what a great thing it is in this perplexed, confused, and, if not unhappy at least unrestful time, to come across a thing which is cleanly itself! what a pleasure it is amid our entwining controversies to find straightness, and among our confused noises a chord. hans christian andersen is a good type of that simplicity; and his own generation recognised him at once; now, when those contemporaries who knew him best are for the most part dead, their recognition is justified. of men for whom so much and more is said by their contemporaries, how many can stand the test which his good work now stands, and stands with a sort of sober triumph? contemporary praise has a way of gathering dross. we all know why. there is the fear of this, the respect for that; there is the genuine unconscious attachment to a hundred unworthy and ephemeral things; there is the chance philosophy of the moment over-weighing the praise-giver. in a word, perhaps not half-a-dozen of the great men who wrote in the generation before our own would properly stand this test of a neat and unfringed tradition. it is not to[pg 150] be pretended that according to that test so must men be judged. many of the very greatest, hugo for instance, and in his line, huxley (a master of english); or, again, to go further back, the great byron, would not pass the test.
things have been said about most men, great or little, in our fevered time, so exaggerated, so local and so lacking balance, whether of experience or of the fear of posterity, that contemporary opinion should not be allowed by its misfortunes to weigh them down. but a man has a quality of his own when he is so made that even his contemporaries do him justice, and that was the case with hans christian andersen. i will bargain that if our letters survive five hundred years, this excellent writer will quietly survive. even the french may incorporate him. and next it is the business of one who praises so much to ask in what the excellence of this writer consists. it is threefold: in the first place, he always said what he thought; in the second place, he was full of all sorts of ways of saying it; and, in the third place, he said only what he had to say.
to say what one thinks, that is, to tell the truth, is so exceedingly rare that one may almost call it a grace in a man. just those same manifold strings which pull contemporary criticism hither and thither, and which have made me suggest above that contemporary criticism commonly belittles a man in the long run, just those same strings pull at every writer to make him conform to what he knows to be false[pg 151] in his time. but some men—with limitations, it is true, and only by choosing a particular framework—manage to tell the truth all their lives; those men, if they have other literary qualities, are secure of the future.
and this leads me to the second point, which is that andersen could not only tell the truth but tell it in twenty different ways, and of a hundred different things. now this character has been much exaggerated among literary men in importance, because literary men, perceiving it to be the differentiation which marks out the great writer from the little, think it to be the main criterion of letters. it is not the main criterion; but it is a permanent necessity in great writing. there is no great writing without this multiplicity, which is sometimes called imagination, sometimes experience, and sometimes judgment, but which is in its essence a proper survey of the innumerable world. this quality it is which makes the great writers create what are called "characters"; and whether we recognise those "characters" as portraits drawn from the real world (they are such in balzac), or as figments (they are such in dickens), or as heroines and heroes (they are such in shakespeare and in homer, if you will excuse me), yet that they exist and live in the pages of the writer means that he had in him that quality of contemplation which corresponds in our limited human nature to the creative power.
lastly, i say that andersen said what he had to[pg 152] say and no more. this quality in writers is not restraint—a futile word dear to those who cannot write—it is rather a sort of chastity in the pen. the writer of this kind is one who unconsciously does not add; if any one were to ask him why he should not add an ornament or anything supposititious, he would be bewildered and perhaps might answer: "why should i?" the instinct behind it is that which produces all terseness, all exactitude, and all economy in style.
andersen, then, had all those three things which make a great writer, and a very great writer he is.
note that he chose his framework, or, at any rate, that he was persuaded to it. he could not have been so complete had he not addressed himself to children, and it is his glory that he is read in childhood. there is no child but can read hans christian andersen, and i at least have come across no man who, having read him in childhood, does not continue to read him throughout life. he wrote nothing that was not for the enlivening or the sustenance or the guiding of the human soul; he wrote nothing that suggested questions only. if one may speak of him in terms a trifle antiquated (or rather for the moment old-fashioned), he was instinct with charity, and therefore he is still full of life.
having said so much of andersen in general, something should be said of him in particular. he was northern; you always feel as you read him that if his scene is laid in the open air, the air is fresh[pg 153] and often frosty; that if he is talking indoors the room is cosy and often old. certain passions which the north lacks are lacking in him, both upon their good and upon their evil side. he is never soldierly, and he is never revengeful; he is never acute with the desire for life, but, again, he is never envious. those who read him and who are also northern may well be in love with denmark. it is a triumph of our civilisation that this little land, quite outside the limits of the roman empire, not riven by any of the empires' great vital resurrections, undisturbed by the vision of the twelfth and of the thirteenth centuries, spared from the march of napoleon's armies, should be so completely european. what could be more european to-day than that well-organised, contented, peasant state? it is a good irony to put against the blundering prophecies of barbaric people that beyond the germanies this secure and happy state exists. one might put it in a phrase a little too epigrammatic and say that as one reads hans christian andersen one remembers elsinore, and one recalls the good architecture of copenhagen. if ever any misfortune again shall threaten that state, and if barbarism attempts to play the fool with it, something that really is the conscience of europe and not the empty and sham organisation to which that phrase is too often prostituted will arise and protect the danes.
