us once again, collectively, and was gone, and we struggled to a vertical position, the elderly ladies finding the assistance of their attendant priests more than useful in this process.
My knees, too, were very sore; but what did I care? I had seen Pope Benedict XV.
THE TRUE WIZARD OF THE NORTH
It is no disrespect to the author of the Waverley Novels to say that the true Wizard of the North was born on a Sunday in 1805, in a cobbler's cottage at Odense, in Denmark, when Scott was thirty-four.
Hans Christian Andersen's father, a cobbler, was a thoughtful, original, and eccentric man—as cobblers have the chance to be. On the day that his little Hans was born, he sat by the bed-side and read to the child Holberg's "Comedies." It made no difference that the audience only cried. Later the father became his son's devoted slave and companion, reading to him the "Arabian Nights," constructing puppet theatres and other entertaining devices, and entrusting him with his peculiar views of the world and religion. The mother was, in the words of Mary Howitt, Hans Andersen's first English translator, "all heart"; from her perhaps came his instant readiness to feel with others, his overmastering sense of pity, his smiling tears, while from his father much of his odd humour and irony. But there was still another influence. Like a child of genius of our own race with whom Hans Andersen has not a little in common, Charles Lamb (who in 1805 was thirty), the boy was much with his grandmother, his father's mother, a distressful gentlewoman who, having come upon evil days, lived in great poverty with an insane husband, a toy-maker, and kept the home together by acting as gardener to a lunatic asylum. To little Hans, who was often with her, she would tell stories of her own youth and that of her mother, who had done an extremely Andersenian thing—had run away from a rich home to marry a comedian.
Now and then Hans would accompany her to the asylum itself. "All such patients," he has written, in "The True Story of My Life," "as were harmless were permitted to go freely about the Court; they often came to us in the garden, and with curiosity and terror I listened to them and followed them about; nay, I even ventured so far as to go with the attendants to those who were raving mad. … Close beside the place where the leaves were burned the poor old women had their spinning room. I often went in there and was very soon a favourite. … I passed for a remarkably wise child who would not live long; and they rewarded my eloquence by telling me tales in return; and thus a world as rich as that of the 'Thousand and One Nights' was revealed to me. The stories told by these old ladies, and the insane figures which I saw around me in the asylum, operated in the meantime so powerfully upon me that when it grew dark I scarcely dared to go out of the house."
Here, given a sensitive, imaginative nature, we have material enough to build up much of the genius of Hans Christian Andersen. How could he have been very different from what he was, one asks, with such companions and surroundings in the most impressionable years—an embittered whimsical father, full of the "Arabian Nights," a mother "all heart," a grandmother all romantic memory, a mad, toy-making grandfather, and these wool-gathering old ladies inventing strange histories to amuse him? And, added to all this, circumstances of poverty to drive his thoughts inwards? Poets, it would almost seem, can be both made as well as born.
But the boy had still more luck; for he struck up an acquaintance, ripening into friendship, with a man who carried out play-bills, "and he gave me one every day. With this, I seated myself in a corner and imagined an entire play, according to the name of the piece and the characters in it. This was my first, unconscious poetizing." A little later a clergyman's widow gave the boy the freedom of her library (as Samuel Salt gave his to the little Charles Lamb), and there he first read Shakespeare: "I saw Hamlet's ghost, and lived upon the hearth with Lear. The more persons died in a play, the more interesting I thought it. At this time I wrote my first piece; it was nothing less than a tragedy, wherein, as a matter of course, everybody died. The subject of it I borrowed from an old song about Pyramus and Thisbe; but I had increased the incidents through a hermit and his son, who both loved Thisbe, and who both killed themselves when she died. Many speeches of the hermit were passages from the Bible, taken out of the Little catechism, especially from our duty to our neighbours." Later the boy wrote a drama with a king and queen in it, and, feeling himself at fault as to the language of courts, produced a German-French-English-and-Danish lexicon, and took a word out of each language to lend the royal speeches an air.
Hans Andersen's father dying when the boy was still young, the mother married again, and Hans was left even more to himself. He read and wrote and recited all day, so that it became generally understood that he was to be a poet; and as nothing is so absurd to the eyes of healthy normal boys as a poet, he was the victim of not a little ridicule. His mother's wish to apprentice him to a tailor precipitated his fate. Rather than that he would go, he declared, to Copenhagen and join the theatre. To deny her son anything was beyond her power; but she was happier about it after consulting a witch and receiving from the coffee-grounds and the cards the assurance (afterwards realised) that he would become a great man, and that in honour of him Odense would one day be illuminated. And so at the age of fourteen, with thirty shillings and a bundle of clothes, Hans Christian Andersen arrived in Copenhagen to seek his fortune.
On that day his childhood was over. Some one has said that nothing that really counts ever happens to us after the teens are reached, and it is more true than not. At Copenhagen, Hans Andersen, young as he was, forsook the world of fantasy and entered the world of fact. The dancer to whom he had an introduction laughed at him; he was repulsed from the theatre. For four or five years he starved and suffered. His singing and his passion for reciting, however, gained him a few friends to set against poverty and the ridicule which his earnest enthusiasm, uncouth lanky figure, and long nose brought him almost everywhere that he went. Among them were Weyse, the composer, Sibonia, the singer, and Guldborg, the poet, through whose interests the boy was able to take lessons in singing and dancing, and even to make his theatrical début in the chorus. It was the composition of a tragedy that decided his fate and made his fortune, for it came into the hands of Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Theatre, brought him the interest of that influential man, and led to the Royal Grant which sent the young author to the Latin School at Skagelse for a period of three years.
In 1829 he published his first characteristic work, the "Journey on Foot from Holm Canal to the East Point of Armager," a very youthful tissue of grotesque humour and impudence. A desultory year or two followed, when he wrote much and came in for a quite undue share of attack, which his sensitive nature began to construe as a death-warrant; and then, in 1833, again through Collin, a travelling grant of £70 a year for two years was obtained for him from Frederick VI, and he set off for Paris. With that journey his true career began, the success of which was never to be chequered save by occasional fits of depression following upon hostile criticism. From Paris he went to Rome, where he met Thorwaldsen and wrote his first and best known novel, "The Improvisatore," an intense and fanciful story of Rome and the stage, marked by much tender charm, and, like the writer's mother, "all heart," in which an autobiographical thread is woven. The novel had an immediate success, and Hans Andersen suddenly found himself one of the leading Danish authors.
But not yet was his real work begun. His real work was the telling of fairy tales—or "Eventyr og Historier," as he called them—the first of which were published in a slender volume in 1835, a little after "The Improvisatore," under the title "Fairy Tales as Told to Children." Since in this book were "The Tinder Box," "Little Claus and Big Claus," "The Princess and the Pea," and "Little Ida's Flowers," it will be seen that Hans Andersen entered the arena fully armed. Next year came the second part, containing "Thumbelina," "The Travelling Companion," and "The Naughty Boy," and in 1837 a third part, with "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes." Hans Andersen himself, whose constant ambition (again like Lamb) was to write successfully for the stage, thought but little of these stories, which presented no difficulties to his pen. He preferred (authors often being their own worst judges) his novels,
