Hans Christian Andersen

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Title:     Hans Christian Andersen
Author: Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen [More Titles by Boyesen]

Hans Christian Andersen was a unique figure in Danish literature, and a solitary phenomenon in the literature of the world. Superficial critics have compared him with the Brothers Grimm; they might with equal propriety have compared him with Voltaire or with the man in the moon. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scientific collectors of folk-lore, and rendered as faithfully as possible the simple language of the peasants from whose lips they gathered their stories. It was the ethnological and philological value of the fairy-tale which stimulated their zeal; its poetic value was of quite secondary significance. With Andersen the case was exactly the reverse. He was as innocent of scientific intention as the hen who finds a diamond on a dunghill is of mineralogy. It was the poetic phase alone of the fairy-tale which attracted him; and what is more, he saw poetic possibilities where no one before him had ever discovered them. By the alchemy of genius (which seems so perfectly simple until you try it yourself) he transformed the common neglected nonsense of the nursery into rare poetic treasure. Boots, who kills the ogre and marries the princess--the typical lover in fiction from the remotest Aryan antiquity down to the present time--appears in Andersen in a hundred disguises, not with the rudimentary features of the old story, but modernized, individualized, and carrying on his shield an unobtrusive little moral. In "Jack the Dullard" he comes nearest to his primitive prototype, and no visible effort is made to refine him. In "The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the fortune of some unscrupulous clown while they themselves die in poverty. In "The Porter's Son" he is an aspiring artist, full of the fire of genius, and he wins his princess by conquering that many-headed ogre with which every self-made man has to battle--the world's envy, and malice, and contempt for a lowly origin. It is easy to multiply examples, but these may suffice.

In another species of fairy-tale, which Andersen may be said to have invented, incident seems to be secondary to the moral purpose, which is yet so artfully hidden that it requires a certain maturity of intellect to detect it. In this field Andersen has done his noblest work and earned his immortality. Who can read that marvellous little tale, "The Ugly Duckling," without perceiving that it is a subtle, most exquisite revenge the poet is taking upon the humdrum Philistine world, which despised and humiliated him, before he lifted his wings and flew away with the swans, who knew him as their brother? And yet, as a child, I remember reading this tale with ever fresh delight, though I never for a moment suspected its moral. The hens and the ducks and the geese were all so vividly individualized, and the incidents were so familiar to my own experience, that I demanded nothing more for my entertainment. Likewise in "The Goloshes of Fortune" there is a wealth of amusing adventures, all within the reach of a child's comprehension, which more than suffices to fascinate the reader who fails to penetrate beneath the surface. The delightful satire, which is especially applicable to Danish society, is undoubtedly lost to nine out of ten of the author's foreign readers, but so prodigal is he both of humorous and pathetic meaning, that every one is charmed with what he finds, without suspecting how much he has missed. "The Little Mermaid" belongs to the same order of stories, though the pathos here predominates, and the resemblance to De la Motte Fouqué's "Undine" is rather too striking. But the gem of the whole collection, I am inclined to think, is "The Emperor's New Clothes," which in subtlety of intention and universality of application rises above age and nationality. Respect for the world's opinion and the tyranny of fashion have never been satirized with more exquisite humor than in the figure of the emperor who walks through the streets of his capital in robe de nuit, followed by a procession of courtiers, who all go into ecstasies over the splendor of his attire.

It was not only in the choice of his theme that Andersen was original. He also created his style, though he borrowed much of it from the nursery. "It was perfectly wonderful," "You would scarcely have believed it," "One would have supposed that there was something the matter in the poultry-yard, but there was nothing at all the matter"--such beginnings are not what we expect to meet in dignified literature. They lack the conventional style and deportment. No one but Andersen has ever dared to employ them. As Dr. Brandes has said in his charming essay on Andersen, no one has ever attempted, before him, to transfer the vivid mimicry and gesticulation which accompany a nursery tale to the printed page. If you tell a child about a horse, you don't say that it neighed, but you imitate the sound; and the child's laughter or fascinated attention compensates you for your loss of dignity. The more successfully you crow, roar, grunt, and mew, the more vividly you call up the image and demeanor of the animal you wish to represent, and the more impressed is your juvenile audience. Now, Andersen does all these things in print: a truly wonderful feat. Every variation in the pitch of the voice--I am almost tempted to say every change of expression in the story-teller's features--is contained in the text. He does not write his story, he tells it; and all the children of the whole wide world sit about him and listen with, eager, wide-eyed wonder to his marvellous improvisations.[1]

[1] Brandes: Kritiker og Portraiter, p. 303.

In reading Andersen's collected works one is particularly impressed with the fact that what he did outside of his chosen field is of inferior quality--inferior, I mean, judged by his own high standard, though in itself often highly valuable and interesting. "The Improvisatore," upon which, next to "The Wonder-Tales," his fame rests, is a kind of disguised autobiography which exhibits the author's morbid sensibility and what I should call the unmasculine character of his mind,[2] To appeal to the reader's pity in your hero's behalf is a daring experiment, and it cannot, except in brief scenes, be successful. A prolonged strain of compassion soon becomes wearisome, and not the worthiest object in the world can keep one's charity interested through four hundred pages. Antonio, in "The Improvisatore," is a milksop whom the author, with a lavish expenditure of sympathy, parades as a hero. He is positively ludicrous in his pitiful softness, vanity, and humility. That the book nevertheless remains unfailingly popular, and is even yet found in the satchel of every Roman tourist, is chiefly due to the poetic intensity with which the author absorbed and portrayed every Roman sight and sound. Italy throbs and glows in the pages of "The Improvisatore"--the old vagabond Italy of pre-Garibaldian days, when priests and bandits and pretty women divided the power of Church and State. Story's "Roba di Roma," Augustus Hare's "Walks in Rome," and all the other descriptions of the Eternal City, are but disguised guide-books, feeble and pale performances, when compared with Andersen's beautiful romance.

[2] R. L. Stevenson in speaking of the "Character of Dogs" makes the following cruel observation: "Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with an excruciating vanity and scouting even along the streets for the shadows of offence--here was the talking dog."--Memories and Portraits, p. 196.

The same feminine sentimentality which, in spite of its picturesqueness, makes "The Improvisatore" unpalatable to many readers, is still more glaringly exhibited in "O. T." and "The Two Baronesses." In "The Story of My Life" the same quality asserts itself on every page in the most unpleasant manner. The author makes no effort to excite the reader's admiration, but he makes constant appeals to his sympathy. Nevertheless this autobiography rivals in historic and poetic worth Rousseau's "Confessions" and Benvenuto Cellini's "Life." The absolute candor with which Andersen lays bare his soul, the complete intentional or unintentional self-revelation, gives a psychological value to the book which no mere literary graces could bestow. I confess, until I had the pleasure of making Andersen's acquaintance, "The Fairy Tale of My Life" impressed me unpleasantly. After I had by personal intercourse possessed myself of the clew to the man's character, I judged differently. Andersen remained, until the day of his death, a child. His innocence was more than virginal; his unworldliness simply inconceivable. He carried his heart on his sleeve, and invited you to observe what a soft, tender, and sensitive heart it was. He had the harmless vanity of a child who has a new frock on. He was fidgety and unhappy if anybody but himself was the centre of attraction; and guilelessly happy when he could talk and be admired and sympathized with. His conversation was nearly always about himself, or about the kings and princes and lofty personages who had graciously deigned to take notice of him. He was a tuft-hunter of a rare and curious sort; not because he valued the glory reflected upon himself by royal acquaintances, but because the pomp and splendor of a court satisfied his thirst for the marvellous. A king seemed to him, as to the boy who reads his fairy-tales, something grand and remote; and in invading this charmed sphere he seemed to have invaded his own fairy-tales, and to live actually in the fabulous region of wonders in which his fancy revelled. He conceived of his life as a fairy-tale, and delighted in living up to his own ideal of living. The very title of his autobiography in Danish (Mit Livs Eventyr) shows this conclusively; and it ought to have been rendered in English "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." "The Story of My Life," as Mr. Scudder has translated it, would have been in the original "Mit Livs Historie," a very common title, by the way, for an autobiography, while Mit Livs Eventyr is entirely unique.

The feeling of the marvellous pervades the book from beginning to end. The prose facts of life had but a remote and indistinct existence to the poet, and he blundered along miserably in his youth, supported and upheld by a dim but unquenchable aspiration. He commiserated himself, and yet felt that there was something great in store for him because of his exceptional endowment. Every incident in his career he treated as if it were a miracle, which required the suspension of the laws of the universe for its performance. God was a benevolent old man with a long beard (just as he was depicted in old Dr. Luther's Catechism) who sat up in the skies and spent his time chiefly in managing the affairs of Hans Christian Andersen as pleasantly as possible; and Hans Christian was duly grateful, and cried on every third or fourth page at the thought of the goodness of God and man. Sometimes, for a change, he cried at the wickedness of the latter, and marvelled, with the naïveté of a spoiled child, that there should be such dreadful people in the world, who should persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting him. Those who were good to him he exalted and lauded to the skies, no matter how they conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity. Some of the most mediocre princes, who had paid him compliments, he embalmed in prose and verse. Frederick VII. of Denmark, whose immorality was notorious, was, according to Andersen, "a good, amiable king," "sent by God to Danish land and folk," than whom "no truer man the Danish language spoke." And this case was by no means exceptional. The same uncritical partiality toward the great and mighty is perceptible in every chapter of "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." It was not, however, toward the great and mighty alone that he assumed this attitude; he was uncritical by nature, and had too soft a heart to find fault with anybody--except those who did not like his books. Heine's jocose description of heaven as a place where he could eat cakes and sweets, and drink punch ad libitum, and where the angels sat around raving about his poetry, was probably not so very remote from Andersen's actual conception. His world was the child's world, in which there is but one grand division into good and bad, and the innumerable host that occupies the middle-ground between these poles is ignored. Those who praised what he wrote were good people; those who ridiculed him were a malignant and black-hearted lot whom he was very sorry for and would include in his prayers, in the hope that God might make them better.

We may smile at this simple system; but we all remember the time when we were addicted to a similar classification. That it is a sign of immaturity of intellect is undeniable; and in Andersen's case it is one of the many indications that intellectually he never outgrew his childhood. He never possessed the power of judgment that we expect in a grown-up man. His opinions on social and political questions were naïve and quite worthless. And yet, in spite of all these limitations, he was a poet of rare power; nay, I may say in consequence of them. The vitality which in other authors goes toward intellectual development, produced in him strength and intensity of imagination. Everything which his fancy touched it invested with life and beauty. It divined the secret soul of bird and beast and inanimate things. His hens and ducks and donkeys speak as hens and ducks and donkeys would speak if they could speak. Their temperaments and characters are scrupulously respected. Even shirt-collars, gingerbread men, darning-needles, flowers, and sunbeams, he endowed with physiognomies and speech, fairly consistent with their ruling characteristics. This personification, especially of inanimate objects, may at first appear arbitrary; but it is part of the beautiful consistency of Andersen's genius that it never stoops to mere amusing and fantastic trickery. The character of the darning-needle is the character which a child would naturally attribute to a darning-needle, and the whole multitude of vivid personifications which fills his tales is governed by the same consistent but dimly apprehended instinct. Of course, I do not pretend that he was conscious of any such consistency; creative processes rarely are conscious. But he needed no reflection in order to discover the child's view of its own world. He never ceased to regard the world from the child's point of view, and his personification of an old clothes-press or a darning-needle was therefore as natural as that of a child who beats the chair against which it bumped its head. In the works of more ambitious scope, where this code of conduct would be out of place, Andersen was never wholly at his ease. As lovers, his heroes usually cut a sorry figure; their milk-and-water passion is described, but it is never felt. They make themselves a trifle ridiculous by their innocence, and are amusing when they themselves least suspect it. Likewise, in his autobiography, he is continually exposing himself to ridicule by his naïve candor, and his inability to adapt himself to the etiquette which prevails among grown-up people. Take as an instance his visit to the Brothers Grimm, when he asked the servant girl which of the brothers was the more learned, and when she answered "Jacob," he said, "Then take me to Jacob." The little love affair, too, which he confides seems to have been of the kind which one is apt to experience during the pinafore period; a little more serious, perhaps, but yet of the same kind. It is in this vague and impersonal style that princes and princesses love each other in the fairy-tales; everything winds up smoothly, and there are never any marital disagreements to darken the honeymoon. It is in this happy, passionless realm that Andersen dwells, and here he reigns supreme. For many years to come the fair creatures of his fancy will continue to brighten the childhood of new generations. No rival has ever entered this realm; and even critics are excluded. Nevertheless, Andersen need have no fear of the latter; for even if they had the wish, they would not have the power, to rob him of his laurels.

Hans Christian Andersen was born in the little town of Odense, on the island Fünen, April 2, 1805. His father was a poor shoemaker, with some erratic ambitions, or, if his son's word may be trusted, a man of a richly gifted and truly poetic mind. His wife was a few years older and a good deal more ignorant than himself; and when they set up housekeeping together, in a little back room, they rejoiced in being able to nail together a bridal bed out of the scaffolding which had recently supported a dead nobleman's coffin. The black mourning drapery which yet clung to the wood gave them quite a sense of magnificence. Their first child, Hans Christian, grew up amid these mean surroundings, constantly worried by the street boys, who made a butt of him, and tortured him in the thousand ingenious ways known to their species. He had no schooling to speak of; but, for all that, was haunted, like Joseph, by dreams foreshadowing his future greatness. Guided by this premonition he started, at the age of fourteen, for Copenhagen, a tall, ugly, and ungainly lad, but resolved, somehow or other, to conquer fame and honor. He tried himself as a dancer, singer, actor, and failed lamentably in all his débuts. He could not himself estimate the extent of his own ignorance, nor could he dream what a figure he was cutting. Undismayed by all rebuffs, though suffering agony from his wounded vanity, he wrote poems, comedies, and tragedies, in which he plagiarized, more or less unconsciously, the elder Danish poets. Mr. Jonas Collins, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, became interested in the youth, whose unusual ambition meant either madness or genius. In order to determine which it might be, Mr. Collins induced King Frederic VI. to pay for his education, and after half a dozen years at school Hans Christian passed the entrance examination to the University. Mr. Collins continued to assist him with counsel and deed; and his hospitable house in Bredgade became a second home to Andersen. There he met, for the first time, people of refinement and culture on equal terms; and his morbid self-introspection was in a measure cured by kindly association, tempered by wholesome fun and friendly criticism. He now resolved to abandon his University studies and devote his life to literature.

I have no doubt it would have alarmed the gentle poet very much, if he had been told that he belonged to the Romantic School. To be classified in literature and be bracketed with a lot of men with whom you are not even on speaking terms, and whom, more than likely, you don't admire, would have seemed to him an unpleasant prospect. That he drew much of his inspiration from the German Romanticists, notably Heine and Hoffmann, he would perhaps have admitted; but he would have thought it unkind of you to comment upon his indebtedness. In his first book, "A Pedestrian Tour from Holmen Canal to the Eastern Extremity of Amager" (1829), he assumed by turns the blasé mask of the former and the fantastically eccentric one of the latter; both of which ill became his good-natured, plebeian, Danish countenance. For all that, the book was a success in its day; and no less an authority than the æsthetic Grand Mogul, J. L. Heiberg, hailed it as a work of no mean merit. It strikes us to-day as an exhibition of that mocking smartness of youth which often hides a childish heart. It was because he was so excessively sentimental and feared to betray his real physiognomy that he cut these excruciating capers. His other alternative would have been mawkishness. His vaudeville, "Love on the Nicholas Tower," which satirizes the drama of chivalry, is in the same vein and made a similar hit. A volume of "Poems" was also well received. But in 1831 he met with his first literary reverse. A second collection of verses, entitled "Phantasies and Sketches," was pitilessly ridiculed by Henrik Hertz, in his "Letters from the Dead." Andersen's lack of style and violations of syntax were rather maliciously commented upon. If Gabriel's trump had sounded from the top of the Round Tower, it would not have startled Andersen more. He was in despair. Like the great child he was, he went about craving sympathy, and weeping when he failed to find it.

"I could say nothing," he writes in "the Fairy-Tale of My Life," "I could only let the big, heavy waves roll over me; and it was the common opinion that I was to be totally washed away. I felt deeply the wound of the sharp knife; and was on the point of giving myself up, as I was already given up by others."

This is one of the numerous exhibitions of that over-sensitiveness to criticism which caused him such long and continued suffering. His mind was like a bared nerve, quivering with delight or contracting with violent pain. Utterly devoid, as he was, of self-criticism, he regarded his authorship as something miraculous, and held God (who apparently supervised each chapter) responsible for the fate of his books. "If the Lord," he writes in solemn earnest to a friend, "will take as good care of the remainder as he has of the first chapters, you will like it."[3] There was to him no difference between his best and his worst. It was all part of himself, and he could scarcely conceive of any motive for finding fault with it, except personal malice, envy, animosity.[4] This did not, however, always prevent him from associating with the malevolent critic, as for instance in the case of Hertz, with whom he presently established pleasant relations.

[3] P. Hansen: Illustreret Dansk Litteratur Historic, vol. ii., p. 477.

[4] I derive this impression not only from the Autobiography, but from many conversations. An account of My Acquaintance with Hans Christian Andersen will be found in The Century Magazine, March, 1892.

In 1831 Andersen made his first trip abroad. "By industry and frugality," he says, "I had saved up a little sum of money, so I resolved to spend a couple of weeks in North Germany."

The result of this journey was the book "Shadow Pictures," which was followed in 1833 by "Vignettes on Danish Poets," and a chaplet of verse entitled "The Twelve Months of the Year." It is quite true, as he affirms, that in his "Vignettes," he "only spoke of that which was good in them" [the poets]; but in consequence there is a great lack of Attic salt in the book. In 1833 he went abroad once more, visited Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, and sent home the dramatic poem "Agnete and the Merman," the comparative failure of which was a fresh grief to him. After his return from Rome (1835) he published his "Improvisatore," which slowly won its way. It was the reputation this novel gained abroad which changed public opinion in Denmark in its favor. A second novel, "Only a Fiddler" (1837), is a fresh variation of his autobiography, and the lachrymose and a trifle chaotic story, "O. T." (being the brand of the Odense penitentiary) scarcely deserved any better reception than was accorded it.

It is a curious thing that misconception and adversity never hardened Andersen or toughened the fibre of his personality. The same lamentable lack of robustness--not to say manliness--which marked his youth remained his prevailing characteristic to the end of his life. And I fancy, if he had ever reached intellectual maturity, both he himself and the world would have been losers. For it is his unique distinction to have expressed a simplicity of soul which is usually dumb--which has, at all events, nowhere else recorded itself in literature. We all have a dim recollection of how the world looked from the nursery window; but no book has preserved so vivid and accurate a negative of that marvellous panorama as Andersen's "Wonder Tales for Children," the first collection of which appeared in 1835. All the jumbled, distorted proportions of things (like the reflection of a landscape in a crystal ball) is capitally reproduced. The fantastically personifying fancy of childhood, where does it have more delightful play? The radiance of an enchanted fairy realm that bursts like an iridescent soap-bubble at the touch of the finger of reason, where does it linger in more alluring beauty than in "Ole Luköie" ("The Sandman"), "The Little Mermaid," or "The Ice-Maiden"? There is a bloom, an indefinable, dewy freshness about the grass, the flowers, the very light, and the children's sweet faces. And so vivid--so marvellously vivid--as it all is. Listen to this from "Five in a Pea-Pod:"

"There were five peas in one pod. They were green, and the pod was green; and so they thought that the whole world was green. And that was just as it should be. The pod grew and the peas grew; they accommodated themselves to circumstances, sitting all in a row."

Or take this from "Little Tuk:"

"Yes, that was Little Tuk. His name wasn't really Tuk, but when he couldn't speak plain, he used to call himself so. It was meant for Charley; and it does very well, when one only knows it."

Or this incomparable bit of drollery from Hjalmar's dream in "The Sandman:"

"There came a terrible wail from the table-drawer where Hjalmar's school books lay. 'Whatever can that be?' said the Sandman. And he went to the table and opened the drawer. It was the slate which was in convulsions because a wrong number had got into the sum, so that it was fairly falling to pieces. The slate-pencil tugged and jumped at the end of its string, as if it had been a little dog that wanted to help the sum. But he could not. There was a great lamentation in Hjalmar's copy-book, too; it was quite terrible to hear. On each page the large letters stood in a row, one underneath the other, and each with a little one at its side. That was the copy. And next to these were a few more letters, which thought they looked just like the others. These were the ones Hjalmar had written. But they lay down as if they had tumbled pell-mell over the pencil lines upon which they were to stand.

"'Look, this is the way you should hold yourselves,' said the copy, 'sloping this way with a bold swing.' 'Oh, we should be very glad to do that,' answered Hjalmar's letters, 'but we can't. We are so weakly.' 'Then you must take medicine,' said the Sandman. 'Oh, no, no,' cried they, and straightway they stood up so gracefully that it was a pleasure to look at them."

This strikes me as having the very movement and all the delicious whimsicality of a school-boy's troubled dream. It has the delectable absurdity of the dream's inverted logic. You feel with what beautiful zest it was written; how childishly the author himself relished it. The illusion is therefore perfect. The big child who played with his puppet theatre until after he was grown up is quite visible in every line. He is as much absorbed in the story as any of his hearers. He is all in the game with the intense engrossment of a lad I knew, who, while playing Robinson Crusoe, ate snails with relish for oysters.

Throughout the first series of "Wonder Tales" there is a capital air of make-believe, which imposes upon you most delightfully, and makes you accept the most incredible doings, as you accept them in a dream, as the most natural thing in the world. In the later series, where the didactic tale becomes more frequent ("The Pine Tree," "The Wind's Tale," "The Buckwheat"), there is an occasional forced note. The story-teller becomes a benevolent, moralizing uncle, who takes the child upon his knee, in order to instruct while entertaining it. But he is no more in the game. A cloying sweetness of tone, such as sentimental people often adopt toward children, spoils more than one of the fables; and when occasionally he ventures upon a love-story ("The Rose-Elf," "The Old Bachelor's Nightcap," "The Porter's Son"), he is apt to be as unintentionally amusing as he is in telling his own love episode in "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." However, no man can unite the advantages of adult age and childhood, and we all feel that there is something incongruous in a child's talking of love.

It is a curious fact that his world-wide fame as the poet of childhood never quite satisfied Andersen.[22] He never accepted it without a protest. It neither pleased nor sufficed him. He was especially eager to win laurels as a dramatist; and in 1839 celebrated his first dramatic success by a farcical vaudeville entitled "The Invisible at Sprogöe." Then followed the romantic drama "The Mulatto" (1840), which charmed the public and disgusted the critics; and "The Moorish Maiden," which disgusted both. These plays are slipshod in construction, but emotionally effective. The characters are loose-fibred and vague, and have no more backbone than their author himself. J. L. Heiberg thought it high time to chastise the half-cultured shoemaker's son for his audacity, and in the third act of "A Soul after Death," held him up to ridicule. Andersen, stabbed again to the heart, hastened away from home, "suffering and disconcerted." But before leaving he published "A Picture-Book without Pictures", (1840), which is attached to the American edition of his "Stories and Tales," and deserves its place. The moon's pathetic and humorous observations on the world she looks down upon every evening of her thirty nights' circuit have already become classic in half-a-dozen languages. The little girl who came to kiss the hen and beg her pardon; the ragged street gamin who died upon the throne of France; the Hindoo maiden who burned her lamp upon the banks of the Ganges in order to see if her lover was alive; the little maid who was penitent because she laughed at the lame duckling with a red rag around its leg--who does not know the whole inimitable gallery from beginning to end? The tenderest, the softest, the most virginal spirit breathes through all these sketches. They are sentimental, no doubt, and a trifle too sweet. But then they belong to a period of our lives when a little excess in that direction does not trouble us.

[5] For verification of this statement I may refer to his indignant letter _à propos of the statue that was to be raised to him in Copenhagen, in which he was represented surrounded by listening children: "None of the sculptors," he wrote, "have known me; none of their sketches indicate that they have seen what is characteristic in me. Never could I read aloud when anybody was sitting behind me or close up to me; far less if I had children on my lap or on my back, or young Copenhageners lying all over me. It is a façon de parler to call me 'the children's poet.' My aim has been to be the poet of all ages; children could not represent me."

In 1842 Andersen gave to the world "A Poets' Bazaar," a chronicle of his travels through nearly all the countries of Europe. In 1844 the drama "The King is Dreaming," and in 1845 the fairy comedy "The Flower of Fortune." But his highest dramatic triumph he celebrated in the anonymous comedy "The New Lying-in Room," which in a measure proved his contention that it was personal hostility and not critical scruples which made so large a portion of the Copenhagen literati persecute him. For the very men who would have been the first to hold his play up to scorn were the heartiest in their applause, as long as they did not know that Andersen was its author. Less pronounced was the success of the lyrical drama "Little Kirsten" (1846); and the somewhat ambitious epic "Ahasverus" comes very near being a failure. The next ventures of the versatile and indefatigable poet were the novel "The Two Baronesses" (1849), and the fairy comedies "More than Pearls and Gold" (1849), adapted from a German original, "The Sandman"[6] (1850), and "The Elder Tree Mother" (1851). The comedies "He was not Born" (1864), "On Langebro" and "When the Spaniards were Here" (1869), complete the cycle of his dramatic labors. But the most amusing thing he did, showing how incapable he was of taking the measure of his faculties, was to write a novel, "To Be or Not to Be" (1857), in which he proposed once and forever to down the giant Unbelief, prove the immortality of the soul, and produce "peace and reconciliation between Nature and the Bible." It was nothing less than the evidences of Christianity in novelistic form with which he designed to favor an expectant world. "If[7] I can solve this problem," he naïvely wrote to a friend, "then the monster materialism, devouring everything divine, will die." But rarely was a bigger Gulliver tackled by a tinier Liliputian. The book not only fell flat, but it was only the world-wide renown and the good intention of its author which saved it from derision.

[6] Danish, Ole Luköie.

[7] Hansen: Illustreret Dansk Litteratur Historie, ii. p. 560.

Though Andersen never attained in Copenhagen an uncontested recognition of his talent, honors both from at home and abroad were showered upon him. The fame which undeniably was his commanded respect, but scarcely approval. Heiberg made merry at his obscurity in the country of his birth and his celebrity beyond its boundaries, and represented him as reading "The Mulatto" to the Sultan's wives and the "Moorish Maiden" to those who were to be strangled, kneeling in rapture, while the Grand Eunuch, crowned his head with laurels. But in spite of obloquy and ridicule, Andersen continued his triumphant progress through all the lands of the civilized world, and even beyond it. In 1875 his tale, "The Story of a Mother," was published simultaneously in fifteen languages, in honor of his seventieth birthday. A few months later (August 4th) he died at the villa Rolighed, near Copenhagen. His life was indeed as marvellous as any of his tales. A gleam of light from the wonderland in which he dwelt seems to have fallen upon his cradle and to have illuminated his whole career. It was certainly in this illumination that he himself saw it, as the opening sentence of his autobiography proves: "My life is a lovely fairy-tale, happy and full of incidents."

The softness, the sweetness, the juvenile innocence of Danish romanticism found their happiest expression in him; but also the superficiality, the lack of steel in the will, the lyrical vagueness and irresponsibility. If he did not invent a new literary form he at all events enriched and dignified an old one, and revealed in it a world of unsuspected beauty. He was great in little things, and little in great things. He had a heart of gold, a silver tongue, and the spine of a mollusk. Like a flaw in a diamond, a curious plebeian streak cut straight across his nature. With all his virtues he lacked that higher self-esteem which we call nobility.

[The end]
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's essay: Hans Christian Andersen

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