Chapter Three pursues the discussion of aesthetics broached in the previous chapter, focussing on the aesthetic experience most often associated with Romanticism: the Sublime. Contrasting the influential histories of Samuel Holt Monk and Marjorie Nicholson, it argues that no single theory of the sublime dominated the eighteenth century, and that Kant’s influential ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ does not exhaust the term’s many historical meanings, which included the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, and the philosophical sublime. The chapter addresses the sublime in a variety of discourses and practices, including landscape gardening, astronomy, gothic fiction, revolutionary politics, language theory and antiquarian texts such as Ossian and the Scandinavian Veddas. It then distinguishes between Burke’s physiological, Kant’s cognitive, Schiller’s moral, and Herder’s more ‘naturalised’ versions of the philosophical sublime, before looking at the rhetorical sublime in Longinus and eighteenth-century language theories, and finally at the natural sublime in landscape aesthetics and in the poetry of Wordsworth, Leopardi, and Mickiewicz. It concludes that academic reconstructions of the Romantic sublime based on Kant have skewed the history of the concept, in particular by legitimating models of Romantic individuality that have excluded women.

The Introduction surveys the range and diversity of engagements with the sublime across different areas of enquiry, genres of cultural productivity, and national traditions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. It explores the close links between ‘the sublime’ and ‘the Romantic’ in academic discourse before outlining the history of ‘the Romantic Sublime’ as a critical construct. It argues for a potential disconnect between what scholars have called ‘the Romantic Sublime’ and how the sublime might actually have been produced, encountered, experienced, and understood during the Romantic period. A selection of key Romantic-period engagements with the sublime are discussed, as are the major scholarly histories of the topic, from the early twentieth century to the present day.

This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia (1839) reminds the reader early on that the attractions of Denmark are not limited to the capital but extend across the entire country, ‘whose fertile lowlands have ever been the dwelling-place of a mighty people’. However, if Copenhagen received comparatively few British tourists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then the rest of Denmark – that ‘flat country’ which Sommer’s Description of Denmark portrays, rather less encouragingly than Murray’s Hand-Book, as ‘abounding in bogs and morasses’ – received even fewer. But by no means none at all. Prior to the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), for example, at least eight other English-language accounts of travel in Denmark had appeared. These include the brief but informative descriptions of key places on the land route from Hamburg to Copenhagen given in the Grand Tour (1749) of Thomas Nugent (1700–72), and the much more substantial discussion offered by William Coxe (1748–1828) in his Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784), which Wollstonecraft used, and which had gone to three editions by the time of her visit. And, of course, many other accounts would follow Wollstonecraft’s, written by everyone from wealthy tourists through prisoners of war to the author of the controversial Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

Like Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence, however, most British observations of places outside Copenhagen focus on the surrounding environs of Zealand and were made en passant, as it were, to and from the capital, at the beginning or the end of a larger Nordic tour. And the majority of these describe the east coast of Zealand between Copenhagen and Helsingør (Elsinore), the latter famous in Britain, of course, as the setting for Hamlet, as the prison of Caroline Matilda (1751–75), and as the main crossing point between Denmark and Sweden, ‘the grand turn-pike gate to the Baltic’, as Andrew Swinton (dates unknown) describes it in his Travels (1792). But increasing numbers of British travellers did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries describe the rest of the Denmark, often as far west as the moors along the Jutland coast, including the likes of William Coxe and Edward Daniel Clarke (1769–1822), both of whom who made the journey from Germany to Copenhagen overland rather than by sea.

Not the least striking of the many striking passages in that most sensational of Gothic novels, The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis (1775–1818), is found in Chapter I of Volume III, where two nuns discuss the Danes, inhabitants of a country which, they are told, is ‘terribly infested by Sorcerers, Witches, and Evil Spirits’. One nun asks, ‘[A]re not the People all Blacks in Denmark?’, to which the other replies, ‘By no means, reverend Lady; They are of a delicate pea-green with flame-coloured hair and whiskers.’ ‘Mother of God!’ replies the first: ‘Pea-green? […] Oh! ’tis impossible!’, at which point the Porteress, who has been listening, interjects with ‘contempt’: ‘Impossible? […] Not at all: When I was a young Woman, I remember seeing several of them myself.’

In Lewis’s novel, this humorous passage is merely one of many which serve to illustrate the credulity of the Spanish Catholic nuns, and presumably, by implication, of Catholics more generally. But the conversation between the nuns should also be seen in a wider context, because discussion of the national character of the Danes was a persistent and surprisingly extensive strand of British writing about Denmark during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – and Lewis, as we have seen in Chapter 3, was certainly familiar with at least some of that writing. Nor, indeed, is Lewis’s vision of exotic Danes altogether unique. The Scottish historian and traveller William Thomson (1746–1817), for example, in his Letters from Scandinavia – published in 1796, the same year as Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark – remarks that ‘the Danes are rather bizarre in their appearance […] They have many of them a sickly appearance and others look as if they painted [i.e. used makeup]’, something stereotypically associated, at the time, with the French. And, of course, this British discussion of the Danish national character itself took place within the still-wider context of the ongoing debate about national character in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which can be traced back at least as far as the essay ‘Of National Characters’ first published by David Hume (1711–76) in 1748, in which Hume uses the ‘supposed’ contrast between an Englishman and a Dane as one of his early, illustrative examples.