rhythm and romanticism 101music’ (Schlegel 1963 : 265 ). Schlegel’s perhaps most hyperbolic state-
ment about music is the following, that pre-empts Walter Pater’s remark
that ‘All art aspires to the condition of music’: ‘beauty (harmony) is the
essence of music, the highest of all arts. It is the mostgeneral[art]. Every
art has musical principles and when it is completed it itself becomes
music. This is even true of philosophy and thus also, of course, of litera-
ture (Poesie), perhaps also of life. Love is music – it is something higher
than art’ (Schlegel 1980 : 151 ). Elsewhere he asks: ‘Are architecture
and metre perhaps only applied music –? or areallarts that?’ (Schlegel
1963 : 244 ). These remarks are in one sense merely provocative, and
they function again rather in the manner of music itself because they
resist attempts to cash them out into a series of literal claims.^14 How-
ever, the idea of ‘love’ as music does fit in with the utopian dimension
of Schlegel’s thought that seeks to make the world which, as being ‘en
soi’, is ‘endless’, but inarticulate ‘unity’, into the ‘infinite plenitude’
of being ‘pour soi’, by both articulating things in ever new ways and
seeking to make those ways harmonise with each other. Why, though,
should music be regarded as underlying so many aspects of culture in
this manner? The answer has to do with its relationship to ‘feeling’.
In his probably most explicit treatment of the issue of music and
feeling, from the lectures on philosophy of 1804 – 5 , Schlegel maintains:Now if feeling is the root of all consciousness, then the direction of lan-
guage [towards cognition] has the essential deficit that it does not grasp
and comprehend feeling deeply enough, only touches its surface...
However large the riches language offers us for our purpose, however
much it can be developed and perfected as a means of representation
and communication, this essential imperfection must be overcome in
another manner, and communication and representation must be added
to; and this happens throughmusicwhich is, though, here to be regarded
less as a representational art than as philosophical language, and really
lies higher than mere art. Every effort to find a general philosophical
language had to remain unsuccessful because one did not touch on
the fundamental mistake of philosophical experiments with language. –
Feeling and wishing often go far beyond thinking;musicasinspiration,as
the language of feeling, which excites consciousness in its well-spring, is
the only universal language.
(Schlegel 1964 b: 57 )14 There are links to Platonic and Pythagorean ideas here, but in the context of Schlegel’s
other ideas, this is a secondary factor.