2 April: Boreham on Hans Andersen

Elves and Pixies
The years come and go. We get a new crop of poets, of novelists, of historians, of philosophers, of dramatists and of everything else but; we get no new fairytales. The supremacy of the old masters is allowed to remain unchallenged. This is the thought that forces itself upon the mind today—the birthday of Hans Andersen. One does not fall in love with Hans Andersen at first sight. He was extremely ugly, painfully clumsy, and poorly educated. His father was a cobbler and the home consisted of but a single room. He himself was never prepossessing. It seems odd that the wizard who filled Europe with fairy palaces and fairy princesses was a singularly prosaic figure—gnarled, sour, and nursing a perpetual grudge. He passed through life with a wry face; his heart was full of self-pity and discontent; he cherished the illusion that he had been abominably treated; and his soul was, as a natural consequence, embittered by the scurvy trick that the fates seemed to have played upon him.

It is curious to reflect that Andersen's Fairy Tales were published in the year in which Mark Twain was born. Both men were in revolt against the decrees of fortune. Mark Twain considered himself a heaven-born philosopher cruelly driven to become a humorist; Hans Andersen regarded himself as a brilliant dramatist doomed by a hard fate to concoct bedtime stories for little children. When first he came to grips with destiny, he found her paths perplexing. A pitiful lameness restricted the ambit of his activity. Conscious of some inspiration, he wrote a novel or two; but the wretched things fizzled out like damp squibs. He composed dramas which were either rejected with scorn or played to derisive or contemptuous houses. At his wits' ends, he shuffled off to seek employment of some more modest kind! He begged to be engaged as an actor in some minor part. The producer looked at his uncomely figure, shrugged his shoulders, and, as a solatium, offered to make him carpenter and handy man. He accepted.

Employed in this unpromising way, he discovered with astonishment that he could captivate the minds of boys and girls by the fireside stories that he told. One of the children to be attracted to his knee was a little girl at Copenhagen who afterwards became Queen Alexandra, the consort of Edward VII.

Fairies Are Fairies ln Silk Or In Sackcloth
It was in 1835 that Hans Andersen resolved to publish a lean little volume of his children's stories. It was an unalluring affair, badly-printed, badly bound and badly produced. Everything was sacrificed to cheapness, for neither the author nor the publisher could imagine that anybody would be willing to pay more than sixpence for stories like "The Tinder Box" and "Little Ida's Flowers"! The critics damned the singular venture with faint praise. The tales made an appeal, however. People read them, repeated them to their children, and the children excitedly recited to one another. The fantastic characters in the whimsical stories won for themselves a place in the thought and affection of both young and old. The world was a happier place for the pixies and elves that Hans Andersen had set free to flit about it. Had he more such lovely beings stored away in the mysterious recesses of that unattractive head of his?

Responding to such inquiries and snatching greedily at such encouragements, Hans Andersen soon set his wits to work and produced a second volume, and, later on, a third. A year intervened between each of these publications. The profits were, of course, negligible. "In a small fatherland," he wrote, "the poet is always a poor man. Honour, therefore, rather than wealth, becomes the goldfish that he must try to catch. It remains to be seen, whether I shall catch it by telling fairytales." His heart was still aflame with a fierce rebellion at being reduced to the expedient of inventing these flimsy myths in place of the imposing dramas of which he had formerly dreamed.

Making Possible Today The Flights Of Tomorrow
From every point of view he was an oddity. Although his appearance was so grotesque, his mind was an enchanted realm in which any absurd extravagance could flourish. Thus, inspite of the revelation that his mirror daily made to him, he was able to convince himself that he possessed the most amazing charms and that all the loveliest ladies in the land were madly in love with him! With the most perfect composure he could converse with princes as easily as with peasants. Early in life he attracted the attention of King Frederick VI, and those who saw the two together could detect no suspicion of patronage in the one and no trace of obsequiousness in the other. Hans Andersen could walk and talk with royalty as though he had trodden the corridors of palaces all his life. Yet, forgetting that he had ever moved in such exalted company, he could squat by the hearth of a ploughman or by the brazier of a shepherd, and make himself most perfectly at home in that environment.

The pity is that he never realised the value of his own work. To the last he despised himself for having stooped to it. He forgot that the human imagination is like the old-fashioned pumps. You had to pour water into them before you could draw water out of them. In the same way you must pour something into a child's fancy before its best products will become visible. "Babies," old Dr. Johnson used to say, "babies do not want your baby talk. They like to be told of giants and castles and of something that can stretch and stimulate their little minds." That was precisely what Hans Andersen did. Assisted by his royal and highly-placed friends, he travelled all over Europe telling his fascinating fantasies to old and young, to rich and poor, to high and low. And, by means of his books, he has been similarly engaged ever since. By quickening the imaginations of millions of children, he has prepared them to play their part in life with greater enjoyment to themselves and with greater profit to mankind. When, 70 years ago today, he died at Copenhagen, he was accorded a public funeral at the expense of the Danish people; and, during the years that have followed, the world has been growingly impressed by the abiding value of his work.

F W Boreham

Image: Hans Andersen