint,” but the alignment of music with the noncognitive, “emotional,” and unrestrained seems overdetermined by modern assumptions. More generally, West underplays the conventionality of connecting poetics with music. Dryden’s “musicality” and use of musical vocabulary in poetics risks being misconstrued as distinctive, and distinctively connected with enthusiasm (176, 179). 77. Dryden, Works xii.94. Compare Longinus xv; Scodel, “Cowleyan Pindaric,” 208. 78. Dryden, Works vii.3–9. In this, it alluded to the tradition of court odes and panegyric, now the preserve of whiggish poets, and perhaps particularly to Dennis’s Pindarics. West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 116–29. 79. Dryden, Works vii.559–60. 80. Scodel, “Cowleyan Pindaric,” 208. 81. Ibid. 82. On reception, see Dryden, Works vii.555–62; Kinsley and Kinsley, eds., Dryden; Myers, Handel, Dryden and Milton, 17–44. 83. Proffitt, “Political Satire”; Myers, Dryden, 184–85; Miner, ed., Poems, v–vii; Scodel, “Cowleyan Pindaric,” 205; Paulson, “Dryden,” 54. 84. Dryden, Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), Works iv.3–90; Noggle, Skeptical Sublime, chap. 2; Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism, 26–27. 85. Doody, Daring Muse, 212. 86. Turner, “ ‘Thy Lovers,’ ” 319, 325. 87. Smith, “Argument and Contexts,” 478–79.

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88. Turner, “ ‘Thy Lovers,’ ” 331. 89. Smith, “Argument and Contexts,” 479. 90. See Gerson, De canticordo (1423–26), col. 648, in Irwin, “Mystical Music,” 196–97. 91. Scodel, “Cowleyan Pindaric,” 208. 92. Skouen, “Vocal Wit,” 379–81, 390–92, 396. 93. See Mason and Rounce, “Alexander’s Feast,” 141, 156. 94. Ironically, for Scott such “digressive,” “pindaric” “music” is anti-sublime. Works of John Dryden (1808), in Kinsley and Kinsley, eds., Dryden, 332, 362. 95. Mason and Rounce, “Alexander’s Feast,” passim. 96. See the excerpts in Ashfield and de Bolla, eds., Sublime, 53–54, 77–78, 99, 172. 97. Turner, “ ‘Thy Lovers,’ ” 331. 98. On Apollo’s lyre and Zeus’s thunderbolt, see Revard, Politics, 102–14; Moul, “Versions of Victory.” 99. Csapo and Wilson, “Timotheus.” 100. Newcastle to the Prince of Wales, in Keay, Magnificent Monarch, 208; Newcastle, “For Seremoneye, & Order,” in Strong, Catalogue of Letters, 210. 101. Macgregor, “ ‘Lying Odes,’ ” 70–72, points out the intertext of Dryden’s Cock and the Fox fable: “Ye Princes rais’d by Poets to the Gods, / And Alexander’d up in lying Odes, / Believe not ev’ry flatt’ring Knave’s report” (ll.659–61). 102. Horace, Ars poetica 100–130; Longinus ix.2–3, ix.10–11, xiii.2, xv.1–4. Compare Turner, “ ‘Thy Lovers,’ ” 331. 103. Turner, “ ‘Thy Lovers,’ ” 331. 104. Dryden to Dennis, March 1694(?), in Ward, ed., Letters, 72. Compare West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 120. 105. Dennis, “To Mr. Dryden . . . Pindarick Ode” (1694). 106. See West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 168. 107. Early English Books Online (EEBO) reveals ten appearances in print before 1697. 108. Illuminating (and rare) studies of Dennis and music are Head, “ ‘A Pleasing Rape’ ”; Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 37–44. 109. For the defense, see Dennis’s preface to Dennis and Eccles, The Musical Entertainments in the Tragedy of Rinaldo and Armida (1699). Head, “ ‘A Pleasing Rape,’ ” 59–61, offers a reading of the work in terms of the sublime. 110. For Sir Tremendous Longinus, see Timothy Rag [Richard Steele], An Answer to a Whimsical Pamphlet . . . Humbly inscrib’ d to Sir Tremendous Longinus (1720). 111. Advancement 172. On Dennis and enthusiasm, see recently West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 120–23, 126, 172–74; Morillo, “John Dennis”; further, especially Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation; Klein and La Vopa, eds., Enthusiasm and Enlightenment. 112. Longinus viii.2–3, translation following Russell; Advancement 172. 113. Dennis, proposal to Grounds; further, Dennis, Critical Works, i.8–9, 42–44, 215, 228, 332, 400, 510–11, ii.237, 495. 114. Grounds 15–16. 115. Dennis, “Turin, October 25. [16]88,” 138. 116. Ibid., 138–39. 117. Ibid., 139. 118. Ibid., 139–40. 119. Ibid., 140. 120. For example, Advancement 169.

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121. Grounds 7. 122. Advancement Epistle Dedicatory, unpaginated. Compare Longinus xxxv.3. 123. Advancement Epistle Dedicatory. 124. Ibid., 168–73. 125. Ibid., 23–24. Compare Grounds 98–99. 126. Dennis, Essay upon Publick Spirit (1711), 19. 127. Ibid.; Feldman, “Strange Births,” 176–77. 128. Dennis, Essay upon Publick Spirit, 19. 129. Grounds 79. 130. Dryden, Works ii.19, ll. 471–74; compare Boileau, Traité, in Œuvres complètes, 341–42; further Head, “ ‘A Pleasing Rape.’ ” 131. On Monmouth-Absalom and seduction, see Bowers, Force or Fraud, 75–88. 132. Lamb, “Longinus,” 557. 133. Advancement 170. 134. Grounds 99. 135. Ibid., 99–100. 136. Ibid., 7.

chapter 2 1. Jackson, Thirty Letters (1783), i.117–18. 2. Ibid., 118; for the view that music imitates or inspires passions, see Jackson, An Ode to Fancy by Warton (1773), preface. 3. Jackson, Thirty Letters, i.119. 4. Blair, Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), 74. Warton, Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), 55, 63, called Alexander’s Feast “sublime . . . to an unparallelled degree” and uniquely suited to musical composition because it “expressed all the greater passions” and moved between them “sudden[ly] and impetuous[ly].” Dryden’s ode tops the list of “Odes, Class I. Sublime” in Drake’s Literary Hours (1798), 384. 5. Longinus, Essay upon Sublime (1698), 26. 6. OED, s.v. “jarring,” sense 1. 7. Ibid., sense 2. 8. See also Stanyon, “ ‘What Passion.’ ” 9. See, for instance, the definition accompanying Charles Le Brun’s 1668 Royal Academy lecture, Expressions des passions de l’ âme (1727), 1. Psychical movement toward or away from an object unites definitions as diverse as Augustine’s, Descartes’s, and Hobbes’s. 10. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 101. 11. Ibid., 23–25. 12. For “What moves me?” see Ashfield and de Bolla, eds., Sublime, 2. Tellingly, two key “early users of the category” of emotions (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 101) were theorizing taste and sublimity: Henry Home, Lord Kames, in Elements of Criticism (1762) and Archibald Alison, in Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790). 13. Advancement 26; Grounds 16. 14. Brady, Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day (1692), s.ii.1, 3, 7, in Husk, An Account of the Musical Celebrations, 162.

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15. Burke, “To Dr H——n,” 30, ll.13, 3–4. Further Stanyon, “Passion of Edmund Burke.” 16. Shepard, “Music Therapy,” 148–51. 17. Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik, 61, 66–67. 18. Milton, Paradise Lost, book v, ll.623–24. 19. Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 422; Coltharp, “Raising Wonder,” 14. Compare Williamson, “Heavenly Harmony,” 529. West, Dryden and Enthusiasm, 115, rejects secularizing readings but similarly concludes that the closing stanza indicates a “strug gle[]” with “coherence” in poetry and in aesthetic-emotional responses to art. 20. Longinus xxxv.3–4, trans. Russell. 21. Lucretius, De rerum natura iii.28–30. 22. See Mitchell’s ode, discussed later in the chapter, or Christopher Smart, Carmen cl. Alexandri Pope in S. Cæciliam Latine redditum . . . To which is added Ode for Musick on Saint Cecilia’s Day (1746). 23. Gerrard, “Hill, Aaron,” in DNB. 24. Eliza Haywood, “To Hillarius, on His sending some Verses, sign’d M.S.,” “An Irregular Ode. To Mr. Walter Bowman, Professor of the Mathematics. Occasion’d by his objecting against my giving the Name of Hilarius to Aaron Hill, Esq,” in Secret Histories (1725), 78, 261–64; King, “New Contexts”; Inglesfield, “James Thomson”; Monk, Sublime, 88–90, 101–3; Morris, Religious Sublime, 138–54. 25. Gerard, Aaron Hill, 106–10. 26. Representative studies are Kivy, “Mainwaring’s Handel”; Johnson, “Giant HANDEL”; Shapiro, “ ‘Drama of an Infinitely Superior Nature’ ”; Smith, Handel’s Oratorios, 108–26; Harris, “Silence as Sound”; Brown, “Moods at Mid-Century”; Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture, 20–52. 27. Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (1760), title page. English from Smith’s 1739 translation of Longinus, xxxiii.78–79. 28. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances (1785), 106; Johnson, “Giant HANDEL,” 532–33. 29. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances, 106. 30. Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 165; Avison, Essay on Musical Expression . . . A Reply to the Author of “Remarks” (1753), 27; Burney, Account of the Musical Performances, 37. 31. On Hill and Dennis, see Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 106–10. 32. Hill, Plain Dealer, i.45–52. On the periodical, see Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 102–21. 33. McGeary, “Verse Epistles,” 31–33. 34. Hill, Tears of the Muses (1737), 24. 35. Hill, Plain Dealer no. 94 (12 February 1725), ii.309–16. 36. Hill, Tears of the Muses, 25. 37. Hill, Judgment-Day (1721), iii. Compare Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 113. 38. Compare Guest’s reading of Hill’s “Free Thoughts” in A Form of Sound Words, 27–30. 39. Hill, Creation (1720). 40. Ibid., xii. 41. The commonplace has Roman origins and political implications, as in Milton’s note on his “English Heroic Verse Without Rhyme,” and Marvell’s “On Paradise Lost,” in Paradise Lost, 53–55; Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711), ll.337–61. 42. Hill, Gideon, 21.

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43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 30. 45. Ibid. 46. Hill, Tears of the Muses, 23. See also Pope’s Second Pastoral, or Alexis. To Dr. Garth, reapplied to Pope in Hill’s Creation, v. 47. Hill, Gideon, 30. 48. Ibid., 32. 49. Ibid. 50. Compare OED, s.v. “emotion,” senses 1–3. 51. Hill, Gideon, 30. 52. Hill, Creation, ss.i.18–9, vii.10, vii.12. 53. On Malcolm, see James Heintze, “Malcolm, Alexander,” in Grove; Herissone, Music Theory, 13, 21–22; Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind, 109–22. 54. Malcolm, Treatise, iii–xii; Mitchell, Ode on the Power of Musick (1721), with three additional closing verses. See also Mitchell, Poems on Several Occasions (1729), i.15–32. Unless noted, quotations are from the free-standing print. 55. Mitchell, “Dedication,” “Advertisement” (unpaginated), in Ode on the Power of Musick. 56. Calhoun Winton, “Mitchell, Joseph,” in Grove. 57. Winton, “Author of The Fatal Extravagance.” 58. Hill, Plain Dealer no. 36 (24 July 1724), i.299, 297. 59. Ibid., 297. 60. Addison had recommended the “sublime manner of thinking” in psalms and the “majestick Simplicity” of ballads in Spectator, i.316, iv.144; further nos. 70, 74, 465. On the ballad revival, see Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 115–16; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism; Gelbart, Invention of “Folk Music,” 14–39. 61. Compare Lucretius, De rerum natura iii.1–30. 62. Ibid., i.1, vi.94: “hominum divomque voluptas.” 63. Compare Theophilus Parsons, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1699, s.vii.18–24, itself imitating Alexander’s Feast, in Husk, Account of the Musical Celebrations, 183; Thomas Fletcher, On the Feast of Cecilia. 1686. An Ode, s.iii.1–23, in Poems on Several Occasions (1692), 20–25; Joseph Addison, “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1694), 136, s.iii.7–8; Addison, Poetical Works, 136–37, s.iv.2–6; Thomas Yalden, “Ode, for St.  Cecilia’s Day, 1693” (1694), 129, s.ii.1–4; John Hughes, Ode in Praise of Musick (1703), 4, s.3. 64. Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 77. 65. Ibid., 81–101; King, Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, 27–31. 66. Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 70. 67. Using Dennis’s letters (and one from Thomson to Hill), Clare Brant describes how early eighteenth-century wits borrowed the conventions of libertine love letters to court male literary friends. Brant suggests this discursive strategy waned by the 1730s, strained by the participation of actual women. Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters, 48–53. 68. See especially Harris, Transformations of Love. Gerrard connected Neoplatonist friendship circles and Hillarian friendship in “Scorpion.” 69. Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, 75. 70. Addison, “Song for St.  Cecilia’s Day,” 137, s.iv.1–4. See also John Oldham and John Blow, Second Musical Entertainment Perform’ d on St.  Cecilia’s Day (1685), ll.16–22; Thomas D’Urfey, An Ode for the Anniversary Feast of St. Cecilia (1691), in Husk, An Account of the Musical Celebrations, 159–61; Hill, Gideon, 21; Creation, xiv.

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71. Poriss, Changing the Score, 5; Cowgill, “Mozart Productions.” 72. On the publication date, see Foxon, English Verse, i.470. On Radadmisto, Burrows et al., eds., Handel Documents, 525–27; McGeary, Politics of Opera, 58–65; LaRue, Handel, 105– 16; Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 331. 73. On the logic of height linking castrati with royal power, see Feldman, Castrato, 3–78. 74. Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 342. 75. Ibid. 76. Quoted in ibid., 336. 77. For the phrase, see Cervantes, “ ‘Tuneful Monsters.’ ” 78. Haywood, “An Irregular Ode. To Mr. Walter Bowman,” ll.42–45, in Secret Histories, 263. 79. Advancement 170. 80. On the play, see King, Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, 67–69; Rose, Political Satire, 66–72. 81. Johnson, Hurlothrumbo: or, The Super-Natural (1729), 4, 10, 30, 39–40, 45. 82. Johnson, Blazing Comet (1732), iv–v. 83. Ibid., 33. 84. Ibid., 44. 85. Ibid., 47. 86. Ibid., 49. 87. Ibid., viii, ix. 88. The title page bears the name “Hurlothrumbo Johnson,” although the pamphlet is usually described as anonymous. See, for example, Johnson, “Giant HANDEL,” 518; Gilman, “Arne,” 537; McGeary, Politics of Opera, 341n65. 89. Johnson, “Giant HANDEL,” 523. 90. Ibid. 91. Johnson, Hurlothrumbo, 60; Johnson, Blazing Comet, ix. 92. Johnson, Harmony, 4. 93. Ibid., 13. 94. Ibid., 13, 19. 95. Collected in Dubois, ed., Avison’s Essay. 96. Johnson, “Giant HANDEL,” 520. 97. Avison, Reply, 49–51. 98. See Dryden’s “Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell” (1696), Works iv.752–4, and the commendatory verses in John Blow, Amphion Anglicus (1700), i–viii. 99. Avison, Reply, 3–4; Dubois, ed., Avison’s Essay, xxi. 100. On this feature of Pindarics, see Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry, 1–18; Weinbrot, Britain’s Issue, 336, 349; Oates, “Jonson, Congreve, and Gray.” 101. Gray, Poems (1768), 70. 102. Gray, Odes (1757), 5–11, l.1. 103. Ibid., 49. 104. See Kinsley and Kinsley, eds., Dryden, 129–30, 222, 251. 105. Pope, Essay on Criticism, 22–23, ll.374–83. 106. McLoughlin and Boulton, eds., Writings and Speeches, 185. 107. PE IV.iii.248, IV.vi.255, IV.xxi.291–93. 108. On musical vibrations and Burke, see Trower, Senses of Vibration, 26–30. On music and nerve theory, see especially Kennaway, ed., Music and the Nerves.

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109. Christopher Nugent, An Essay on the Hydrophobia (1753), quoted in Sarafianos, “Contractility,” 30–31. 110. For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who coined the term, aesthetics was the “science of how something is to be sensitively cognized.” Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae (1735), in Guyer, History of Modern Aesthetics, i.5. 111. See further chapter 5. 112. See, for instance, PE II.xx.156, III.xxv, III.xxv.234. 113. PE III.xxvii.238. On Burke’s passions, see Dwan, “Edmund Burke.” The Enquiry’s determinedly physiological account of passion arguably approaches the later paradigm of emotions, Dixon’s “morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings.” Although Burke sometimes describes passions as mental experiences or resulting from thoughts, the body has the upper hand in accounting for passions. Ideas of sensation are also primarily involuntary, imposed on the perceiving mind by physical stimuli. Aesthetic responses appear morally disengaged, as we are not morally responsible for passions: put the body in particu lar poses, and particu lar passions naturally follow (PE IV.iv.249–52); show us from afar a ship in a storm, and we feel a delight unmingled with schadenfreude because, our moral sympathies suspended, we irrepressibly enjoy our own security. This allows pleasure in morally reprehensible events to be recuperated within a larger, supposedly ethically justifiable account of taste. Compare Dwan, “Edmund Burke,” 577– 82; Ryan, “Physiological Sublime”; Bourke, “Pity and Fear,” 173–75. 114. Bullard argues for a strongly Lucretian dimension to the Enquiry in Edmund Burke, 79–108; “Burke’s Aesthetic Psychology,” 56–57; “Edmund Burke Among the Poets.” On dissonances between Burke and Lucretius, see Janowitz, “Sublime Plurality”; Baker, “Lucretius,” 284–85.

chapter 3 1. Bodmer, “Das Erdmännchen,” in Neue critische Briefe (1749), 474–506. 2. Bodmer’s anacreontics, self-consciously simple love and drinking songs loosely following the Greek poet Anacreon, are taken from Friedrich von Hagedorn, Oden und Lieder (1747). Debrunner, Das güldene schwäbische Alter, 61–63. 3. Compare Müller, “J. J. Bodmers Poetik,” 339–40. Contra Schneider, Ins Ohr geschrieben, 21–26. 4. Bodmer was the first to propose that the manuscript (now Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek cod. Pal. germ. 848) was made for the Zurich patrician Rüdiger Manesse. 5. Eggenberger, “Die Manesse-Liederhandschrift,” 627; Hope, “Miniatures.” 6. Welker, “Melodien”; Holznagel, Wege, 38–49. 7. On the shorthand “Leibniz-Wolffian,” see Wilson, “Reception of Leibniz,” 445–53. 8. Compare Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 16–23, 41–43. 9. See Lütteken and Mahlmann-Bauer, eds., Bodmer und Breitinger; Reiling, Genese der idealen Gesellschaft; Bloch, “ ‘Schreiben thut bleiben’ ”; Graber, Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit; Bender, Johann Jakob Bodmer und Johann Jakob Breitinger. Recent English-language discussions are Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 103–17; Buchenau, Founding, chapter 4. 10. Bodmer to Schinz, 1 December 1776, ZBZ Ms Bodmer 13. 11. Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 234–37, 263–83; Viëtor, “Idee des Erhabenen,” 44. 12. Quadlbauer, “Die genera dicendi,” 111; Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 55–56.

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13. Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 263; Blackall, Emergence. It is important to note that Latin and “school-philosophy” nonetheless remained important to German enlightenment, and that so-called progress into enlightenment was not dependent on the inevitable overthrow of Latin by native German spirit, as might be suggested by some older studies influenced by völkisch ideologies, such as Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie. See Wilson, “Reception of Leibniz,” 444; Schneiders, Die wahre Aufklärung, 14–15; further Haskell, Prescribing Ovid. 14. Bodmer and Breitinger, Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Krafft (1727). On Wernicke and Longinus, see Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 237–48. On Wernicke and Dryden, see Baumgartner, Dryden’s Relation to Germany, 4–25. 15. Addison, Spectator, iv.144. Bodmer, Johann Miltons Verlust des Paradieses (1732); Breitinger, Critische Abhandlung (1740); Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740), with Addison’s defense of Milton as an appendix; Dichtkunst (1740), ii.42–90; Bodmer, Critische Betrachtungen (1741). 16. Bodmer, “Vorrede” to Dichtkunst i.X5r, X5v, XX4v–XX6r. 17. Fuseli corresponded with “Bodmer-Longinus” (as he called him in a letter of 1766) from England and credited Bodmer with his admiration for Milton and Shakespeare. Torbruegge, “Johann Heinrich Füssli,” 161; Myrone, “Henry Fuseli”; Stähli, “ ‘Wäre es Ihnen gleichgültig.’ ” 18. Grimm, “Impulse,” especially 762–64; Lütteken, “ ‘Tichter,’ ” especially 40–43; Lütteken, Monologische, 118–89, 90–208. See also Geiger, Volksliedinteresse, 5–21. 19. Lütteken, “ ‘Tichter,’ ” 42–43. 20. Reimann, Einführung des Kirchengesangs; Nef, Collegia Musica; Jakob, “Musik.” 21. Reichardt, “Kirchenmusik—Zürich,” Musikalisches Kunstmagazin 2, no. 5 (1791): 216. 22. Baumann, Bibliographie, 14. 23. Reichardt, “Kirchenmusik—Zürich,” 216. 24. Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke, 315–61; Rentsch, “ ‘Zwar frey,’ ” 814–16. 25. See M. P. Planta’s 1766 speech to the town council and Lavater’s letters, cited in Baumann, Bibliographie, 14. 26. Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke, 344. 27. Spectator no. 70, i.297; Geiger, Volksliedinteresse, 11. 28. See the letters of 8 February to 14 September 1724, in Geiger, Volksliedinteresse, 11. Bodmer’s manuscript of his Altenglische Balladen (1780) similarly recorded dismay at Herder’s argument that “the essence of the folksong [Volkslied] is song [Gesang].” ZBZ Bodmer Ms 34a; Geiger, Volksliedinteresse, 11–18. 29. Bodmer to Zellweger, 14 September 1724, ZBZ Ms Bodmer 20.14. 30. For letters from König to Bodmer, see ZBZ Ms Bodmer 3.12. 31. Lütteken, “ ‘Tichter,’ ” 43. 32. See variously Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 263–88; Zelle, “ ‘Vernünftige Gedanken’ ”; Zelle, Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne, 134–41; Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen,” 261–93; Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 104–17; Hilliard, Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts, 11–13; Fritz, Vom Erhabenen, 222–28. 33. On philosophical eclecticism, see Marti, “Schule des richtigen Denkens,” 156–60. 34. Bodmer and Breitinger, Einbildungs-Krafft [b2]. 35. Ibid., 236–39. 36. Dichtkunst ii.352–398, especially ii.352, ii.374 (on Longinus); Bodmer, Critische Briefe 102. 37. Bodmer, Critische Briefe 101, 98.

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38. See Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 104–17. 39. Dichtkunst ii.362. 40. The continued relevance of Leibniz and Wolff is evident at Dichtkunst X7v (Bodmer’s preface), i.4 (compare Wolff, Philosophia rationalis [1728; rev. ed. 1732], §29), i.7, i.9, i.222, ii.46, ii.96, ii.311. 41. While attacking superstition, Zu rich rational orthodoxy maintained the existence of miracles, angels, and demons. See, for example, Dichtkunst i.158; further Loop, “Deismus,” 222–25; Zelle, “ ‘Vernünftige Gedanken,’ ” 38–39. 42. Dichtkunst i.112, i.123, i.128; i.262–90, ii.433–34. 43. Cassirer, Freiheit und Form, 70–79. Compare Meyer, “Restaurative Innovation”; Viëtor, “Idee des Erhabenen,” 245. For critiques of Cassirer, see Kowalik, Poetics, 37–39; Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 32, 105–6, 111–12; Buchenau, Founding, 84–99. Torbruegge, “Johann Heinrich Füssli,” explicitly equated the wonderful and sublime. See also Bender, Johann Jakob Bodmer und Johann Jakob Breitinger, 87–94; Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 263–64; Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen,” 274. The equation is contested by Fritz, Vom Erhabenen, 223–24. 44. For instance, Bodmer, Critische Briefe 94–96; Dichtkunst i.124, ii.416. 45. Dichtkunst i.129. 46. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 37. See also Marti, “Schule des richtigen Denkens,” 158–63, 171. 47. Kowalik, Poetics, 37–60. 48. My emphasis. Breitinger here echoes his nemesis in Leipzig, Gottsched, in Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (1730/51), 151. Compare Wolff, Vernuenfftige Gedancken (1720), §571. On Zurich-Leipzig rivalry, see recently Döring, “Literaturstreit.” 49. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 105. 50. Dichtkunst i.118–19. 51. Compare Wolff, Vernuenfftige Gedancken, 152. 52. Auksi, Christian Plain Style, especially 228–31. Further Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 17–20, 263–90. 53. Boileau, “Réflexions X,” 155. 54. Chapin, “C. P. E. Bach,” 105. 55. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, quoted from Hache, “Thunder,” 27. 56. Addison, Spectator no.465 (23 August 1712). 57. Reimann, Einführung des Kirchengesangs, 12–25, Garside, Zwingli, 27–65; Aeschbacher, “Zwingli.” On Zwingli’s eighteenth-century heritage, see Jakob, “Musik,” 253–54. 58. Erasmus, commentary on 1 Corinthians 14, cited in Garside, Zwingli, 32. 59. Zwingli, Ußlegen und gründ der schlußreden (Zurich, 1523), cited in Reimann, Einführung des Kirchengesangs, 13. 60. Breitinger, “Drey Reden” (1773). 61. Dichtkunst similarly castigates rhetorical treatises for “oratorical exaltations” of harmony (Wohlklang) that attribute a “superstitious,” “Magical Power” to music (ii.36–38). 62. Like Longinus’s discussion of instrumental music, Laws uses the relatively unusual mimemata for artistic imitations or representations. 63. Plato, Laws 2.669e–670a; compare Republic, 3.396b, against imitating neighing horses and bellowing bulls. 64. For example, Bodmer and Breitinger, Einbildungs-Krafft [b2]; Dichtkunst i.457. 65. Gilby, Sublime Worlds, 119. 66. Till, Das doppelte Erhabene, 233–48. 67. On the term, see Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime, 23–47.

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68. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 40. 69. Derrida, Truth in Painting. 70. Dichtkunst ii.448–49; M. de la Motte, “L’ode de M. de la Faille” (1730), 398–99. 71. On mistranslation, compare the use of Stimmen (voices) for French accords (chords), or the singular Symphonie (often an abstract term for music, somewhat like “harmony,” in Bodmer and Breitinger’s writings) for simphonies, referring in La Motte to instrumental movements. 72. Perhaps Breitinger echoes wider Germanophone reactions against high-style French opera and dance. Johann Mattheson, for one, argued that chaconnes oversatiate listeners. Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), 233. 73. Bodmer’s earth mannikin raised the same idea, although Bodmer’s narrator found it doubtful. Bodmer, Neue critische Briefe, 496. Compare Pope, preface to Iliad (1715–20), vol. 1 (unpaginated). 74. Pope, preface to Iliad. 75. Grimm, “Impulse,” 763–64, nonetheless sees their poetics as crucial to eighteenthcentury music theorists, especially in the network of Johann Georg Sulzer, a former student of the Swiss writers and editor of the influential Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Berlin, 1771–74). Sulzer apparently entrusted the encyclopedia’s music entries to others, and his attitude toward music was ambivalent. Riley, “Civilizing the Savage.” Sulzer’s formation in Zurich doubtless shaped this ambivalence. 76. Krause, Von der musikalischen Poesie (1752), 136, 194, 252. For an English introduction to Krause, see Berg, Correspondence. 77. Contra Lütteken, “ ‘Tichter,’ ” 52–59; Grimm, “Impulse,” 763–64. On Baumgarten, see Berg, Correspondence, xxi–xxiii. 78. Dichtkunst ii.25–28, 265–71. On Brockes, see Zelle, “Das Erhabene,” 226. 79. Telemann, “Gedanken über (S[alvo].T[ituli].) Herrn Brockes Sing-Gedicht vom Wasser im Frühlinge” (1723), in Stenzel, ed., Epochen, 96, ll.13–14, 26. On Telemann and the sublime, see Lütteken, Monologische, 149–69. 80. Drollinger and Johann Jacob Spreng, Herrn Carl Friederich Drollingers Gedichte (1743), 91–92. 81. Heinzelmann, “Pope in Germany,” 18–19; Drollinger, Alexander Popen Versuch von den Eigenschaften eines Kunstrichters (1741), repr. in Drollinger and Spreng, Drollingers Gedichte. 82. Drollinger and Spreng, Drollingers Gedichte, 78–80. 83. Compare Tate: “Music best can Music’s power recite,” s.v.8, in Husk, An Account of the Musical Celebrations, 148; Addison, “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” 134, s.i.11; Congreve, Hymn to Harmony, 1, s.i.4. 84. These writers’ music odes all circulated in Germany. See Christian Felix Weiße, Scherzhafte Lieder (1763), 219–55; Herder, Cäcilie, 287; Monheim, Händels Oratorien, 51–53, 83–90, 483–88; Baumgartner, Dryden’s Relation to Germany, 64–86. 85. Große, “Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit,” 159–64. 86. “Damons Thränen über des Thirsis Tod,” s.28, in Samuel Lange and Immanuel Pyra, Thirsis und Damons Freundschaftliche Lieder (1749), 69. 87. For parallel British satires of the musical sublime, see for example [Anon.,] “Perdita’s Feast, or The Powers of Love and Music” (1783); [John Wolcot], Lousiad, in Works of Peter Pindar (1794), i.271–72; further Colbert, “Petrio-Pindarics.” 88. Reproduced in Stenzel, ed., Epochen, 190–91. 89. Klopstock, Declamatio, qua poetas epopeiae auctores (1747), HKA Addenda ii/i.13–15, 200–201.

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90. Beiser, Diotima’s Children; Deleuze, Fold; Menke, Force, 12. 91. This facet of Leibniz’s relevance goes beyond the question of more explicit responses to his ideas in eighteenth-century music theory, on which see Leisinger, Leibniz-Reflexe in der deutschen Musiktheorie. Leisinger’s study does not discuss the sublime. 92. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 105. 93. See Leibniz, Confessio philosophi: Papers Concerning the Problem of Evil, 151n16. Henceforth Papers. 94. Compare, treating very different arguments, Deleuze, Fold, 127–37. 95. Leibniz, “Letter to Magnus Wedderkopf,” Papers, 4, 144. 96. Leibniz, “Conversatio cum Domino Episcopo Stenonio de libertate,” Papers, 119. 97. Leibniz, “On the Omnipotence and Omniscience of God and the Freedom of Man,” Papers, 23. 98. Leibniz, Papers, 43–44. 99. Compare Sleigh in Leibniz, Papers, 154. 100. Longinus ix.1–2; compare Porter, Sublime in Antiquity, 97–98.

chapter 4 1. Karl August Küttner, Charaktere teutscher Dichter (1781), ii.374–75. 2. See William Wordsworth, “Conversations with Klopstock,” in Prose Works, i.89–100. 3. Drake, Literary Hours, 383. 4. Luther celebrated music as God’s greatest gift after theology. He maintained a medieval conception of music grounded in ratio, where music is key to relationships between different orders of creation and simultaneously, like humanist theorists, emphasised music’s practical affective power, seeing music as binding the congregation into one body within the sacramental and redemptive functions of worship. See Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music; Butt, Music Education, 12–51; Irwin, Neither Voice. On Schulpforta, see Werner, “Musik und Musiker,” 537–38; Pernet, Religion, 60–66. 5. Klopstock, “Einleitung” in Geistliche Lieder (1758). 6. Koch, “Klopstock”; Lemmel, “Sylbenmaß”; Richards, “Enduring Monument,” 149; Bock, Deutsche Dichter, 3–19. 7. Letter to Cäcilie Ambrosius, 1767, cited in Lütteken, “Identifikationsfigur,” 37. On Singhäuser, see Hilliard, “Stellenwert,” 65–66. 8. Klopstock, Gelehrtenrepublik (1774), HKA Werke vii/i.172. 9. Lütteken, “Identifikationsfigur,” 34; Nebrig, Rhetorizität des hohen Stils, 108; Hilliard, Philosophy, 142; Hilliard, “Stellenwert,” 66–67. 10. Compare Kohl, “ ‘Sing, unsterbliche Seele,’ ” 69. 11. For the paragon, see Hilliard, Philosophy, 100. 12. On Pindaric agonism, see Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry. Compare the similar conception of Klopstock in Kohl, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, 17–18. 13. Klopstock, Oden, HKA Werke i.574, l.10. Compare Kohl, “ ‘Sing, unsterbliche Seele,’ ” 83. 14. Klopstock, Von der heiligen Poesie, preface to Messias, vol. 1 (1755), **3r. 15. Bodmer to Zellweger, 5 September 1750, in HKA Briefe i.428. 16. HKA Briefe iii, nos. 49 (27 October 1757), 54 (30 December 1757), Erläuterungen 262– 66; Briefe iv/i, nos. 8 (4 February 1759), 88 (12 April 1761).

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17. Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 93; compare Hertz, End of the Line, 40–60. 18. Klopstock, HKA Werke i.126, l.1. 19. On Klopstock and such continuous verbs, see Borchmeyer, “Klopstock,” 15. 20. Klopstock, Epigramme, HKA Werke ii.35. 21. See recently Stanyon, “Sublime Rauschen,” and the literature cited there. 22. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 166–67. 23. Michaelis, “Ueber das Erhabene in der Musik,” 44. Compare Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 167–68. 24. Michaelis, “Ueber das Erhabene in der Musik,” 44. 25. DeLillo, White Noise, 60–61. On exhilaration, see Jameson, Postmodernism, 10. 26. Martus, Werkpolitik, 297–98, offers an overview. 27. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book III, chap. xi, ¶5. 28. Siegert, Relays, 1. 29. Menninghaus, “Dichtung,” 145. 30. Amtstätter, Beseelte Töne, 46. Compare Kohl, Klopstock, 11–21, 66–68. 31. Klopstock, Ueber Sprache und Dichtkunst (1779), 84, 255; further HKA Werke ii.53–54, 58; Martus, Werkpolitik, 298. 32. Hilliard, “Schweigen”; Borchmeyer, “Klopstock,” 26–29. 33. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 168. Compare Scharnowski, “ ‘Es spricht nicht.’ ” 34. In Die Alpen (1729), Albrecht von Haller set the sometimes frightening noise of waterfalls within a physico-theological scheme of providence and wonder. Haller, in Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte, 11th ed. (1788), 34, 44–45, 52. For Goethe, see Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, 6 (18–21 June 1775). On music theory, see Stanyon, “Sublime Rauschen.” 35. See, for instance, Aarsleff, “Philosophy of Language.” 36. Thomas, Origins, 142. 37. Samuel Sömmerring, Über das Organ der Seele (1796), 49. Compare Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 152–58, 63–68; Siegert, Relays, 166–82. 38. Sömmerring, Über das Organ der Seele, 45–49. 39. Sömmerring himself celebrated auditory exactness and clarity—evident in minute perceptions of musical tuning—not overwhelming, tonally imprecise rushing. 40. Heinse, Ardinghello und die glückseeligen Inseln, in Sämmtliche Werke, iv.106. Compare Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 166. On Heinse, see recently Irvine et al., eds., Musikalisches Denken. 41. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 168. 42. Heinse, Ardinghello, iv.106. 43. Heinse to Fritz Jacobi (29 August 1780), in Sämmtliche Werke, x.33–35. 44. See HKA Briefe i.307–8; Körte, ed., Briefe. 45. Klopstock, HKA Briefe i.125 (no. 74, 12–21 and 25 July 1750). 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 125–26. 49. Ibid., 125. 50. Klopstock, HKA Werke i.170–81. 51. On the book of Job, see Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 158–63; Lamb, Rhetoric of Suffering. 52. Luther, Luther’s Works, i.126, xvii.356, liii.322. Uses of Rauschen in Luther’s Bible translation are themselves noteworthy; see Campe, “Rauschen.”

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53. Compare Job 38:4–17; Genesis 1:1–8. 54. Compare Job 38:9–11; Psalms 104:28, 145:16. 55. Klopstock, HKA Werke i.527. 56. On Klopstock’s translation, see Monheim, Händels Oratorien, 109–21, 330–36. 57. On Christ as mediator in Klopstock, see Hilliard, “Schweigen,” 13. On music as mediatory, see Fritz, Vom Erhabenen, 474–80. 58. Hilliard, Philosophy, 143; Klopstock, Von der heiligen Poesie, **6r; Mark 14:58. 59. Klopstock, HKA Werke i.283–85, l.1. 60. For Klopstock and Lowth, see HKA Briefe viii/ii.392–93; Johann Andreas Cramer, Klopstock (1778), ii.289. 61. Lowth’s innovation is sometimes overstated. The interpretation of parallelism as poetry presented by Lowth was largely anticipated by Johann Christian Schoettgen’s Leipzig dissertation, Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae (published fourteen years before Klopstock’s student years in Leipzig), and early German readers expressed reservations about his scholarship and novelty. Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry, 266–68; Smend, “Lowth in Deutschland.” 62. Schorch, “Das Erhabene,” 79; Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry, 284–85. 63. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787), i.100–101. 64. See Austern et al., eds., Psalms. 65. Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry, 234. 66. See, for example, Morris, Religious Sublime, 105–36. 67. Luise Henriette von Brandenburg, Jesus meine Zuversicht (1649), in Klopstock, Geistliche Lieder, HKA Werke iii/i.144. Compare Colossians 1:18–20. 68. Heinse, Sämmtliche Werke, x.33. 69. Langen, “Wortschatz,” 180. 70. See Klopstock, HKA Briefe iii.29–30 (letter of December 1755); PE I.xv.77; on Kant, Passannante, Catastrophizing, 192–235. 71. See Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime”; Hibberd and Stanyon, “Sonorous Sublimes,” 16n52. 72. Chua, Absolute Music, 118. On Bebung, see Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1762/87), i.6–7. 73. Milbank, “Pleonasm,” 65–70. Compare Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry, 8; Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, i.242. 74. Milbank, “Pleonasm,” 60–72, 74–79. 75. Derrida, Grammatology, 95–268. 76. Klopstock, HKA Werke vii/i.172; compare Hilliard, Philosophy, 141. 77. Klopstock, HKA Werke vii/ii.771. 78. Francesco Petrarca, “Nature of Poetry,” 262–63. Compare Kugel, Idea of Biblical Poetry, 212–16, 221–22: such ideas were common among early modern theorists, including Puttenham, Sidney, and Dennis. 79. Michael Praetorius, preface to Urania oder Urano Chordia (Wolfenbüttel: Fürstliche Druckerei, 1613). Translation modified from Varwig, Histories, 113. 80. Ibid. 81. Werner Breig, “Höfische Festmusik im Werk von Heinrich Schütz,” in Heinrich Schütz in seiner Zeit, ed. Walter Blankenburg (Darmstadt, 1985), 384; translated in Varwig, Histories, 33. 82. Gable, “St. Gertrude’s Chapel.” 83. Axel Beer, “Florilegium portense,” in MGG, Sachteil iii.557–58; Riemer, Erhard Bodenschatz.

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84. See Hellmut Federhofer, “Utendal, Alexander,” Konrad Ameln, “Lechner, Leonhard,” Lini Hübsch-Pfleger, “Knöfel, Johann,” in Grove. 85. Clark, “C. P. E. Bach”; Neubacher, Georg Philipp Telemanns Hamburger Kirchenmusik. 86. Lütteken, Monologische, 169–90, 404–13; Lütteken, “Identifikationsfigur,” 37–38; Richards, “Enduring Monument,” 168; Monheim, Händels Oratorien, 332–36. 87. On the composition, see Richards, “Enduring Monument,” 162–66. Klopstock’s Psalm offers another case of antiphonal parallelism developed through engagements between Klopstock and composers. See Magvas, “Ein Brief ”; Lee, “Klopstock.” 88. Klopstock, HKA Werke i.430–33, ll.5, 12, 14. 89. Bach, Klopstocks Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste (1784), 1. 90. On Klopstock against skepticism, see Hilliard, Freethinkers, 63–68. 91. Pocock, “Enthusiasm,” 26. 92. Klopstock, HKA Briefe iv/ii.680; HFA i.527–34; Kant AA xv.399–400; Große, “Aufklärung,” 166. 93. Leibniz, The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, 113–29. 94. Ibid., 119. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. See ibid., 115–18. 98. On buildings for polychoral music, see Howard and Moretti, Sound and Space. 99. Compare Heller-Roazen, Inner Touch, 108–9. 100. Leibniz, The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, 118–20. 101. Klopstock, Von der heiligen Poesie, **6r. 102. See HKA Briefe v/i–ii, nos. 59, 69, 71, 90, 114, 143; Briefe vi/i–ii, nos. 72, 79, 101, 214, 229; Briefe vii/ii–iii, nos. 27, 80, 147. On bards, Germanic mythology and Ossian, see Kohl, Rhetoric. On Gluck and Klopstock, see Lütteken, Monologische, 349–71, 350–58; Schneider, Ins Ohr geschrieben, 200–224. 103. Schnitzler, “ ‘Ritter Gluck,’ ” 24–28; Stanyon, “ ‘Rastrierte Blätter.’ ” 104. Richards, “Enduring Monument,” 154, 162–63, 172; Bock, Deutsche Dichter, 3–19.

chapter 5 1. Ehrhardt, “Attraktion,” 422; Simon, “Bildpolitiken,” 97; Zuckert, “Awe or Envy,” 220– 21. More detailed accounts include Stollberg, “ ‘Energieen des Erhabnen’ ”; Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, especially 103, 114–21; Simons, “Botschaft,” 38–40. 2. See, for example, Simons, “Botschaft,” 38–40; Simon, “Bildpolitiken,” 97; Jay, Downcast Eyes, 106. 3. Norton, “Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment.” 4. Although they give little attention to music or sublimity, this approach broadly follows Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics; Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology; Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment. 5. Herder, Abhandlung, 56–57. 6. Schulte-Sasse, “Herder’s Concept of the Sublime,” 280; Bedenk, Verwicklungen, 156; Pfotenhauer, “Anthropologie,” 91; Stollberg, “ ‘Energieen des Erhabnen,’ ” 22. 7. Herder, “Oden, (von Klopstock.)” (1773), 121. 8. Lamb, “Sublime,” 395.

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9. Ibid., 295–96. 10. Lamb, “Longinus,” 553. 11. Pope, Essay, 22, l.374. Herder knew the Essay and Alexander’s Feast, alongside Pope’s Orpheus-themed music ode. HFA vii.554–55; Herder, Cäcilie, 294. 12. Herder also interpreted Alexander’s Feast as complex: “Labyrinths of impressions [Empfindungen]” arise with “every new little digression of every labyrinth” in its movement from “affect to affect.” Viertes kritisches Wäldchen, HFA ii.351. 13. KU §46, 307–8. 14. Compare Heller-Roazen, Inner Touch, 101–15. 15. Herder, Kalligone (1800), iii.16–39. 16. See Schneider, ed., Herder; Norton, “Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment”; Bohlman, “Translating Herder.” 17. For a detailed English-language study of Herder’s theory and its influence, see Forster, After Herder. 18. Although repudiated by Hamann, Herder’s argument recalls Hamann’s formulation that God speaks “to the creature [directly] through the creature [mediately].” Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce, in Sämtliche Werke, ii.204. 19. Thomas, Origins, 9–10, 87–89, 110. Herder did not know Rousseau’s essay on the origins of language but drew on his Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’ inégalité parmi les hommes (1754), Emile ou De l’ éducation (1762), and Dictionnaire de musique (1764). Gaier in HFA i.1275, 1288, 1296, 1307. 20. Compare Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, HFA ii.601–8; Weidner, “Secularization,” 191. 21. This reading draws on, with modifications, Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie, 84–141. 22. See Fludd, Utriusque cosmi . . . historia, 90; Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (1650), ii.366–67. 23. Besonnenheit was also associated with the Greek virtue sophrosyne (discretion, prudence, moderation), and so with the mean. Bayer, Zeitgenosse, 109. 24. See Simon, “Bildpolitiken,” 108n39. Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie, 100–127, contrasts language’s “essential intellectual origin” and less-essential “sensuous, hearing origin.” 25. See Herder, “Oden, (von Klopstock.),” 110–11. 26. See Gaier in HFA i.1311; Blackwell, Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), 38. 27. Blackwell, Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 38. 28. Ibid., 39. Blackwell refers to Pseudo-Longinus’s lost Peri metrou. 29. Ibid. 30. On eighteenth-century discussion of the classical idea that music originated with reeds, see Thomas, Origins, 50–53; Head, “Birdsong.” 31. Compare Selbstheit und Liebe, HFA iv.419–20. 32. For Herder on Longinus and the fiat lux, see HFA i.33–4. 33. See Zuckert, “Awe or Envy,” 228; Guyer, “Free Play,” 353. Haym, Herder, i.260n1, influentially argued that Kalligone represented no advances on the fourth of the Kritische Wäldchen. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics, 120n1, and Pfotenhauer, “Anthropologie,” 90–91, treat Kalligone as retreating from an earlier, progressive aesthetic; for contrasting views, see Trabant, “Herder’s Discovery of the Ear”; Binczek, “Zur Deutung.” My own approach is not concerned with demonstrating the “coherence” or “theoretical advancement” in Herder’s thought, or lack thereof. (Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics, 5, 235.)

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34. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics, 234–35. 35. KU §51, 324–25. As Haym noted (Herder, ii.710–12), Herder’s “repulsion” from Kant is brought to a point in his treatment of music. 36. See, for example, Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines Kunstliebendenklosterbruders (1796); Michaelis, Geist der Tonkunst. 37. Compare Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 5. 38. See Herder, Kalligone, iii.5–11, iii.12–15, iii.40–42, iii.43–88, iii.140–50. Herder’s distance from Burke is frequently downplayed. See Parret, “From the Enquiry,” 94–96; Ehrhardt, “Attraktion,” 415–16; Ehrhardt and Arnold, “Handschriftliches”; Schulte-Sasse, “Herder’s Concept of the Sublime,” 270. 39. Here, as elsewhere, Herder has more in common with Kant than he allows. Guyer, “Free Play,” 353–54. 40. KU §§25–26, 248–57. 41. See especially KU §23, 245–46; further KU §29, 268. 42. Boileau, Traité, 341–42. 43. Compare Herder’s critique of husk-and-kernel models, Fragmente, HFA i.423–24, i.579; further Groß, “Vom ‘Körper der Seele.’ ” 44. Compare PE II.iii–iv, V.vii.337–38. 45. Pope, Dunciad (1743), 73–74, book i, ll.320–26, 330. 46. Matthew 16:18–19. 47. PE II.vi.125–26. 48. On this “medium,” see Herder, Kalligone, i.106; HFA vi.82; Gaier, “Problem of Core Cognition,” 297. 49. Nisbet, Herder, 23–36, 149–50. 50. Ehrhardt and Arnold, “Handschriftliches,” 134; Ehrhardt, “Attraktion”; fourth Kritisches Wäldchen, HFA ii.349; Kalligone, iii.14–15. Herder criticizes Burke for limiting the sublime to the repulsion side of the dyad. HFA ii.349–51; Kalligone iii.15–42. 51. Herder, Kalligone, i.110–11, discusses Rameau alongside Chladni’s Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (1787). Both enabled a view of sound as foundational to empirical knowledge and science. 52. Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778), HFA iv.353. 53. Herder, “Fragmente einer Abhandlung über die Ode” (1764), HFA i.88–95. 54. Compare Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, 115–21. 55. DQW xv.174; Congreve, “Discourse on the Pindarique Ode,” in Pindarique Ode. 56. Grimm, s.v. “Satz.” Michaelis will explicitly call counterpoint sublime in “Bemerkungen,” 179–81. Compare Sisman, “Learned Style”; Garratt, “Prophets Looking Backwards.” 57. Grimm, s.v. “Gegensatz.” 58. See Žižek and Milbank, Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? 59. See Zelle, Doppelte Ästhetik, 188–219. 60. Leventhal, Disciplines, 162–63, contrasts Herder’s static “paradoxes” against Hegelian dialectic. Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie, 161, suspected Hegelian dialectic was indebted to Herder, especially in Herder’s Abhandlung. On music and Hegelian mediation, see Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity, 54–78, 105–37. 61. HFA v.685. 62. Kant AA v.86–88. 63. KU §29, 269; §27, 257. 64. KU §29, 274.

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65. See, for example, Puschmann, Heinrich von Kleists Cäcilien-Erzählung, 65–68. 66. J. F. Reichardt, ed., Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, 2.5 (Berlin, 1791): 1–4, 16, 18, 22–23. 67. Ibid., 18. 68. Reichardt, ed., Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, 2.7 (Berlin, 1791): 65, 87–89. 69. Ibid., 87. 70. Vöhler, “Hölderlins Longin-Rezeption,” 172. 71. Ibid., 167–70. See further Lewis, “Boileau”; Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life; Fenves, “ ‘Scale of Enthusiasm.’ ” 72. Vöhler, “Hölderlins Longin-Rezeption,” 158, 170–72. 73. For Hölderlin meeting and reading Herder, see Lampenscherf, “Exzentrische Bahnen.” 74. Tieck, “Über das Erhabene” (1792), in Schriften, 637–52. 75. Compare Dahlhaus, “E. T. A. Hoffmanns Beethoven-Kritik,” 81–86, 90–91. 76. Mörike, Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag, 65–66. 77. Helmholtz, “Ueber die physiologischen Ursachen,” 134, 143. Translations adapted from Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 46–75. 78. Helmholtz, “Ueber die physiologischen Ursachen,” 134. 79. Ibid., 135. 80. Hoffmann, “Beethovens Instrumental-Musik,” in Sämtliche Werke, 52. Compare Bonds, Music as Thought, 6–10. 81. Simon, “Bildpolitiken,” 97. 82. Augustine, De musica 1.2.2. 83. Herder, Kalligone, iii.23.

chapter 6 1. Koschorke, Körperströme, 117. See also Piper, Dreaming in Books, 188–235; Siegert, Passage. On animal magnetism and sympathy, see Burwick, “De Quincey and Animal Magnetism”; Winter, Mesmerized, especially 40 (on De Quincey), 309–20 (on music); Fara, Sympathetic Attractions. On vibrations and nerves, see Logan, “Suspiria de Machina”; further Trower, Senses of Vibration. 2. DQW v.176–83, 195–99, 227–41, 257–60, 280–81, 311–12. The reviews show lively interest in Italian opera and Beethoven’s student Moses Moscheles. Groves, “Thomas De Quincey.” For relevant literature on De Quincey and music, see Stanyon, “Counterfeits,” 179n8. 3. Wellek set the terms of debate on Kant and De Quincey in Immanuel Kant in England, 65–135. A useful recent discussion is Roberts, Revisionary Gleam, 153–97. Broader studies include Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade; Black, “Confession, Digression, Gravitation”; Dunn, Thomas De Quincey’s Relation to German Literature. 4. PE IV.xi.264. 5. De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion (1849), DQW xvi.414. 6. De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), DQW ii.73–74. 7. PE III.xxv. 8. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 42. 9. Stanyon, “Serpentine Sighs,” 31–58. 10. For discussion and some of the relevant literature, see ibid., 36–37. 11. Mitchell, “Metamorphoses.” 12. Kennaway, Bad Vibrations, 23–62.

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13. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 9–27. 14. A succinct introduction to these problems is Beiser, “Enlightenment.” Compare especially KU §§27–29, 257–78. 15. The most popu lar setting of the funeral sentences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was William Croft’s (1678–1727), performable by parish choirs (like that of St.  Ann’s, Manchester, where Elizabeth was buried) but also used for state funerals like those of Nelson (1806) and George IV (1830). William Croft et al., Burial Service. . . . Performed at the Funeral of His . . . Majesty George the Fourth (1840); [Anon.,] Services and Anthems . . . [for] the Late Lord Viscount Nelson (1806). There may have been a particu lar choral tradition associated with “I heard a voice,” since this sentence is rubricated as “sung by the whole Choir” in the ser vice book for Nelson’s funeral, unlike any other music for the event (25). 16. Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 191. 17. Of course, more generally, plucked strings on instruments such as the lute and piano can also cause unplucked strings to resonate in sympathy. 18. On the chase, see Hayes’s Remarks, in Dubois, ed., Avison’s Essay, 77. Compare Suspiria, DQW xv.171–77. 19. Milton, paraphrased in these last lines and used in the motto to the Dream-Fugue, also placed serial falls and resurrections under Christ’s ultimate victory over death (Paradise Lost, x.633–37). 20. Critics have been divided on where to place the emphasis in De Quincey’s sublime. On the search for stasis and transcendence, and disavowal of the bodily or empirical, see De Luca, Thomas De Quincey; Logan, “Suspiria de Machina”; O’Quinn, “Ravishment”; Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities, 38–45. On movement and lack of closure, see Balfour, “On the Language of the Sublime.” On the interplay of stasis and movement, see Burwick, Thomas De Quincey, 112–42. 21. Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798), ll.107–8, in Lyrical Ballads, 116–20. 22. De Quincey associated this vocabulary of matter and form with Kant. DQW x.159–79. 23. Coleridge, Major Works, 218–19. 24. Ibid., 219. 25. Coleridge, Marginalia, 1069. 26. Coleridge, The Friend, 19 (1809), cited in Fulford, “Politics of the Sublime,” 819; further Thorpe, “Coleridge,” 196–204. 27. See James Vigus’s introduction to the notes in Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, 64–65. On Leibniz’s formulation and its roots in existing music theory, see Leisinger, Leibniz-Reflexe in der deutschen Musiktheorie, 43–58. 28. Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, 96, §94. 29. KU §51, 324–25. 30. See Wordsworth, Poems, 236–38, l.3. 31. Lindop, “De Quincey’s ‘Immortal Druggist,’ ” 341. Compare Weliver, “Tom-Toms,” 264–68. 32. On the poem, compare Potkay, “Captivation.” 33. Compare Lindop, “De Quincey’s ‘Immortal Druggist,’ ” 341. 34. Browne, Major Works, 149. 35. Against mysticism, see DQW ii.250–51. 36. “Sir William Hamilton, Bart.” (1852), DQW xvii.146. 37. A key text was Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 2.3. 38. For an overview, see Heinzen, “Transnational Affinities.”

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39. See issues of the Morning Post (London), May–July 1805; John Palmer, Like Master Like Man (1811), i.198; Allatson Burgh, Anecdotes, iii.356; [Anon.,] “Chronicles of the Italian Opera in England” (1830), 71; Ellen Creathorne Clayton, Queens of Song (1863), i.272. 40. Morning Post, 20 May 1805. 41. Ibid., 28 June and 2 July 1805. 42. Stanyon, “Counterfeits,” 180–87. 43. O’Quinn, “Ravishment,” ¶¶2–4; Pougin, Giuseppina Grassini. 44. O’Quinn, “Ravishment,” ¶5. 45. On De Quincey, see further Barrell, Infection of Thomas De Quincey. On stagings, more indirect representations, and memories of the wars, see among the extensive literature Russell, Theatres of War; Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination; Hoock, ed., History, Commemoration, and National Preoccupation; Forrest et al., eds., War Memories. 46. For a very different reading of this charge and its implications for viewers’ experience of the sublime, see O’Quinn, “Ravishment.” 47. See further Stanyon, “Counterfeits.” 48. On the opera tradition, see Ograjenšek, “Rise and Fall.” 49. Morning Post (21 June 1804); singer and theater manager Michael Kelly remembered her voice as “sublimely pathetic,” Reminiscences, ii.193. On Romantic criticism, see Wood, “Castrato’s Tale.” 50. See Stanyon, “Counterfeits.” 51. On the Memnon statues, see Barrell, Infection of Thomas De Quincey, 106–23. 52. John Ayrton Paris, Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest (1842), 304–5. Paris’s Memnon appears among chapters entitled “Musical Instruments,” “The Jew’s Harp,” “Echoes,” “The Whispering Gallery,” and “Other Acoustic Amusements” (295–319). This is the kind of publication De Quincey might expect readers to recall as providing scientific “account[s]” of “acoustic phenomena” like the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s. DWQ ii.155–56. 53. “Fashionable World,” Morning Post and Gazetteer (London), 30 July 1802. 54. Aristophanes, Plutus 284–321; for a translation of these lines, see Aristophanes, Wealth, 464–69. 55. For a Romantic-era interpretation of the passage, see the commentary in Aristophanes, Comedies (1822), 30–31. 56. Aristophanes, Plutus 290–300. 57. Ibid., 290–315. 58. DQW xv.188. 59. Compare Younquist, “De Quincey’s Crazy Body”; Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, 85–88, 195; Richardson, “Romanticism and the Body”; Thorslev, “German Romantic Idealism,” 100–101. 60. DQW xv.179 pictures telegraphic exchange between the writing self and its memorial dream figures.

conclusion 1. Austen, Mansfield Park, 131–32; Janowitz, “ ‘What a Rich Fund.’ ” 2. Austen, Mansfield Park, 132. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 132–33.

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Index

absolute music, 8, 117, 169, 202, 205 acoustics, 14, 76, 111, 168, 190–91, 195, 204. See also reverberation; sound; vibration Addison, Joseph, 16, 18, 69–70, 88, 94, 126, 166, 191, 203; Spectator 87, 126 Adorno, Theodor, 8, 15 aesthetics, 1–2, 4, 18, 54, 76–77, 91, 108, 110, 142, 145, 155–56, 159, 167–69, 187, 193; Leibniz-Wolffian 89, 91, 110; Nazi 15; post-Kantian 168, 195; rationalist 93, 107–8 affect, 6, 10, 18, 53–54, 62, 78, 90, 117–18, 128–30, 134, 200, 228n12. See also emotions affection, 10, 52, 53, 54, 55 agency, 7, 26, 35, 42, 57, 73–74, 78, 105, 151; divine 143; musical 177, 185, 195–96 agonism, 16, 112–13. See also antagonistic intimacy Albion, 32–33, 35, 38, 70. See also Britain Alemannic, 83 allegory, 27, 32, 147, 185, 189, 196 allusion. See intertextuality: allusion amimetic, 29, 37, 137, 162, 172, 205. See also nonrepresentational; nonimitative anacreontic, 83–84 analogy, 29, 109, 126, 128, 136–37, 161, 173, 190, 207 Andromache, 181, 188–89, 193–94 angels, 37, 55, 59, 62, 69, 71–72, 90, 105–6, 127, 129, 132, 162, 193–94, 222n41 Anglicanism. See Christianity: Anglicanism antagonism, 85, 185, 194; antagonistic intimacy 3, 5, 51, 79, 107, 110, 199 anthropology, 14, 50, 99, 102, 147, 150, 164 antiphony, 13, 111, 115, 124–27, 130, 132, 135–38, 163–64, 174, 199, 207. See also parallelism antithesis, 124, 130, 163–64 apocalypse, 34–35, 48, 56, 59, 64–65, 71, 127–28, 132, 173–74, 177, 180

Apollo, 34, 42, 163 argutia, 97 arias, 69, 104, 179, 188 Aristotle, 32, 37 arrangement, 3, 28, 121, 199; harmonious 30, 45; verbal 29–30, 92, 95, 98, 199 astonishment, 36, 48, 56, 72, 90, 114, 121, 124, 137, 150, 176, 200, 207; as response to the sublime 1, 6–7, 10, 41, 54, 105, 107 atheism, 24, 66 atoms, 35, 56, 66, 135 atonality, 15, 208 attraction, 3, 24, 90, 159, 194–95 audiation, 36, 45, 50, 202. See also hearing audience, 19, 28, 31, 33, 42–43, 49, 112, 168, 185 auditors. See listeners Augustine of Hippo, 3, 24, 37, 109 aural, 38, 59, 84, 100–101, 104, 115, 129, 148, 152, 154–58, 169, 172, 175, 183; arts 155, 163; comprehension 36, 131; events 16, 196; imagination 202; immediacy 119; intermediary encounters 16; memory 190; sensual aurality 49. See also audiation; hearing; senses; sound; vibration Austen, Jane, 198, 202–3 autonomous, 2, 8, 175 Avison, Charles, 6, 54, 74–75, 78; Essay on Musical Expression 74; Reply 74–75 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 10, 111, 129, 131, 133–34, 167; Heilig 133; Klopstocks Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste 133–34 bagpipes, 10, 14, 103 ballads, 6, 63–65, 86–88 bard, 6, 10, 18, 52, 64, 74–75, 107, 111, 138, 143 bastard, 1, 3, 23, 28, 30, 96. See also illegitimate; legitimate

264

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bathos, 39, 103, 107 Beattie, James, 10 Bebung, 128–29, 132. See also earthquake (Erdbeben) Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 8–9, 15–16, 194, 199 bells, 10, 157, 188 Berlin, 8, 133, 149. See also German Bible, 49, 63–67, 77, 86, 115, 121–35, 138, 152, 178; Corinthians 124, 130, 135; Ezekiel 190; Genesis 55–56, 60, 93, 121–22, 148; Isaiah 132; Job 122–23, 133; Kings 121; Matthew 128–29; Psalms 6, 13, 25, 34, 61, 88, 94, 111, 125–28, 138, 152–53, 164–65; Revelation 64, 132, 177–78 Bodmer, Johann Jacob, 3, 6, 7, 16, 18–19, 77, 83–97, 102–13, 120, 137, 145, 155, 168–69, 199, 203; Critische Briefe 90, 95–97; Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Krafft 87, 89–90 body, 24, 28, 41, 53–54, 71, 79, 98, 117, 150, 168, 199, 205; bodily passions 17–18, 28, 67; body politic 58, 192–93; the listening body 5, 7, 44, 61, 96, 107, 185; the reverberating body 19, 124, 129, 160, 166, 170–71, 192; and soul 100–101, 135–37; the sounding body (corps sonore) 132, 159–60, 162, 205; of the church 126, 165. See also affect; brain; hearing; nerves; physiology; senses Boethius, 4, 24, 48, 64, 78, 100. See also cosmos Boileau, Nicolas, 1, 3, 12, 26, 30–35, 49, 51, 91–3, 96–97, 104, 124, 126, 147 brain, 13, 25, 176, 184, 195. See also cognition; psychology Breitinger, Johann Jacob, 7, 16, 18–19, 77, 85–112, 125, 137, 155, 164, 168–69, 199, 203, 206; Critische Dichtkunst 85, 91–95, 97–103; “Three Speeches” 95; Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche der EinbildungsKrafft 87, 89–90 Britain: Anglo-German exchange 16–18, 75–79, 86, 111, 113, 142, 153, 156, 172, 183, 196–97; audiences 57, 63, 189; Battle of the Boyne 39; emotions in British culture 52; music criticism 9, 72, 74–75; Romanticism 183, 189; Royal Society 25, 65; sublime in British culture 3, 16, 24, 31, 51, 171. See also England Brockes, Heinrich, 92, 94, 104–5, 108

Burke, Edmund, 16–19, 53–56, 60, 104, 129, 141, 148, 155–60, 172–75, 199–200, 203–4; Philosophical Enquiry 54, 75–79 Burney, Charles, 57, 69, 77, 167 Cario, 193–94 Cecilia, Saint, 33–35, 37, 40–42, 52, 64, 70, 75, 105, 166, 193, 200 celestial, 12, 37, 46, 124 chaconne, 100, 223n72 chaos, 5, 13, 35, 50–51, 122, 157 Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 27, 30, 32, 35, 46, 49 choral music, 1, 37, 56–57, 69, 94, 122–36, 163–64, 174, 177–79, 187, 191–94 Christianity, 18, 24, 36, 42, 87, 90, 93, 103, 113, 116, 120, 124–32, 135, 138, 146, 158, 162–63, 166–67, 191; Anglican 40, 180; Calvinist 86; Catholic 24–25, 30, 46, 87, 200; the church 12, 25, 34, 87–88, 94, 97, 126, 133, 158, 162, 165, 191–92; Evangelical 191; Lutheran 18–19, 87, 108, 111, 113, 122–23, 138, 142, 224n4; pietist 105, 113, 120; Protestant 30, 40, 86, 200–201; Reformed 85, 93, 97, 108; sermons 34, 40 city, 25, 107, 185 classical, 37–38, 42, 53, 87, 92, 99, 109, 146, 148, 163–64; rhetoric 45, 55, 89, 101, 117, 125; thought 4, 32 clavichord, 129, 206–7 clouds, 1, 12, 33, 61, 177–78, 192, 208 cognition, 7, 27, 61–62, 77, 85, 90–91, 101, 110, 115–17, 155, 177, 184, 200. See also brain; consciousness; psychology Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 111, 182–84 complexity, 61–62, 77, 107–8, 144, 164 concordia discors, 6, 24, 26, 45–46, 48, 61–62, 66, 77, 108–9, 165, 174, 186–87, 194–95, 206, 210n24. See also harmony; discord; dissonance Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Abbé De, 149, 151, 153 Congreve, William, 63, 105, 166 consciousness, 19, 76, 116, 168, 182–83, 191. See also brain; cognition; psychology Copenhagen, 131 corporeality, 58, 77, 98–99. See also body cosmos, 4, 35, 56, 59, 64–65, 71, 78, 100–101, 121–22, 151, 161, 172, 185; cosmic order 45, 47, 55, 156, 204; infinite 154–55, 164, 170, 195, 204, 208; terrifying 64, 164

i n d ex country, 107, 198–99. See also rural Cowley, Abraham, 34–36, 45–46, 59; Pindarique Odes 34, 38 criticism, 6–11, 17, 46, 72–75, 86–89, 115, 142, 146–47 crown, 32, 40, 49, 141. See also monarchy cyclops, 193–94 Dahlhaus, Carl, 8 dance, 9, 34, 46, 55, 61–62, 71, 73, 100, 107, 164 David, King, 34, 47, 49, 125–26 death, 34–35, 56, 64, 113–14, 121, 128–30, 157, 168, 177–78, 190–91. See also grief; funerals debauchery, 39, 181 Deleuze, Gilles, 108 Dennis, John, 3, 6–7, 17–18, 23–24, 26, 31, 45–51, 54, 56–57, 60–62, 67, 71, 79, 185, 195, 199–201, 203, 206; Rinaldo and Armida 45; The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry 48; The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry 48–50 De Quincey, Thomas, 1, 6, 16, 19, 75, 141, 163, 171–97, 200–201, 207, 231n20; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 172–74, 181–88, 190–91, 193, 196; Suspiria de profundis 1, 171–72, 175–76, 178, 181, 190, 194, 196; The English Mail-Coach 172–73, 175, 178–79, 192, 196 Derrida, Jacques, 99, 131 Descartes, Rene, 36, 117–18, 135, 187, 202 desire, 39, 59, 135 dialectic, 5, 16, 26, 98, 101–2, 119, 130, 142, 163–64, 166, 168, 182, 204 discord, 2, 6, 13–14, 24, 26–27, 32–33, 41, 46–50, 66–67, 109, 112, 182, 186–87, 194–95, 206. See also dissonance dissonance, 1–2, 6, 12, 33, 53, 92–93, 102, 108–10, 156, 180, 186, 195, 201. See also discord divine, 17, 40–43, 46, 59–60, 68, 72–74, 105, 123–27, 162, 177, 181, 191, 200–201; agency 143; harmony 93, 100–101; horror 56; inspiration 34, 59, 154; origin of language 149; pleasure 56, 186. See also Christianity; God; sublime: religious; transcendence dream, 125, 134–36, 156, 163, 172–73, 175–81, 185, 187, 196 Dresden, 89. See also German Drollinger, Carl Friedrich, 104–5, 107–8 drums, 14, 36, 45, 65, 76, 109

265

Dryden, John, 3, 5, 17–18, 23–27, 31–56, 63–66, 69, 74–75, 78, 87, 105, 130, 144, 164, 166, 174, 199–202, 205; Albion and Albanius 32–33, 38; Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Musique 5, 17, 26, 33, 38–39, 41–46, 49, 55, 65, 70, 75, 105, 144, 200, 216n4; Apology for Heroique Poetry 32, 38; A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day 33–39, 54–56 ear, 3, 13, 19, 25, 38, 41, 48, 59, 61, 76, 94, 96, 101–3, 115, 129, 158, 160, 168, 177, 182, 187, 195, 204, 207 earthquake (Erdbeben), 104, 128–29 ecstasy, 12, 30, 68–69, 71, 79, 90, 119, 120, 122, 194–95 Edinburgh, 63, 73, 172 effeminate, 39, 46, 49–50. See also femininity; masculinity Egypt, 123, 190 ellipsis, 65, 69, 126 emotions, 7, 18, 28–31, 36, 38, 45, 47, 57, 62, 75, 78, 88–89, 100, 131, 137, 149, 189, 220n113; history of 52–54. See also feeling; passions Empfindsamkeit, 129 empiricism, 54, 75–78, 90, 93, 100–101, 137, 155–56, 159, 161, 168–69, 172, 177, 182, 186, 193, 196, 200, 229n51 England: King’s Theatre, London 181, 188–89; London 18, 27, 34, 49, 57–58, 63, 73, 178, 182, 184, 188–89, 193, 196; Little Theatre in the Hay, London 71, 73; literary culture 33, 57–58, 71, 78, 191, 199; musical culture 57–58, 133; Oxford, 74, 176–78, 196; political authority 24–25; Queen’s Theatre, London 57; Restoration 17, 24, 26, 30, 32, 43, 46, 73; Trafalgar 189, 192; Westminster Abbey, 57, 167. See also Britain Enlightenment, 15, 65, 99, 102–3, 116, 131, 142, 159, 167, 203, 205, 221n13 enthusiasm, 9, 11–12, 17, 38, 46–47, 70, 73, 90, 107, 119, 125, 134, 137, 142–43, 152, 162, 167, 170, 194, 201, 214n76 epic, 12, 60, 63, 65, 86–87, 100 Epicurus, 65 epistemology, 18, 107, 125, 134–35, 167, 169, 200, 206 Erlmann, Veit, 13, 115, 117, 119, 175, 204 erotic. See sublime: erotic ethics, 2, 10, 24, 26, 50, 115 Eucharist, 127–28, 162

266

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eulogy, 6, 26–27, 39, 43, 47, 95 Euripides, 189 Europe, 3, 75, 87, 125, 129, 188 eye, 3, 42, 48, 53, 67–68, 83–84, 98, 144, 156, 158–59, 168, 175, 180, 204, 207. See also senses; sight; visual fascism, 15, 211n64 feeling, 3, 15, 31, 53–54, 56–57, 68, 71, 78–79, 95, 125, 127, 129, 141, 146, 152, 155, 167–68, 182, 187, 196, 208. See also emotions; nerves; passions; senses femininity, 31, 68, 94, 181–82, 188 fiat lux, 35, 55, 62, 93, 97, 154 fire, 72, 125, 127, 180, 188 floods, 6, 47, 104–5, 116, 121, 144, 150 flute, 1, 3, 14, 23, 28–29, 36, 96, 147 folk song, 18, 64, 88 force, 5, 29, 31, 35, 38–39, 42, 49–50, 58–62, 74–75, 77, 96, 108, 115, 119, 136, 157, 200, 205; artistic 33, 45, 61, 84, 98, 105; Gewalt 98; moral 39, 58, 60 Foucault, Michel, 205–6 France: Paris 100, 193; musical culture 27, 100–103. See also Neoclassical; Napoleon: Napoleonic Wars freundschaftlicher Lieder, 105–6 friendship, 65, 67–68, 74, 103, 105, 111, 120, 159, 182. See also homosocial fugue, 58, 163, 173, 175, 179–80 funeral, 177–78, 180, 196, 231n15. See also death fury, 47, 72, 144, 150 genealogy, 11, 43, 74–75, 158 genera dicendi, 86, 132 genius, 9, 15, 57, 68, 73–75, 113–14, 147, 167–68, 203 German: audiences 88; linguistics 100, 145; literary culture 86–89, 91, 97–98, 103–8, 111, 113, 138, 147, 153; musical culture 115, 131–32, 138; patriotism 111; philology 6; primitive 103; Romanticism 175; thought 16, 89, 183. See also Berlin; Britain: Anglo-German exchange; Dresden; Jena; Leipzig; Swabia ghosts, 64, 85, 161 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 10, 111, 138 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 91, 118, 167 Grabu, Louis, 27, 32 Grassini, Giuseppina, 181, 188–90, 193–94

Gray, Thomas, 74–75; The Bard 74–75; The Progress of Poesy 75 Greece, 2, 9, 32–34, 39, 86, 144, 146, 148, 164, 189–90, 204 grief, 52, 177, 189–90, 192. See also death Hades, 110. See also hell; Tartarus Handel, George Frideric, 2, 9–10, 16, 18, 49, 54, 57–58, 65, 68–70, 72–75, 78, 124, 132–33, 167, 173, 177, 180, 187, 200, 206; Coronation Anthem 173, 180, 187; Messiah 2, 57, 124, 167, 177–78, 180; Radamisto 69–70; Rinaldo 49, 57; 1784 Commemoration 57; compositional style 57 harmony, 3–7, 10–19, 24–38, 41–42, 45–50, 55–66, 69, 71–73, 77–78, 85, 89, 91–102, 107–12, 121, 124, 135–37, 142, 145–50, 153–56, 160–61, 167–70, 174, 177, 180–88, 191–92, 195, 199, 201–6; as concordia discors 26, 109; formal 5; as literary allegory 27; metaphysical 24–25; musical 24, 30. See also arrangement; concordia discors; discord; dissonance; order harp, 23, 96, 106, 122, 127, 150, 183, 190 Hartley, David, 76, 182–83; Observations on Man 76 Hasse, Johann Adolph, 111 Hayes, William, 54, 74; Remarks on Mr. Avison’s Essay 74 Haywood, Eliza, 54, 57, 67, 70–73 hearing, 3, 13, 16, 32, 76, 98, 101, 118, 137, 142, 152, 159, 161, 181–82, 187–88. See also aural; ear; listener; senses heaven, 32, 59, 71–72, 94, 108, 126–27, 148, 152, 166, 177–78, 185, 199, 201, 206; and earth 35, 37–39, 42–43, 48, 56, 105, 123–24, 142, 162, 178. See also angels; clouds; God; hell Hebrew, 60, 126, 164 Heinse, Wilhelm, 115, 119–20, 128, 137, 148 hell, 152, 157–58 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 142, 166, 168, 195 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 5, 19, 76–77, 102–3, 108, 138, 141–74, 183–84, 192, 195, 200, 204–5, 207, 228n12; Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache 148–54, 163, 166; as critic 142–48; Cäcilie 142, 147–48, 161–67, 172, 174, 200, 202; Kalligone 142, 147–48, 154–57, 159–61, 164, 166, 169, 183 hermeneutics, 40, 54, 94 heroes, 33, 39, 44, 61, 69, 103, 117, 168, 189

i n d ex Hill, Aaron, 9, 18, 52, 54, 57–71, 76–79, 164, 192, 204; The Creation 60–61, 66; Gideon 60, 63, 68; Judgment-Day 59–60; Plain Dealer 58, 63–64; Tears of the Muses 58–59, 61 Hitler, Adolf, 15 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 8, 168, 204–5 Hogarth, William, 175 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 5, 142, 166–68 Homer, 18, 29, 62, 102, 108, 110, 153 homosocial, 67, 218n67. See also friendship Horace, 2, 32–33, 44–45, 94, 208; Carmina 33 Horkheimer, Max, 15 horror, 10, 48, 56, 72, 78, 104–5, 107–8, 150, 178–80, 195. See also terror humanism, 18, 25, 111–12, 117, 125, 131, 208 Hume, David, 205 hymns, 65, 87, 111, 127, 131, 148, 164, 167, 193 hypsos, 24, 26–27, 86, 107 idealism, 8, 12, 76, 103, 118, 155, 157, 167, 183–84, 196, 202 identity, 76, 109, 120, 124 illegitimate, 23, 30, 49. See also bastard imagination, 4, 61, 87, 89, 92, 110, 116, 135, 146–47, 152, 156, 165–66, 168, 181, 202, 204, 208 imitation, 4, 9, 23, 29, 38, 63–64, 96, 153, 162, 204–5 immortality, 33, 121 infinity, 5, 8, 11, 19, 110, 116, 121, 156, 161, 166, 172, 196, 204 inflation, 36–37, 41, 65, 174 inspiration, 34, 46, 86, 105, 112 instrumental music, 2, 8, 11, 15, 23, 36, 69, 96, 112, 120, 131, 162, 169, 203–4 intertextuality, 2, 34, 122, 132, 193–94; allusion 52, 121–22, 144, 152, 157–58. See also allegory irregular ode, 33–35, 38. See also Pindaric ode irony, 39, 97, 166, 175, 184, 193 irrationality, 15, 30, 90, 110, 142, 170, 200, 204 Israel, 60, 130, 152 Jackson, William, 52–53 James II and VII, King of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 32, 35, 39 Jena, 111. See also German Johnson, Samuel: “Hurlothrumbo,” 70–73; The Blazing Comet: The Mad Lovers; Or,

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the Beauties of the Poets 70–72; Hurlothrumbo: or, The Super-Natural 70, 72; Harmony in an Uproar 72–73 Jove, 33, 41–44, 144. See also Dryden, John: Alexander’s Feast Kant, Immanuel, 3, 9–11, 17, 19, 54, 76, 85, 104, 115–18, 129, 141, 147–48, 152, 154–61, 165–69, 172–76, 180–86, 195–97, 201–5, 207. See also sublime: Kantian Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf, 106–7 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 16, 18–19, 103, 108, 111–38, 142–47, 152, 154, 163–64, 169, 174, 178, 182, 199, 204–5, 207–8; An Young 113–14; Der Bund 112–13; Die Chöre 124–30, 133–35; Die Frühlingsfeyer 121–24, 133, 136, 207; Die Musik 123–24; Geistliche Lieder 127; Der Messias 111, 113; Morgengesang am Schöpfungsfeste 133–34 knowledge, 19, 46, 91–92, 97–98, 116, 135, 137, 148, 151, 155–57, 162, 170, 176, 205–7, 229n51; limits of 1, 77, 110; production 25, 65, 91, 97, 156; unmediated 11, 103. See also rationalism Krause, Christian Gottfried, 103–4, 107–8 La Motte, 100 Lange, Samuel Gotthold, 105–8 Latin, 86, 179, 221n13 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 86, 88 legend. See my thology Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 18, 77, 85, 89–91, 97, 100–102, 108–10, 113, 135–37, 147, 153–55, 183 Leipzig, 111, 132–33. See also German Leverkühn, Adrian, 207–8 libertinism, 26–27, 31, 39, 46, 67, 120, 143 lightning, 19, 33, 41, 65, 157, 170, 200 legitimate, 5, 11, 17, 23, 25, 30, 32, 74. See also bastard; illegitimate linguistics, 5, 16, 48, 96, 100, 124, 150, 152, 154, 166 listener, 5, 7, 36, 38–39, 41–45, 59, 65, 93, 100, 105, 118, 127, 129, 135, 160, 166, 177, 181–82, 185, 189, 191, 193; elevation of 17, 45, 78, 124, 155; listening 7, 11, 15, 27, 49, 138, 181, 205, 207. See also audiation; body: the listening body; hearing literature, 2, 5, 6 liturgy, 94, 131–32, 135, 162, 177–78 Locke, John, 78, 116

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loftiness, 10, 31–33, 37, 41, 43–45, 71–72, 74, 86, 98, 102, 106, 125, 129, 204 London. See England: London Longinus. See Pseudo-Longinus loudness. See volume love, 18, 36–37, 45, 53, 55, 64–72, 77, 83, 95, 101, 103, 144, 159, 174, 180, 194, 206 Lowth, Robert, 126, 130, 137, 163 Lucretius, 56, 64–66, 78, 186 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 27, 31 Luther, Martin, 122, 135, 152. See also Christianity: Lutheran Lyotard, Jean-François, 11, 207 lyre, 3, 28–29, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 70, 75, 111, 193–94 madness, 7, 42, 53, 65, 71 magic, 30, 95, 102, 148, 200, 206 Malcolm, Alexander, 63–65, 69–70 Mann, Thomas, 15, 207–8 masculinity, 46, 49, 67, 83, 181, 189 materiality, 4–5, 8, 76–77, 95, 97, 99–102, 118–19, 132, 143, 176, 183, 195–96, 201, 204 mathematics, 5, 25, 55, 63, 73, 101, 106, 109, 153, 156, 171, 207 medieval, 5, 14, 18, 74, 83, 123, 138, 161 memory, 60–61, 172, 177, 181, 188–90, 193, 196 Menninghaus, Winfried, 117, 125 metaphysics, 24, 31, 33, 71, 73, 78, 96, 100–101, 123, 131, 136, 138, 156, 169, 186 Michaelis, Christian Friedrich, 9, 104, 116, 167 Milbank, John, 30 military, 46, 94, 189, 192 Milton, John, 16, 18, 55, 69, 75, 92, 108, 137, 157, 190; Paradise Lost 46, 87–88 mimesis, 4, 9, 13, 27, 29, 31–32, 38, 44–45, 61, 104, 120, 144, 201, 205. See also imitation; representation; resemblance Minnesang, 83–84 mist, 2, 27, 43, 84, 120 Mitchell, Joseph, 54, 57, 63–71, 73, 76–77, 206; ODE on the Power of MUSICK 63–71 modernity, 2, 14, 175 monads, 135–36, 152 monarchy, 23–27, 30, 32–36, 41, 43–46, 49, 69, 74, 121, 158, 181, 188–89; House of Hanover 16–17, 86 Monk, Samuel, 31 morality, 5, 15, 17, 31, 39–40, 50, 53–54, 58–60, 62, 94, 176, 208 Mörike, Eduard, 16, 142, 168

mortality, 68, 190 mountains, 33, 47, 62, 84, 104; Alps 3, 47, 88, 119 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 168, 194 muse, 28, 58, 61, 64, 96, 105, 113–14 mysticism, 11, 63–64, 101, 163, 186, 195 my thology, 44, 83, 138, 144, 157, 166–67, 170, 190, 194, 200 Napoleon, 188, 194; Napoleonic wars 179–80, 189, 192, 196 narrator, 42, 44, 128, 177–79, 208 nationalism, 16, 149, 189 nature, 35, 40, 47–49, 65–66, 77–78, 83, 90, 99, 119–20, 122–24, 141, 144, 147–56, 160–61, 186, 198–99, 201; human 28, 30, 48, 77, 88, 101; immensity of 56. See also earthquake (Erdbeben); lightning; mountains; ocean; sea; storm Nelson, Horatio, 189, 192 Neoclassical, 17, 26, 86, 89, 93, 95, 143, 147 Neoplatonic, 4, 37, 67, 78, 96, 101, 184, 188, 191 nerves, 3, 7, 13, 53, 60, 75–76, 118, 129, 159–60, 171, 175–76, 182–83, 188. See also senses Newton, Isaac. See 142, 163, 203 noise, 10, 14, 27, 32, 73, 115–16, 120, 124, 149, 160, 190, 193, 201 nonimitative, 129, 169. See also amimetic; nonrepresentational nonrepresentational, 8, 19, 193. See also amimetic; nonimitative nostalgia, 6, 187–88 notation, 73, 84–85, 202 nuns, 94, 201 occult, 91, 100–102, 206 ocean, 62, 119, 122, 148, 152, 185, 196, 207. See also sea; river opera, 25, 31–33, 46, 49–50, 57–58, 62, 69–73, 77, 87–89, 129, 164, 168, 181–96, 203; French 100, 223n72; Italian 49, 57, 70, 102, 230n2 opium, 173, 176–78, 181–87, 191–92, 196 oratory, 7, 24, 26, 29, 37, 41, 43, 47, 49–50, 95, 120, 124, 151, 157 orchestra, 19, 69, 187, 191–92 order, 3, 5, 11–14, 28, 36, 47–48, 50, 55, 77, 95, 114, 122, 145–46, 148, 155–56, 163–64, 168, 185. See also harmony organ, 1, 36–37, 41, 65, 76, 132, 139, 159, 174, 177, 179, 191 Orpheus, 37, 107, 143–45, 166

i n d ex pain, 11, 77–78, 150, 154, 176, 187 painting, 2, 50, 84, 87, 98, 112, 198 panegyric. See eulogy parallelism, 115, 124–26, 130–31, 133–34, 138, 158, 163–64, 226n61. See also antiphony Paris. See France: Paris parody, 39, 42, 71, 158 passions, 3, 36–39, 46–56, 64, 71–72, 77–90, 104–6, 145–46, 160, 162, 170, 174, 204, 220n113; carnal 67, 72; conflicting 53, 56, 67; enthusiastic 47, 50, 54, 72, 79, 206; moving 67; vulgar 47. See also body: bodily passions; emotions; enthusiasm pathos, 53, 55, 88–89, 189, 207 patronage, 33, 63, 65, 86, 178 pedagogy, 6, 83, 85, 95, 97 Pepys, Samuel, 27 perception, 52–53, 76, 85, 92, 97, 115–16, 137, 152, 155–56, 160, 182–83, 205 performance, 7, 27, 69, 73, 84, 87, 136, 143, 158 phantasia, 39, 43, 112, 181, 187 phenomenology, 109, 136–37 philosophy, 9, 56, 64, 69, 160, 163, 172, 183, 188, 196, 202–3; natural 17, 24–25; epicurean 56; Kantian 104, 157–58; Leibniz-Wolffian 18, 77–78, 85, 89–91, 97–99, 108, 110 physics, 25, 73, 101, 204; Newtonian 24, 101, 159, 204 physiology, 7, 52, 115, 118, 129, 137, 153, 168. See also body pilgrimage, 86, 108, 111, 120 Pindar, 2, 33–34, 45, 60, 106, 126, 208 Pindaric ode, 8, 10, 13, 34–35, 42–43, 45, 47, 55, 60–64, 208 planets, 62, 124, 171. See also cosmos Plato, 23, 96, 101, 186, 206 politics, 8, 14–15, 24–27, 30, 32–33, 38, 40, 43, 49–50, 86, 189, 192–93. See also agonism; body: body politic; Tory; Whig polyphony, 40, 97, 132 Pope, Alexander, 6, 26, 63, 75, 101–2, 105, 144–45, 158, 164, 166 postmodernism, 4, 11, 19, 96, 116–17, 125, 180 Praetorius, Michael, 132 prophecy, 35, 84, 114, 121, 130, 132 propriety, 23, 25, 31–33, 42, 45, 50, 68. See also morality Pseudo-Longinus, 1, 3–5, 7, 9, 12–13, 18–19, 27—47, 51, 53–58, 61–62, 79, 86–97, 102, 105, 124, 136, 143, 151–54, 167, 170, 199–201;

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Peri hypsous 1, 23, 29–30, 53, 87, 96, 105, 167, 194. See also sublime: Longinian psychology, 3, 7, 18, 25, 76, 86, 90–91, 95, 108, 136. See also cognition Purcell, Henry, 10, 74 Pyra, Jacob Immanuel, 105–8 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 4, 33 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 149, 160 rape, 49. See also ravishment ratio, 4, 30, 55, 61, 109, 119, 148, 183, 186, 208 rationalism, 77, 89–91, 107–8, 113, 146, 155–56, 167, 184–85 rauschen (rushing), 2, 10, 14, 115–19, 121–24, 132, 137–38, 190–91, 200, 225n52 ravishment, 30–31, 41, 44, 46, 59, 67, 91, 96, 105–6, 143–44, 177, 201 reader, 37–38, 49, 62, 64, 83, 103, 145–47, 157 reason, 5, 13, 30, 48, 50, 59, 71, 77, 85, 89–90, 118–19, 145, 148, 151–52, 156, 158, 164–65, 169, 203–4; Enlightenment 15; failure of 59; Kantian 19, 154, 173, 181 Reichardt, Friedrich, 88–89, 104, 138, 167 representation, 2, 4, 11, 23, 29, 36, 90–92, 115, 118, 161–62, 165, 202, 205. See also mimesis; resemblance resemblance, 2, 4, 31–36, 45, 61, 99–101, 130, 154, 188, 202–6. See also mimesis; representation resonance, 6, 13, 19, 25, 29, 101, 110, 129, 137, 141, 145, 151, 154, 159, 177, 196, 204, 231n17. See also acoustics; sound; reverberation; vibration resurrection, 34–35, 48, 122–25, 128–30, 133–35, 180, 196 reverberation, 6, 19, 129, 141, 160–63, 170–75, 179, 187, 191–97. See also acoustics; body: the reverberating body; resonance; sound; vibration review, 75, 142, 144–47, 154, 167, 172 revolution, 6, 16, 26, 167, 188, 204 rhetoric, 2, 4, 6, 12, 18–19, 26, 31, 45, 55, 71, 86, 101, 116, 127, 144, 156, 168, 181, 199, 202; anti-rhetorical 85, 95–96, 202; chiasmus, 106, 124, 133–34 Rhine, 119–22, 128 rhyme, 35–43, 46, 48, 56, 60–61, 65–66, 98, 106 ritual, 27, 94, 97, 120, 187 river, 33, 65, 144, 208. See also ocean; sea

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Robinson, Anastasia, 58 Romantic, 15, 103, 112–13, 117, 142, 161, 171, 174–75, 182–83, 189, 196 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86, 102, 149, 151, 153 royal. See monarchy rural, 45, 86, 88, 97, 107. See also country rushing. See rauschen (rushing) rustling. See rauschen (rushing) sacred, 25, 36–37, 39, 42, 65–66, 70–71, 125, 129, 131–32, 142, 162, 165–66. See also Christianity; sublime: religious; religion sacrifice, 103, 105, 162, 180–81, 189 saints, 42, 128, 162, 166, 190 Sappho, 53 satire, 12, 26, 31, 39–40, 43, 49, 71–73, 86–87, 103, 106, 158, 223n87 Schiller, Friedrich, 16, 142, 163, 167–68 Schweizerlieder. See folk song science, 3, 25, 54, 65, 69, 73, 78, 86, 95, 97, 115, 119, 149, 161, 169, 171, 190, 202, 204, 206–7, 221n51. See also acoustics; physics sea, 2, 33, 87, 116, 119, 126, 148, 150, 165, 169, 185, 192, 208. See also ocean; river secular, 37, 39–40, 56, 70–71, 186 semiotics, 30, 101, 114–18, 137, 149, 152, 158–59, 202 Senesino, 58, 68–70, 206 senses, 3, 13, 28, 38, 45–46, 51, 59, 68, 76–78, 85, 91–93, 96–98, 101–5, 114, 119, 142, 152, 155–56, 159, 182, 203–7; sensual 31, 48–49, 51, 67, 71, 89, 107, 181, 184–85. See also feeling; hearing; nerves; sight sex, 26, 49–50, 56, 67, 189 shock, 3, 35, 77–78, 150, 160–61, 171–72, 176–77, 195–97 sight, 16, 19, 39, 64–65, 84, 103, 130–31, 134–36, 148, 152, 159, 161, 178, 180–83, 186–87, 202–3; imaginative 59. See also visual silence, 14, 92–93, 106–7, 110, 116, 152 simplicity, 62–64, 76, 87–89, 93, 96–97, 99, 102–4, 107, 125–26, 144, 164–65 Sömmerring, Samuel, 118–19, 137 sound. See acoustics; hearing; rauschen (rushing); reverberation; vibration; volume storm, 1, 119, 121–23, 136, 148, 150–51, 169, 177, 183, 192 strophe, 145, 163–64 sublime: anti-musical 85, 87, 104, 110, 169, 199; Burkean 147–48, 155, 164, 171, 204;

civilizing 57–62; erotic 57, 64, 67, 189; false 7, 12, 24, 72, 96, 153; Kantian 3, 10–11, 19, 116, 169, 180; libertine 26–27, 39, 41; Longinian 2–3, 19, 24, 27–33, 37, 41, 44, 53, 56, 74, 79, 86, 99, 106, 110, 112, 121, 124, 144–45, 157, 199; loyalist 27, 36; Lucretian 56, 64–66, 78, 186; Pindaric 69–70, 74, 77, 105–6, 112, 192; post-Kantian 19, 172–73, 203; postmodern 11, 96; sublime power 17, 33, 35, 38, 70–71, 92, 95, 105, 130, 176, 177, 180, 191; rhetorical 7, 9, 18, 85; religious 9, 57–62, 64, 70, 114, 124, 130; stylus sublimis (sublime style) 12, 31, 33, 67, 69–72, 93, 95, 97, 106–7, 132, 201; terrifying 104; true 5, 7, 10, 12, 24, 30–31, 96, 107, 136, 148, 156–57, 174, 200, 202–3; visual 38, 59; Zwinglian 93–94 succession, 23–24, 30, 32, 34, 40; of poets 74–75 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 120, 223n75 sun, 43, 92–94, 133, 207. See also fiat lux Swabia, 83–86. See also Alemannic Switzerland, 18, 85–90, 93, 96, 103–8, 113, 120; Zurich 86–88, 93–94, 97, 100, 108, 167, 220n4; literary culture 86–87; Swiss federation 86; relations with England 86–87; folk song 88; Zwinglian reformation 87, 93–94, 97, 108. See also Swabia syntax, 65, 106, 117, 144–45, 201 Tartarus, 159. See also Hades; hell taste, 27, 54, 71–72, 74, 77–78, 89, 95 Telemann, Georg Philip, 104, 111 temporality, 131, 145, 157, 180–82 terror, 19, 36, 62, 64, 77–78, 89–90, 104, 114, 125, 142, 150, 159, 171–73, 180, 200. See also horror theology, 25, 55–56, 91, 109, 121, 131, 147; Lutheran 111, 142, 224n4; Reformed 18, 85–86 thunder, 36, 41–42, 62, 72, 120, 122–25, 127, 132, 157, 183 Timotheus, 5, 38–44, 49, 64, 75, 144, 166. See also Dryden, John; Alexander’s Feast tombs, 128–29, 180–81, 188. See also death tongue, 53, 55, 94 Tory, 26, 45, 66, 212n19 totality, 19, 85, 116, 155–56, 174, 178, 180, 187, 195, 202 tragedy, 39, 46, 163, 189 tranquillity, 5, 55–56, 71, 78–79, 174, 185, 187, 195, 199–200

i n d ex transcendence, 10–12, 17, 27, 45–46, 71–72, 77, 152, 157, 167, 181–82, 194–95; transcendental subject 10, 116–18, 172 transnationalism, 16–17. See also Britain: Anglo-German exchange transport, 1, 5, 29–30, 44–45, 49, 52, 62, 78–79, 105, 116–17, 128, 144–45, 151–52, 160, 162–64, 176. See also affect; listener: elevation of triumph, 7, 15, 65, 68, 127–28, 174–75, 192 trumpet, 14, 34–36, 56, 64–65, 114, 127, 157, 174, 177, 180 truth, 26, 44, 97, 135, 137, 157, 201, 205 unification, 61, 77, 92, 109–10, 112, 123, 128, 148, 157, 164, 166, 176–82, 187, 191–92 usurpation, 26, 45, 49, 143 utterance, 12, 114, 120, 138, 146, 154, 207 vibration, 4, 13, 25, 60, 75, 79, 129, 171, 175–76, 184, 188, 192–93. See also acoustics; reverberation violence, 6, 39, 41, 44, 53, 79, 84, 89, 92, 108, 110, 144, 159, 166–68, 171, 177–80, 200; violent emotions 75, 89; violent feeling 79 violin, 36, 61, 76, 109 Virgil, 45, 50, 194; Georgics 45 virtue, 30, 46, 61, 88, 91–92, 152, 156, 204

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visual, 27, 68, 169, 178, 182, 187, 202, 204–5; art 98, 112, 163–66, 181. See also sight voice, 2, 34, 37–39, 66, 105–6, 117, 132, 151, 154, 162, 189, 193, 201, 208; of God 60, 165; supernatural 69, 73, 83–84, 105, 177 volume, 36, 41, 59, 66, 132, 163 Wagner, Richard, 1, 11, 15–16, 117, 164, 199 war, 8, 14, 24, 39, 69, 106, 179, 188–89, 192–94, 196, 207, 232n45. See also Britain: Battle of the Boyne; Napoleon: Napoleonic wars waterfall, 116, 118–20, 225n34 Whig, 9, 24, 26, 39, 45–46, 49, 65–66, 212n19 William III, King of England, 23, 39, 46, 63–64 Wolff, Christian, 77, 85, 90–91, 97, 108, 110, 155, 162 wonder, 36–37, 56, 61, 103, 108–9, 121; Wunderbare (wonderful) 91–92, 94, 98 Wordsworth, William, 111, 182, 184, 196 Young, Edward, 57, 63, 114, 137; Night Thoughts 113–14 Zurich. See Switzerland: Zurich Zwingli, Huldrych, 18, 87, 93–94, 97, 113

acknowledgIents

This book took shape over many years and owes innumerable debts to family, friends, colleagues, and teachers at the University of Melbourne, Queen Mary University of London, Christ’s College Cambridge, and King’s College London. My primary debt of gratitude is to Anne Janowitz for her integrity, imagination, and incisive intellect. Invaluable support and criticism also came from Markman Ellis and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London, Adrian Armstrong, Shahidha Bari, Thomas Dixon, Rüdiger Görner, Paul Hamilton, Megan Kitching, Andrew Lincoln, Nydia Pineda, Chris Reid, Matt Rubery, Miri Rubin, Bill Schwarz, Gareth Stedman Jones, James Vigus, Tessa Whitehouse, and the late Kevin Sharpe. Beyond Queen Mary, I am grateful to Gavin Alexander, Suzanne Aspden, Jeremy Begbie, Matthew Bell, Heather Benbow, Paul Bentley, Nora Berend, Maximilian Bergengruen, Anna Bernard, Andrew Bowie, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Stijn Bussels, Marion Campbell, Kora Caplan, Michael Champion, Keith Chapin, Rachel Chaplin, Justin Clemens, Deirdre Coleman, Jane Darcy, Mark Darlow, Leoma Dyke, Ziad Elmarsafy, Maggie Faultless, William Fitzgerald, Sietske Fransen, Sarah Gador-Whyte, Raphaële Garrod, Emma Gilby, Simon Goldhill, Penelope Gouk, Rachel Greene, John Griffiths, Sophie Hache, Lydia Hamlett, Stefan Hanß, Yasmin Haskell, Sundar Henny, Sarah Hibberd, Nils Holger-Petersen, Julian Holstein, Hilary Howes, Joe Hughes, Tom Irvine, Rhys Jones, Sarah Kareem, Alicia Kent, Hee-Ju Kim, Leo Kretzenbacher, Jonathan Lamb, Tom Langley, Dorothy Lee, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Alison Lewis, Andrew Lynch, the late Philippa Maddern, Javed Majeed, Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Sebastian Matzner, Tom McAuley, Justine McConnell, Grantley McDonald, Josephine McDonagh, Andrew McKenzie McHarg, Tim Mehigan, Jan-Friedrich Missfelder, Douglas Moggach, Rosa Mucignat, David Neaum, Zoe Norridge, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Peter Otto, Roger Parker, Helen Pfeifer, Emily Pillinger, Eyal and Stav Poleg, David Ricks, Tim Rogan,

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ac k n ow l ed g I en ts

Anthony Rooley, David and Gonni Runia, Corinna Russell, Susanne Schweizer, David Sedley, Philip Shaw, Michael Silk, Elaine Sisman, Jenny Spinks, Katarina Stenke, Jan Stockigt, Rachel Stroud, Wiebke Thormählen, Stephanie Trigg, David Trippett, Clara Tuite, Carrie Vout, Alex Walsham, Nicolas Wiater, Heather Wiebe, Ross Wilson, John Wiltshire, and Martin Wright. Emma Dillon as series editor and Jerry Singerman at Penn have provided invaluable wisdom, vision, clarity, and kindness during the editing process. I am also grateful to scholars who read versions of the manuscript in its entirety: Marshall Brown, Keith Chapin, Peter de Bolla, Judith Hawley, Matthew Head, and Alexander Regier. Their encouragement, insights, and criticism have greatly shaped this book. Work on the book was supported by the generosity of the Rae and Edith Bennett Travelling Scholarship, Queen Mary University of London, King’s College London, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Christ’s College and CRASSH at Cambridge, and Queen’s College, University of Melbourne. The project would not have possible without my family: the Mendelovitses, the Champions, Rachel, Sam, and the Stanyon clan, and especially my parents, Juliette and Carl, who taught me to read. I wish Carl had been able to read this book, with the critical zeal and blind loyalty he brought to all his children’s efforts. The project would not have been bearable without the wit, friendship, spare bedrooms, dinners, and diversions provided by the Fulljames and Williamses, the Cargills, Steve Dept & Co., the Neukams, Tuesday Group, Connie Schüritz, Pam Hutcheson, Julia and Dave Crispin, and Milan and Lenka Žonca. Finally, I am immeasurably grateful for the enthusiastic passion, beautiful sublimity, and sober rage of David, Miriam and Matthew Champion.