Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/27

 Flowers" was composed in consequence of hearing the small daughter of Thiele make remarks about the plants in the Botanic Gardens of Copenhagen; remarks the delicious artlessness of which so delighted Andersen that he noted them down, and reproduced them in the setting which we all know so well. This is an example of the side of Andersen's genius on which he most closely approaches Lewis Carroll.

If from this lovely fantasia we turn to the other three stories, we see something different, something more entirely original, and suggestive of a more surprising departure. These also were suggested to Andersen by matters lurking in his recollection. He never, perhaps, absolutely invented the material of his tales. But these were legends the crude germ or kernel of each of which he had heard long ago, in his unparalleled childhood — fragments of the prejudice and ignorance and mother-wit of the untaught peasant mind. These were atoms of folk-lore left sticking to his memory from the days when he went weeding in the garden of the lunatic asylum, or strolled along among the hop-pickers at Bogense. These worn fragments of a primitive age, shapeless and unsuggestive to any less penetrating imagination than his, Andersen redeemed from their low uses, and clothed again with his fancy and his humanity.

The next little collection, that of 1836, contained three, and that of 1837 only two stories. It appeared in these that Andersen had become a little shy of his old, direct folk-lore. He had put forth his discovery, and the world had proved averse to it. Here was "The Traveling Companion," in its remodeled form, which, indeed, was actual folk-lore; but the others belonged to the modern, the invented, or, as we English may roughly call it, the Alice section of the stories. "The Naughty Boy" came out of Anacreon; "The Emperor's New Clothes," remarkable as showing the first complete development of Andersen's satiric irony, from Spanish sources. In "Thumbeline" and "The Little Mermaid" we have pure fairy tales, works of literary fancy, unattached to any genuine folk-lore. The last mentioned, however, was the earliest of all Andersen's tales to become widely popular. It was in "The Wild Swans," of 1838, that he first dared to come back to actual Danish legend. By this time he had begun to conquer his public, and he now went on writing as it happened to please him best. Oddly enough, he himself was never perfectly converted. To the last, and in the presence of his immortal little masterpieces, he continued to be slightly scandalized at the liberties he had persuaded himself to take with classical Danish.

Perhaps there never existed a more remarkable instance of the adaptation of extraordinary circumstances to the purposes of a unique genius than was seen in the case of the early training of Andersen. His childish days had been spent in strange places, in still stranger company. He must have been about five years of age when he went with his parents to dine with the jailer of the common prison in Odense. Two prisoners waited at table,