SOURCE: Greenway, John L. “‘Reason in Imagination is Beauty’: Oersted's Acoustics and H. C. Andersen's ‘The Bell.’” Scandinavian Studies 63, no. 3 (1991): 318-25.

It may come as a surprise to those who do not consort with scientists save under duress to find that Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851), the preeminent scientist of the early nineteenth century, discoverer of the relationship between electricity and magnetism in 1820, was the genial hub of cultural debate in Denmark for a generation. Friend and confidant of poets and critics, Oersted convinced a dubious Hans Christian Andersen to publish his Eventyr, fortalte for børn (Tales Told for Children) in 1835. Andersen wrote to Henriette Wulff on March 16, 1835, that he had “Dernæst skrevet nogle Eventyr for Børn, om hvilke Ørsted siger, at naar Improvisatoren gjør mig berømt, gjør Eventyrene mig udødelig, de ere det meest fuldendte jeg har skrevet, men det synes jeg ikke, han kjender ikke Italien” [Topsøe-Jensen 1: 211] (Then I wrote some tales for children, about which Oersted says that if The Improviser makes me famous, the tales will make me immortal, that they are the most accomplished things I have done, but I don't think so: he doesn't know Italy).

Discussing Andersen's use of the supernatural, Paul V. Rubow pointed out that Andersen was able to modernize the world of the eventyr by incorporating Oersted's theories of physics and aesthetics (Rubow 85-94). Andersen not only found the aesthetic bases of Oersted's acoustical theories congenial, but he used them to regulate the representation of reality in at least one of his eventyr: “Klokken” (1845; “The Bell”).

“Klokken” is not as familiar to English-speaking readers as are others of Andersen's tales, so a brief summary will help later show the importance of romantic acoustical theory to the story. Along about evening, people hear a sound like a church-bell coming from the woods. The adults search for the source of this sound, and, coming to the edge of the woods, promptly set up a store. The Emperor offers a title to the discover of the melodious tones' source, the award going to the theorist who concluded that the sound came from a wise owl knocking its head on a hollow tree. True, he did not go very far into the forest, but he annually published an article about the owl.

On a glorious, sunny Confirmation Day, the children hear the mysterious sweetness of this bell and decide to find it. Some stop at the store, another stops at the “kluk!” of a brook, and the others go on until they find a hut with a little bell. Yes, they all say, this must be it. All, that is, but the king's son, who says that the bell is too small to produce tones “som saaledes rørte et Menneske-Hjerte” [206] (that so could move a human heart).

The king's son goes on alone, for as the others say, “saadan En vilde nu altid være klogere” [206] (someone like him always wanted to be smarter), meeting a poor boy who had left the group early. They do not go on together: the king's son goes to the left, (the side of the heart): “det var snart ligesom et Orgel spillede dertil” [207] (it was as though an organ played along). The boy goes to the right, for that side looked more beautiful.

At sunset, when nature was “en stor, hellig Kirke” [208] (a great, holy church) and the colors of the day blended with the starry gleams of night, at the shining altar of the sun, in total joy the king's son “bredte sine Arme ud mod Himlen, mod Havet og Skoven” [208] (spread out his arms toward the heavens, the sun and the forest). The poor boy joins him then, and holding hands “i Naturens og Poesiens store Kirke” [208] (in the great church of nature and poetry), there sounded around them “den usynlige hellige Klokke” [208] (the invisible holy bell).

Clearly, the story demands interpretation. Grønbech points out that, while Andersen's literary works resist being regulated by a systematic philosophy, “Klokken” belongs to that class of Andersen's stories where an idea regulates the narrative (177-78). True; the transcendent experience is not for all: many are misled by bourgeois motives (the shop) or deceived by empirical evidence (the bell in the hut). Still, the church of nature stands accessible to some, be they rich or poor. It exists; it can be found. So far, so obvious.

While “Klokken” should be a charming allegory of romantic innocence, knowledge of the acoustical theories of Andersen's scientist friend and mentor will allow us to read the story on a deeper level and help explain why, at the end, we do not find the transcendent bell. Now obsolete, Oersted's theories lent what would at the time have been a realistic dimension to Andersen's tale.

Oersted's lifelong interest in acoustics complimented the studies in electromagnetism which made him famous. In order for us to see the aesthetic role physics plays in “Klokken,” we must enter his imaginative world for a moment and understand the reciprocal relationships Oersted saw among sound, light, nature, and God.

Although Oersted became famous for his discovery of electromagnetism, his first serious experiments were conducted on acoustical figures (Klangfigurer). In 1808, he found that if one draws a bow along the edge of a pumice-covered glass plate, symmetrical patterns emerge. In the conclusion of his “Forsøg over Klangfigurer” (1808; Experiments upon Acoustical Figures) he suggests that electricity could be generated through sound vibrations, and that light acts on the eye much as sound does on the ear. Anticipating later directions in his research, he then speaks of nature's “dybe, uendelige, ufattelige Fornuft, som igiennem Tonestrømmen taler til os” [Naturvidenskablige skrifter 2:34] (profound incomprehensible reason which speaks to us through the flow of music).

He continues this line of thought in his “Om Grunden til den Fornøjelse Tonerne frembringe” (On the Cause of the Pleasure Produced by Music) in 1808. The symmetry of acoustical figures becomes beautiful, he argues, because the oscillations express the underlying “reason in nature.” Although Oersted modified his theories as he matured, he always insisted that nature's hidden reason expresses itself in tones. In his collection of philosophical essays Aanden i Naturen (1850; The Soul in Nature, 1852, 1966), appearing a year before his death, he makes the point explicit by titling an essay “The Same Principles of Beauty Exist in the Objects Submitted to the Eye and to the Ear” (325-51).

Oersted's experiments with acoustical figures seem to have been immensely interesting to nonscientists as well as to scientists, for to Oersted they demonstrated the scientific basis of beauty's physical reality. Søren Kierkegaard noted that Oersted's inner harmony reminded him of an acoustical figure; the artist Ekeberg painted him with a glass plate in his hand, and Oersted in a verse used acoustical figures as a metaphor for scientific inquiry (V. Andersen 111). Authors as diverse as Frederika Bremer and Carsten Hauch employed the image, and H. C. Andersen refers to acoustical figures in Kun en Spillemand (Kuehle; Rubow 86).

We may better understand the importance of acoustics in Oersted's imagination, as well as its role in Andersen's tale, by returning to Oersted's repeated emphasis upon the “unity of nature” (Knight, “The Scientist” 82-87). A second reading of “Klokken” leads one to notice that Andersen emphasizes the day's bright sunshine, and at the end of the story the king's son and the poor boy are inundated by color as well as sound. Oersted would read this ending as subtle and realistic: to Oersted, electricity, light, heat and sound were all forms of oscillation in the physical world and, hence, express Nature's fundamental unity, symmetry, and essential reason, much as did his early work with acoustical figures.

While Oersted's theories, with their aesthetic bent, differ markedly from our own, his contemporaries held similar views. Humphry Davy (who read the galley proofs for the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads) held similar theories and expressed them in poetry (Fullmer 118-26; Knight, “The Scientist” 72) while distrusting Oersted's Germanic background. If we look briefly at Oersted's view of light, we see that the transcendental epiphany at the end of “Klokken” becomes an aspect of romantic physics, as well as a literary phenomenon, indeed a realistic event if we remember that sound, electricity, and light are but differing expressions of the unity, of the “spirit in nature.” Oersted saw the significance of his 1820 discovery of electromagnetism as proving just this unity of Kraft (later called “energy”).

In 1815-1816, Oersted argues in his “Theorie over Lyset” (Theory of Light) that light comes from a unification of electrical and chemical forces, heat being a slower form of light. In his “Betragtninger over Forholdet mellem Lyden, Lyset, Varmen og Electriciteten” (1829; Observations upon the Relationship among Sound, Light, Heat, and Electricity), he relies again upon oscillations to show that their interdependence expresses the fundamental unity of nature. In the later “Undersøgelse over Lyset med Hensyn paa det Skjønnes Naturlære” (1842; Investigations of Light with a View to the Natural Doctrine of the Beautiful), Oersted develops the metaphorical implications of this theory: light connects the universe and lets us feel like participants in all creation (Naturvidenskablige skrifter 2:509).

In “Theory of Light,” Oersted describes the psychological effect of light as the bringing forth of joy, an assertion to which he repeatedly returned. The assumption of a unity in nature, an assertion which regulated his research (and that of other nineteenth-century scientists in diverse fields as well) led him in his “Observations on the History of Chemistry” (1806) to conjecture that human neural sensibility might be a form of his earlier “Law of Oscillation,” operating upon the organism as a consequence of sound, light and electricity (Soul in Nature 320-23). With “Experiments on Acoustical Figures,” Oersted argues that this operation cannot be reduced to mere mechanics, for aural effects symbolize nature's transcendent unity and reason: “det som i Tonekunsten henriver og tryller os, og lader os glemme alt, medens vor Siæl svæver hen paa Tonestrømmen, det er ikke spåndte Nervers mechaniske Pirring,” he says, “men det er Naturens dybe, uendelige, ufattelige Fornuft, som igiennem Tonestrømmen taler til os” [Naturvidenskablige skrifter 2:34] (in acoustics, that which exalts and enchants us, letting us forget all while ascending on the stream of sound, is not the mechanical excitement of tensed nerves, but it is nature's deep, infinite incomprehensible reason which speaks to us through the stream of sound).

The mind, Oersted asserts, evolved under the same dynamics as did nature. In “On the Physical Effects of Tones,” Oersted believes that the “meeting of numerous oscillations, which you assume in the nervous system, is not an exception from the usual mode of operation in nature, but belongs to her universal laws” (Soul in Nature 363). In the “Investigations of Light” (1842) he again draws the metaphorical implications of his theory by concluding that light is in essence an image of life, dark of death (Naturvidenskablige skrifter 2:507).

Oersted repeatedly admonished his many friends who wrote imaginative literature that narratives set in the present should not violate this underlying reason in nature (and hence, for him, its beauty and divine origin). In Mit livs eventyr (1855; The Story of My Life) Andersen credits Oersted's belief that “Jeg vil at den af Digteren fremstillede Verden, med al dens Frihed og Dristighed, dog skal beherskedes af de same Love, som det aandelige Øie opdager, den virklege Verden, og uden hvilke det er ikke værd at leve deri” [2:167] (I want the poetically represented world, with all its freedom and daring, to be circumscribed nonetheless by the same laws the spiritual eye discovers: that real world, without which it is not worth living in).

Andersen was not immune to criticism of this sort, and he took Oersted's comments seriously. He relates that when he translated Byron's “Darkness” into Danish in 1833, Oersted objected that Byron's bleak vision of entropic anarchy at the end of things was wrong: Oersted is said to have commented that “‘Digteren tør tænke sig,’ sagde han, ‘at Solen forsvinder fra Himlen, men han maa vide, at der kommer da ganske andet Resultater, end dette Mørke, end dette Kulde, disse Begivenheder, dette er en Vanvittigs Phantasie!’” [2:10-11] (‘The artist might well imagine,’ he said, ‘that the sun disappears from the heavens, but he ought to know that something very different from the darkness, from this chill would occur; these occurrences are the imagination of a madman!’). Andersen writes that, having thought about it, he agreed. After Oersted's death, Andersen recalled that “Ørsted forlangte med Rette stræng Sandhed selv i Phantasiens Raaderum” [2:245] (Oersted correctly insisted upon strict verisimilitude, even in the chamber of the imagination).

As we return to Andersen's story after this excursion into one aspect of his friend's physics and the aesthetic judgments stemming from them, we see how Andersen could well have used Oersted's theories of sound and light to underscore his theme with what, at the time, would be realistic detail: realistic in the sense of conforming to contemporary scientific theory. The narrator of “Klokken” says that the sound “affected human hearts so strangely”; Oersted suggests in “The Physical Effects of Tones” that the harmony regulating the acoustical figures on glass could be extended to human sympathy. We need only recall his emphasis on the unity of nature to see how Oersted would connect chemical affinity, acoustical effects, and an affinity between nature and mind. “This accordance between nature and mind can hardly be ascribed to chance,” he says in “Observations on the History of Chemistry” (Soul in Nature 323).

Andersen says he wrote to Oersted that The Soul in Nature prompted his essays on “Faith and Science” and “Poetry's California” in his collection I Sverrige (In Sweden) where he asserts that “Videnskabens Sollys skal gjennemtrænge Digteren” [121] (the sunlight of science must penetrate the poet). Oersted replied, according to Andersen in Mit livs eventyr, that “maaske bliver De Den af Digterne, der vil udrette meest for Videnskaben” [2:117] (perhaps you are going to be that very poet, who will accomplish the most for science). Andersen, when he received the second part of The Soul in Nature, replied that “hvad især gjør mig glad, er, at jeg her synes kun at se min egen Tanke, den, jeg tidligere ikke saaledes har gjort mig klar selv” [2:118] (what above all gladdens me is that here I seem to see only my own thoughts, which I had not previously clarified for myself).

Oersted seems to have had a similar vision of the relationship between literature and science. Years before, in 1807, he wrote to his friend Adam Oehlenschläger that the scientist and the poet begin at different points: the scientist begins with the real world and ends in a sort of artistic experience; the poet, though, begins with intuition, which he strives to clarify for others: “Naar han har naaet Grendsen af sin Bane, sammensmælter han Kunsten med Videnskaben. Saaledes skiller Digteren og Tænkeren sig ad, ved Begyndelsen af deres Vej, for ved Enden at omfavne hinanden” [Oehlenschläger 3:21] (When he has reached the end of his course, he fuses art with science. The poet and the scientist differ at the beginning of their path, only to embrace each other at the end).

Some critics have speculated that George Brandes's interpretation of “Klokken” was wrong: the king's son is not poetry; Andersen saw himself as the poor boy in the story and Oersted as the king's son (Holm 43; Rubow 94). If we accept this conjecture, interesting interpretations unfold: Andersen does not tell of the travails of the poor boy, who takes the path on the right because it is beautiful, but of those of the king's son, who takes the path on the left because that is where the heart is. The king's son knows enough empirical acoustics to realize that the small bell the children found was much too small and delicate to be heard so far away, but he is not limited by the empirical. He lets his heart guide his reason to the ultimate, transcendent experience.

If indeed Oersted was the model for the king's son, Andersen understood his older friend deeply, particularly at the end of the story. After having made a fool of himself early in his career by venturing into the speculative physics of the Naturphilosophen (Gower), Oersted eventually broke with Schelling and, later, Steffens over their lack of experimental rigor and their belief that one could attain ultimate knowledge through philosophy alone (Natur videnskablige skrifter 1:25; Michelsen 35; Stauffer 39).¹ Oersted had a bitter feud with Grundtvig and the latter's Verdens Krønike, in part because of Grundtvig's assumption he could speak with God's voice. Oersted insisted that human reason could never be complete unto itself, “for our Reason, although originally related to the infinite, is limited by the finite, and can only imperfectly disengage itself from it. No mortal has been permitted to penetrate and comprehend the whole” (The Soul in Nature 451). Importantly, while the bell the children find in the forest is beautiful, the source of the sound is invisible to the king's son and the poor boy alike. They do not discover the bell but experience transcendence through light. Oersted maintains that light allows us to penetrate into nature and not only knits us into the universe, but catalyzes the feeling of joy as it does to the king's son (The Soul in Nature 113).

Michelsen points out Oersted's preference for organic metaphors over the abstract: he did not call his final collection of philosophic essays “The Idea in Nature,” as would a Platonist or a Naturphilosoph, but The Soul [Aanden] in Nature (Michelsen 36). We have no evidence that Oersted communicated his 1807 views to Andersen, but given the continuity of Oersted's views, in particular his belief in the unity of nature, the conjecture is plausible. Indeed, I suspect Andersen pays quite a compliment to his friend and envies the moment of scientific insight: at the moment of transcendence for the king's son, oscillations fuse, and nature becomes one with mind. The waves of the ocean meet the light of the setting sun, “Alt smeltede sammen i glødende Farver,” acoustically mingling: “Skoven sang og Havet sang og hans Hjerte sang med” [208] (everything melted together in glowing colors: the forest sang and the ocean sang and his heart sang along). When the poor boy (whose imagination we do not share) arrives, the final synthesis becomes that symmetry Oersted saw expressing creation's inner reason: in the great church of nature and poetry the last sounds we hear from the holy bell are hallelujahs of “salige Aander” (blessed Spirits).

After Oersted's death in 1851, Andersen's view of nature seems to have changed to one extolling the drama of conquest and power, as we see, for instance, in “Den ny Aarhundredes Musa” [1861; “The New Century's Muse”] (Busk-Jensen 6:65-66). In “Klokken,” however, Andersen's view is the same as that of Oersted. Oersted almost paraphrases Andersen's poetic conclusion with his own elevated prose: “The holy engagement of art does not spring from conscious reflection, but from an unconscious and mystic sanctuary. … Every melting harmony, every resolved dissonance, is again a higher combination, which in itself bears the same stamp of reason, and which all its parts cooperate towards an inward unity” (The Soul in Nature 351).

As we have seen, we cannot separate Oersted's physics from his aesthetics, and Andersen, I believe, incorporated Oersted's physics of sound and light to give his tale a realistic context we no longer recognize. Thanks to Oersted, “Klokken” displays a physics of spiritual beauty: in a verse to Andersen, Oersted wrote: “Fornuften i Fornuften er det Sande, / Fornuften i Villien er det Gode, / Fornuften i Phantasien er det Skønne” [Mit livs eventyr 2:245] (Reason in Reason is Truth; Reason in Will is Goodness; Reason in Imagination is Beauty).

Notes

1. He did, however, retain their faith in the unity of nature, which not only guided his experiments in electromagnetism but later led to the articulation of the Conservation of Energy (Stauffer, Knight, “Steps”).

Research for this article was conducted under a grant from the Humanities, Science and Technology program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to which the author expresses his gratitude.

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