VIII Hans Andersen 1805–1875
It matters not to have been born in a duck-yard, if one has been hatched from a swan’s egg.
This is the story of Hans Andersen, the son of a poor cobbler and his wife a washerwoman. Nearly every child in the world has read his Fairy Stories, and the romance of his own life is almost as marvelous as one of these—more marvelous, perhaps, because it is really true. All the things he dreamt of—all the things he longed to happen, came true, so that when he was fifty he wrote it down and called it “The Story of My Life.”
Hans Andersen was born rather more than a hundred years ago in the ancient city of Odense, in Denmark. His parents were very poor, so poor that they had only one room under a steep gabled roof. In this room, which was kitchen, workshop, parlor, and bedroom, Hans Andersen opened his eyes, to the sound of his father hammering shoes. He was born in a great bed with curtains—which had been made by his father out of a nobleman’s coffin; there were bits of ragged crape still hanging about the woodwork of the bed. The little room which was Hans’ home was to him exciting and delightful beyond measure. It was full of all sorts of things—the walls were covered with pictures, and the tables and chests had shiny cups and glasses and jugs upon them. The room was always decorated with fresh birch and beech boughs, and bunches of sweet herbs hung from the rafters. In the lattice window grew pots of mint. Close to the window was the cobbler’s workshop and a shelf of books. The door was painted with rough landscapes, and when the little boy was in bed he would gaze at these and make up stories about them. His father and mother, before they came to bed, would say to one another in low voices how nice and quiet Hans was, believing him to be asleep—when he was really wide awake enjoying his own thoughts and fancies about the pictures. Between the Andersens’ cottage and their neighbor’s there stood a box of earth, which Andersen’s mother planted with chives and parsley. This was their garden, and you can read about it in the “Snow Queen.” As Hans grew up he thought there was nothing so nice in the world as his own little home, and he loved to beautify it with garlands of flowers and wild plants, which he would put about in glasses. He was very fond of his mother, who was not, it seems, a particularly attractive woman. She was good-natured, but silly and thriftless, never thinking of the morrow so long as they had a roof over their heads that day. She was careless, too, about Hans as an infant, and was in the truest sense of the word uneducated. Hans got his love of reading and his imagination from his unsuccessful, unhappy father. The cobbler was a far more educated person than his wife, and he was better born. But owing to his family’s misfortunes—for they had come down in the world—he was obliged, much against his will, to take up shoemaking; this work he settled down to with a sad and bitter heart. All his spare time he gave to reading. Books became his one comfort. He was never seen to smile except when he was reading. Sometimes he would read aloud in the evenings and his wife would gaze at him completely puzzled—not understanding, but admiring him all the same.
As Hans grew older, he and his father became great friends, and they went long walks together; and while his father sat and thought or read, Hans ran about picking wild strawberries and making pretty garlands of flowers. The cobbler certainly rather neglected his shoemaking, and as he was different from his neighbors, they shunned him and thought all sorts of evil things about him. The cobbler’s one wish was to get away from the city and to live in the country. On hearing one day that the squire of a large village required a shoemaker about the place, he offered himself as such. Then he would have a cottage and a little garden and perhaps a cow. The squire’s wife sent him a piece of silk to make a specimen of dancing shoes. For the next few days the family could talk of nothing else but these shoes and of their hopes for the future. Hans prayed to God to fulfil his father’s wishes. At last the shoes were finished and were gazed upon with admiration by Hans and his mother. Off went the cobbler with the shoes wrapped up in his apron—while his little family waited in impatience and anxiety at home. When the cobbler returned his face was quite pale and they saw something dreadful had happened. He told them the squire’s wife had not even tried on the shoes. She had just looked at them, and said the silk was spoiled and that she would not require him as shoemaker. The cobbler then and there took out his knife and cut the poor shoes in pieces. So all their hopes were dashed to the ground; their rosy hopes of a life in the country with a cow and a garden faded like a dream, and they wept.
Hans Andersen as a child had no boy friends, and he hardly did any lessons, but he was very far from being bored, because he had such a lively imagination and could always invent games and stories for himself. His father would make him toys, pictures that changed their shapes when pulled with a string, and a mill which made the miller dance when it went round, and peep-shows of funny rag dolls. What he liked best was making dolls’ clothes. In the little garden he would sit for hours near the one gooseberry-bush. This, with the help of a broomstick and his mother’s apron, he made into a little tent, and there he would sit in all weathers, fancying things and inventing stories. Very occasionally he went to a school, and at one school he made friends with a little girl and would tell her stories. They were mostly about himself—how he was of noble birth only the fairies had changed him in his cradle, and all sorts of other inventions. One day he heard the little girl say, “He is a fool like his grandpapa,” and poor Hans trembled and never spoke to her about these things again. He had a mad old grandfather at the lunatic asylum, where he sometimes went. His grandmother, the mother of his father, was a dear old lady who looked after the garden of the asylum, and brought flowers to the Andersens every Sunday. She would recount to Hans stories of her youth—of her mother’s mother, who had been quite a grand lady, and of her own happy childhood in more prosperous circumstances. Strange sights Hans would see in the court at the asylum, sights that would haunt him for days and even years, so that he would beg his parents to put him in their big bed and draw the curtains that he might feel safe. He grew up religious in a sort of superstitious way, and this was his mother’s influence. He was shocked at his father, as his mother and the neighbors were—“there is no other devil than that which is in our own hearts,” said his father one day, and Andersen’s mother burst into tears and prayed to God to forgive his father. The cobbler died when Hans was only eleven years old, and he was left alone with his mother.
He continued to play with his toy theater and peep-shows and made dolls’ clothes. But he also read all he could lay hands on, and a great deal of Shakespeare, which made a deep impression on him. He liked best the plays where there are ghosts and witches—he felt he must go on the stage. He jotted down at this time the titles of twenty-five plays; the spelling of the titles being most peculiar!
Naturally young Hans Andersen was the laughing-stock of the neighborhood. Nobody understood him, and Hans singing in the lanes and sewing and reading at home was simply regarded as a lunatic. By the time he was fourteen he had not a single friend of his own age. Boys teased him, and screamed at him, “There goes the play scribbler,” so that Hans shrank from them and would hide himself at home from their mocking eyes and voices. He longed, like the ugly duckling of his story, for the companionship of people cleverer and nobler than himself.
He was indeed very funny to look at, quite comically ugly with his large nose and feet and very small Japanese eyes, and he was so tall and gawky that his clothes were always too small for him, which made him look still odder. He became persuaded that his voice was going to make his fortune, and an old woman who washed clothes in the river told Andersen that the Empire of China lay under the water there. Hans quite believed her. He thought to himself that perhaps one moonlight night, when he would be singing by the water’s edge, a Chinese Prince might push his way through the earth on hearing his song, and would take him down into his country and there make him rich and noble. Then he might let him visit Odense again, where he would live and build a castle, the envied and admired of everybody. Long after—Andersen says in his autobiography—when he was reading his poems and stories aloud in Copenhagen, he hoped for such a Prince to appear in the audience who would sympathize and help him.
But the gentry, though much amused by the cobbler’s peculiar son, were sorry for him. He seemed to them a strange and freakish being, who, though he could recite plays from memory and make poetry, was yet so ignorant that he knew no grammar, or even how to spell. They laughed at Hans’ absurdly ambitious and childish ideas, that he was at once going to be a great writer, or singer, or actor, without any education at all. One family tried their best to get him into the local school, or to enter some trade, but he would not hear of it. He was, however, sent to the ragged school for a time to learn scripture, writing, and arithmetic. They found he could hardly write a line correctly, and he was dreadfully bored by this sort of learning. He must have been an annoying pupil, for he was always dreamy and absent-minded, and never looked at his lessons except on his way to and from school. He tried to please the master by bringing him bunches of wild flowers. He left the school as ignorant as he had entered it. At about the age of fourteen he was confirmed, and wore for the first time a pair of boots—of these he was so tremendously proud that when he walked up the aisle of the church he drew his trousers right up so that every one might see the boots, and he rejoiced that they squeaked so loudly that every one’s attention might be drawn to them—at the same time he felt he ought not to be thinking so much of his boots and so little of his Maker. The story of the Red Shoes was inspired by them. Naturally his relations began to get a little anxious about this time as to his future. He was fourteen and he had not yet done anything sensible, and was what ordinary people would call a dunce. He had, it is true, shown extraordinary skill with his needle, and this pointed to his being a tailor. While his relations talked and worried over Hans together and came to no conclusion the boy continued his desultory life. But he had great schemes in his head, and was making up his mind to take his fate into his own hands. He would, like the heroes he had read about, set out by himself to seek his fortune. This meant that he would go to Copenhagen and there find work at the Theater. This idea had come to him when the actors from the Royal Theater there had come to Odense.
Andersen had one day got permission to appear on the stage as a shepherd. His enthusiasm and funny childish ways amused and interested the actors, and Hans at once thought he was a born actor and that his fortune was made. He heard these same actors speak about a thing called a Ballet, which seemed to be finer than anything in the world, and of a wonderful lady who danced in the Ballet, and Hans pictured her as a sort of fairy queen who would help him and make him famous. His mother was rather alarmed at these plans, but Hans said in answer to her objections, “You go through a frightful lot of hardships, and then you become famous.” So the mother consulted a wise woman, who, examining the coffee grouts, said that Hans Christian Andersen would become a great man, and that one day Odense would be illuminated in his honor. Hans’ mother was then quite satisfied. The boy packed up his little bundle to take him to the ship, and so to Copenhagen. He had about nine dollars in his pocket, and was fourteen years old. Most people would say what a mad expedition and how absurd, but Hans had no fear, he was happy, for he had his wish, and was quite sure that he would make his fortune.
When he arrived at Copenhagen he rushed off to see the Fairy Queen, the dancer he had heard about, and told her how he wished to go on the stage. To show her what he could do, he took off his boots and made a drum out of his hat, and so began to dance and sing. As he had such a very odd appearance, his heavy elephantine gambols simply terrified the poor lady, she took him for an escaped lunatic, and of course showed him the door.
But Hans Andersen, still hopeful, went off to the Director of the Theater, and there met with another rebuff. He was told that only educated people were engaged for the stage. This was hard to bear, and after various adventures and disappointments Hans found he had only fifty cents left—so either he must return to Odense by the first coasting ship, or stop at Copenhagen and learn a trade. He chose a trade, and apprenticed himself to a joiner, but there the roughness and coarse talk of his fellow-joiners upset him so much that he left the same day. So there he was, friendless and with nothing to do but to wander the streets. In his wanderings, he suddenly remembered the name of a man he had heard the Odense people talk about, a musician, the Director of the Conservatoire. So off he went to this man’s house, with the purpose of asking him to take him as a pupil. When he arrived he found the musician was having a dinner-party, but Andersen was allowed in, and telling them of his object he was taken to the piano, and there played and recited. When he had finished, he burst into tears, but the company applauded and raised a small collection of money for him. The kind musician arranged that he should have lessons in singing, and Hans, full of joy, wrote to his mother that his fortune was in sight.
For the next nine months he was supported by these “noble-minded men,” as he called them, but when he lost his voice about the age of fifteen, they advised him to return to his native town and learn a handicraft, but rather than do this the poor boy was ready to endure every hardship. He lived now in a garret in the lowest quarter of Copenhagen, and had nothing to eat but a cup of coffee in the morning and a roll eaten on a bench later in the day. He was very proud and sensitive, so he would pretend that he had had plenty to eat and that he had been dining out with friends, also that he was quite warm, when his clothes were absolutely threadbare and patched, and his wretched boots let in all the wet, so that his feet were sometimes not dry for weeks. When he lay down to sleep in his attic, he tells us, after saying his prayers, he was helped by his trust in God that everything would turn out right in the end; and indeed it was almost miraculous the way something or somebody always turned up to help.
Kind-hearted people taught him German and Danish, and sent him to the dancing school to learn dancing, but they did not give him money, because they had no idea how poor he was, as he said nothing about it. The courage and determination he showed at this time were really remarkable in so young a boy, and in spite of being very nearly starved he continued to write poems and plays. One play he sent to the Royal Theater without giving his name, and never doubted in his childish ignorance that it would be accepted. It was sent back to him with a curt note saying that the play showed such a lack of education that it was absurd. But the only effect this had on Andersen was to make him write another, and he sent that to the manager of the theater; but this time those who read it said it showed unmistakable signs of talent, and advised that Andersen’s friends should ask the King to help with money to support and educate the boy. Frederick VI of Denmark was like the kind kings in Andersen’s stories. He arranged at once that Hans should be sent to the Latin School at Slagelse for three years, to be properly educated and cared for. This was arranged and Hans went off to school, but his time there was not at all happy.
The adventurous, free life he led in Copenhagen, though he had been hungry and cold, had been much more to his liking. In the story of his life he writes about this period with the greatest bitterness. He had been so happy at the prospect of learning, and when he got to school, he felt like a wild bird shut up in a cage. “I behaved,” he said, “like one who is thrown into the water without being able to swim. It was a matter of life and death to me to make progress, but there came one billow after another—one called Mathematics, another called Grammar, another called Geography—and I began to fear I should never swim through them all.” He was terribly frightened of failing, and began to think he was a dunce, for he was seventeen and had to be put with the smallest boys in the school, which was very discouraging, but it was greatly the master’s fault. He treated Hans as he would ninety-nine boys out of a hundred. He never ceased laughing at him, and seldom, if ever, encouraged him; so damping was he that Andersen really began to feel he was not worth all the trouble and money that were being spent upon him. Andersen, with his sensitive, imaginative nature, was apt to make mountains out of molehills. His imagination, indeed, was quite extraordinary, extravagant, and out of proportion to his other faculties. He needed a kind, understanding person to guide him, but he was left to himself and had few, if any, friends. The ordinary dull routine of school life made him suffer. He describes it all in his book as a sort of “Dotheboys Hall,” when it was really just an ordinary school like any other at that date. His anxiety to get on may be guessed at when we read that he nearly worried himself to death, because he got “Very good” in a report for conduct, instead of “Remarkably good.” “I am a strange being,” he once wrote. “If the wind blows a wee bit sharply the water always comes into my eyes, though I know very well that life cannot be a perpetual May day.”
When he was twenty his master moved to Elsinore, and Andersen went with him. He was pleased and excited at the change; the beautiful country round Elsinore filled him with joy; but, alas! he got on still less well with his master, who treated him, Andersen says, as a perfectly stupid, brutish boy. At that period it was considered the right thing for schoolmasters, and even parents, never to praise a child or encourage him for fear of spoiling him. Yet all the time this master was scolding and laughing at Hans, he was writing to the boy’s friends, praising his nature, his warm heart and imagination, and his diligence in work. He recommended him as worthy of any support in the way of money or education that might be given him. One day Andersen brought his master a poem he had written, and the man scoffed and said it was mere idle trash, and only fit for the rubbish-heap. This quite finished Hans; he was found by another master in deep distress. The same master told Andersen’s friends of the boy’s unhappiness and advised his removal. He was taken away. So ended what Andersen describes as the “darkest and bitterest period of my life.” He had been at school a little more than three years.
Andersen now became a student at Copenhagen. He worked hard and conscientiously, but was always stupid at examinations, and at Latin and Greek. In his spare time he wrote poems, plays, and sketches, and published his first considerable book called “A Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of Amager.” This strange volume is such a confused jumble of things that it is rather like a dream. But even in the jumble you can see Andersen’s gift, in the little fairy-like touches and the beautiful descriptions of nature and of seasons. The Danes liked the book, for rather childish and fantastic things amuse them. Most of Andersen’s work, however, was pronounced to be wishy-washy and silly by the critics, and Andersen failed and failed again; yet he never gave up trying and never apparently lost belief in his own talent. Still he got very cast down and unhappy, and felt that he must get away and have a complete change. The same kind King who had helped him with his education, then allowed him money for foreign travel, and Andersen went off for a long spell abroad—to Italy, to France, and to Germany.
Away from his own country he got great inspiration, he says, and started by writing a novel which he was certain would take the world by storm. It was a most bitter blow that when the book was published every one laughed at it, and the reviews which reached him abroad pronounced it to be dull, sentimental, and unreal. But Andersen had made up his mind that he would be either a great novelist or a great dramatist; so on he went, writing with his usual persistence and courage. He did at last succeed in bringing out a successful novel.
So immediate was its success that the author’s reputation seemed made. This type of novel, which is very romantic and very impossible, would not be appreciated nowadays; but again its charm lay in its descriptions of scenery and places. Andersen was delighted, and at once made up his mind that he was to be one of the greatest novelists the world had ever seen. But this was not to be, for except for one or two rather beautiful books of travel, his serious books were not great, and were not to make him famous.
Now Andersen had a talent which he did not take seriously himself, and if it had not been for his friends, perhaps the world would never have known of it.
When Hans Andersen was in a good humor and wanted to keep children quiet and amused—nicely behaved and nice-looking children they had to be—he used to tell them fairy tales. Odense, his birthplace, was a home of legends, and folk stories he had heard as a child stuck in his memory. These he wove into stories in the most wonderful manner. He had a peculiar way of telling these stories which simply delighted children. He never in telling them troubled about grammar; he would use childish words and baby language. Then he would act and jump about and make the most comic faces. Nobody who had not heard him could guess how lively and amusing these stories were; but it never seemed to strike Andersen that he might write them down: he did not think them worth it. When some one suggested that he might write them down and print them, so that they should be known by other people, not only his own small circle of friends, Andersen laughed at the idea, but decided to do it just for fun. He would write them down as he told them. Now this is easier said than done, for when you begin to put pen to paper your inclination is to write a thing like an essay and not as if you were talking to somebody. Yet what you feel when you read Hans Andersen’s stories is just this, that they are told and not written. He printed first a tiny volume, and called it “Fairy Tales as Told to Children”; it cost ten cents. In this volume were “The Tinder Box,” “Little Claus and Big Claus,” and “Little Ida’s Flowers,” and this was followed by a second part with “Thumbeline” and “The Traveling Companion,” and then a third number appeared containing “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Little Mermaid.” The three parts made the first volume of his tales.
Andersen still refused to take these “small things,” as he called them, seriously. He was certainly not encouraged by the critics, for they were too stupid and conventional to see the point of these tales. Some were too grand even to look at them, and some were shocked. One wrote that no child should be allowed to read “The Tinder Box,” for it wasn’t at all nice that a Princess should ride on a dog’s back, and be kissed by a soldier. Hans Andersen was advised by these dense people not to waste any more time on such things. There was also much scolding about the conversational style of the writing. It was quite unlike the heavy, pompous stuff people were accustomed to at that date. “This is not the way people write,” it was said, “this is not grammar.” But there were people who saw at once the beauty of these stories, who declared that they would make Andersen immortal.
Andersen himself did not trouble much about it one way or the other; he still thought about the success of his novel, and made plans for writing another with Napoleon as his hero. He would compel people to see what a great dramatist and novelist he was. He wrote and translated many operettas and plays. One was produced at the Royal Theater with great success. It was a poor play but well acted, and containing some noble sentiments; it pleased the honest Danes. But the Fairy Tales went on appearing at intervals, and found their way into most Danish homes. In fact, they were building up Hans Andersen’s reputation for him all over the world. Andersen soon found that he had great admirers among children, and there were very few nurseries where they didn’t know the stories by heart. Perhaps his own country had not been quite so eager about them as some others—Germany and Sweden, and even England, which is supposed to be slow and conservative about new things, were very enthusiastic. When Andersen visited England at the age of forty-three, he found he was quite a lion. Great ladies would repeat his stories from memory, and he was asked out to breakfasts, teas, and dinners, to meet other important people of the day. He was delighted, because he loved to be appreciated. Dickens was specially kind to him and asked Andersen to stay with him. Andersen wrote about England to his friends in Denmark: “Here I am regarded as a Danish Walter Scott, while in Denmark I am supposed to be a sort of third-class author.” He fumed and fretted in quite a childish way that the Danish papers did not pay more attention to his reception in England; it made him feel quite ill, he says.
So after writing an immense poem and another novel, which both failed, he devoted himself to the Fairy Tales.
Andersen in his own “Life” says about his Fairy Tales, that he would willingly have given up writing them, but that they forced themselves upon him. He knew that the critics would object to the style of the writing, and that was why, at the beginning, he had called the stories “Fairy Tales for Children,” but he had meant them as much for the grown-ups. He found that people of different ages were equally amused by them—the older ones by the deeper meaning, and children by the fancies, so like their own, and the amusing, lively style of the writing. Indeed, Andersen’s great gift is that he appeals to so many different sorts of people, that he himself has so many sides. He is tender, sad, and wistful, but also absurd, fantastic, and amusing. At one moment he makes us cry, the next instant we laugh. Andersen had been able to keep the imagination of a child of five or six, though he was a grown-up man of over thirty when he began to publish his stories. He saw through a child’s eyes, and never felt any difficulty in imagining all the playthings coming alive. He does not, for one thing, distinguish between things and persons. He makes inanimate things human, and he does it without any effort or apparent stretching of the imagination. It seems quite the most ordinary thing in the world, when Andersen tells us about it, that an inkpot should talk with a pen, and that flowers, dolls, earwigs, beetles, clouds, and the necks of bottles should all converse with one another, and have their special personalities. He could write about anything, and the telling of utterly improbable things quite simply and naturally, is one of his great gifts. “Tell us a story about a darning-needle,” said the Danish sculptor Thorwaldsen, who was never tired of hearing him; and that was how the story came to be written. “I am not a fellow, I am a young lady,” said the darning-needle, and how could a darning-needle be anything else?
Many incidents of Andersen’s curious childhood inspired his stories as well as folk-lore. Beautifully as he has adapted legends—such as the “Wild Swans” and the “Swineherd”—his own inventions are, I think, the best of all. What more lovely and touching story can be imagined than the “Little Mermaid,” or more charming than “Thumbeline”? In the “Little Mermaid,” and that thrilling “Story of the Traveling Companion,” we seem to see the author’s great belief in good, in love, and self-sacrifice; yet he never points a moral or annoys by preaching. That was the last thing he could be; he was much too aware of his own failings to think of lecturing other people about theirs, even in a story. Some of his heroes play the most shocking pranks, such as the soldier in “The Tinder Box,” who kills an old woman; and Little Claus’ behavior is rather odd; yet they never seem to meet with any retribution. On the contrary, they thrive exceedingly.
Andersen had a great gift of satire, which in some cases may be rather bitter and unkind, but in Andersen’s it could not possibly offend people. He laughs at the world, and at people’s foibles in such an amused, kindly spirit, though he does show up most clearly the absurdity and emptiness of such things as riches and power, which believe that everything is within their grasp. “The Little Nightingale” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” are examples of this sort of story.
In the world that Andersen writes about—a world of children, birds, flowers, supernatural beings, and friendly kings—ugly, sordid, unsatisfactory things have no place. Andersen himself could never really face the ugly and cruel, he could not even write or talk about them; so that this delicate talent of his was not the one to make him write good books about real life, for in the world there are both good and bad. His plays and novels were not true to life; they were sentimental and boring, and only when Andersen has been able to describe nature in his novels does his poetic talent shine through.
Plants were Andersen’s favorite things, as anyone can see who reads “The Fir Tree,” “Little Ida’s Flowers,” or “The Snow Queen.” “Flowers know that I love them,” he said. He likened them to sleeping children, for he loved simplicity and unconsciousness. Only in the vegetable world he felt was there complete peace and harmony, without any jarring element. When he saw a fallen tree he felt he must weep, and when the buds began to swell in the spring, he would laugh aloud for joy. After flowers, Andersen loved birds better than four-footed animals, and then children. I suppose some people might be shocked at this. He didn’t love children in the mass; there are, after all, nice and nasty children; but he had great friends among them.
When he was old, his admirers in Denmark put up a statue to him in Copenhagen, showing him as an old man with uplifted finger and a smiling face, surrounded by a host of children. It sounds all right to those who didn’t know Andersen. Well, he was quite cross about it, and said he didn’t feel like that at all. It was annoying to have himself represented as “a venerable, toothless old man, with a pack of children crowding round,” as he expressed it.
Andersen, by the time he was middle-aged, was celebrated over a great part of the world. He was fashionable in his own town of Copenhagen, and people would nudge one another in the street as he passed, saying, “There goes the Poet.” Actresses recited his stories, and he himself read them aloud at parties, which would be considered very great occasions. In some ways it sounds rather trying. He had a way of reading his favorites over and over again, and demanding absolute attention; the ladies must stop knitting, the gentlemen must cease to smoke. In spite of these rules and regulations his extraordinary way of reading, his charming voice, his faces and antics, astonished and interested his audience so much that they put up with anything, and would have been willing to stand on their heads, if he had asked them to.
Andersen was made very happy by success, and he says in his “Life,” that it made up to him for all the hard words the critics had spoken. “There came within me,” he says, “a sense of rest, a feeling that all, even the bitter in my life, had been needful for my development and fortune.”
It was a constant source of wonder and delight to him to find himself where he was. He, the son of a poor cobbler and a washerwoman, who had run about as a child in wooden shoes, now to be treated by the most important people as their equal, and to enjoy the best that the world can give. He was friends with princes, and kings were as fathers to him. On his travels, which were like fairy tale travels, he found himself welcomed in every drawing-room of every capital in Europe. He met Dumas and Victor Hugo in France; in Germany, Heine, the brothers Grimm, and Mendelssohn and Schumann; and Dickens, as we know, in England. And he didn’t meet these people in a stiff, formal way, but in their dressing-gowns, so to speak. His childlike nature drew people to him, and he was friendly and intimate with them at once. All these things appeared to him more marvelous even than the most fantastic incidents of his own fairy tales. He would often, when enjoying some quite ordinary luxury, which most people take as a matter of course, such as lying on a sofa in a new dressing-gown surrounded by books, think of his childhood and wonder.
That Andersen should have been impressed by grandeur, by kings and princes in their castles, and the trappings of wealth, is quite natural. He was pleased and amazed, as a child and as a peasant are pleased and amazed. It appealed to his romantic imagination, and the marvel of the contrast with his own childhood and early manhood never ceased to delight him, and to make him thankful. He was not a snob, for a snob is one who despises the less fortunate, but he had a real democratic feeling and never forgot that he was a peasant to start with. He knew that poor people have just as much nobility of soul as the better off, and he shows this in his stories. He is always pointing out the beauty of simple, humble things; of the things that people pass by without noticing. In a lovely but little-known story, “The Conceited Apple Blossom,” though it is only about flowers, you can think of them as people, and it becomes really an allegory on rich and poor. Andersen said about poor people that they were as defenseless as children, and therefore he felt specially tender toward them. When at his literary jubilee, celebrated at Copenhagen, he received gold snuffboxes from kings, and letters from ladies declaring their love from all over the world, he treasured most, four-leaved clovers sent him by peasants, and a waistcoat made for love by an admiring tailor.
Hans Andersen was very vain, and sometimes very silly. He thirsted for praise and encouragement, all the more so, that for so many years he had met with nothing but contempt. Praise was to him, he says, as necessary as sunshine and water to flowers, and without it he perished. Praise made him feel nice, humble, and grateful, but disagreeable criticism made him bitter and proud. He made no effort to conceal his vanity. If he had been praised he wanted everybody to know about it. Once he shouted to a friend on the other side of the street, “Well, what do you think? I am read in Spain now. Good-by!”
But Hans Andersen’s character was full of contradictions. Though acutely sensitive and easily dejected, yet he was dogged, and sometimes almost pushing in his desire to be thought a great writer. From earliest days he had been full of enterprise and energy—the energy of the spirit, for his health had never been good, and had been made worse by privations. At thirty he said he felt sixty, but at sixty he felt younger.
The great Danish writer, Brandes, has written a splendid Essay on Andersen, in which he says in reference to him, “He who possesses talent should also possess courage.” And Hans Andersen did possess these, the happiest perhaps of all combinations of qualities.
We may be glad to know that Hans Andersen was not vain of his looks; indeed, he thought himself very ugly. But he fancied that he looked distinguished. He had his hair curled every day, and he wore very high starched collars to hide his long neck, and very baggy trousers to hide his legs. But in spite of this he was always extremely odd to look at—immensely tall and shambling, with huge feet like boats, a great Roman nose, and almost invisible eyes. But this did not prevent his being simply idolized by the ladies of Denmark, several of whom wrote and asked him to marry them!
The end of Andersen’s life was certainly the happiest period. For fifteen years at least, he had enjoyed the fact that of all Danish writers he was the most famous in the world. He was a genius, for what he wrote was absolutely original, and peculiar to himself. His fairy stories are beautiful inspirations with nothing to do with education or learning.
Andersen was fortunate in being appreciated, and his works were at the height of their popularity during his lifetime. It is rather pathetic that this being so, there should still have lingered in his mind wistful regrets for his serious works, the unsuccessful novels and plays. “Do you not think,” he said when he was quite old, to a well-known English critic, “that the people will come back to my ‘Two Baronesses’?” (a very bad novel he wrote). Fortunately his critic had not read the book.
No human being is entirely satisfied, nor should he be, for he would then become complacent and conceited, though in Andersen’s case, as we know, nearly every dream of his youth came true.
Hans Andersen was seventy when he died. His last days were spent happily and peacefully with some friends in a house called “Rolighed,” which means peace or quietude, outside Copenhagen. It overlooked the Sound, that sheltered and beautiful bit of coast which lies between the town of Copenhagen and the turbulent Kattegat. From his window Andersen could watch the ships going by like “a flock of wild swans,” as he described it, and he could see in the distance Tycho Brahe’s island sparkling in the sun.
Even when he was ill, he was able to get about the garden to look at the wild flowers he had planted there, and to make his own original nosegays which he had loved to do as a child.
Surrounded by the kindest and most loving friends, he was spared all suffering and discomfort at the end, for he had an illness which gradually weakened him and he simply went to sleep never to wake again. When he was dying he said very often, “How beautiful the world is! How happy I am!”
It was this spirit of Andersen’s, which to the end found beauty and joy in life, that makes his stories so fresh and eternal. For though Hans Andersen died a long time ago, he still lives in his writings. In nearly all countries they are known and read. For the truly great works of men are a gift to the whole world, and belong to all countries and to all time. I think these stories of Hans Andersen’s will probably live for ever, long after we are gone—perhaps so long as this world shall last.
D. P.