Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/26

 "The Dead Man" — which was quite a failure — was the story which, entirely rewritten, appeared in 1831 as "The Traveling Companion." In Andersen's account of his journey in the Harz Mountains, published in 1831, there is to be found a story of an old king, who believed that he had never heard a lie, and therefore promised that the man who should first successfully tell him a falsehood should receive the princess, his daughter, and half his royal kingdom. Here the fairy-tale tone is clearly perceptible, but it has not yet discovered its form or its final character. But in 1835 there appeared a little pamphlet, — the originality and importance of which it would be difficult to appraise too highly, — "Fairy Tales Told for Children." This precious pamphlet of sixty-one pages contained four tales, "The Tinder-Box," "Little Claus and Big Claus," "The Princess and the Pea," and "Little Ida's Flowers." These four stories are included in the present collection, and the reader may find it interesting to detach these, with a view to observing what we may call Andersen's primitive manner in the evolution of a fairy tale.

There was one peculiarity in these stories which startled a Danish ear, and led at first to almost universal reproof by the critics, and neglect by cultivated readers. Like the other literatures of Europe, and more than some, — more than our own, for instance, — the poetry and prose of Denmark were held at that time in the bondage of the proprieties. An author still had to consider not merely what he should, but also what he should not say. There was little attempt to reproduce, even in comedy, the actual daily speech of citizens, but something more polished, more rhetorical, more literary, in fact, was put into the lips of even vulgar persons before they could be permitted to speak in public. It would not be easy to make an Englishman or a Frenchman understand how startlingly lax and puerile the conversations in these little stories of Andersen's appeared; perhaps a German would realize it more. It was the first time that children and uneducated people of the lower middle class had been allowed to speak in Danish literature, and their naivetés and their innocent picturesqueness were at first an absolute scandal. Conceive what Johnson and Burke would have thought of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," and you have a parallel to the effect of "Little Claus and Big Claus" upon academic Denmark.

But in this first typical specimen there were differences to be observed. "The Tinder-Box" and "The Princess and the Pea" are not of the same class as "Little Ida's Flowers." Nothing of its kind could be more exquisite than the last, and Andersen never excelled its lightness and brightness of fancy, its intimate recognition of the movement of a child's imagination. Only a great poet could have written it — only the great poet who subsequently wrote so many other pure fairy tales of the same enchanting innocence and ebullience. But that poet needed not to have had Andersen's peculiar training. As a matter of fact, "Little Ida's