Part 11

But all these entertainments were too much for the old man. He grew more feeble and ill, and died at last on May 30, 1778, at the age of eighty-three. Shortly before his death Voltaire signed a declaration which summed up his belief: “I die worshiping God, loving my friends, and not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition.” His body, dressed up as though he were alive, was taken out of Paris in a carriage and buried at Scellières, about a hundred miles away. The bishops of the diocese sent an order to forbid the burial, but it was too late. No newspaper was allowed to mention his death or anything about him, and the Academy was forbidden to hold the service which was customary on the death of a member. In the twentieth century just the same orders were issued by the Russian Government when Tolstoy died. Nothing is feared more by Church and State than the influence of a great reformer.

Over Voltaire’s body controversy raged just as it had over the living man.

On the eve of the French Revolution the National Assembly of France made Louis XVI sign a decree ordering Voltaire’s remains to be transferred to Paris. This was done with great pomp and ceremony. A long procession with banners and music passed through the city. An immense sarcophagus, forty feet high, surmounted by a full-length figure of Voltaire and a winged figure of Immortality, was drawn along by twelve white horses. On it was written, “He avenged Callas, La Barre, Sirven, and Montbailli. Poet, philosopher, historian, he gave a great impulse to the human mind; he prepared us to become free.” A hundred thousand people walked in the procession through crowds of hundreds of thousands more. The body was buried in the Panthéon. But this was not its last resting-place. In 1814, on the restoration of the Bourbon Kings, his bones were removed and thrown into a waste place outside the city. This was discovered in 1864, when his heart, which had been in the possession of the Villette family, was placed inside the empty tomb.

It has been impossible to enumerate even Voltaire’s principal writings, but mention must be made of one of the most remarkable of his works, which was his “Philosophical Dictionary.” It contained brief articles on an enormous variety of subjects, each one brimful of interest, whether they were treated with serious thought and profound learning or with sarcasm and biting irony. He kept on adding to it until it reached eight volumes, and, needless to say, it shocked and infuriated as well as delighted those who read it. He also assisted with many contributions to the great encyclopædia which Diderot and d’Alembert helped to compile, and which created a great stir and exercised a considerable influence on the contemporary thought of France.

Madame du Deffand, one of the many brilliant women of eighteenth-century France, who knew Voltaire well and corresponded with him for many years, said of him that “he was good to read and bad to know.” His faults were certainly very marked, and to some extent spoilt his virtues. His vanity was almost ridiculous; he was quite unscrupulous in making money, in attacking his enemies, and in defending himself; he scoffed with cruel and bitter words, but he never mocked at any men who lived good lives. Mischief prompted him more than malice. He could not help laughing at people who pulled long faces and were incapable of laughing at themselves.

He certainly disbelieved in the creeds of the Church; but by partaking, on one occasion, of the Communion, building a church, and joining a religious order, it looked as if he were insincere, though he is not the only person who has conformed to religious observances in which he did not really believe. But Voltaire scandalized people by doing it all with his tongue in his cheek; in fact, he was altogether irreverent by nature, and reverence is a quality which the strongest opponent of any creed ought always to display. Granting all these defects, however, Voltaire’s influence in opening men’s minds, showing up what was false, sham, and hypocritical, was quite immeasurable. He had, too, the great virtue of humanity. This is not just sentimental kindness and empty sympathy, but, as John Morley expresses it, “Humanity armed, aggressive, and alert; never slumbering and never wearying; moving like an ancient hero, over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues, and Voltaire is one of its master types.”

A great upheaval was not far off, and gradually the way was being prepared for a better day in France and in Europe. Another man was at work, Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom Voltaire knew, but did not like. While Voltaire was appealing to the minds of the thoughtful, Rousseau was reading the hearts of the people and stirring their imagination. The age was one of extreme corruption, frivolity, and luxury on one side, and poverty, degradation, and misery on the other: an age of bad laws, stale traditions, and reckless cruelty. Voltaire and his friends were sowing the seeds of revolt. The people, only half-conscious, were being driven, as they so easily can be in any country where they are kept ignorant, partly by circumstances, partly by weak men, and partly by an atrocious social system, into the precipice of disaster.

The crash came in the great French Revolution, the greatest convulsion through which any country has ever passed. With all its bloodshed and violent excesses, and in spite of the reaction which quickly followed it in the rise of Napoleon, the Revolution finally destroyed a disastrous method of government, and freed the people from the worst forms of oppression which had grown up in the long reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Voltaire did not live to see this tremendous change; he would have deplored its violence, but his responsibility for the growth of the ideas which made such a thing possible was by no means small.

A. P.

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.