Read Ebook: Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits by Brandes Georg Anderson Rasmus Bj Rn Translator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 762 lines and 145848 words, and 16 pages

That he is no poet for men, Prince Bismarck has rightly felt."

"On the contrary," says another, "Paul Heyse is very masculine. He is pronounced weak by some because he is pleasing, because a finished grace has lent its impress to his creations. People do not realize how much strength is requisite in order to have this exquisite charm!"

"What is Heyse?" says a third. "The denizen of a small town, who has so long played hide and seek with Berlin, with the social life of the world, with politics, that he has estranged himself from our present, and only feels at home among the troubadours in Provence. I always scent out something of the Proven?ale and of the provincialist in his writings."

"This Heyse," remarks a fourth, "in spite of his fifty years and the maturity of his authorship, has the weakness to wish to persuade us throughout that he is an immoral, lascivious poet. But no man believes him. That is his punishment."

"I have never in my life been so greatly envied," once said a lady, an old friend of Heyse's youth, in my presence, "as I was to-day, in one of our higher schools for young ladies, which I was visiting, when the rumor was circulated that I was about to pass the evening in a circle where I would meet him. The little damsels unanimously commissioned me to carry to him their enthusiastic greetings. How gladly would they one and all have thrown themselves into his arms! He is and always will be the idolized author of young maidens."

"One can define Paul Heyse," said a critic, "as the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy of German poetry. He appears like Mendelssohn when compared to the great masters. His nature, like that of Mendelssohn, is a German lyric, sensitive temperament, permeated with the most refined Southern culture. Both men lack the grand pathos, the energetic power, the storm of the dramatic element; but both have natural dignity in earnestness, charming amiability and pleasing grace in jest, they are thoroughly cultured in regard to form, they are virtuosos in execution."

Gesammelte Werke, iv. 135.

Ibid., v. 199.

Kinder der Welt, ii. 162.

Kinder der Welt, iii. 210, 242, 256.

Kinder der Welt, iii. 109.

Gesammelte Werke, iii. 300.

Kinder der Welt, ii. 47.

Gesammelte Werke, v. 201. On page 175 the word "vornehm" is used by her.

Gesammelte Werke, viii. 44, 246, 321.

Kinder der Welt, ii. 355. "That you are the best, deepest, purest, noblest of women"--"Poor, brave, free-born breast--bow well it has preserved its patent of nobility." Kinder der Welt, iii. 309.

Im Paradiese, iii. 6.

Gesammelte Werke, v. 197.

Gesammelte Werke, ix. 73.

Gesammelte Werke, viii. 168.

Gesammelte Werke, vi. 71: "I have been sold once in my life. How mankind will now blame me if I give myself as a free-will offering in order to suppress the anguish of that disgrace!"

Gesammelte Werke, vi. 40.

Gesammelte Werke, vi. 5.

Kinder der Welt, ii. 265.

Did not a critic of this sort take it upon himself to get up a "warning" in the same style, against Goethe's "Faust"? "The purport of this immoral work," he wrote, "is the following: A physician , already pretty well advanced in years, is weary of study, and hankers after carnal pleasures. Finally he signs a bond with the devil. The latter leads him through divers low diversions to a burgher's daughter, a young maiden, whom Faust at once attempts to seduce. A couple of rendez-vous at the house of an old procuress prepare the way for this. As the seduction, however, cannot be brought about speedily enough, the devil gives Faust a jewel-case to present to the young maiden. Wholly powerless to resist this gift, that is to say, not even seduced, simply purchased, Gretchen yields to Faust; and in order to be all the more undisturbed with her lover she doses her old mother with a narcotic, which kills the old woman. Then after being the cause of her brother's death, she destroys her child, the fruit of her shame. In prison she employs herself in singing obscene songs. That her lover left her in the lurch we cannot wonder when we consider his religious principles. He is, as the scene in which his donna questions him about his faith clearly proves, no Christian; indeed, he does not even seem to believe in a God, although he endeavors to grasp at all sorts of empty subterfuges to conceal his absolute unbelief.

"As this wicked book, notwithstanding all this, finds, as we hear to our astonishment, many readers, indeed, even lady readers, and is in constant demand at the circulating libraries in our city, we beg of all fathers of families to watch over the spiritual welfare of those belonging to them, to whom such profligate reading is all the more dangerous because its immoral teachings are veiled in a polished, insinuating form."

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.

He who possesses talent should also possess courage. He must dare trust his inspiration, he must be convinced that the fancy which flashes through his brain is a healthy one, that the form which comes natural to him, even if it be a new one, has a right to assert its claims; he must have gained the hardihood to expose himself to the charge of being affected, or on the wrong path, before he can yield to his instinct and follow it wherever it may imperiously lead. When Armand Carrel, a young journalist at the time, was censured by the editor of the paper for which he wrote, who, pointing to a passage in the young man's article, remarked, "That is not the way people write," he replied, "I do not write as people write, but as I myself write," and this is the universal formula of a gifted nature. It countenances neither fugitive rubbish, nor arbitrary invention, but with entire self-consciousness it expresses the right of talent, when neither traditional form nor existing material suffices to meet the peculiar requirements of its nature, to choose new material, to create new forms, until it finds a soil of a quality to give nurture to all of its forces and gently and freely develop them. Such a soil the poet Hans Christian Andersen found in the nursery story.

Happy, indeed, is Andersen! What author has such a public as he? What is, in comparison, the success of a man of science, especially of one who writes within a limited territory for a public that neither reads nor values him, and who is read by four or five--rivals and opponents! A poet is, generally speaking, more favorably situated; but although it is a piece of good fortune to be read by men, and although it is an enviable lot to know that the leaves of our books are turned by dainty fingers which have employed silken threads as book-marks, nevertheless no one can boast of so fresh and eager a circle of readers as Andersen is sure of finding. His stories are numbered among the books which we have deciphered syllable by syllable, and which we still read to-day. There are some among them whose letters even now, seem to us larger, whose words appear to have more value than all others, because we first made their acquaintance letter by letter and word by word. And what a delight it must have been for Andersen to see in his dreams this swarm of children's faces by the thousands about his lamp, this throng of blooming, rosy-cheeked little curly-pates, as in the clouds of a Catholic altar-piece, flaxen-haired Danish boys, tender English babies, black-eyed Hindoo maidens,--rich and poor, spelling, reading, listening, in all lands, in all tongues, now healthy and merry, weary from sport, now sickly, pale, with transparent skin, after one of the numberless illnesses with which the children of this earth are visited,--and to see them eagerly stretch forth this confusion of white and swarthy little hands after each new leaf that is ready! Such devout believers, such an attentive, such an indefatigable public, none other has. None other either has such a reverend one, for even old age is not so reverend and sacred as childhood. In considering this public we can conjure up a whole series of peaceful and idyllic scenes: yonder some one is reading aloud while the children are listening devoutly, or a little one is sitting absorbed in its reading, with both elbows resting on the table, while its mother, in passing by, pauses that she too may read over the child's shoulder. Does it not bring its own reward to write for such a circle of auditors? Is there, indeed, one that has a more unspotted and ready fancy?

"Count Lucanor spoke one day with Patronio, his counsellor, and said to him, There is a man who has come to me and addressed me on a very important subject. He gives me to understand that it would conduce in the highest degree to my advantage. But he says that no man in the world, however highly I may esteem him, must be allowed to know anything about it, and he so earnestly enjoins upon me to keep the secret that he even assures me all my possessions and my life itself will be imperilled if I reveal it to any one. And as I know that nothing can come to your knowledge that you cannot determine whether it be meant for a blessing or with deceitful intent, I beg of you to tell me how this matter strikes you. Sir Count, replied Patronio, in order that you may be able to comprehend what should, in my opinion, be done in this matter, I beg of you to hearken unto how a king was served by three rogues, who sought his presence. The count asked what it was that took place." This introduction resembles a programme; we first learn the bold question to which the story following is to be the answer, and we feel that the story owes its existence solely to the question. We are not permitted to draw for ourselves from the narrative the moral that it seems to us to contain; it must be directed with a violent effort to the question concerning the amount of confidence that is due people who are shrouded in mystery. Such a method of telling a story is the practical, not the poetic one; it places undue limits on the pleasure the reader takes in discovering the hidden moral for himself. True, the fancy is gratified to find its work made easy, for it does not really desire to exert itself; but neither does it like to have its easy activity anticipated; like old people who are permitted to keep up a semblance of work, it does not wish to be reminded that its work is mere play. Nature pleases when it resembles art, says Kant; art, when it resembles nature. Why? Because the veiled purpose gives pleasure. But no matter, let us read further in the book.

"Sir Count, said Patronio, there once came three rogues to a king and stated that they were most superior masters in the manufacture of cloth, and that they especially understood how to weave a certain stuff which was visible to everyone who was actually the son of the father whom all the world supposed to be his, but which was invisible to him who was not the son of his supposed father. This pleased the king greatly, for he thought that with the aid of this fabric he could learn which men in his kingdom were the sons of those who were legally accredited to be their fathers, and which were not, and that in this way he could adjust many things in his kingdom; for the Moors do not inherit from their fathers if they be not truly their children. So he gave orders to have the men conducted to his palace in which they could work."

"And they told him that, in order to be sure they were not deceiving him, he might lock them up in the palace until the fabric was finished, and this pleased the king vastly!" They now receive gifts of gold, silver, and silk, spread abroad the tidings that the weaving has begun, and through their bold indication of pattern and colors cause the king's messengers to declare the fabric admirable, and thus succeed in obtaining a visit from the king, who, as he sees nothing, "is overcome by a deathly terror, for he believes that he cannot be the son of the king whom he has considered his father." He therefore praises the fabric beyond measure, and every one follows his example, until one day on the occasion of a great festival he puts on the invisible garment; he rides through the city, "and it was well for him that it was summer." No one could see the fabric, although every one feared to confess his inability to do so, lest he should be ruined and dishonored. "Thus this secret was preserved, and no one dared reveal it, until a negro who tended the king's horse, and had nothing to lose, went to the king" and affirmed the truth.

"Who bids you keep a secret from a faithful friend, Will cheat you too as surely as he has a chance."

In his youth, Andersen, who then took Musaeus for his model, had not advanced far enough to understand how to mingle jest and earnest in his diction; they were always at variance; scarcely was utterance given to a sentiment before the disturbing parody made its appearance. John says a few words, in which he expresses his love, and the author adds: "O, it was so touching to hear! The poor young man, who was at other times so natural, so amiable, now spoke quite like one of Clauren's books; but then, what will not love do?" On this point, with this pedantic frivolity, Andersen still persisted in 1830; but five years later the transformation process is at an end; his talent has shed its skin; his courage has grown; he dares speak his own language.

The determining element in this mode of speech was from the outset the childlike. In order to be understood by such youthful readers as those to whom he addressed himself, he was obliged to use the simplest possible words, to return to the simplest possible conceptions, to avoid everything abstract, to supply the place of indirect with direct language; but in thus seeking simplicity, he finds poetic beauty, and in attaining the childlike he proves that this childlike spirit is essential to true poetry; for that form of expression which is na?ve and adapted to the general comprehension is more poetic than that which reminds the reader of industry, of history, of literature; the concrete fact is at once more life-like and more transparent than that which is presented as proof of a proposition, and the language which proceeds directly from the lips is more characteristic than the pale paraphrase with a "that."

To linger over this language, to become absorbed in its word-treasury, its syntax, its intonation, is no proof of a petty spirit, and does not take place merely through love of the vocables or the idiom. True, language is but the surface of a work of poetic fancy; but if the finger be placed upon the skin, we may feel the throbbing pulse which indicates the heart-beats of the inner being. Genius is like a clock; the visible index is guided by the invisible spring. Genius is like a tangled skein, inextricable and knotted, as it may seem, it is nevertheless inseparably one in its inner coherence. If we but get hold of the outer end of the thread, we may slowly and cautiously endeavor to unravel even the most tangled skein from its coil. It is not harmed by the effort.

The elementary quality in Andersen's poetry insured him a circle of readers among the cultivated people of all lands. It was still more effectual in securing him one among the uncultivated people. That which is childlike is in its very essence of a popular nature, and a wide circulation corresponds with an extension downward. Because of the deep and grievous but most natural division of society into grades of culture, the influence of good literature is confined almost exclusively to one class. If in Denmark a series of literary productions like Ingemann's romances make an exception, it is chiefly because of qualities which remove them from the cultivated classes through lack of truth to nature in the character delineations and in the historic coloring. With Ingemann's romances it is the same as with Grundtvig's theories: if one would defend them, it could not be done by proving their truth, but by practically laying stress on their outward usefulness, the advantage they have been to the Danish cause, to the interests of enlightenment and piety, etc. Ingemann's romances stand, moreover, in noteworthy relation to Andersen's nursery stories. The latter are read by the younger, the former by the older children. The nursery story harmonizes with the luxuriant imagination and the warm sympathy of the child, and the somewhat older maiden; the romance, with the fantastic desire for action of the child and especially of the somewhat older boy, with his growing taste for deeds of chivalry, with his conceit, his love of pleasing and daring. Romances are written for grown people; but the healthy mind of the nation has slowly dropped them until they have found their natural public in the age between ten and twelve years. Truth is something relative. At twelve years of age these books seem just as fall of truth, as at twenty they seem full of innocent lies. But they must be read before the twelfth year be gone, for at twelve and a half it is already too late for those who are a trifle advanced in intellectual development. With the nursery story the reverse is the case. Written in the beginning for children and constantly read by them, they speedily rose to the notice of grown people and were by them declared to be true children of genius.

It was a lucky stroke that made Andersen the poet of children. After long fumbling, after unsuccessful efforts, which must necessarily throw a false and ironic light on the self-consciousness of a poet whose pride based its justification mainly on the expectancy of a future which he felt slumbering within his soul, after wandering about for long years, Andersen, a genuine offspring of Oehlenschl?ger, strayed into Oehlenschl?ger's footsteps, and one evening found himself in front of a little insignificant yet mysterious door, the door of the nursery story. He touched it, it yielded, and he saw, burning in the obscurity within, the little "Tinder-Box" that became his Aladdin's lamp. He struck fire with it, and the spirits of the lamp--the dogs with eyes as large as teacups, as mill-wheels, as the round tower in Copenhagen--stood before him and brought him the three giant chests, containing all the copper, silver, and gold treasure stores of the nursery story. The first story had sprung into existence, and the "Tinder-Box" drew all the others onward in its train. Happy is he who has found his "tinder-box."

We have seen how sympathy with child-nature led to sympathy with the animal which is doubly a child, and to sympathy with the plants, the clouds, the winds, which are doubly nature. What attracts Andersen to the impersonal being is the impersonal element in his own nature, what leads him to the wholly unconscious is merely the direct consequence of his sympathy. The child, young though it may be, is born old; each child is a whole generation older than its father, a civilization of ages has stamped its inherited impress on the little four-year-old child of the metropolis. How many conflicts, how many endeavors, how many sorrows have refined the countenance of such a child, making the features sensitive and precocious! It is different with animals. Look at the swan, the hen, the cat! They eat, sleep, live, and dream undisturbed, as in ages gone by. The child already begins to display evil instincts. We, who are seeking what is unconscious, what is na?ve, are glad to descend the ladder that leads to the regions where there is no more guilt, no more crime, where responsibility, repentance, restless striving and passion cease, where nothing of an evil nature exists except through a substitution of which we are but partially conscious, and which, therefore, robs our sympathy of half its sting. An author like Andersen, who has so great a repugnance to beholding what is cruel and coarse in its nakedness, who is so deeply impressed by anything of the kind that he dare not relate it, but recoils a hundred times in his works from some wanton or outrageous deed with the maidenly expression, "We cannot bear to think of it!" Such an author feels content and at home in a world where everything that appears like egotism, violence, coarseness, vileness, and persecution, can only be called so in a figurative way. It is highly characteristic that almost all the animals which appear in Andersen's nursery stories are tame animals, domestic animals. This is, in the first place, a symptom of the same gentle and idyllic tendency which results in making almost all Andersen's children so well-behaved. It is, furthermore, a proof of his fidelity to nature, in consequence of which he is so reluctant to describe anything with which he is not thoroughly familiar. It is, finally, an interesting phenomenon with reference to the use he makes of the animals, for domestic animals are no longer the pure product of nature; they remind us, through ideal association, of much that is human; and, moreover, through long intercourse with humanity and long education they have acquired something human, which in a high degree supports and furthers the effort to personify them. These cats and hens, these ducks and turkeys, these storks and swans, these mice and that unmentionable insect "with maiden's blood in its body," offer many props to the nursery story. They hold direct intercourse with human beings; all that they lack is articulate speech, and there are human beings with articulate speech who are unworthy of it, and do not deserve their speech. Let us, therefore, give the animals the power of speech, and harbor them in our midst.

On the almost exclusive limitation to the domestic animal, a double characteristic of this nursery story depends. First of all, the significant result that Andersen's animals, whatever else they may be, are never beastly, never brutal. Their sole faults are that they are stupid, shallow, and old-fogyish. Andersen does not depict the animal in the human being, but the human in the animal. In the second place, there is a certain freshness of tone about them, a certain fulness of feeling, certain strong and bold, enthusiastic, and vigorous outbursts which are never found in the quarters of the domestic animal. Many beautiful, many humorous and entertaining things are spoken of in these stories, but a companion piece to the fable of the wolf and the dog--the wolf who observed the traces of the chain on the neck of the dog and preferred his own freedom to the protection afforded the house dog--will not be found in them. The wild nightingale, in whom poetry is personified, is a tame and loyal bird. "I have seen tears in the Emperor's eyes; that is the real treasure to me," it says. "An emperor's tears have a peculiar power!" Take even the swan, that noble, royal bird in the masterly story, "The Ugly Duckling," which for the sake of its cat and its hen alone cannot be sufficiently admired,--how does it end? Alas! as a domestic animal. This is one of the points where it becomes difficult to pardon the great author. O poet! we feel tempted to exclaim, since it was in your power to grasp such a thought, to conceive and execute such a poem, how could you, with your inspiration, your pride, have the heart to permit the swan to end thus! Let him die if needs must be! That would be tragic and great. Let him spread his wings and impetuously soar through the air, rejoicing in his beauty and his strength! let him sink down on the bosom of some solitary and beautiful forest lake! That is free and delightful. Anything would be better than this conclusion: "Into the garden came little children, who threw bread and com into the water. And they ran to their father and mother, and bread and cake were thrown into the water; and they all said, 'The new one is the most beautiful of all! so young and handsome!' and the old swans bowed their heads before him." Let them bow, but let us not forget that there is something which is worth more than the recognition of all the old swans and geese and ducks, worth more than receiving bread-crumbs and cake as a garden bird,--the power of silently gliding over the waters, and free flight!

Andersen prefers the bird to the four-footed animal. More birds than mammals find place with him; for the bird is gentler than the four-footed beast, is nearer to the plant. The nightingale is his emblem, the swan his ideal, the stork his declared favorite. It is natural that the stork, that remarkable bird which brings children into the world,--the stork, that droll, long-legged, wandering, beloved, yearningly expected and joyfully greeted bird, should become his idolized symbol and frontispiece.

Yet plants are preferred by him to birds. Of all organic beings, plants are those which appear most frequently in the nursery story. For in the vegetable world alone are peace and harmony found to reign. Plants, too, resemble a child, but a child who is perpetually asleep. There is no unrest in this domain, no action, no sorrow, and no care. Here life is a calm, regular growth, and death but a painless fading away. Here the easily excited, lively poetic sympathy suffers less than anywhere else. Here there is nothing to jar and assail the delicate nerves of the poet. Here he is at home; here he paints his Arabian Nights' Entertainments beneath a burdock leaf. Every grade of emotion may be experienced in the realm of plants,--melancholy at the sight of the felled trunk, fulness of strength at the sight of the swelling buds, anxiety at the fragrance of the strong jasmine. Many thoughts may flit through our brain as we follow the history of the development of the flax, or the brief honor of the fir-tree on Christmas evening; but we feel as absolutely free as though we were dealing with comedy, for the image is so fleeting that it vanishes the moment we attempt to render it permanent. Sympathy and agitation gently touch our minds, but they do not ruffle us, they neither rouse nor oppress us. A poem about a plant sets free twofold the sympathy to which it lays claim; once because we know that the poem is pure fiction, and again because we know the plant to be merely a symbol. Nowhere has the poet with greater delicacy invested plants with speech than in "The Fir-Tree," "Little Ida's Flowers," and in "The Snow Queen." In the last named story, every flower tells its own tale. Let us listen to what the Tiger-lily says: "Hearest thou not the drum? Bum! bum! those are the only two tones. Always bum! bum! Hark to the plaintive song of the old women! to the call of the priests! The Hindoo woman in her long robe stands upon the funeral pile; the flames rise around her and her dead husband, but the Hindoo woman thinks on the living one in the surrounding circle; on him whose eyes bum hotter than the flames; on him, the fire of whose eyes pierces her heart more than the flames which soon will bum her body to ashes. Can the heart's flame die in the flame of the funeral pile?" --"I do not understand that at all," said little Gerda.--"That is my story," said the Tiger-lily.

Yet a step farther, and the fancy of the poet appropriates all inanimate objects, colonizes and annexes everything, large and small, an old house and an old clothes-press , the top and the ball, the darning needle and the false collar, and the great dough men with bitter almonds for their hearts. After it has grasped the physiognomy of the inanimate, his fancy identifies itself with the formless all, sails with the moon across the sky, whistles and tells stories like the wind, looks on the snow, on sleep, night, death, and the dream as persons.

The determining element in this poetic mind was, then, sympathy with all that is childlike, and, through the representation of such deep-seated, elementary, and constant spiritual conditions as those of the child, the productions of this imagination are raised above the waves of time, spread beyond the boundaries of their native land and become the common property of the divers classes of society. The time when genius was looked upon as a meteor fallen from the skies, has long since passed away; now it is known that genius, as all else that comes from nature, has its antecedents and its conditions, that it holds relations of general dependence with its epoch, is an organ for the ideas of the age. Sympathy for the child is only a phenomenon of the sympathy of the nineteenth century for whatever is na?ve. Love of the unconscious is a phenomenon of the love of nature. In society, in science, in poetry and in art, nature and the child had become objects of veneration; in the realms of poetry, art, science, and society, there takes place a reciprocal action. If there arise, therefore, a poet whose affections are attracted to the child, whose fancy is allured by the animal, by plants, and by nature, he dares follow his impulses, he gains courage to give utterance to his talent, because a hundred thousand mute voices about him strengthen him in his calling, because the tide he believes himself to be stemming, rocks him gently as it bears him onward to his goal.

Thus it will be seen we can study the poet's art by studying the ideas which are his inspiration. To contemplate these in their origin and their ramifications, in their abstract essence and their concrete power, is, therefore, no superfluous act, when it becomes our task to make a study of individual poetic fancies. For the bare idea cannot make poetry; but neither can the poet make poetry without the idea and without the surroundings which give it its impetus. About the fortunate poet there gathers a multitude who, in a less felicitous way, are working in his own vein; and about this multitude the people swarm as mute but interested fellow-laborers. For genius is like a burning reflector, which collects and unites the scattered rays of light. It never stands alone. It is merely the noblest tree in the forest, the highest ear in the sheaf, and it is first recognized in its real significance and in its true attitude when it is seen in its rightful place.

I have stated that the childlike element in Andersen is universally intelligible. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. This childlike tone has a decidedly Teutonic impress; it is best understood in England and in Germany, less well in any of the Latin nations, least of all by the French. In fact, Andersen is very little known and read in France. England is the only land in which romances and semi-romances are devoted to the portrayal of the spiritual life of little children , and English child nature is unique of its kind. It is only needful to open the first illustrated French book for children that comes to hand to observe the difference. The English child and the French child are as dissimilar as the acorn and the beechnut. Moreover, Andersen could never gain firm foothold in France for the reason that the field is already occupied, having been taken possession of long since by La Fontaine.

One of the most marked traits in La Fontaine's and the Gallic mode of contemplating life is the war against illusion. The humorous play in La Fontaine's na?vet? is dependent on the fact that, harmless as this na?vet? is, good-natured and gentle as it always shows itself to be, it now and then gives undoubted evidence that it is not altogether foolish, that it will not allow itself to be duped, that it knows very well how to estimate and value all the stupidity and hypocrisy, all the preaching and all the empty phrases with which humanity permits itself, as by common consent, to be led by the nose or by the heart. With a smile it passes by all the earnestness at whose core is corruption and hollowness, all the greatness which at bottom is but audacity, all the respectability whose essence is a lie. Thus it puts "Everything in its Right Place," which is the title of one of Andersen's most popular tales. The key-note of its earnestness is poetic enthusiasm, and its keen wit has a sting which is carefully concealed. French satire is a rapier with a provisional button. In "Tartuffe," "Candide," and "Figaro," it effected a revolution before the revolution. Laughter is the oldest Marseillaise of France.

The most marked trait in Andersen's mode of viewing life, is that which gives the ascendency to the heart, and this trait is genuinely Danish. Full of feeling itself, this method of contemplation takes every opportunity to exalt the beauty and significance of the emotions. It overleaps the will , does combat with the critique of the pure reason as with something pernicious, the work of the Devil, the witch's mirror, replaces pedantic science with the most admirable and witty side-thrusts , describes the senses as a tempter, or passes them over as unmentionable things, pursues and denounces hardheartedness, glorifies and commends goodness of heart, violently dethrones coarseness and narrowness, exalts innocence and decorum, and thus "puts everything in its right place." The key-note of its earnestness is the ethic-religious feeling coupled with the hatred felt by geniality for narrowness, and its humorous satire is capricious, calm, in thorough harmony with the idyllic spirit of the poet. Its satire has only the sting of a gnat, but it stings in the tenderest places. Which of the modes of contemplation is the best? Such a question is not worthy of an answer. I love the beech, but I love the birch as well. Only because they please me, not in view of casting the balance in favor of either of these modes, I quote the following lines of George Herwegh:--

"Within the breast one little word is seated, Yet wisely is its utterance subdued, For hearts that beat too high will be defeated."

A genius, born in an age whose every influence opposes his development, is either hopelessly crushed or goes to ruin like any inferior talent. An Andersen born in Denmark in 1705, instead of 1805, would have been a most unfortunate and thoroughly insignificant individual, perhaps even a maniac. A genius born at a period when everything unites to come to its aid, produces classic, genial creations. Now, this first harmony between a poet and his era corresponds to a second one between the individual faculties of genius, and to a third one between genius and its peculiar type of art. The nature of genius is an organically connected whole; its weakness in one direction is the condition of its strength in another; the development of this faculty causes that one to be checked in its growth, and it is impossible to alter any single particular without disturbing the entire machinery. We may wish that one quality or another was different than it is, but we can readily comprehend that any decided change is out of the question. We may wish our poet had stronger personality, a more manly temperament, and more mental equilibrium; but we have no difficulty in understanding that the lack of defined personality, and the incompleteness of the character whose acquaintance we make in "The Story of my Life," stand in the most intimate relationship with the nature of his endowments. A less receptive mind would not be so susceptible to poetic impressions, a harder one would not unite so much flexibility with its more rigid attitude, one more susceptible to criticism and philosophy would not be so na?ve.

Since, then, the moral attributes are requisite to the intellectual, so, too, they are mutually contingent one upon the other. An overflowing lyric sentiment, an exalted sensibility, cannot exist with the experience and method of a man of the world, for experience chills and hardens. A lightly vaulting fancy that hops and soars like a bird, does not admit of being united with the logically measured crescendo and decrescendo of dramatic action. An observation by no means inclined to be cold-blooded cannot possibly penetrate psychologically to the heart of things; a childlike, easily quivering hand cannot dissect a villain. If, therefore, we place genius of this kind face to face with sundry defined and well-known types of art, we can determine beforehand precisely what its relations with each of them will be.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet