Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/30

 him from presently enjoying the gambols of the elves in the woodland. He is a good little modern boy, living in a quiet parish, among God-fearing people, but the mountain opens before him and he enters without surprise the great hall where the king of the trolls sits under a canopy of pink spiders' webs, and listens to the choir of great black grasshoppers playing on Jews' harps. But he is the same sober Christian lad as ever, and in due time overthrows all his enemies by his honesty and sagacity. Here the mixture of spiritual ideas is bewildering, if we only persuade ourselves to realize it, and involves an incongruity which no other teller of fairy stories allows himself to undertake. In one of Grimm's stories, for instance, or of Asbjörnsen's, we have trolls, and wicked princesses, and imps with enormous noses, but they are not mixed up with the singing of hymns in church and preparing for a first communion. But in the mind of a child this or any incongruity is possible, and the mind of Andersen was exactly like that of a child. Hence, even when his topsy-turvy world is most startling, we are never scandalized. Probably no one was ever found to accuse Andersen of profanity.

A somewhat similar moral incongruity would not be quite so easy to condone, if we were inclined to take a very high ground. The soldier in "The Tinder-Box" cuts off the head of the old woman and steals her treasures with shocking ingratitude, yet with complete impunity. His ultimate good fortune even springs directly from his crime. The behavior of the merchant's son to the Turkish princess in "The Flying Trunk" was deplorable, but Andersen does not seem to regret it. Little Claus can hardly be said to live up to any recognized standard of morals in his relation to Big Claus. But all this is very characteristic of the childish instinct. Life to a child is a phantasmagoria, and thanklessness and rapine and murder are amusing shadows which the unsubstantial human figures throw as they dance in the flicker of the firelight. It is precisely the absence of any priggishness in this respect, and the daring with which he sets himself against all the obvious school-room axioms of conduct that help to make up the astounding fascination of Andersen. His very savagery endears him to the little innocent barbarians of the nursery. It was a favorite exercise with Andersen to read aloud his fairy tales, soon after they were written, to some fortunate friend. The number of those who can say that they have enjoyed this privilege must now be growing small. In England it must be extremely small, for Andersen's latest visit to this country was paid in 1857. The present writer, therefore, is tempted to believe that there is some little rarity, at least, in the experience which he is able to relate, and the more so from a particular which will be presently mentioned. Only on a single occasion did Hans Christian Andersen read to me one of his unpublished fairy tales, and, indeed, I had not the honor of knowing him until he had given to the world the main bulk of his productions. But in the summer of 1872 I