Fairy tales and stories

Front matter

FT MEADE GenCol 1

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

II

But before Hans Christian Andersen came to write fairy tales he was to leave his provincial home and go to the capital to seek his fortune.

One evening in Copenhagen just a hundred years ago there was a small dinner party to which Hans Christian came without being invited. It was at the house of Siboni, director of the Royal Conservatory, and his guests were men like himself — Weyse, the composer, Baggesen, the poet, and others interested in the arts.

As they were seated at the table the housekeeper, very excited, came rushing in. She had just heard the most extraordinary story, she told the whole company — she had to tell the whole company because Siboni was an Italian and did not understand Danish very well. She spoke to the guests, fellow Danes, and the guests spoke to their host.

Outside, she said, was a young man, really a boy, who wanted to sing for the master. He was remarkable! He had traveled by stage from his home town, Odense, to seek his fortune in Copenhagen, where he had no friends, and now he was down to his last dollar. He had told her his whole story, the poor chap. His father was dead. In Odense he had often taken small parts in the theater and he’d sung in the choir; there in the theater he had learned Siboni’s name and he was sure that if only Siboni would try his voice everything would be right. He had meant to find work in Copenhagen, he said, and he had apprenticed himself to a carpenter, but the other apprentices had been so rough he couldn’t stay there. He knew all he needed was a chance. Besides, he had written plays himself and he could act, he knew he could. . . .

The housekeeper wanted them to see for themselves this remarkable child, whose name was Hans Christian Andersen. As by this time the guests were much impressed and as also they had come to the end of dinner she led them out.

They gazed at the intruder as he stood simply and appealingly before them. He was no beauty. He was tall and exceedingly thin, and he was wearing his father’s best coat made over for him. His hair was curly, he had a prominent Adam’s apple, and he had a high soprano voice. The company looked at one another as Siboni took him into the room where stood the piano.

But his voice was lovely and sincere. Filled with excitement the boy sang, declaimed some scenes from Holberg, and then recited some poems. The poems were sad. With their sentiment and with the feeling of his own miserable plight the fourteen-year-old youth ended in actual tears.

The party broke into comforting applause. “I predict that something’ll come of this boy,” said Baggesen. “Yes,” said Weyse, who had been a poor boy himself, “but we must really see what we can do to help him.” Siboni thought he could make a place for him, and Hans Christian was told to call on Weyse the following day.

As Hans Christian left, his heart bounding with happiness, the housekeeper patted him on the cheek. “I heard Professor Weyse say he had collected $50 for you, and he’ll be your friend, never fear!”

III

And he was. Though no one could have been poorer than Hans Christian, or more friendless, or more strangely at sea in the world, this kind group of Danish literati saw promise in him of the sort they valued, and until he had completed his education and actually received a royal pension he never ceased to find a helping hand.

The fact that he was given a home at Siboni’s did not seem so strange to Hans Christian Andersen. It was exactly the sort of miracle in which he believed. “The wonderful,” he said, “has always been truth to me.” But even though he found these men ready to help him his way was not easy. When his voice failed and he was kept at school by his benefactors because of his other talents, he was haunted by the fear of his own unworthiness. His imagination whipped him and he could not live without kindness, sympathy, praise. This sometimes made him seem quite silly. One good friend, Admiral Wulff, who translated Shakespeare into Danish, laughingly recollects that Hans Christian had come to him at his home saying, “You have translated Shakespeare ; I admire him greatly. But I also have written a tragedy. Shall I read it to you?” Yet this very yearning for recognition and admiration was due, as it so often is due, to the fact the man did not quite believe in himself or in his own powers.

IV

To try his powers he attempted the highest kind of literature. He wrote tragedies and solemn poems and serious romances. He was determined to be important and he felt for a long time that his fairy tales were just “little things.” It was afterward, when he formed them in that “graphic, crooning, living, dancing, jumping style” of his, that he knew they wrere the natural and complete expression of his real self. In these talcs, so many of them taken from the gnarled and weathered folk tales of old Denmark, he was at last thoroughly at home. He was at ease in this world of slippered kings and pouting princesses, of witches on their broomsticks, of storms and terrors and icy seas and ocean caverns, of flowers that waltz and figures in porcelain that fall in love. With a quick and knowing eye he moved in this universe of birth and love and death, of joy and happiness, hunger and desire. He opened a casement on this world of his dancing imagination with a perfect understanding of its quality — with gaiety, with tenderness, with sly and glinting humor.

We know from Georg Brandes, the great Danish critic whose description of Andersen’s style I have just quoted, what a childlike figure Andersen always remained. Brandes is himself a man of immense moral courage and unsparing critical force. He could not help noting Andersen’s painful “wish to please and win the affection of every single person he encountered on his path.” Yet Brandes gives a sympathetic picture of the famous man coming to be encouraged and admired. “He was most winning,” he says, “when he paid me a visit, as he occasionally did, in the ridiculously small room, very high up, which I then inhabited. He would come in, sit down on the narrow, leather-covered stool that was all I could offer him, glance askance at the window,' however carefully it might be closed, move, in his dread of a draught, a little away from it, and take a manuscript out of his breast pocket.”

Y

Long-suffering as he was, and anxious to placate the world, Hans Christian prudently and serenely made his way to the top. His own life was his most wonderful fairy tale. One of Brandes’ stories tells of Andersen’s revenge on the dean who snubbed him at confirmation

PREFACE because he was so poor. In later years this dean was stationed in the neighborhood of a Danish royal residence. It so happened that Andersen was the guest of the King. Knowing that the King understood him, Andersen inquired one morning if he could ask a favor. He wished to borrow the King’s carriage with the full royal equipage. The King was amused to grant him the favor, and then, clothed in all his glory, Andersen amiably called on the dean and had the joy of knowing all during his visit that outside the dean could see waiting for him the coach and four horses and liveried postilions of a King. *

It was, in the literal sense, poetic justice, especially in a state where the King is the head of the church. But the man who could do that could also tell us the most touching fact about his confirmation. He wore boots for the first time. “The boots creaked, and that inwardly pleased me, for thus the congregation would hear that they were new.”

Here we have the touch that makes Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales so deep — the unexpected and delicious fidelity to real experience. He believed, yes, that “there is a loving God who directs all things for the best.” But this belief did not close his eyes to the difference between his beloved moral order and the human order to which an artist must be true. Sometimes Hans Christian is merely sweet and idyllic. His finest triumph is not that he is idyllic but that, believing in a loving God, he keeps the variety, the pattern, of adventurous and unpredictable life. He creates. And to his creations he gives a will of their own.

Why do we like Hans Christian Andersen? Personally I like him because he walked right up to this stern old universe and stroked it so comprehendingly on the nose. Like most people who really have an imagination, whether it be a terrible imagination like Swift’s, or a sweet one like his own, he did not stand off from the world to hang it with mere tinsel and Christmas candles. He didn’t play with the thickness and toughness of reality. He took reality as it is, which children nearly all respect, and then he peopled it with his own daring yet reasonable creations, which children generally admire. Children live far too much amid the pressure and obstacle of fact to want a world of bland insipidity, a world from which pressure and obstacle have been removed. But they do rejoice, with high-hearted partisanship, in the conquest of dangers and terrors. They worship heroes and heroism because they feel the need of heroism and want to be heroes themselves. And it is because Hans Christian really lives like a child in the freshness of his senses and the quickness of his hopes and fears that he has been able, in these imperishable tales, to win the allegiance of the most realistic of all audiences.