Marin Mersenne on Language and Music

Abstract

The Abbe du Bos, whose Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture was not only influential in France where it was published in 1719, but also in England where it appeared in translation in 1748, compared music and poetry and found that musical sound was no less than the voice of nature itself, whereas articulate language consisted of mere arbitrary and artificial symbols. *1 This idea, although not new in 1719, gathered strength in the course of the eighteenth century and eventually became subversive of an esthetic doctrine which had ruled European art for two centuries. Since the Italians had flooded Europe with commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics, the word not music was generally held to be the true voice of nature, the proper instrument for the perfect imitation of nature. Poetry reigned supreme in the hierarchy of the arts, because the word was assumed to be synonomous with reason, and the most significant human experience was thought to be in