HANS ANDERSEN: HIS STRUGGLE FOR FAME.

Otago Witness, Issue 3782, 7 September 1926, Page 82

HANS ANDERSEN: HIS STRUGGLE FOR FAME.

By

Robert Lynd.

Even in this age of anniversaries, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Hans Christian Andersen has been allowed to pass almost without comment in England. The Germans have been more pious, and in Berlin a Hans Andersen Exhibition lias been running, at which the isitor can walk through rooms constructed in imitation of the rooms in Hans Andersen’s house, and can feast his eyes on Haus Andersen’s hat and boots, as well as on his desk and his wastepaper basket. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this that Hans Andersen is no longer a popular English author. He has his critics even in the nursery, and there is as constant a war between the disciples of Andersen and the disciples of Grimm, as between the disciples of Plato and the disciples of Aristotle. But this does not mean that Hans Andersen and Plhto arc forgotten authors. It only means that they arc authors whom a certain hard-headed section of the public does not find to its taste. And the same jay be said of Blake and of Sir J. M. Barrie. Undoubtedly, in order to appreciate Hans Andersen, you must be something of a sentimentalist. You must like Christmas trees, and poor and unfortunate children, and unhappy mermaids. You must be able to read about Cinderella, even if the Prince's officers never discover her to place the glass slipper on her foot. For Hans Andersen, in his fairy tales without faircs, never goes out of his way to give his favourite characters happy destinies. People often say that they cannot read him because lie is too sentimental. Tlie real reason why they cannot read him is because he is too true to life and its heartbreaks as well as its happinesses. His fairy tales, indeed, are the true story of his own life. He himself was the ugly duckling about whom he wrote the story that lias touched the hearts of thousands of infants just learning to read. In "The Story of My Life” he has told of his birth into poverty in the Danish island of Odersee. His father was a poor shoemaker, whose family had come down in the world, and who “had himself put together his work bench and his marriage bed.” The bed—ou which Hans Andersen was born—"lie had made,” we are told, “out of the wooden frame which, a short time before, had borne the coffin of the deceased Count Trampc, as the latter lay in state ;stlic remnants of the black cloth ou the boards still kept this fact in remembrance. Here was a birth amid circumstances prophetic of sorrow. And, indeed, according to Hans* Auderscn, there were other circumstances of the time that were ominous of the strange intermixture in his future career. He tells us:— My father is said to have sat, on the first day, on the bed, and to have read aloud in Holbsrg, whilst I cried. “Wilt thou sleep, or listen quietly?” he is reported to have said in jest; but I cried on, even in the church, when I was being baptised, so that the preacher, who was a passionate man, said: ‘The youngster screams like a cat, which words my mother never could forget. A poor immigrant, Comar, who stood godfather, consoled her in the meantime with the assurance, that the louder I screamed a 9 a child, the more pleasingly should I sing when I had become older. As a child—even in a home consisting of a single room—Hans Andersen had surroundings that cannot be considered unpropitions to his genius. "The walls were him, and head him the “Arabian Nights.” hung a few shelves with books and songs,” while on Sundays, his poor father —whose ambition In life it was to learn Latin—played all sorts of imaginative games with him, and read his the “Arabian Nights.” There was also a kitchen garden in the gutters of the roof, like the garden described in "The Snow Queen.”, Hans in those days used to love talking to the old women of the neighbourhood, and would often astonish them with his curious knowledge and eloquence. I had accidentally heard of the internal quality of the human frame —of course, without understanding anything of it; but these mysteries Immediately attracted me, and with chalk I depicted for the old women a quantity of flourishes on the door which were tq represent the intestines; my description of the heart and the lungs made the deepest impression. I passed for an extraordinarily wise child who could not live long; they rewarded ray eloquence by telling me stories; —a world as rich as that in the “ Thousand and One Nights ” here rose up before me. Here, and in his father's stories as well as in his own early dreams anil sorrows, we may see tlie beginnings of the fairy tales that have made him immortal. At an early age he was left fatherless, and his mother, who had to set to work And earn a living as a charwoman, seems to have had little time to look after him. “ I sat quite alone at home,” he says, “ with the little theatre, made dolls’ clothes, and read plays.” It was his mother’s ambition that Hans should become a tailor, but, having other dreams, lie pleaded to be allowed to go to Copenhagen and seek his fortune. “ What wiU become of you then?” asked his mother. “I will become celebrated,” replied Hans. A tall, ungainly boy of 14, with very little money in his pocket, Hans left liis weeping mother, and entered Copenhagen, on foot, with all his worldly goods in a small bundle. He at once ealled on Madame Schall, the leading dancer at the opera, and the servant girl, taking him for a beggar, gave him alms. His persistence at last gained him admission, and being asked what

sort of part he thought he could play the boy replied, “ Cinderella.” He thereupon asked to be allowed to show her how he could dance and sing. I requested permission to be allowed to lay aside my boots, because otherwise I should not be light enough for that part; and now I took my large hat for a tambourine and began to dance and sing: “ Rank and riches here below, Are not free from pain and woe.” My strange gestures and great activity made the dancer take me for a mad person, and she hastened to get rid of me. It is a remarkable thing that a boy so sensitive, awkward, and diffident as Hans Andersen was should have shown such dogged courage in a strange city that welcomed him with derision and the promise of starvation. He at length won the sympathy of a patron, however, who persuaded the King to make him an allowance and send him to school. Here Ik wrote a considerable amount of verse, only to be told by the head master that his poetry would “ become mouldy as the bookseller’s,” and that he would end his days in a madhouse. It was not for some years that Hans Andersen discovered tlie fairy tale as the literary form that suited his genius. He had written poetry, drama, a travel book, and fiction before he published his first fairy tale at the age of 30. The fairy tales, like Lamb's “ Essays of Elia,” were born into a rather indifferent world. Even some of his friends told him that lie had no talent for this kind of writing, and others advised him to study the French fairy tales as models. With every new volume of the tales, however, his fame increased, till in the end he came to he universally recognised as one of tlie world’s great storytellers. He liiinself was disappointed that his fame as a novelist did not equal his fame as an author for children. But, on the whole, with all liis disappointments and miseries, he was forced to confess that lie had been “ a child of good fortune.” He wrote at the height of his fame: My life is a pretty tale, so eventful and so happy. My life’s history will say to the world what it says to me; there is a God replete with love. Who orders everything for the best. It is the sort of confession that you would have expected from the man who wrote “The Ugly Duckling.” You will remember that the ugly duckling, which after all its sufferings turned out to he a swan, had the same happy fate in the end as Hans Andersen: It felt quite glad at all the need and misfortune it had suffered, now it realised its happiness and all the splendour that surroundcc it. And the great swans swam round it, and stroked it with their beaks. And it said to itself in it 3 joy: “I never dreamed of such happiness when I was still the ugiy duckling.” The derided Hans Andersen is now tlie most famous author in tlie literary history of liis nation. He is beloved all over tlie world as a writer in whose work we find a veritable Christmas tree of life, brilliant with tlie candies of laughter and hung with tlie manycoloured toys of love, and charity, and pity.