Littell's Living Age/Volume 126/Issue 1631/Hans Christian Andersen
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.
The child-world has lost a friend, who was to it what Shakespeare is to the grown-up world of men and women, by the peaceful passing-avvay of "dear And'sen," as every one in Copenhagen called the wonderful story-teller, — to the last, a child in heart and in ignorance of the ways of worldliness. He belonged to the quaint and simple Danish city all his life as entirely as Thorwaldsen belonged to it in his later years, and in a more intimate way — in proportion to the expansiveness of his own nature and the warmth and variety of his own sympathies. He belonged to every family, and had more than the entrée — for, after all, that implies a grace, — his own place in every household. With the servants, as with the masters, he was "dear And'sen," and nobody ever passed him without a salutation. It is hard to fancy city and suburb without his familiar, shabby, ungainly, slouching figure, in its ill-fitting, unbrushed clothes (he always wore flopping trousers which touched the toes of his gigantic boots, and a shawl, his own or anybody's, it did not matter, wrapped round his shoulders), and his ugly, musing face, abstracted-seeming, but keenly observant too, with its high receding forehead, its close-set eyes, and the steep incline from the top of the forehead to the nape of the neck, as if the back of the head had been sliced away. His individuality was perhaps more marked than that of any famous man on record, and remained more entirely unchanged by the lapse of time and by circumstances. He never ceased to be a study to the observer who first regarded him with the curiosity he inspired in every one; but each day's observation was a fresh confirmation of the impression he had made within an hour of meeting him. In that charming Danish society, frank, kindly, simple, cultivated, it was a child they had set in the midst, — a child, according to the ideal of childhood; keenly sensitive, entirely egotistical, innocently vain, the centre of life, interest, concern, and meaning to himself, perfectly unconscious that there existed another standard, an outer circle, taking it for granted that everywhere and in everything he was to be first and all; glad with the gladness, sorrowful with the passing grief, of childhood, petulant and pouting, downright, without a notion of reticence, or indeed of modesty, but equally without a notion of evil or indecency; full of optimist satisfaction when all was well with himself, and yet incapable of self-seeking, or design of any kind; disinterested as much from ignorance of advantage to be gained or objects to be sought, as from the nobler source of disinterestedness; incapable of considering the convenience, or of understanding the ways and methods of other people; in a word, always interesting, but sometimes troublesome.
Nobody in Copenhagen would, however, have been guilty of the treason of thinking Andersen troublesome. To the inexhaustible indulgence accorded to a pet child they added the profound veneration with which imaginative people regard genius, especially in its poetic manifestation. The "dear And'sen" had rooms of his own, but he was rarely in them, and he not only went as often as he liked, at any hours he liked, to everybody's house, but he might bring any number of people, and to have a friend who knew Andersen was a passepartout in Denmark. He was perfectly regardless of the ordinary forms of social life; his personal habits were exceedingly careless, not to say repulsive; he was not agreeable as a next neighbour, or as observed from over-the-way, at a dinner-table, for he ate voraciously, and was a decidedly dirty feeder; he had no notion of time, and as pertinaciously required every one to be at his beck and call as any curled darling in the nursery who is at once the plague and the joy of the household. He had not an idea of self-restraint or of à propos, and his intense egotism was nourished by everybody and everything. It never occurred to him that he was not the centre of every one's life and thoughts. He once entered a room, shook hands all round, and then descrying a stranger — a young English lady just arrived at Copenhagen — he went up to her, took her by both hands, addressed her as "the English rose, who had come to Denmark to see a great poet," added, " All your friends will be happy that you are with Andersen," and went off to fetch a photograph of himself, which he bestowed on her with much emphasis. The admiring circle perceived 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 Petershoï, and be silent, almost sullen — never failing to remark and return the salutation of passers-by, however — for a time; then he would begin to poke about on the ground with his invariable stick, looking exactly like an old bone-picker, until he had found a bone, a pebble, a twig, a bit of rag — any unconsidered trifle of the wayside, when he would stand still, scratching his left cheek, and look fixedly at the thing he had in the palm of his hand. After a little, he would call his companion up with a gesture and begin, — "Once in a fair land there lived," etc, and trace the bit of bone back to the animal it had belonged to, and to its brief life in the pastures, the twig to its forest-kin, the pebble to its countless fellows on the illimitable shore in the morning of time, the rag to its threads in the loom and its share in a court costume or an infant's robe, until one began to wonder whether it could be fancy, or were all true. He loved children, storks, and flowers with something approaching passion, of which, otherwise, there was no trace in him. To children he yielded place, which no "big people" ever expected from him. He would bear interruption by a child, and patiently answer its questions, always becoming more childlike himself in doing so; he understood children and they understood him, after the occult fashion of the higher animals, and he might be commonly seen built up in a bower of children, with one on each foot — where there was plenty of room for it — and an outer hedge of them as the less privileged audience. To them he was "dear And'sen," too, and a play-fellow, also a confidant and helper. Many a tooth has been extracted, many a dose of medicine administered, under the influence of a story from Andersen; and the Copenhagen children's favourite toys are the personages of his stories made in terra-cotta. The chief favourite is "Ole Luckoï," who comes to visit the little ones in their sleep — never until they are fast asleep, though — and whispers to them pleasant dreams of the coming of Santa Claus. "Ole Luckoï" is a comical little fellow, with two umbrellas tucked under his arm, one, to be held over the heads of good children, bringing good dreams; the other to be held over the heads of children who have thought or done "what the good God does not like," bringing dreams of discomfiture. Andersen never invented a story or created a personage to frighten a child, to produce any feeling of suspense or repulsion; Luckoï was not to be waited for in the dark, with trembling limbs and beating heart; he could never be seen, and he always knew, when he trod upon the stair, whether the child was really sleeping. In every order his descriptions, and the accessories of his stories, impromptu as they always were, were wonderfully accurate, and people wondered, for he never studied botany or any other science from books, yet when he gave a soul and a costume to a flower, he never departed from its colour or its character, — for instance, in his wonderful story of the despotic father-carrot, and his lovely daughter, in her pale yellow gown, with the feathery green necklace. This story he improvised to reward a little girl who had obeyed her mother's injunctions that she should eat a tough old carrot which was in her plate of soup. To get him on the subject of storks was whimsically pleasant. He had so closely studied a colony of these birds, that every one had a character and a history for him; stork family-life, stork heart, stork brain, every reality and every fancy that even his imagination could bring out, would reward the questioner as to stork character and qualities, "What a pity it is Andersen cannot have a stork-wife!" was more than once said. All things animate, and the things we call inanimate responded to the call of his delightful fancy, and he revelled in his own power. That it could have a rival in attractiveness, or that it ever could bore others, no more occurred to him than it occurs to an only child to suspect the existence of a rival with its parents. Wherever he was, he was not only first, but all, as a matter of course. The "name-day" of the "English rose," as he called her, befel while she was in the same house with the poet, and several other guests were also there. After the pretty Danish fashion, her hostess gave her a name-fete of which the rose was queen, with the right to choose a king for the day. Her privileges were explained, and she prepared to declare her choice, but she had reckoned without "dear And'sen," who greeted her at once with, — "I — I — yes, And'sen himself will be your choice; you shall say that And'sen was your name-day king," — and so it had to be. He never left her side all day; he was as constant as one of his own storks, and his entire conviction of her proud content was so simple and so manifest, that no one could have ridiculed it who boasted any heart or the faintest sense of humour.
He had no power of enduring physical pain, or any notion that it was undignified to bemoan himself. He would talk to his friends of every ailment and sensation with quite pathetic earnestness. To see Andersen rub his stomach slowly and heavily, while he explained, "I was bad all the night, and when the pain came I asked the good God to take me away, but when it went I thought I should like to live," and to hear him gravely repeat the gesture with the statement to each comer, was the funniest thing possible. Every one listened and sympathized with profound respect. He ran a thorn into his finger one day, and not only did he cry, throw himself about, and finally scream when it had to be taken out with a needle, but he declined to eat dinner, and so completely took it for granted that nobody else could eat any, that nobody did, and the meal was not even served. When the thorn had been extracted, he wept with joy, and sat for hours holding the little instrument of torture between his finger and thumb, exhibiting it to all new-comers, and expatiating on his sufferings. Suddenly he coughed, and missed the thorn. Impossible to persuade him it had not flown into his mouth and been swallowed. "Will it be as sore here as it was here?" he asked mournfully, touching his stomach and his finger alternately.
His marvellous simplicity extended to every affair of life. He, who made many rich, was poor himself. His books brought him very little; the tiny pension allowed him by the State and his free stall at the theatre constituted his wealth. But he never thought of money; in that, too, he had all a child's perfect trustfulness. Some spirited attempts were made to marry him; one, in particular, by a handsome peasant-girl, who wrote him a love-letter, and took it to him herself. When he had read it, she urged her cause in words, — "I would be so good to you," she said; "I would take such care of you." — "I don't doubt it," he replied; "but, my good girl, I don't want to be married." He had a grand passion, he used to say, once, and it was enough for all his life; and then he would weave some of his purest, brightest, most beautiful and graceful fancies round the image of — Jenny Lind.
Some mysterious affinity existed between him and the flower-world. He would handle flowers and whisper to them, and they would take wondrous combinations at the bidding of his big, flat fingers. When he held flowers, or presented them, he became almost graceful, and he had a floral language all his own. A quick observer might trace Andersen's reading of character, or rather the revelation of his true child-instinct, in the flowers which he would present to the ladies whom he selected for this coveted honour.
He sleeps well in the city which loved and honoured him so truly, whose everyday life is full of him and of associations with him, whose every familiar object has been lent new meaning by his extraordinary fancy, and his simple, trustful, childlike heart. His memory will be kept green throughout a long period of remembrance, by plentiful traditions of one whose character was as unique as his genius.