Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/25



INTRODUCTION

an original species of writing as that in which Andersen excelled does not burst full-blown upon the world. It is the result of many experiments, many accidents, even, perhaps, of some blunderings. Andersen did not set out deliberately to be a teller of fairy stories, much less did he expect or desire to be mainly known as the composer of these smaating, as he called them, of these trifles or bagatelles. He set out in life intending to be a serious poet, a writer of five-act dramas, a novelist of passion and society. Almost to the very last he persisted in believing that the critics and the public had made a mistake, and that his ambitious works, in the conventional branches of the profession, were what he would really live by. "Don't you think," he said to me in a sort of coaxing whisper, toward the very close of his life—"don't you think that people will really come back to 'The Two Baronesses' when these smaating have had their day?" "The Two Baronesses" is an old novel of Andersen's, which I had not read, so I could only bend my eyes politely. But that was in 1874, and people have neither come back to "The Two Baronesses" nor forgotten "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Snow Queen."

Unwilling as he was to admit it, however, Andersen could not fail to be aware that the Fairy Tales were his real possession and treasure-trove. In 1862 he deigned to recollect how these stories came into existence, and his notes,—which I do not happen to have seen translated or even referred to,—although tantalizingly scanty, are very valuable. He put back the germ of his fairy-story telling to the year 1829, when he published, along with a little collection of his poems, a tale in prose called "The Dead Man." This was a treatment of one of the disquieting, half-humorous, half-melancholy legends which Andersen had heard when in his childhood he haunted the Odense workhouse and its old women. He deliberately tried to tell it in the tone of Musäus, a German author of the eighteenth century, who began by being an imitator of Richardson, and who ended as the first man to collect and retell, after a somewhat over-genteel fashion, the folk-tales of Germany. Musäus possessed no great talent, but it is interesting to see him, who set the Brothers Grimm and all the multitude of modern folk-lorists in motion on the one hand, giving the start-word in a very different direction to Andersen. For xvii