birth of consciousness, which will determine the treatment of the
subject. If one remember the facts of his early years rather than how he
thought and felt about those facts, he will be less inclined to dwell
upon the facts afterward, or make use of them in his work. They will have
little significance to him. A distinction in this view is to be observed
between Richter and Goethe. The autobiographies of the two men reveal the
different impressions made upon them by their childhood. The facts which
Goethe recalls are but little associated with contemporaneous reflection
upon the facts, and they serve but a trifling purpose in Goethe’s art.
The facts which Richter recalls are imbedded in a distinct conception
regarding them, and perform a very positive function in his art.
The character of Mignon may be dismissed from special consideration,
for it is clear that Goethe used Mignon’s diminutiveness and implied
youth only to heighten the effect of her elfish and dwarfish nature.
The most considerable reference to childhood is perhaps in the Sorrows
of Young Werther, where the relations between Werther and Charlotte
comprise a sketchy group of children who act as foils or accompaniments
to the pair. Werther discovers Charlotte, it will be remembered, cutting
slices of bread for her younger brothers and sisters; it is by this
means that Goethe would give a charm to the character, presenting it in
its homely, domestic setting. But his purpose is also to intimate the
exceeding sensibility of Werther, and he represents him as taking a most
affectionate interest in the little children whom he sees on his walks.
I suspect, indeed, that Goethe in this has distinctly borrowed from the
Vicar of Wakefield; at any rate, the comparison is easily suggested,
and one brings away the impression of Goldsmith’s genuine feeling and
of Goethe’s deliberate assumption of a feeling for artistic purposes.
Nevertheless, Goethe makes very positive use of childhood in this novel,
not only through the figures of children, but also through the sentiment
of childhood.
“Nothing on this earth, my dear Wilhelm,” says Werther, “affects my heart
so much as children. When I consider them; when I mark in the little
creatures the seeds of all those virtues and qualities which they will
one day find so indispensable; when I behold in the obstinate all the
future firmness and constancy of a noble character, in the capricious
that levity and gayety of temper which will carry them lightly over the
dangers and troubles of life, their whole nature simple and unpolluted,
then I call to mind the golden words of the Great Teacher of mankind:
‘Except ye become as little children.’ And now, my friend, these
children, who are our equals, whom we ought to consider as our models,
we treat as subjects. They are allowed no will of their own! And have we
then none ourselves? Whence comes our exclusive right? Is it because we
are older and more experienced? Great God! from the height of thy heaven,
thou beholdest great children and little children, and no others; and
thy Son has long since declared which afford the greatest pleasure. But
they believe in him, and hear him not,—that too is an old story; and they
train their children after their own image.”
We must regard this as a somewhat distorted application of the words
of the gospel, but it is interesting as denoting that Goethe also, who
stood so much in the centre of illumination, had perceived the revealing
light to fall upon the heads of young children. It is not, however, so
much by his direct as by his indirect influence that Goethe is connected
with our subject. If Luther was both an exponent of German feeling and a
determining cause of its direction, Goethe occupies a similar relation
as an expression of German intellectualism and a stimulator of German
thought. A hundred years after his birth, when measures were taking
to celebrate the centenary by the establishment of some educational
foundation to bear his name, the enthusiastic supporters of Froebel
sought to divert public interest into the channel of this movement for
the cultivation of childhood. Froebel’s philosophy has affected modern
educational systems even where his method has not been scrupulously
followed. Its influence upon literature and art can scarcely be traced,
except so far as it has tended to give direction and set limits to the
great body of books and pictures, which, made for children, are also
expository and illustrative of the life of children. I mention him simply
as an additional illustration of the grasp which the whole subject of
childhood has obtained in Germany; it has made itself felt in religion
and politics; so revolutionary was Froebel’s philosophy held to be that
his schools were suppressed at one time by the government as tending to
subvert the state. This was not strange, since Froebel’s own view as to
the education of children was radical and comprehensive.
A child’s life finds its chief expression in play, and in play its social
instincts are developed. Now the kindergarten recognizes the fact that
play is the child’s business, not his recreation, and undertakes to guide
and form the child through play. It converts that which would otherwise
be aimless or willful into creative, orderly, and governed action. Out
of the play as governed by the wise kindergartner grows a spirit of
courtesy, self-control, forbearance, unselfishness. The whole force of
the education is directed toward a development of the child which never
forgets that he is a person in harmonious relation to others. Community,
not competition, is the watchword of the school. In this view the
kindergarten has its basis in the same law which lies at the foundation
of a free republic. Obedience, as taught by the system of public schools,
is an obedience to rules; it may be likened to the obedience of the
soldier,—a noble thing, but not the highest form of human subjection of
the will. Obedience as evolved in the true kindergarten is a conscious
obedience to law. The unity of life in the school, with entire freedom of
development in the individual, is the aim of the kindergarten.
* * * * *
The enthusiasm which made itself felt in France in the rise of the
romantic school, with its expression chiefly through poetry, the drama,
and fiction, disclosed its power likewise in Germany. There, however,
other channels offered a course for the new current. The rise of the
school of religious painters, of which Overbeck and Cornelius were
eminent examples, was a distinct issue of the movement of the times. It
was regarded as reactionary by some, but its reaction was rather in form
than in spirit. It ran counter to a Philistinism which was complacent
and indifferent to spiritual life, and it sought to embody its ideas in
forms which not only Philistinism but humanism contemned, yet it was all
the while working in the interest of a higher freedom. It is noticeable,
therefore, that this religious art, in its choice of subjects, not only
resorted to the early ecclesiological type, but struck out into a new
path, choosing themes which imply a subjective view of Christianity.
Thus, Overbeck’s picture of Christ blessing little children, a subject
which is a favorite one of modern religious art, is a distinct
recognition of modern sentiment. Here is the relation borne by the Christ
to little children presented by a religious art, which, however much it
might seek to reinstate the old forms, could not help being affected
by the new life of Christianity. Overbeck went to the early Florentines
for his masters, but he did not find this subject among their works. He
caught it from the new reading of the old gospel.
VIII
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
As Overbeck and his school returned to the religious art which preceded
the Renaissance, so Thorwaldsen, like Canova and lesser men, turned back
to Greek art, and was working contemporaneously with Overbeck at Rome
in a very different temper. To him the central figure of Christianity
was not a child in its mother’s arms, but a strong, thoughtful man;
for childhood he turned to the sportive conception of Amor, which he
embodied in a great variety of forms. The myth appealed, aside from the
opportunity which it offered for the expression of sensuous beauty, to
his northern love of fairyland. His countryman, Andersen, tells us how,
when they were all seated in the dusk, Thorwaldsen would come from his
work and beg for a fairy-tale.
It is Andersen himself who has made the most unique contribution not only
to the literature which children read, but to that which is illustrative
of childhood. He attained his eminence sheerly by the exhibition of a
power which resulted from his information by the spirit of childhood. He
was not only an interpreter of childhood; he was the first child who made
a real contribution to literature. The work by which he is best known is
nothing more nor less than an artistic creation of precisely the order
which is common among children.
It is customary to speak of his best known short stories as fairy tales;
wonder-stories is in some respects a more exact description, but the
name has hardly a native sound. Andersen himself classed his stories
under the two heads of _historier_ and _eventyr_; the _historier_
corresponds well enough with its English mate, being the history of
human action, or, since it is a short history, the story; the _eventyr_,
more nearly allied perhaps to the German _abenteuer_ than to the English
_adventure_, presumes an element of strangeness causing wonder, while
it does not necessarily demand the machinery of the supernatural.
When we speak of fairy tales, we have before our minds the existence,
for artistic purposes, of a spiritual world peopled with beings that
exercise themselves in human affairs, and are endowed in the main with
human attributes, though possessed of certain ethereal advantages, and
generally under orders from some superior power, often dimly understood
as fate; the Italians, indeed, call the fairy _fata_. In a rough way we
include under the title of fairies all the terrible and grotesque shapes
as well, and this world of spiritual beings is made to consist of giants,
ogres, brownies, pixies, nisses, gnomes, elves, and whatever other
creatures have found in it a local habitation and name. The fairy itself
is generally represented as very diminutive, the result, apparently,
of an attempted compromise between the imagination and the senses, by
which the existence of fairies for certain purposes is conceded on
condition they shall be made so small that the senses may be excused from
recognizing them.
The belief in fairies gave rise to the genuine fairy tale, which is now
an acknowledged classic, and the gradual elimination of this belief
from the civilized mind has been attended with some awkwardness. These
creations of fancy—if we must so dismiss them—had secured a somewhat
positive recognition in literature before it was finally discovered
that they came out of the unseen and therefore could have no life.
Once received into literature they could not well be ignored, but the
understanding, which appears to serve as special police in such cases,
now has orders to admit no new-comers unless they answer to one of
three classes: either they must be direct descendants of the fairies of
literature, having certain marks about them to indicate their parentage,
or they must be teachers of morality thus disguised, or they may be mere
masqueraders; one thing is certain, they must spring from no belief in
fairy life, but be one and all referred to some sufficient cause,—a
dream, a moral lesson, a chemical experiment. But it is found that
literature has its own sympathies, not always compassed by the mere
understanding, and the consequence is that the sham fairies in the sham
fairy tales never really get into literature at all, but disappear in
limbo; while every now and then a genuine fairy, born of a genuine,
poetic belief, secures a place in spite of the vigilance of the guard.
Perhaps nothing has done more to vulgarize the fairy than its
introduction upon the stage; the charm of the fairy tale is in its
divorce from human experience; the charm of the stage is in its
realization, in miniature, of human life. If the frog is heard to speak,
if the dog is turned before one’s eyes into a prince, by having cold
water dashed over it, the charm of the fairy tale has fled, and in its
place we have only the perplexing pleasure of legerdemain. The effect of
producing these scenes upon the stage is to bring them one step nearer
to sensuous reality, and one step further from imaginative reality; and
since the real life of fairy is in the imagination, a wrong is committed
when it is dragged from its shadowy hiding-place and made to turn into
ashes under the calcium light of the understanding.
By a tacit agreement fairy tales have come to be consigned to the
nursery; the old tools of superstition have become the child’s toys,
and when a writer comes forward, now, bringing new fairy tales, it is
almost always with an apology, not for trespassing upon ground already
occupied, but for indulging in what is no longer belief, but make-belief.
“My story,” he is apt to say, “is not true; we none of us believe it,
and I shall give you good evidence before I am done that least of all do
I believe it. I shall probably explain it by referring it to a strange
dream, or shall justify it by the excellent lesson it is to teach. I
adopt the fairy form as suited to the imagination of children; it is a
childish thing, and I am half ashamed, as a grown person, to be found
engaged in such nonsense.” Out of this way of regarding fairy tales has
come that peculiar monstrosity of the times, the scientific fairy tale,
which is nothing short of an insult to a whole race of innocent beings.
It may be accepted as a foregone conclusion that with a disbelief in
fairies the genuine fairy tale has died, and that it is better to content
ourselves with those stories which sprang from actual belief, telling
them over to successive generations of children, than to seek to extend
the literature by any ingenuity of modern skepticism. There they are,
the fairy tales without authorship, as imperishable as nursery ditties;
scholarly collections of them may be made, but they will have their true
preservation, not as specimens in a museum of literary curiosities,
but as children’s toys. Like the sleeping princess in the wood, the
fairy tale may be hedged about with bristling notes and thickets of
commentaries, but the child will pass straight to the beauty, and awaken
for his own delight the old charmed life.
It is worth noting, then, that just when historical criticism, under the
impulse of the Grimms, was ordering and accounting for these fragile
creations,—a sure mark that they were ceasing to exist as living forms in
literature,—Hans Christian Andersen should have come forward as master
in a new order of stories, which may be regarded as the true literary
successor to the old order of fairy tales, answering the demands of a
spirit which rejects the pale ghost of the scientific or moral or jocular
or pedantic fairy tale. Andersen, indeed, has invented fairy tales
purely such, and has given form and enduring substance to traditional
stories current in Scandinavia; but it is not upon such work that his
real fame rests, and it is certain that while he will be mentioned in
the biographical dictionaries as the writer of novels, poems, romances,
dramas, sketches of travel, and an autobiography, he will be known and
read as the author of certain short stories, of which the charm at first
glance seems to be in the sudden discovery of life and humor in what
are ordinarily regarded as inanimate objects, or what are somewhat
compassionately called dumb animals. When we have read and studied
the stories further, and perceived their ingenuity and wit and humane
philosophy, we can after all give no better account of their charm than
just this, that they disclose the possible or fancied parallel to human
life carried on by what our senses tell us has no life, or our reason
assures us has no rational power.
The life which Andersen sets before us is in fact a dramatic
representation upon an imaginary stage, with puppets that are not
pulled by strings, but have their own muscular and nervous economy. The
life which he displays is not a travesty of human life, it is human
life repeated in miniature under conditions which give a charming and
unexpected variety. By some transmigration, souls have passed into
tin-soldiers, balls, tops, beetles, money-pigs, coins, shoes, leap-frogs,
matches, and even such attenuated individualities as darning-needles;
and when, informing these apparently dead or stupid bodies, they begin
to make manifestations, it is always in perfect consistency with the
ordinary conditions of the bodies they occupy, though the several
objects become by this endowment of souls suddenly expanded in their
capacity. Perhaps in nothing is Andersen’s delicacy of artistic feeling
better shown than in the manner in which he deals with his animated
creations when they are brought into direct relations with human beings.
The absurdity which the bald understanding perceives is dexterously
suppressed by a reduction of all the factors to one common term.
For example, in his story of The Leap-Frog, he tells how a flea, a
grasshopper and a leap-frog once wanted to see which could jump highest,
and invited the whole world “and everybody else besides who chose to
come,” to see the performance. The king promised to give his daughter to
the one who jumped the highest, for it was stale fun when there was no
prize to jump for. The flea and the grasshopper came forward in turn and
put in their claims; the leap-frog also appeared, but was silent. The
flea jumped so high that nobody could see where he went to, so they all
asserted that he had not jumped at all; the grasshopper jumped in the
king’s face, and was set down as an ill-mannered thing; the leap-frog,
after reflection, leaped into the lap of the princess, and thereupon the
king said, “There is nothing above my daughter; therefore to bound up to
her is the highest jump that can be made: but for this, one must possess
understanding, and the leap-frog has shown that he has understanding.
He is brave and intellectual.” “And so,” the story declares, “he won
the princess.” The barren absurdity of a leap-frog marrying a princess
is perhaps the first thing that strikes the impartial reader of this
abstract, and there is very likely something offensive to him in the
notion; but in the story itself this absurdity is so delightfully veiled
by the succession of happy turns in the characterization of the three
jumpers, as well as of the old king, the house-dog, and the old councilor
“who had had three orders given him to make him hold his tongue,” that
the final impression upon the mind is that of a harmonizing of all
the characters, and the king, princess, and councilor can scarcely
be distinguished in kind from the flea, grasshopper, leap-frog, and
house-dog. After that, the marriage of the leap-frog and princess is
quite a matter of course.
The use of speaking animals in story was no discovery of Andersen’s, and
yet in the distinction between his wonder-story and the well-known fable
lies an explanation of the charm which attaches to his work. The end
of every fable is _hæc fabula docet_, and it was for this palpable end
that the fable was created. The lion, the fox, the mouse, the dog, are
in a very limited way true to the accepted nature of the animals which
they represent, and their intercourse with each other is governed by the
ordinary rules of animal life, but the actions and words are distinctly
illustrative of some morality. The fable is an animated proverb. The
animals are made to act and speak in accordance with some intended
lesson, and have this for the reason of their being. The lesson is first;
the characters, created afterward, are, for purposes of the teacher,
disguised as animals; very little of the animal appears, but very much
of the lesson. The art which invented the fable was a modest handmaid
to morality. In Andersen’s stories, however, the spring is not in the
didactic but in the imaginative. He sees the beetle in the imperial
stable stretching out his thin legs to be shod with golden shoes like the
emperor’s favorite horse, and the personality of the beetle determines
the movement of the story throughout; egotism, pride at being proud,
jealousy, and unbounded self-conceit are the furniture of this beetle’s
soul, and his adventures one by one disclose his character. Is there a
lesson in all this? Precisely as there is a lesson in any picture of
human life where the same traits are sketched. The beetle, after all his
adventures, some of them ignominious but none expelling his self-conceit,
finds himself again in the emperor’s stable, having solved the problem
why the emperor’s horse had golden shoes. “They were given to the horse
on my account,” he says, and adds, “the world is not so bad after all,
but one must know how to take things as they come.” There is in this and
other of Andersen’s stories a singular shrewdness, as of a very keen
observer of life, singular because at first blush the author seems to be
a sentimentalist. The satires, like The Emperor’s New Clothes and The
Swiftest Runners, mark this characteristic of shrewd observation very
cleverly. Perhaps, after all, we are stating most simply the distinction
between his story and the fable when we say that humor is a prominent
element in the one and absent in the other; and to say that there is
humor is to say that there is real life.
It is frequently said that Andersen’s stories accomplish their purpose
of amusing children by being childish, yet it is impossible for a mature
person to read them without detecting repeatedly the marks of experience.
There is a subtle undercurrent of wisdom that has nothing to do with
childishness, and the child who is entertained returns to the same story
afterward to find a deeper significance than it was possible for him
to apprehend at the first reading. The forms and the incident are in
consonance with childish experience, but the spirit which moves through
the story comes from a mind that has seen and felt the analogue of the
story in some broader or coarser form. The story of The Ugly Duckling
is an inimitable presentation of Andersen’s own tearful and finally
triumphant life; yet no child who reads the story has its sympathy for
a moment withdrawn from the duckling and transferred to a human being.
Andersen’s nice sense of artistic limitations saves him from making
the older thought obtrude itself upon the notice of children, and his
power of placing himself at the same angle of vision with children is
remarkably shown in one instance, where, in Little Klaus and Big Klaus,
death is treated as a mere incident in the story, a surprise but not a
terror.
The naïveté which is so conspicuous an element in Andersen’s stories was
an expression of his own singularly artless nature. He was a child all
his life; his was a condition of almost arrested development. He was
obedient to the demands of his spiritual nature, and these led him into
a fresh field of fancy and imagination. What separates him and gives him
a distinct place in literature is, as I have said, that he was the first
child who had contributed to literature. His very autobiography discloses
at every turn this controlling genius of childhood, and the testimony of
his friends confirms it.