The Emperor's Nightingale: Some Aspects of Mimesis

Abstract

peror's Nightingale. Its message-an exceptionally sobering one in the present context-is that nature is altogether finer and more enduring than art. It tells how a Chinese emperor, beguiled by a precious imitation bird that had been given him, forsook a natural songster he had once favored. But when that glittering counterfeit broke down, its clockwork sound silenced, the now aged ruler found welcome solace in the real bird's return, in its more reliable and spiritually healing song. The nature-romanticism of the writer's time, with its transcendentalist and mystical inclinations, is, of course, portended in this touchingly nuanced story. And, as elsewhere in Andersen's tales, one encounters visual sensibilities happily attuned with the comfortable optimism and practical acceptance of life epitomized in the art of the Biedermeier age. Just possibly, some of Andersen's contemporaries might not have agreed that man's handiwork was necessarily more transient than God's, and inferior; but it is unlikely, for at that period, nature was not only the artist's subject but to a large extent the measure of his accomplishment. Thus it was that then, as has often been the case before and since, art was put to a test that it must, by definition, fail, as did the craftsman's mechanical bird in Andersen's parable. Despite the artist's foregone defeat in any contest with nature (only in myth does a Pygmalion appear), over the ages artists have been irresistibly drawn to the challenge of imitating nature. The persistence of those claims upon their skills and the inventive flights that have been elicited in the process testify to the extraordinary hold that the desire to mirror nature, or better still, to capture something of its essence, can exert over