Page:The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen (c1899).djvu/10

 mark. It shows us what that gallant little kingdom is, has been, and may be. And in the midst of a charming egotism,—perhaps because of this charming egotism—it reveals Andersen to us in a way which makes us love him more and not less.

It is immensely to the credit of the artists of Copenhagen, of the people of rank there, of what Mrs. Grundy calls “Society,” that this boy, only not a beggar boy, landing in the streets there with nothing but hope and one rixthaler, should have pressed his way forward and upward till he became the Dane spoken of most often in the literary circles of the world. It makes one believe in small kingdoms, small commonwealths—may I say, in Brick Moons?—when one sees the cordiality, the best form of charity, the distinguished care, with which Copenhagen could take care of such a Danish boy when he needed care. His first attempts at fame are made when he goes upon the stage of the theatre as one of the “populace,” dressed in the dress which was made out of his father’s coat for his own confirmation. He thinks to be a singer, and is not fit to be a singer. He thinks to be a poet, and they do not accept him as a poet; this is their fault, not his. But he then does what he can do: he writes, and writes the truth. He tells what he has seen, with that admirable unwillingness to try to tell what he has not seen. Realism, the realism of the nineteenth century, about which much is absurdly said and sung, appears, whether in the story of the tin soldier or in romance so called, made out of the life of a fiddler.

And here, as it seems to me, is the tonic which this Danish peasant administered to the literature of England and America. I do not know whether he did as much good in Denmark as he did here; I do not know whether they needed it as much as I think it was needed by the writers for children here; I do know that this quiet use of language, in which there is a nominative case for the thing that is described, and a good steadfast verb which describes that thing; in which there is no rushing north, south, east, or west for an effect which is visible and at hand,—I do know that this use of language is an excellent example for young authors or for old.

It is fifty-four years since Mary Howitt introduced this shepherd of the people to people who could not read Danish but could read English. This English nation for whom she wrote, and the American nation which is born from that English nation, would not be what they are if, some thousand years ago, rather more than less, certain Danes, so called, had not occasionally found their way into English seaports, and when they chose colonized the lands of the inhabitants. It is not simply that a quaint word or two slipped from their dialect into ours. There is more than that. The blood of Norsemen is in our veins. Perhaps it is true that the habit of calling a spade a spade was particularly a Danish habit. Perhaps the Danes had the gift of using words of one syllable where the Latin nations preferred to use words of four syllables; they liked to say Thor, and did not like to say Diispeter. And perhaps,—these are only my guesses, but I am in the habit of thinking that we like to hear Jenny Lind sing, that we like to read the poems of Tegner and the voyages of Nansen, that we like to find the Linnea borealis on the slopes of the White Mountains, because we are all Scandinavians in blood. Perhaps this is the reason why we and our children like to read Hans Christian Andersen.

It may please the reader to have a little remembrance of Andersen, which I copy from a private note of one of his friends: “I once had the good fortune to pass four months under the same roof with Hans Christian Andersen. I often heard him read his fairy tales, and one beautiful moonlight night he wrote down these lines to me. The following is a literal translation of the autograph:

He then gathered this bouquet in the garden where we were, and gave it to me as a remembrance of him, but I shall not forget him even without it.” The faded rose is in the letter from which I copy the lines.

EDWARD E. HALE