Part 12

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.

IX

MAZZINI

1805–1872

The supreme virtue is sacrifice—to think, work, fight, suffer, where our lot lies, not for ourselves but others, for the victory of good over evil.