THERE are men whose lives seem arguments for the existence of a conscious providence, lives fashioned as it were deliberately for one purpose with a cruelty that has deprived them of any obscure and friendly retreat. Hans Andersen is one of these, and there is a sense of unusual brutality in the ingenuity which providence expended for so small a result, a few volumes of children’s stories and a shelf of poetic dramas without merit.
To fashion this writer what was required? First and foremost a raw sensibility, a bundle of shrieking nerves which barred the possessor hopelessly from any easy comfort. The son of a cobbler of unbalanced mind, the grandson of a lunatic, Andersen might as easily have become a madman as an artist. When he was a child, his parents tried to cure his nerves at the holy well of St Regisse on St John’s Eve; but during the night which he spent by the spring he was woken by a thunderstorm and the screams of a lunatic girl who had been sleeping at his feet. It is possible that one thought saved the boy and the man from madness: ‘I am going to be famous. First you suffer the most awful things, and then you get to be famous.’ The same idea is expressed again and again in his work. ‘All who see you,’ the witch says to the mermaid who seeks a human form, ‘will say that you are the most beautiful child of man they have ever seen. You will keep your gliding gait, no dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading upon sharp knives, so sharp as to draw blood. If you are willing to suffer all this I am ready to help you.’ And in the story of The Wild Swans the heroine to save her brothers has to weave eleven shirts from stinging-nettles. ‘The sea is indeed softer than your hands, and it moulds the hardest stone, but it does not feel the pain your fingers will feel. It has no heart and does not suffer the pain and anguish you must feel.’
Andersen has been held up as an example of supreme egotism, because everything which he and those he loved suffered he related to his own future, wondering of his family’s early bitter disappointment at a failure to find a livelihood on a country estate whether God had not ruined their hopes to save him from becoming a mere farmer. But this was not egotism; it was an artist’s parallel to the Catholic ideal of the acceptance of pain for a spiritual benefit. If he had not found a reason to accept pain, his mind might well have broken; he might have been happy in the manner of his grandfather who wandered singing and wreathed in flowers through the streets of Odense or of his father who imagined himself on his deathbed one of Napoleon’s captains, instead of the broken private that he was, and cried aloud, ‘Hats off, you whelps, when the Emperor rides by.’
His nerves, too, supplied what fate next demanded in completing the artist – persistence, an inability to find happiness even when he had won his fame. In Sweden, when the students of Lund marched in a body to acclaim him, he could not believe in their sincerity; he thought they were making game of him and searched their faces for smiles. When he left Odense for Copenhagen, at the age of fourteen, without work or friends, a wise woman had declared that one day his native place would be illuminated in his honour, so that when, 48 years later, he returned to receive the freedom of the city, it might have been expected that he would enjoy a few moments of unmixed happiness. But at night, as he watched from the City Hall the torches and the lamps and the crowd singing in his honour in the square, the cold wind touched a tooth into almost unbearable pain, so that he could only count the verses still remaining and long for the programme to end. It is impossible, at times, not be convinced of the actuality of this purposeful fate; for it was an extraordinary coincidence, if it was not a malignant providence, which caused him to overhear, as he stood at his window in Copenhagen, just returned from his triumphal visit to England, a man say to his companion: ‘Look, there is our orang-outang who is so famous abroad.’
Most men have one earth into which they can creep to rest the nerves, but for Andersen it was stopped. He was deprived even of the satisfaction of sex. Again his life was curiously of a piece, as if no opportunity was to be wasted to warp his nature to the required shape. As a boy alone in Copenhagen, chance found him lodgings in a street of red lights. His surroundings must have continually aroused desires which he had not the money to satisfy. And they were never satisfied. He was as passionate as most men, three times he tried to marry, but he retained the exhausting innocence which, to quote Miss Toksvig,*3 ‘he described himself as the kind which reads the Bible and always finds the Song of Songs; the innocence that ruins sleep’.
There remained for fate to limit and define his range as an artist. The son of a washerwoman and a cobbler Andersen inherited the folk, tradition; his earliest fairy stories were transcripts of tales he had heard as a child. Witches were part of his everyday life; they were called in by his mother to foretell his future, to heal his father’s sickness, and the little medieval court of Odense supplied one of the commonest ingredients of his tales, the ease with which a poor child can talk with royalty. Odense had only 7,000 inhabitants, but it had a palace and a governor and a regiment of dragoons, and the cobbler’s son was admitted to audience. But Andersen did not submit easily to the claims of this environment. It was his ambition to be a dramatic poet; with extraordinary persistence he followed this aim to the end of his life, and because his plays almost invariably failed he was convinced that he was not appreciated in his own country.
Miss Toksvig’s is a most satisfying biography of this unhappy man in all his curious glassy transparency. She writes with sympathy and without sentimentality; and it is a pleasure to watch her masterly choice and arrangement of incident into a story which is always exciting. One can only wish that she had not confined herself to Andersen’s life. She throws off suggestions for a new estimate of his work, which I should like to have seen pursued. ‘In Hans Christian,’ Miss Toksvig writes, ‘the Unconscious was made flesh and dwelt unashamed and bewildered among men,’ and perhaps the chief importance of Hans Andersen today to adult readers lies in the frequency with which he allowed his unconscious mind to take control of his pen. There are passages in The Snow Queen which anticipate the method of the Surréalistes. His contemporaries complained that his stories contained no moral, but it is in their occasional passages of pure fantasy, as when the flowers speak their irrelevant messages to Gerda, that his stories have their greatest importance for the contemporaries of M. Philippe Soupault.
1933
From Collected Essays
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