Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/28

 but Hans Christian could eat nothing; his brain was full of all the stories of robbers and dungeons and enchanted castles that he had ever heard of, and he had to be put to bed. But when he was left alone, he characteristically tells us, he forgot to be frightened, for he turned the whole incident into a wonderful fairy tale. How he played about in the corridors of the madhouse, and how a beautiful lunatic nearly frightened him to death, is well known; but this is an incident which could have happened, one is inclined to say, to no poet but Andersen. He has given us a most curious account of the long hours he used to spend in the old women's ward of the poorhouse at Odense, and how he offered to sketch the internal economy of any one of the ancient ladies, with chalk, on the door of the room. With these and other ingenuities he so diverted them that they declared with one voice that so clever a child was not long for this world. But, in their turn, to this ignorant, freakish, wild little boy, the old women told stories, legends of troll and water-sprite, ghost and goblin and wizard, such as in those days the uninstructed imagination of the Scandinavian peasant teemed with.

When the child was eleven, his father, the gentle, consumptive young cobbler, fell deadly sick. Already Andersen had gained a reputation as a clever, uncanny boy ("he is cracked, like his grandfather," people said in Odense); accordingly when his father was very ill, his mother sent him out at night to walk by the river, "for," she said, "if thy father is to die this time, thou wilt meet his ghost." The poor frightened child came home, having seen nothing, and his mother's superstition was assuaged; but the third day after that her husband did die. Little Andersen and his mother watched with the corpse, and all night long a cricket chirped; till at last the mother sat up and cried to it, "You need not call to him; he is dead!" In this amazing old-world atmosphere of terror and spiritual bewilderment was the delicate and nervous brain of this great modern poet nurtured, and we must not forget it if we would understand in what manner he was prepared for the composition of the Fairy Tales.

It may be said that in his address to his imaginary audience Andersen never advanced beyond what he recalled of his own childhood in those loose, undisciplined and fruitful years when it was doubtful whether he would become a tailor's apprentice or a super at a provincial theater. It is to what he recollected of his own dimly-luminous mind before he set out for Copenhagen, in 1819, that he addressed, in later life, the ingenuous language of his tales. Hence he uses the simplest words, the most concrete images, is occupied with the rudest tastes and the humblest ambitions. If he wishes to conjure up power, it is always in the person of an old king, generally a peasant in intelligence and experience, but known to be a king by his wearing a golden crown and an ermine robe, and by his carrying a scepter. So, if he wishes to suggest wealth, he uses none of its symbols or evidences, but quantities of bullion — bars of