4/5/2023 0 Comments Nightingale reviews![]() ![]() We would do well to remember one of Wilde’s most memorable aphorisms from his 1891 ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray (a novel we have analysed here): ‘All art is quite useless.’ The fact that the red rose turns out not to be of any practical use, Wilde would doubtless remind us, is not the point. The problem is that, as so often in Wilde’s work, the modern world is too practical-minded to appreciate art for its own sake (‘art for art’s sake’ was the unofficial slogan for Aestheticism, a movement for which Wilde was a prominent spokesperson). ![]() The Nightingale is the symbolic and total embodiment of this impulse. Artists often talk about ‘putting a lot of themselves’ into their art, or ‘pouring their heart out’ or ‘giving themselves’ to their art. ![]() So, viewed this way, the Nightingale’s sacrifice is not so pointless, since it produced a work of art. The rose is, in a sense, a beautiful work of art which doesn’t spontaneously grow from the tree but must instead be created by the fusion of the Nightingale’s song (art), the power of nature (the moonlight), and the artist’s willingness to sacrifice herself (the piercing of the bird’s heart). Indeed, Andersen even wrote a fairy tale, ‘ The Nightingale’, which is about nature and art, and these two themes are never far away from any Oscar Wilde story. This is a trope he may have learned from Hans Christian Andersen, whose fairy tales he knew well. Many of Wilde’s fairy tales are about characters sacrificing themselves: the Happy Prince allows himself to be dismantled, piece by piece, to help the poorest and most needy in the city, for instance. So, like many fairy tales, we can say with confidence that ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is ‘about love’, or even, ‘about true love’: the Nightingale believes in true love, but gives her life in a pointless gesture, because the solitary rose that stems from her sacrifice does not achieve what it was designed to achieve, and is discarded by the Student after the Professor’s daughter rejects it. She, at least, is Romance, and the Student and the girl are, like most of us, unworthy of Romance.’ He added: ‘I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the Tale – for in writing it I did not start with the idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers.’ In a May 1888 letter to a friend, Wilde wrote of the meaning of ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’: ‘The nightingale is the true lover, if there is one. ![]()
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