XHANS ANDERSEN
Almost the last story Hans Andersen wrote was a sentimental fable, called “The Cripple,” which he intended as an apologia for his career as a teller of fairy-tales. It is the story of a bed-ridden boy, the son of a poor gardener and his wife, who receives a story-book as a Christmas present from his father’s master and mistress. “He won’t get fat on that,” says the father when he hears of so useless a gift. In the result, as was to be expected, the book turns out to have a talismanic effect on the fortunes of the family. It converts the father and mother from grumblers into figures of contentment and benevolence, so that they look as though they had won a prize in the lottery. It is also indirectly the cause of little Hans recovering the use of his legs. For, while he is lying in bed one day, he throws the book at the cat in order to scare it away from his bird, and, having missed his shot, he makes amiraculous effort and leaps out of bed to prevent disaster. Though the bird is dead, Hans is saved, and we leave him to live happily ever afterwards as a prospective schoolmaster. This, it must be confessed, sounds rather like the sort of literature that is given away as Sunday-school prizes. One could conceive a story of the same kind being written by the author ofNo Gains Without PainsorJessica’s First Prayer. Hans Andersen, indeed, was in many respects more nearly akin to the writers of tracts and moral tales than to the folklorists. He was a teller of fairy-tales. But he domesticated the fairy-tale and gave it a townsman’s home. In his hands it was no longer a courtier, as it had been in the time of Louis XIV, or a wanderer among cottages, as it has been at all times. There was never a teller of fairy-tales to whom kings and queens mattered less. He could make use of royal families in the most charming way, as in those little satires, “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But his imagination hankered after the lives of children such as he himself had been. He loved the poor, the ill-treated, and the miserable, and to illuminate their lives with all sorts of fancies. His miracles happen preferably to those who live in poor men’s houses. His cinder-girl seldom marries a prince:if she marries at all, it is usually some honest fellow who will have to work for his living. In Hans Andersen, however, it is the exception rather than the rule to marry and live happily ever afterwards. The best that even Hans the cripple has to look forward to is being a schoolmaster. There was never an author who took fewer pains to give happy endings to his stories.
His own life was a mixture of sadness and the vanity of success. “The Ugly Duckling” is manifestly the fable of his autobiography. Born into the house of a poor cobbler, he was at once shy and ugly, and he appears to have been treated by other children like the duckling which “was bitten and pushed and jeered at” in the farmyard, and upon which “the turkey-cock, who had been born with spurs, and therefore thought himself an emperor, blew himself up like a ship in full sail and bore straight down.” His father died early, and at the age of eleven Hans ceased to go to school and was allowed to run wild. He amused himself by devouring plays and acting them with puppets in a toy theatre which he had built, till at the age of eighteen he realised that he must do something to make a living. As he did not wish to dwindle into a tailor, he left his home, confident that he had the genius to succeed in Copenhagen. There hispassion for the theatre led him to try all sorts of occupations. He tried to write; he tried to act; he tried to sing; he tried to dance. “He danced figure dances,” wrote Nisbet Bain, “before the most famousdanseuseof the century, who not unnaturally regarded the queer creature as an escaped lunatic.”
By his persistence and his ugliness, perhaps, as much as by the first suggestions of his genius, he contrived at last to interest the manager of the Royal Theatre, and, through him, the King; and the latter had him sent off to school with a pension to begin his education all over again in a class of small boys. Here, one can imagine, the “ugly duckling” had a bad time of it, and the head master, a man with a satirical tongue, seems to have been as merciless as the turkey-cock in the story. Hans’s education and his unhappiness went on till he was in his twenties, when he escaped and tried his hand at poetry, farce, fantasy, travel-books and fiction. We hear very little of his novels nowadays—in England at any rate; but we know how they were appreciated at the time from some references in the Browning love-letters, within a few years of their being published. The first of them appeared in 1835, when the author was thirty, and a few months later an instalment of the first volume of thefairy-tales was published. Andersen described the latter as “fairy-tales which used to please me when I was little and which are not known, I think.” The book (which began with “The Tinder-Box” and “Little Claus and Big Claus”) was, apart from one critic, reviewed unfavourably where it was reviewed at all. Andersen himself appears to have been on the side of those who thought little of it. His ambition was to write plays and novels and epics for serious people, and all his life he was rather rebellious against the fame which he gradually won all over Europe as a story-teller for children. He longed for appreciation for works likeAshuerus, described by Nisbet Bain as “an aphoristic series of historical tableaux from the birth of Christ to the discovery of America,” andTo Be or Not to Be, the last of his novels, in which he sought to “reconcile Nature and the Bible.”
We are told of his vexation when a statue was put up in Copenhagen, representing him as surrounded by a group of children. “Not one of the sculptors,” he declared, “seems to know that I nevercouldtell tales whenever anyone is sitting behind me, or close up to me, still less when I have children in my lap, or on my back, or young Copenhageners leaning right against me. To call me the children’s poet is a mere figureof speech. My aim has always been to be the poet of older people of all sorts: children alone cannot represent me.” It is possible, however, that Andersen rather enjoyed taking up a grumpy pose in regard to his stories for children. In any case he continued to publish fresh series of them until 1872, three years before his death. He also enjoyed the enthusiastic reception their popularity brought him during his frequent travels in most of the countries of Europe between England and Turkey. Nor did he object to turning himself into a story-teller at a children’s party. There is a description in one of Henry James’s books of such a party at Rome, at which Hans Andersen read “The Ugly Duckling” and Browning “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” followed by “a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment, with [W. W.] Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.” Nor does Andersen seem to have thought too disrespectfully of his fairy-tales when he wrote “The Cripple.”
Probably, however, even in his fairy-tales Hans Andersen has always appealed to men and women as strongly as to children. We hear occasionally of children who cannot be reconciled to him because of his incurable habit of pathos. A child can read a fairy-tale like “The SleepingBeauty” as if it were playing among toys, but it cannot read “The Marsh King’s Daughter” without enacting in its own soul the pathetic adventures of the frog-girl; it cannot read “The Snow Queen” without enduring all the sorrows of Gerda as she travels in search of her lost friend; it cannot read “The Little Mermaid” without feeling as if the knives were piercing its feet just as the mermaid felt when she got her wish to become a human being so that she might possess a soul. Even in “The Wild Swans,” though Lisa’s eleven brothers are all restored to humanity from the shapes into which their wicked step-mother had put them, it is only after a series of harrowing incidents; and Lisa herself has to be rescued from being burned as a witch. Hans Andersen is surely the least gay of all writers for children. He does not invent exquisite confectionery for the nursery such as Charles Perrault, having heard a nurse telling the stories to his little son, gave the world in “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard.” To read stories like these is to enter into a game of make-believe, no more to be taken seriously than a charade. The Chinese lanterns of a happy ending seem to illuminate them all the way through. But Hans Andersen does not invite you to a charade. He invites you to put yourself in the place of thelittle match-girl who is frozen to death in the snow on New Year’s Eve after burning her matches and pretending that she is enjoying all the delights of Christmas. He is more like a child’s Dickens than a successor of the ladies and gentlemen who wrote fairy-tales in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He is like Dickens, indeed, not only in his genius for compassion, but in his abounding inventiveness, his grotesque detail, and his humour. He is never so recklessly cheerful as Dickens with the cheerfulness that suggests eating and drinking. He makes us smile rather than laugh aloud with his comedy. But how delightful is the fun at the end of “Soup on a Sausage Peg” when the Mouse King learns that the only way in which the soup can be made is by stirring a pot of boiling water with his own tail! And what child does not love in all its bones the cunning in “Little Claus and Big Claus,” when Big Claus is tricked into killing his horses, murdering his grandmother, and finally allowing himself to be tied in a sack and thrown into the river?
But Hans Andersen was too urgent a moralist to be content to write stories so immorally amusing as this. He was as anxious as a preacher or a parent or Dickens to see children Christians of sorts, and he used the fairy-tale continually as ameans of teaching and warning them. In one story he makes the storks decide to punish an ugly boy who had been cruel to them. “There is a little dead child in the pond, one that has dreamed itself to death; we will bring that for him. Then he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother.” That is certainly rather harsh. “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is equally severe. As a result of her cruelty in tearing flies’ wings off and her wastefulness in using a good loaf as a stepping-stone, she sinks down through the mud into Hell, where she is tormented with flies that crawl over her eyes, and having had their wings pulled out, cannot fly away. Hans Andersen, however, like Ibsen inPeer Gynt, believes in redemption through the love of others, and even the girl who trod on the loaf is ultimately saved. “Love begets life” runs like a text through “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” His stories as a whole are an imaginative representation of that gospel—a gospel that so easily becomes mush and platitude in ordinary hands. But Andersen’s genius as a narrator, as a grotesque inventor of incident and comic detail, saves his gospel from commonness. He may write a parable about a darning-needle, but he succeeds in making his darning-needle alive, like a dog or a schoolboy.He endows everything he sees—china shepherdesses, tin soldiers, mice and flowers—with the similitude of life, action and conversation. He can make the inhabitants of one’s mantelpiece capable of epic adventures, and has a greater sense of possibilities in a pair of tongs or a door-knocker than most of us have in men and women. He is a creator of a thousand fancies. He loves imagining elves no higher than a mouse’s knee, and mice going on their travels leaning on sausage-skewers as pilgrims’ staves, and little Thumbelina, whose cradle was “a neat polished walnut-shell ... blue violet-leaves were her mattresses, with a rose-leaf for a coverlet.” His fancy never becomes lyrical or sweeps us off our feet, like Shakespeare’s inA Midsummer Night’s Dream. But there was nothing else like it in the fairy-tale literature of the nineteenth century. And his pages are full of the poetry of flights of birds. More than anything else one thinks of Hans Andersen as a lonely child watching a flight of swans or storks till it is lost to view, silent and full of wonder and sadness. Mr. Edmund Gosse, inTwo Visits to Denmark, a book in which everything is interesting except the title, describes a visit which he paid to Hans Andersen at Copenhagen in his old age, when “he took me out into the balconyand bade me notice the long caravan of ships going by in the Sound below—‘they are like a flock of wild swans’ he said.” The image might have occurred to anyone, but it is specially interesting as coming from the mouth of Hans Andersen, because it seems to express so much of his vision of the world. He was, above all men of his century, the magician of the flock of wild swans.