Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/713

Rh  nothing either absurd or blamable in this or any other manifestation of Andersen's vanity; and indeed, its frankness, its simple reliance on every one's absolute admiration, preserved it from ridicule or censure; it was so childlike. He never conceived the notion of satire, he did not fear it therefore; and though his vanity was easily hurt, and he would pout and sulk like an offended child, until coaxed into good-humour again, he never suspected a shade of ridicule of him in any one's manner or mind. Wherever he was, he was invariably served first at table, and he was deeply aggrieved at a departure from this custom on the occasion of "the English rose's" arrival at the house near Copenhagen, where he was then staying. He became silent, sulked, would not eat, and disappeared early in the evening. The next morning their hostess came to the English guest and asked her if she would mind not being helped first, "it made dear And'sen so unhappy; he went to the kitchen, and told the servants he could see they no longer loved him, since they thought more of the English lady than of him." When he wanted to go out to walk, every one must go; if he changed his mind and sat down to write, every one must stay at home, for presently he would come into the room to read what he had written, and would be much ruffled by the absence of an auditor. He would walk up to a stranger and say: "They write in such and such a paper that I have such thoughtful eyes; do you think my eyes so thoughtful?" or, "Every one in the world knows me; all the kings in Europe have embraced me, sovereigns come to meet me at their door;" and all this as frankly as a child would ask you to admire its new frock. He never forgot his origin, nor did he ever boast of it; he would say simply, "It is very good of God to have given a poor cobbler's son a great genius, to have made me a great poet." The harsh Danish tongue admits of no fioritura, and therefore though his ideas were so poetical, he clothed them always in the most direct and downright words, and he never had any idea that there was anything which ought not to be said. He spoke very little English, and was no judge of the rendering of Danish into that language; so that Mary Howitt's flat, bald, almost literal translation of his novels — if they may be so called — and stories pleased him; he could understand them, he said. His voice was exquisitely melodious; his reading of his own stories, which he half-acted, so expressive was his gesture, was indescribably delightful. He held one spell-bound, seeing, hearing nothing but him, and his story-telling was even more charming. General conversation he had none; it was difficult to discover on what subjects he really did know anything, for he never conversed; he brought every topic that was started back to himself, to the cloudland in which he lived, to the point in which his interest centred. His talk was always like that of an ideally-gifted child, — question, narrative, fancy, but never meeting, or going with, or borrowing from other minds. He would begin to tell a story — after a few minutes' abstracted gazing at some little object, a straw, a pebble, no matter what — most commonly, a toy or a flower — and pour out his fancies in the plain, unadorned forms of the Danish, his voice exquisitely modulated with every emotion or meaning, and his great, ugly, ape-like hands, which looked as if nothing that they touched could escape sullying or destruction, deftly cutting out the quaintest designs in paper, with wonderful rapidity and delicacy as he spoke. Fairy-scenes, dances, lovers seated under trees, groups of flowers and plants; these and countless other objects would drop from his curling, twisting, snipping scissors, as fancy after fancy came from his lips. Nothing was soulless to the man with a child's soul, a great imagination, and also a child's untroubled belief. He did not seem to have any definite creed, and he attended no place of worship; he had no need of spiritual help or comprehension of spiritual doubt or difficulty. The good God and the Christ-child were the sum of his ideas, and he found them everywhere. "God has made it so, it is right;" or "God has said it is wrong," was all his law; and he could no more have put his mind into a polemical attitude, than he could have tubbed or ridden to hounds. Ingenious people who insist on seeing everything double, discern pantheism under the quaint conceits of this friend and confidant of the fairy and flower and bird world; but there is no such thing — at least it was not in himself — no subtlety of any kind, only the ever-flowing fountain of a wondrous and inexhaustible fancy, to which all living things came, and mirrored themselves therein. You lived in his stories while he was telling them, and he lived in them always. He would walk out with a friend or two at 