Adventures and Enthusiasms. E. V. Lucas

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СКАЧАТЬ above all, he preferred his dramatic efforts; and yet it is by these tales that he lives and will ever live.

      Hans Andersen now began to travel regularly every year and to write little personal memoirs of his adventures in a manner which in England to-day we associate with "Eöthen" and "An Inland Voyage." Wherever he went he made friends, and he was always willing—more, eager—to read his stories aloud: even in Germany, where, owing to his defective knowledge of the language, his audiences had difficulty in maintaining the cast of feature demanded by this most exacting of literary lions. In 1847 he was in London, much fêted, the way having been paved by Mary Howitt's translation of his autobiography and of "The Improvisatore," and in 1857 he was here again, spending five weeks at Gad's Hill with Dickens (by seven years his junior), whom he revered and almost worshipped. Hans Andersen's Anglo-Saxon readers have always been very numerous and very appreciative, and in return he praised England and wrote "The Two Baronesses" in our tongue. Only a few months before his death he was gratified to receive a gift of books from the children of America.

      His latter years were full of honour and comfort. He had many wealthy friends, including the Danish Royal Family, a substantial pension, and a considerable revenue from his work. In the summer he lived with the Melchiors at Rolighet; in winter in rooms in Copenhagen, dining with a different friend regularly each night of the week. His health was better than he liked to think it, and he was able almost to the end to indulge his passion for travel. He went often to the theatre, or, if unable to do so, had the play bill brought to his rooms, where, knowing every classic play by heart, he would follow its course in imagination, assisted by occasional visits from the performers. He never married, and, when once an early and not very serious attachment was forgotten, never seemed to wish it; but he liked to be liked by women. Indeed, he was normal enough to like to be liked by every one, and most of the unhappiness of which he was capable—even to a kind of self-torture—proceeded from the suspicion that he was unwelcome here and there. For in spite of his hard experience of the world, he continued a child to the end; a spoilt child, indeed, more than not, as men of genius often can be.

      He lived to be seventy, and died peacefully on August 4, 1875. "Take care, above all things," he had once said when humorously discussing his funeral, "that you drill a little hole in my coffin, so that I may have a peep at all the pomp and ceremony, and see which of my good friends follow me to the grave and which do not." They were there, every one. He was followed to the grave by all Denmark.

      It is, as I have said, by his fairy tales that Hans Andersen lives and will ever live. There he stands alone, supreme. As a whole, there is nothing like them. One man of genius or another has now and then done something a little in this or that Hans Andersen manner. Heine here and there in the "Reisebilder"; Lamb in "The Child Angel" and perhaps "Dream Children"; and one sees affinities to him occasionally in Sir James Barrie's work (the swallows in "The Little White Bird," for example, build under the eaves to hear the stories which are told to the children in the house, while in Hans Andersen's "Thumbelina" the swallows live under the poet's eaves in order to tell stories to him); but Hans Andersen remains one of the most unique and fascinating minds in all literature. Nominally just entertainment for children, these "Eventyr og Historier" are a profound study of the human heart and a "criticism of life" beyond most poetry. And all the while they are stories for children too; for though Hans Andersen addresses both audiences, he never, save in a very few of the slighter satirical apologues, such as "The Collar" and "Soup from a Sausage Skewer," loses the younger. He had this double appeal in mind when, on a statue being raised in his honour at Copenhagen just before his death, showing him in the act of telling a tale to a cluster of children, he protested that it was not representative enough.

      I would apply to Hans Andersen rather than to Scott the term "The Wizard of the North"; because whereas Scott took men and women as he found them, the other, with a touch of his wand, rendered inhuman things—furniture, toys, flowers, poultry—instinct with humanity. He knew actually how everything would behave; he knew how a piece of coal talked, and how a nightingale. He did not merely give speech to a pair of scissors, he gave character too. This was one of his greatest triumphs. He discerned instantly the relative social positions of moles and mice, bulls and cocks, tin soldiers and china shepherdesses. He peopled a new world, and, having done so, he made every incident in it dramatic and unforgettable. He brought to his task of amusing and awakening children gifts of humour and irony, fancy and charm, the delicacy of which will probably never be surpassed. He brought also an April blend of tears and smiles, and a very tender sympathy with all that is beautiful and all that is oppressed. He did not preach, or, if he did, he so quickly rectified the lapse with a laugh or a quip that one forgets the indiscretion; but he believed that only the good are happy, and he wanted happiness to be universal. Hence to read his tales is an education in optimism and benevolence.

INNOCENCE AND IMPULSE

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      Looking the other day into Grimm, I came upon the story called "Hans in Luck," in which a foolish fellow, having his life's savings in a bag, gives them away for an old horse, and the old horse for a cow, and the cow for a pig, and so on, until at last he has only a heavy stone to his name, and, getting rid of that burden, thinks himself the most fortunate of men—Hans in luck. It was the very ordinary metal of this folk-tale which Hans Andersen transmuted to fine gold in the famous story entitled, in the translation on which I was brought up, "What the old man does is always right," which is a veritable epic in little of simplicity and enthusiasm. No one who has read it can forget it, for its exquisite author is there at his kindliest and sunniest, all his sardonic melancholy forgotten.

      The old man, in bitter financial straits, setting out in the morning to sell his cow at market, makes, in his incorrigible optimism, a series of exchanges, all for the worse, so that when he reaches home in the evening, instead of a pocketful of money to show for his day's dealings, he has only a sack of rotten apples. Nothing, however, has dimmed his radiant faith in himself as a good trafficker, and nothing can undermine his wife's belief in him as the best and financially most sagacious of husbands: a belief which, expressed in the presence of two gentlemen who, having had a wager on her unshakeable loyalty, had come to the house to settle it, led to the old couple's enrichment and assured prosperity.

It was this charming story which came to my mind in the train the other day as I looked at the young sandy-haired and freckled soldier opposite me on the journey to Portsmouth, for here was another example of impulsive simplicity. On the back of his right hand was tattooed a very red heart, emitting effulgence, across which two hands were clasped, and beneath were the words "True Love"; and on the back of his left hand was tattooed the head of a girl. He was perhaps twenty. Should there be no more wars to trouble the world, I thought, as from time to time I glanced at him, he will probably live to be seventy. Since tattoo marks never come out and the backs of one's hands are usually visible to oneself, he is likely to have some curious thoughts as he passes down the years. What kind of emotions, I wondered, will be his as he views them at thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-one? And supposing that this first love fails, what will be the attitude of subsequent ladies to these embellishments? For it would probably be in vain, even if he were sophisticated enough to think of it, for him to maintain that the decoration was purely symbolic, the right-hand device standing for devotion and the left for woman in the abstract. That would hardly wash. Subsequent ladies—and judging from his appearance and his early start there are sure to be some—may give him rather a difficult time.

      It all goes to prove what a dangerous thing impulse can be. And yet as I looked at his simple face, and reflected on what safe areas of normally-hidden epidermis he possessed for such pictorial ebullition, I found myself envying such a lack of self-protectiveness; and I asked myself if, after all, those who will have nothing to do with self-protectiveness are not the salt of the earth. The gamblers, the careless, the sippers of all the honey the moment contains: are not these the best?

      Most young ardencies are not as reckless as СКАЧАТЬ