The Nightingale

 

I have been teaching Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” and as usual, the interpretations of the fable in the common texts, are preposterous. They want to claim the story is meant to show that natural beauty is superior to artificial beauty.

Right. Compare the natural with the artificial nightingale as objects. The nightingale is axiomatically drab, unremarkable in appearance, indeed invisible in the night. Andersen stresses this. “’I never imagined it would be a little, plain, simple thing like that.’” By contrast, the mechanical bird is beautiful: ”’This is very beautiful,’ exclaimed all who saw it.” “It was so much prettier to look at.” 

If Andersen meant to contrast artificial beauty with natural beauty, and find the artificial wanting, he has done a very poor job of it. One would think the opposite.

Nor is the song of the natural bird more beautiful than that of the artifice. Anderson stresses this more than once: less varied, but not less beautiful. It “was as successful as the real bird.” The music master, the resident expert, declared it more beautiful.

In the story, the only problem is that the mechanical bird over time stopped singing.

But that is not a valid contrast with a natural bird. A natural bird would actually die well before the mechanical bird wore out.

Read the story again, understanding that the “natural” nightingale is the Holy Spirit. Everything falls into place. The contrast is not between man and nature, but man and God.

Of course, the school commentaries cannot say this; they must suppress all reference to Christian belief. They must ignore his sins gathering around the Emperor’s bed, or the figure of Death leaving for a churchyard, or the bird’s talk of holiness.

It is the key to all Western literature, to all Western culture, and to life itself, and it is being suppressed in our schools.