enlightened, from the parlor into exile in the remote nursery, where it may listen to nursery tales, traditions, and robber stories, to its heart's content, provided it take good care to have forgotten all this worthless trash when it becomes a grown person. In the society of the nineteenth century (I do not draw the boundary line sharply on the frontiers) the reaction takes place. The individual, personal human being takes the place of the social human being. Consciousness alone had previously been valued, now the unconscious is worshipped. Schelling's philosophy of nature breaks the spell of Fichte's Ego system; war is carried on against the unfruitful intellectual reflection, the folk-lore tale and the nursery story are restored to their rights, the nursery and its occupants are brought into honorable esteem once more, at times even into too great favor. In all lands the folk-lore is collected, and in most countries poets begin to remould it. The sentimental German authors of the transition period (Kotzebue and Iffland) bring children on the stage, in view of touching the audience, even Oehlenschläger introduces children into his works and is, therefore, obliged to endure the censure of Heiberg. So far as society is concerned, silence has been enforced by Rousseau with his pedagogic declamations and theories, such attention as was never known before, is bestowed on the child and above all on the childlike nature, and the enthusiasm for the education of children (Campe) is gradually supplanted by the enthusiasm for the child's "state of nature" (see Rousseau's tendency, as displayed even in Götz von Berlichingen's conversation with his little son).
There is but a step from the child to the animal. The animal is a child that will never be anything else than a child. The same tendency to make life a social life, which thrust aside the child, also banished the animal. The same thirst for simplicity, for nature, for all that is innocent and unconscious which led poetry to the child, led it also to the animal, and from the animal to all nature. Rousseau who champions the cause of the child, champions at the same time the cause of the animal; and first and foremost, as his Alpha and Omega, his "præterea censeo," the cause of nature. He studies botany, writes to Linné, expresses to him his admiration and affection. The scientific contemplation of nature determines the social, which in its turn determines the poetic. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, through his exquisite story "Paul and Virginia," introduces descriptions of nature into French prose, and, what is particularly noteworthy simultaneously with his discovery of the landscape he introduces, as his hero and heroine, two children. Alexander von Humboldt takes "Paul and Virginia" with him on his journey to the tropical regions, admiringly reads the book aloud to his travelling companions in the midst of the nature which it describes, and refers with gratitude to what he owes to Saint-Pierre. Humboldt influences Oersted who in his turn profoundly influences Andersen. The sympathetic contemplation of nature operates on the scientific, which in its turn operates on the poetic. Chateaubriand, in his highly-colored brilliant manner, depicts a nature closely related to the one which Saint-Pierre has received in his peaceful, nature-worshipping soul. Steffens, in his celebrated lectures, first introduces to Denmark the natural system of nature. About the year 1831, at the period, therefore, when Andersen's nursery stories originated, there is founded in England (the land which took the lead in bringing forward the child in literature) the first society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Branches are established in France and Germany, where societies spring up in Munich, Dresden, Berlin and Leipsic. Kierkegaard in his "Enten – Eller" (Either – Or) turns the establishment of these societies into ridicule; he sees in it but a phenomenon of the tendency to form associations, which in his eyes is a proof of the lamentable condition of individual personality. If we return now to Denmark, we will observe that the national landscape painting, with its literal imitation of nature, takes its decisive upward soaring flight at precisely the time when nursery stories are devised. Skovgaard paints the lake in which "the ugly duckling" went splashing about, and at the same time – as by a miracle – the large city becomes too small for the citizen of Copenhagen. He finds it wearisome to gaze the whole summer long on its paving-stones, its many houses and roofs, he longs to see a larger bit of the sky, he repairs to the country, lays out gardens, learns to distinguish barley from rye, becomes a rustic for the summer months. One and the same idea, the recovered idea of nature, extends its influence through all the spheres of life, just as the water of an upland stream flowing downward is distributed through a series of different basins. Could an idea produce a more singular effect, or a more suggestive one for contemplation? During the past century there has been nothing similar. We may, as has been wittily remarked, rummage through Voltaire's "Henriade," without finding a single blade of grass; there is no fodder for the horses in it. We may turn over the leaves of Baggesen's poems, without stumbling on a single description of nature, used even as an accessory. What a leap from this poetry to such poetry as that of Christian Winther, in which the human figures are merely used as accessories and the landscape is almost universally the main point of interest, and how far removed was the world, even in his day, from so much as dreaming of a poetry like that of Andersen, in which animals and plants fill the place of man, indeed, almost make man superfluous!27
Now what is there in plants, in animals, in the child, so attractive to Andersen? He loves the child because his affectionate heart draws him to the little ones, the weak and helpless ones, of whom it is allowable to speak with compassion, with tender sympathy, and because when he devotes such sentiments to a hero, – as in "Only a Fiddler," – he is derided for it (compare with Kierkegaard's criticism),28 but when he dedicates them to a child, he finds the natural resting-place for his mood. It is owing to his genuine democratic feeling for the lowly and neglected that Andersen, himself a child of the people, continually introduces into his nursery stories (as Dickens, in his novels), forms from the poorer classes of society, "simple folk," yet endowed with the true nobility of the soul. As examples of this may be mentioned the washerwoman in "Little Tuk" and in "Good-for-Nothing," the old maid in "From a Window in Vartou," the watchman and his wife in "The Old Street-Lamp," the poor apprentice boy in "Under the Willow-Tree," and the poor tutor in "Everything in its Right Place." The poor are as defenseless as the child. Furthermore, Andersen loves the child, because he is able to portray it, not so much in the direct psychologic way of the romance, – he is by no means a direct psychologist, – as indirectly, by transporting himself with a bound into the child's world, and he acts as though no other course were possible. Rarely, therefore, has charge been more unjust than that of Kierkegaard when he accused Andersen of being unable to depict children; but when Kierkegaard, who, moreover, as a literary critic combines extraordinary merits with great lacks (especially in point of historic survey), takes occasion, in making this criticism, to remark that in Andersen's romances the child is always described "through another," what he says is true. It is no longer true, however, the moment Andersen, in the nursery story, puts himself in the place of the child and ceases to recognize "another." He seldom introduces the child into his nursery stories as taking part in the action and conversation. He does it most frequently in the charming little collection "A Picture-Book without Pictures," where more than anywhere else he permits the child to speak with the entire simplicity of its nature. In such brief, naïve child-utterances as those cited in it there is much pleasure and entertainment. Every one can recall anecdotes of a similar character. I remember once taking a little girl to a place of amusement, in order to hear the Tyrolese Alpine singers. She listened very attentively to their songs. Afterward, when we were walking in the garden in front of the pavilion, we met some of the singers in their costumes. The little maiden clung timidly to me, and asked in astonishment: "Are they allowed to go about free?" Andersen has no equal in the narration of anecdotes of this kind.29 in his nursery stories we find sundry illustrations of the fact, as in the charming words of the child in "The Old House," when it gives the man the pewter soldiers that he might not be "so very, very lonely," and a few kind answers in "Little Ida's Flowers." Yet his child forms are comparatively rare. The most noteworthy ones are little Hjalmar, little Tuk, Kay and Gerda, the unhappy, vain Karen in "The Red Shoes," a dismal but well-written story, the little girl with the matches and the little girl in "A Great Sorrow," finally Ib and Christine, the children in "Under the Willow-Tree." Besides these real children there are some ideal ones, the little fairy-like Thumbling and the little wild robber-maiden, undoubtedly Andersen's freshest child creation, the masterly portrayal of whose wild nature forms a most felicitous contrast to the many good, fair-haired and tame children of fiction.
The fables of the past century (for instance, Lessing's fables) are merely ethic.
G. Brandes: S. Kierkegaards. Ein literarisches Charakterlied. Leipsic, 1879.
The following composition was recently written in Copenhagen by a little maiden of ten years on the theme, "An Unexpected Joy." "There dwelt in Copenhagen a man and his wife who were very happy. All went well with them, and they were extremely fond of each other; but they felt very sorry because they had no children. They waited a long time, still they got none. At last the husband went away on a long journey and was gone ten years. When the time was at an end, he returned home, entered his house, and was happy indeed to find five little children in the nursery, some playing, some in the cradle. This was an unexpected joy!" This composition, however is an example of the kind of naivete' which Andersen never uses. The point would attract a French story-teller, but, like everything else that alludes to sex, it leaves Andersen perfectly cold.
