He also created his style, though he borrowed much of it from the
nursery. "It was perfectly wonderful," "You would scarcely have believed
it," "One would have supposed that there was something the matter in the
poultry-yard, but there was nothing at all the matter"--such beginnings
are not what we expect to meet in dignified literature. They lack the
conventional style and deportment. No one but Andersen has ever dared to
employ them. As Dr. Brandes has said in his charming essay on Andersen,
no one has ever attempted, before him, to transfer the vivid mimicry and
gesticulation which accompany a nursery tale to the printed page. If you
tell a child about a horse, you don't say that it neighed, but you
imitate the sound; and the child's laughter or fascinated attention
compensates you for your loss of dignity. The more successfully you
crow, roar, grunt, and mew, the more vividly you call up the image and
demeanor of the animal you wish to represent, and the more impressed is
your juvenile audience. Now, Andersen does all these things in print: a
truly wonderful feat. Every variation in the pitch of the voice--I am
almost tempted to say every change of expression in the story-teller's
features--is contained in the text. He does not write his story, he
tells it; and all the children of the whole wide world sit about him
and listen with, eager, wide-eyed wonder to his marvellous
improvisations.[18]
[18] Brandes: Kritiker og Portraiter, p. 303.
In reading Andersen's collected works one is particularly impressed with
the fact that what he did outside of his chosen field is of inferior
quality--inferior, I mean, judged by his own high standard, though in
itself often highly valuable and interesting. "The Improvisatore," upon
which, next to "The Wonder-Tales," his fame rests, is a kind of
disguised autobiography which exhibits the author's morbid sensibility
and what I should call the unmasculine character of his mind,[19] To
appeal to the reader's pity in your hero's behalf is a daring
experiment, and it cannot, except in brief scenes, be successful. A
prolonged strain of compassion soon becomes wearisome, and not the
worthiest object in the world can keep one's charity interested through
four hundred pages. Antonio, in "The Improvisatore," is a milksop whom
the author, with a lavish expenditure of sympathy, parades as a hero. He
is positively ludicrous in his pitiful softness, vanity, and humility.
That the book nevertheless remains unfailingly popular, and is even yet
found in the satchel of every Roman tourist, is chiefly due to the
poetic intensity with which the author absorbed and portrayed every
Roman sight and sound. Italy throbs and glows in the pages of "The
Improvisatore"--the old vagabond Italy of pre-Garibaldian days, when
priests and bandits and pretty women divided the power of Church and
State. Story's "Roba di Roma," Augustus Hare's "Walks in Rome," and all
the other descriptions of the Eternal City, are but disguised
guide-books, feeble and pale performances, when compared with Andersen's
beautiful romance.
[19] R. L. Stevenson in speaking of the "Character of Dogs" makes
the following cruel observation: "Hans Christian Andersen, as we
behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with
an excruciating vanity and scouting even along the streets for the
shadows of offence--here was the talking dog."--Memories and
Portraits, p. 196.
The same feminine sentimentality which, in spite of its picturesqueness,
makes "The Improvisatore" unpalatable to many readers, is still more
glaringly exhibited in "O. T." and "The Two Baronesses." In "The Story
of My Life" the same quality asserts itself on every page in the most
unpleasant manner. The author makes no effort to excite the reader's
admiration, but he makes constant appeals to his sympathy. Nevertheless
this autobiography rivals in historic and poetic worth Rousseau's
"Confessions" and Benvenuto Cellini's "Life." The absolute candor with
which Andersen lays bare his soul, the complete intentional or
unintentional self-revelation, gives a psychological value to the book
which no mere literary graces could bestow. I confess, until I had the
pleasure of making Andersen's acquaintance, "The Fairy Tale of My Life"
impressed me unpleasantly. After I had by personal intercourse possessed
myself of the clew to the man's character, I judged differently.
Andersen remained, until the day of his death, a child. His innocence
was more than virginal; his unworldliness simply inconceivable. He
carried his heart on his sleeve, and invited you to observe what a soft,
tender, and sensitive heart it was. He had the harmless vanity of a
child who has a new frock on. He was fidgety and unhappy if anybody but
himself was the centre of attraction; and guilelessly happy when he
could talk and be admired and sympathized with. His conversation was
nearly always about himself, or about the kings and princes and lofty
personages who had graciously deigned to take notice of him. He was a
tuft-hunter of a rare and curious sort; not because he valued the glory
reflected upon himself by royal acquaintances, but because the pomp and
splendor of a court satisfied his thirst for the marvellous. A king
seemed to him, as to the boy who reads his fairy-tales, something grand
and remote; and in invading this charmed sphere he seemed to have
invaded his own fairy-tales, and to live actually in the fabulous region
of wonders in which his fancy revelled. He conceived of his life as a
fairy-tale, and delighted in living up to his own ideal of living. The
very title of his autobiography in Danish (_Mit Livs Eventyr_) shows
this conclusively; and it ought to have been rendered in English "The
Fairy-Tale of My Life." "The Story of My Life," as Mr. Scudder has
translated it, would have been in the original "Mit Livs Historie," a
very common title, by the way, for an autobiography, while _Mit Livs
Eventyr_ is entirely unique.
The feeling of the marvellous pervades the book from beginning to end.
The prose facts of life had but a remote and indistinct existence to the
poet, and he blundered along miserably in his youth, supported and
upheld by a dim but unquenchable aspiration. He commiserated himself,
and yet felt that there was something great in store for him because of
his exceptional endowment. Every incident in his career he treated as if
it were a miracle, which required the suspension of the laws of the
universe for its performance. God was a benevolent old man with a long
beard (just as he was depicted in old Dr. Luther's Catechism) who sat up
in the skies and spent his time chiefly in managing the affairs of Hans
Christian Andersen as pleasantly as possible; and Hans Christian was
duly grateful, and cried on every third or fourth page at the thought of
the goodness of God and man. Sometimes, for a change, he cried at the
wickedness of the latter, and marvelled, with the _naïveté_ of a spoiled
child, that there should be such dreadful people in the world, who
should persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting him. Those who
were good to him he exalted and lauded to the skies, no matter how they
conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity. Some of the most
mediocre princes, who had paid him compliments, he embalmed in prose and
verse. Frederick VII. of Denmark, whose immorality was notorious, was,
according to Andersen, "a good, amiable king," "sent by God to Danish
land and folk," than whom "no truer man the Danish language spoke." And
this case was by no means exceptional. The same uncritical partiality
toward the great and mighty is perceptible in every chapter of "The
Fairy-Tale of My Life." It was not, however, toward the great and mighty
alone that he assumed this attitude; he was uncritical by nature, and
had too soft a heart to find fault with anybody--except those who did
not like his books. Heine's jocose description of heaven as a place
where he could eat cakes and sweets, and drink punch _ad libitum_, and
where the angels sat around raving about his poetry, was probably not so
very remote from Andersen's actual conception. His world was the child's
world, in which there is but one grand division into good and bad, and
the innumerable host that occupies the middle-ground between these poles
is ignored. Those who praised what he wrote were good people; those who
ridiculed him were a malignant and black-hearted lot whom he was very
sorry for and would include in his prayers, in the hope that God might
make them better.
We may smile at this simple system; but we all remember the time when we
were addicted to a similar classification. That it is a sign of
immaturity of intellect is undeniable; and in Andersen's case it is one
of the many indications that intellectually he never outgrew his
childhood. He never possessed the power of judgment that we expect in a
grown-up man. His opinions on social and political questions were
_naïve_ and quite worthless. And yet, in spite of all these limitations,
he was a poet of rare power; nay, I may say in consequence of them. The
vitality which in other authors goes toward intellectual development,
produced in him strength and intensity of imagination. Everything which
his fancy touched it invested with life and beauty. It divined the
secret soul of bird and beast and inanimate things. His hens and ducks
and donkeys speak as hens and ducks and donkeys would speak if they
could speak. Their temperaments and characters are scrupulously
respected. Even shirt-collars, gingerbread men, darning-needles,
flowers, and sunbeams, he endowed with physiognomies and speech, fairly
consistent with their ruling characteristics. This personification,
especially of inanimate objects, may at first appear arbitrary; but it
is part of the beautiful consistency of Andersen's genius that it never
stoops to mere amusing and fantastic trickery. The character of the
darning-needle is the character which a child would naturally attribute
to a darning-needle, and the whole multitude of vivid personifications
which fills his tales is governed by the same consistent but dimly
apprehended instinct. Of course, I do not pretend that he was conscious
of any such consistency; creative processes rarely are conscious. But
he needed no reflection in order to discover the child's view of its own
world. He never ceased to regard the world from the child's point of
view, and his personification of an old clothes-press or a
darning-needle was therefore as natural as that of a child who beats the
chair against which it bumped its head. In the works of more ambitious
scope, where this code of conduct would be out of place, Andersen was
never wholly at his ease. As lovers, his heroes usually cut a sorry
figure; their milk-and-water passion is described, but it is never felt.
They make themselves a trifle ridiculous by their innocence, and are
amusing when they themselves least suspect it. Likewise, in his
autobiography, he is continually exposing himself to ridicule by his
_naïve_ candor, and his inability to adapt himself to the etiquette
which prevails among grown-up people. Take as an instance his visit to
the Brothers Grimm, when he asked the servant girl which of the brothers
was the more learned, and when she answered "Jacob," he said, "Then take
me to Jacob." The little love affair, too, which he confides seems to
have been of the kind which one is apt to experience during the pinafore
period; a little more serious, perhaps, but yet of the same kind. It is
in this vague and impersonal style that princes and princesses love each
other in the fairy-tales; everything winds up smoothly, and there are
never any marital disagreements to darken the honeymoon. It is in this
happy, passionless realm that Andersen dwells, and here he reigns
supreme. For many years to come the fair creatures of his fancy will
continue to brighten the childhood of new generations. No rival has ever
entered this realm; and even critics are excluded. Nevertheless,
Andersen need have no fear of the latter; for even if they had the wish,
they would not have the power, to rob him of his laurels.
Hans Christian Andersen was born in the little town of Odense, on the
island Fünen, April 2, 1805. His father was a poor shoemaker, with some
erratic ambitions, or, if his son's word may be trusted, a man of a
richly gifted and truly poetic mind. His wife was a few years older and
a good deal more ignorant than himself; and when they set up
housekeeping together, in a little back room, they rejoiced in being
able to nail together a bridal bed out of the scaffolding which had
recently supported a dead nobleman's coffin. The black mourning drapery
which yet clung to the wood gave them quite a sense of magnificence.
Their first child, Hans Christian, grew up amid these mean surroundings,
constantly worried by the street boys, who made a butt of him, and
tortured him in the thousand ingenious ways known to their species. He
had no schooling to speak of; but, for all that, was haunted, like
Joseph, by dreams foreshadowing his future greatness. Guided by this
premonition he started, at the age of fourteen, for Copenhagen, a tall,
ugly, and ungainly lad, but resolved, somehow or other, to conquer fame
and honor. He tried himself as a dancer, singer, actor, and failed
lamentably in all his _débuts_. He could not himself estimate the extent
of his own ignorance, nor could he dream what a figure he was cutting.
Undismayed by all rebuffs, though suffering agony from his wounded
vanity, he wrote poems, comedies, and tragedies, in which he
plagiarized, more or less unconsciously, the elder Danish poets. Mr.
Jonas Collins, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, became
interested in the youth, whose unusual ambition meant either madness or
genius. In order to determine which it might be, Mr. Collins induced
King Frederic VI. to pay for his education, and after half a dozen years
at school Hans Christian passed the entrance examination to the
University. Mr. Collins continued to assist him with counsel and deed;
and his hospitable house in Bredgade became a second home to Andersen.
There he met, for the first time, people of refinement and culture on
equal terms; and his morbid self-introspection was in a measure cured by
kindly association, tempered by wholesome fun and friendly criticism. He
now resolved to abandon his University studies and devote his life to
literature.
I have no doubt it would have alarmed the gentle poet very much, if he
had been told that he belonged to the Romantic School. To be classified
in literature and be bracketed with a lot of men with whom you are not
even on speaking terms, and whom, more than likely, you don't admire,
would have seemed to him an unpleasant prospect. That he drew much of
his inspiration from the German Romanticists, notably Heine and
Hoffmann, he would perhaps have admitted; but he would have thought it
unkind of you to comment upon his indebtedness. In his first book, "A
Pedestrian Tour from Holmen Canal to the Eastern Extremity of Amager"
(1829), he assumed by turns the _blasé_ mask of the former and the
fantastically eccentric one of the latter; both of which ill became his
good-natured, plebeian, Danish countenance. For all that, the book was a
success in its day; and no less an authority than the æsthetic Grand
Mogul, J. L. Heiberg, hailed it as a work of no mean merit. It strikes
us to-day as an exhibition of that mocking smartness of youth which
often hides a childish heart. It was because he was so excessively
sentimental and feared to betray his real physiognomy that he cut these
excruciating capers. His other alternative would have been mawkishness.
His vaudeville, "Love on the Nicholas Tower," which satirizes the drama
of chivalry, is in the same vein and made a similar hit. A volume of
"Poems" was also well received. But in 1831 he met with his first
literary reverse. A second collection of verses, entitled "Phantasies
and Sketches," was pitilessly ridiculed by Henrik Hertz, in his "Letters
from the Dead." Andersen's lack of style and violations of syntax were
rather maliciously commented upon. If Gabriel's trump had sounded from
the top of the Round Tower, it would not have startled Andersen more.
He was in despair. Like the great child he was, he went about craving
sympathy, and weeping when he failed to find it.
"I could say nothing," he writes in "the Fairy-Tale of My Life," "I
could only let the big, heavy waves roll over me; and it was the common
opinion that I was to be totally washed away. I felt deeply the wound of
the sharp knife; and was on the point of giving myself up, as I was
already given up by others."
This is one of the numerous exhibitions of that over-sensitiveness to
criticism which caused him such long and continued suffering. His mind
was like a bared nerve, quivering with delight or contracting with
violent pain. Utterly devoid, as he was, of self-criticism, he regarded
his authorship as something miraculous, and held God (who apparently
supervised each chapter) responsible for the fate of his books. "If the
Lord," he writes in solemn earnest to a friend, "will take as good care
of the remainder as he has of the first chapters, you will like it."[20]
There was to him no difference between his best and his worst. It was
all part of himself, and he could scarcely conceive of any motive for
finding fault with it, except personal malice, envy, animosity.[21] This
did not, however, always prevent him from associating with the
malevolent critic, as for instance in the case of Hertz, with whom he
presently established pleasant relations.
[20] P. Hansen: Illustreret Dansk Litteratur Historic, vol. ii., p.
477.
[21] I derive this impression not only from the Autobiography, but
from many conversations. An account of My Acquaintance with Hans
Christian Andersen will be found in The Century Magazine, March,
1892.
In 1831 Andersen made his first trip abroad. "By industry and
frugality," he says, "I had saved up a little sum of money, so I
resolved to spend a couple of weeks in North Germany."
The result of this journey was the book "Shadow Pictures," which was
followed in 1833 by "Vignettes on Danish Poets," and a chaplet of verse
entitled "The Twelve Months of the Year." It is quite true, as he
affirms, that in his "Vignettes," he "only spoke of that which was good
in them" [the poets]; but in consequence there is a great lack of Attic
salt in the book. In 1833 he went abroad once more, visited Germany,
France, Switzerland, and Italy, and sent home the dramatic poem "Agnete
and the Merman," the comparative failure of which was a fresh grief to
him. After his return from Rome (1835) he published his "Improvisatore,"
which slowly won its way. It was the reputation this novel gained abroad
which changed public opinion in Denmark in its favor. A second novel,
"Only a Fiddler" (1837), is a fresh variation of his autobiography, and
the lachrymose and a trifle chaotic story, "O. T." (being the brand of
the Odense penitentiary) scarcely deserved any better reception than was
accorded it.
It is a curious thing that misconception and adversity never hardened
Andersen or toughened the fibre of his personality. The same lamentable
lack of robustness--not to say manliness--which marked his youth
remained his prevailing characteristic to the end of his life. And I
fancy, if he had ever reached intellectual maturity, both he himself and
the world would have been losers. For it is his unique distinction to
have expressed a simplicity of soul which is usually dumb--which has, at
all events, nowhere else recorded itself in literature. We all have a
dim recollection of how the world looked from the nursery window; but no
book has preserved so vivid and accurate a negative of that marvellous
panorama as Andersen's "Wonder Tales for Children," the first collection
of which appeared in 1835. All the jumbled, distorted proportions of
things (like the reflection of a landscape in a crystal ball) is
capitally reproduced. The fantastically personifying fancy of childhood,
where does it have more delightful play? The radiance of an enchanted
fairy realm that bursts like an iridescent soap-bubble at the touch of
the finger of reason, where does it linger in more alluring beauty than
in "Ole Luköie" ("The Sandman"), "The Little Mermaid," or "The
Ice-Maiden"? There is a bloom, an indefinable, dewy freshness about the
grass, the flowers, the very light, and the children's sweet faces. And
so vivid--so marvellously vivid--as it all is. Listen to this from "Five
in a Pea-Pod:"
"There were five peas in one pod. They were green, and the pod was
green; and so they thought that the whole world was green. And that
was just as it should be. The pod grew and the peas grew; they
accommodated themselves to circumstances, sitting all in a row."
Or take this from "Little Tuk:"
"Yes, that was Little Tuk. His name wasn't really Tuk, but when he
couldn't speak plain, he used to call himself so. It was meant for
Charley; and it does very well, when one only knows it."
Or this incomparable bit of drollery from Hjalmar's dream in "The
Sandman:"
"There came a terrible wail from the table-drawer where Hjalmar's
school books lay. 'Whatever can that be?' said the Sandman. And he
went to the table and opened the drawer. It was the slate which was
in convulsions because a wrong number had got into the sum, so that
it was fairly falling to pieces. The slate-pencil tugged and jumped
at the end of its string, as if it had been a little dog that
wanted to help the sum. But he could not. There was a great
lamentation in Hjalmar's copy-book, too; it was quite terrible to
hear. On each page the large letters stood in a row, one underneath
the other, and each with a little one at its side. That was the
copy. And next to these were a few more letters, which thought they
looked just like the others. These were the ones Hjalmar had
written. But they lay down as if they had tumbled pell-mell over
the pencil lines upon which they were to stand.
"'Look, this is the way you should hold yourselves,' said the copy,
'sloping this way with a bold swing.' 'Oh, we should be very glad
to do that,' answered Hjalmar's letters, 'but we can't. We are so
weakly.' 'Then you must take medicine,' said the Sandman. 'Oh, no,
no,' cried they, and straightway they stood up so gracefully that
it was a pleasure to look at them."
This strikes me as having the very movement and all the delicious
whimsicality of a school-boy's troubled dream. It has the delectable
absurdity of the dream's inverted logic. You feel with what beautiful
zest it was written; how childishly the author himself relished it. The
illusion is therefore perfect. The big child who played with his puppet
theatre until after he was grown up is quite visible in every line. He
is as much absorbed in the story as any of his hearers. He is all in the
game with the intense engrossment of a lad I knew, who, while playing
Robinson Crusoe, ate snails with relish for oysters.
Throughout the first series of "Wonder Tales" there is a capital air of
make-believe, which imposes upon you most delightfully, and makes you
accept the most incredible doings, as you accept them in a dream, as the
most natural thing in the world. In the later series, where the didactic
tale becomes more frequent ("The Pine Tree," "The Wind's Tale," "The
Buckwheat"), there is an occasional forced note. The story-teller
becomes a benevolent, moralizing uncle, who takes the child upon his
knee, in order to instruct while entertaining it. But he is no more in
the game. A cloying sweetness of tone, such as sentimental people often
adopt toward children, spoils more than one of the fables; and when
occasionally he ventures upon a love-story ("The Rose-Elf," "The Old
Bachelor's Nightcap," "The Porter's Son"), he is apt to be as
unintentionally amusing as he is in telling his own love episode in "The
Fairy-Tale of My Life." However, no man can unite the advantages of
adult age and childhood, and we all feel that there is something
incongruous in a child's talking of love.