Fiddled out of Reason: Addison and the Rise of Hymnic Verse, 1687–1712 by John William Knapp (review)

At first glance this book could seem narrow, its core being a lengthy chapter in which the author subjects to close analysis the sequence of five hymns written by Joseph Addison and published in the Spectator between July 26 and October 18, 1712. In all, this amounts to 164 lines of verse. Its very considerable achievement, however, is to convince the reader that hymns have an unrecognized cultural centrality. Such an argument can succeed because Knapp's foundational position, eloquently borne out in the book, is that critics who distinguish between "the 'liturgical' and the 'literary,' or the 'religious' and the 'secular'" (227), are wrong from the outset. This is convincing because until the 1730s, hymn-singing was not an accepted feature of Anglican worship. Addison's hymns were therefore written for the page, for silent contemplation, taking their place amongst other kinds of ode and apostrophe rather than custom-composed for a specific devotional practice that occurred within the walls of an ecclesiastical space.

Knapp's book has a collateral achievement—perhaps even a greater one. It takes us closer to Addison's actual thought processes as a latitudinarian Anglican alive in the early eighteenth-century—albeit subject to occasional temptation from Deism as in "The Spacious Firmament"—than this reader, at any rate, has come before, despite having read the standard biographies. That is not entirely a comfortable place to be—see further below.

Addison's best-known hymn, "The Spacious Firmament on High," published in Spectator 465 on August 23, 1712, comprises 24 lines of verse distributed into three 8-line tetrameter stanzas that rhyme aabbccdd. The modern reader may have to look up the odd word in the dictionary and s/he needs to know about the music of the spheres to understand the poem. Otherwise, it is very simple. Knapp devotes 23 pages of textual analysis to this poem. From that fact, again, it might appear as if Knapp has written an unnecessary book, narrow in scope and complicating for no good reason the straightforward lyrics of hymns written with ordinary Christians in mind. Not a bit of it! In fact, his analysis could have been even longer. Indeed, there are two points in the poem at which a further gloss would be valuable. Knapp surmises that the lines "The Moon takes up the wondrous Tale, / And nightly to the list'ning Earth / Repeats the Story of her Birth" (10–12) may encode a mythological reference; these lines might simply refer to the moon's phases. Other lines to which Knapp, otherwise so punctilious, surprisingly does not attend are the hymn's reference to the "dark terrestrial Ball" round which "in solemn Silence, all" move. If this central "Ball" is the sun, why is it deemed "dark" and "terrestrial"? If it is the Earth, had Addison not heard of the theories of Copernicus?

The book's early chapters demonstrate the importance of Pindarics (mainly as aversion therapy) and odes to St. Cecilia on the development of what Knapp prefers to call "the Hymnic" rather than hymns—the former being a more inclusive category, thus more consistent with his premise. These chapters make a good case for the early eighteenth-century hymn's inclusivity and for the degree to which it permeated the culture at large, the activities of other hymnists being interestingly documented in tandem with Addison's—familiar names such as Isaac Watts and less familiar hymnic experiments such as the Sapphics of Ambrose Philips, shown to be influential upon Pope's scattering of hymns. Incidentally, this further complicates the story of binary opposition between Philips and Pope, a story that is far from simple even in what seems to be the clearest case of the pastoral. Pastoral is discussed because it has an important presence in Addison's two earliest hymns, "The Lord my Pasture shall prepare" and "When all thy Mercies...