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Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits

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Title: Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits

Author: Georg Brandes

Translator: Rasmus Björn Anderson


        
Release date: September 17, 2015 [eBook #49999]
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EMINENT AUTHORS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: LITERARY PORTRAITS ***
EMINENT AUTHORS

OF THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY.

_LITERARY PORTRAITS_

BY

Dr. GEORG BRANDES



_TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL BY_

RASMUS B. ANDERSON,

UNITED STATES MINISTER TO DENMARK; AUTHOR OF "NORSE MYTHOLOGY,"
"VIKING TALES OF THE NORTH," "AMERICA NOT DISCOVERED
BY COLUMBUS," AND OTHER WORKS.

NEW YORK:

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.



1886

[Illustration: Georg Brandes]




NOTE.

This volume is published by special arrangement with the author. At my
request Dr. Georg Brandes has designated me as his American translator
and takes a personal interest in the enterprise.

To Auber Forestier, who kindly aided me in translating the stories of
Björnstjerne Björnson, I have to express my cordial thanks for valuable
assistance in the preparation of this translation.

                                                    RASMUS B. ANDERSON.

     COPENHAGEN, DENMARK,
         July, 1886.




AUTHOR'S PREFACE.


It is a well-known fact that at the beginning of this century several
prominent Danes endeavored to acquire citizenship in German literature.
Since then the effort has not been repeated by any Danish author. To
say nothing of the political variance between Germany and Denmark,
these examples are far from alluring on the one hand, and on the
other hand they furnish no criterion of the Danish mind. The great
remodeler of the Danish language, Oehlenschläger, placed his works
before the German public in German so wholly lacking in all charm,
that he only gained the rank of a third-class poet in Germany. The
success, however, which lower grades of genius, such as Baggesen and
Steffens, have attained, was the result, in the first case, of a
veritable chameleon-like nature and a talent for language that was
unique of its kind, and in the second, of a complete renunciation of
the mother-tongue.

The author of this volume, who is far from being a chameleon, and who
has by no means given up his native tongue, who stands, indeed, in the
midst of the literary movement which has for some time agitated the
Scandinavian countries, knows very well that a human being can only
wield a powerful influence in the country where he was born, where
he was educated by and for prevailing circumstances. In the present
volume, as in other writings, his design has simply been to write in
the German language for Europe; in other words, to treat his materials
differently than he would have treated them for a purely Scandinavian
public. He owes a heavy debt to the poetry, the philosophy, and the
systematic æsthetics of Germany; but feeling himself called to be
the critic, not the pupil, of the history of German literature, he
cherishes the hope that he may be able to repay at least a small
portion of his debt to Germany.

The nine essays of which this book consists, and of which even those
that have already appeared in periodicals, have been thoroughly
revised, are not to be regarded as "Chips from the Workshop" of a
critic; they are carefully treated literary portraits, united by a
spiritual tie. Men have sat for them, with whom the author, with one
exception (Esaias Tegnér), has been personally acquainted, or of whom
he has at least had a close view. To be sure, the same satisfactory
survey cannot always be taken of a living present as of a completed
past epoch; but perhaps a picture of the present as a whole may be
furnished, the general physiognomy may be arrived at, by characterizing
as faithfully and vividly as possible, some of its typical forms.

The mode of treatment in these essays is greatly diversified. In some
of them the individuality of the author portrayed is represented as
exhaustively as possible; in others, an attempt has simply been made to
present the man in actual person before the eyes of the reader; some
are purely psychological; others offer a fragment of æsthetics; others,
again, are eminently biographical and historical. In all of them the
characteristics of the individual are so chosen as to bring out the
most important features of the author's life and works.

Even the personalities described are of a very heterogeneous nature.
They belong to not less than six nationalities. Common to all of them,
however, there is a something which is more easily felt than defined;
they are modern authors. By this I do not mean that they all, without
exception, with full consciousness, and with their whole hearts, have
paid homage to the "modern" in art and in thought, but merely that
they, even though in a very unequal degree,--which heightens the charm
to the observer,--represent the modern style of mind.

                                                         GEORG BRANDES.



        CONTENTS.

        PAUL HEYSE
        HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
        JOHN STUART MILL
        ERNEST RENAN
        ESAIAS TEGNÉR
        GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
        FREDERIK PALUDAN-MÜLLER
        BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
        HENRIK IBSEN


[Illustration: PAUL HEYSE.]




EMINENT AUTHORS OF THE 19TH CENTURY.




PAUL HEYSE.


1875.


"How does it happen," I asked recently of a distinguished
portrait-painter, "that you, who formerly have made successful efforts
in several other branches of art, have at last confined yourself wholly
to portrait-painting?"

"I think it is because it has given me the most pleasure," replied he,
"to study and to perpetuate an object which has never existed before,
and will never appear again."

With these words he seemed to me strikingly to designate the interest
which attracts a person to distinct individuality, that of the inner as
well as that of the outer being. To the critic, too, the individual is
an especially alluring object; to him, too, the execution of a portrait
is a singularly fascinating occupation. Unfortunately, his means of
communication are deplorably far behind those of the painter. What
can be more difficult and more fruitless than the attempt to express
in words that which is purely individual--that which in accordance
with its very nature must mock at every effort of reproduction? Is not
personality, in its uninterrupted flow, the true _perpetuum mobile_,
which does not admit of being constructed?

And yet these insolvable problems ever charm and attract anew. After
we have gradually become familiar with an author, have come to feel
ourselves perfectly at home in his writings, to perceive dimly that
certain of their characteristics dominate others, and then happen to
be by nature of a critical turn of mind, we can find no peace until
we have rendered ourselves an account of our impressions, and made
clear the indistinct image of the character of another _ego_ that has
arisen within our own soul. We hear or read criticisms on an author
and find them absurd. Why are they absurd? Other statements seem to us
but half true. What is lacking to make them wholly true? A new work of
importance from his pen appears. How far have the earlier works been a
preparation for it? We almost become curious to learn how we ourselves
would characterize his talent--and we satisfy our curiosity.



I.


Whoever casts a glance on the long row of closely printed volumes
which form Paul Heyse's complete works, and remembers that the author
was born in the year 1830, will first of all be apt to exclaim,
"What industry!" Involuntarily he will trace back this astonishing
productiveness to a will power of rare endurance. None the less,
however, does it owe its origin to a singularly fortunate nature. This
nature possessed within itself so luxuriant a fruitfulness that it
has yielded its harvest without the least effort of the will, without
any undue exertion; it has yielded a harvest of such variety that we
might believe it to be fostered according to a defined plan and with a
painstaking will; nevertheless, it has obviously been permitted to act
with thorough independence. To allow nature to rule, to follow one's
own pleasure or bent (sich gehen zu lassen[1]), has been from the
outset, as we soon come to feel, Heyse's motto, and so it happens that
with qualities which usually lead to a wandering, scanty, fragmentary
productiveness, he has completed and perfected each undertaking, having
written lyric and epic poems, one grand epos (Thekla), a dozen dramas,
more than fifty "novellen," and two large romances. He began early;
while yet a student, he entered on his literary career. Free from care
as a pedestrian tourist who gayly whistles as he strolls along, never
hurrying, pausing to drink at every spring, lingering before the bushes
by the wayside, and plucking flowers as well as berries, resting in the
shade, and wandering along in the shade, he has gradually trodden a
pathway of such extent that we could only expect to see it traversed by
one who maintained a breathless march, with eyes fixed unwaveringly on
the goal.

The voice followed by Heyse as an author is unquestionably the voice
of instinct. North German though he is, nothing is farther removed
from him than cool deliberation and premeditation. Born in Berlin,
he nevertheless takes root in Munich, and finds in the ardent South
German race and in the throbbing South German life the surroundings
most congenial to his temperament; at home in South Germany, he yet
feels constantly drawn to Italy, as the land where the human plant has
attained a more beautiful and luxuriant growth than elsewhere, one
that is less disturbed by reflex action, and where the voice of the
blood speaks most distinctly, most powerfully. This voice is the siren
voice which allures Heyse. Nature! Nature! keeps ringing in his ear.
Germany has authors who appear almost wholly devoid of inspiration, and
who have only been made what they are by a vigorous North German will
(as Karl Gutzkow, for instance); others (as Fanny Lewald) whose works
bear the impress of an active North German intellect. Neither through
volition nor deliberation does Heyse create and fashion his works, but
simply by heeding the inner impulse.

Many an author is tempted to impart to his reader an idea of himself
differing somewhat from the correct one. He takes pleasure in
representing himself as that which he _would like_ to be,--in former
times, as being endowed either with keener sensibilities or deeper
melancholy than he ever possessed, in our day as being now more
experienced, now colder or harsher, than he really is. More than one
distinguished author, as Mérimée, or Lecomte de Lisle, has so shrunk
from manifesting his emotions that he has succeeded, on the other hand,
in exhibiting an appearance of lack of feeling by no means natural to
him. Such people make it a point of honor not to breathe freely and
easily until they have crossed the snow-line where the human element
in our natures ends, and their contempt for those who lay claim to the
sympathy of the multitude on the plane below leads them to yield to
the temptation to force their way up to a height whither pride, not
instinct, bids them ascend. For Heyse this temptation does not exist.
He has never for a moment been able or willing to write himself into
either greater warmth or coldness than he actually felt. He has never
professed to be writing with his heart's blood when he was fashioning
calmly as an artist, and he has patiently submitted when the critics
censured him for lack of warmth. On the other hand, he has never
been able to report, as so many of the most eminent French authors
have done, a horrible or revolting occurrence with the same stoic
tranquillity, and in the same tone that would be suitable in stating
where a man of the world purchases his cigars, or where the best
champagne could be obtained. He aims neither at the ardent style of
passionate temperaments, nor at the self-control of the worldling. In
comparison with Swinburne he seems rather cold, and in comparison with
Flaubert naïve. But the narrow path in which he wanders is precisely
that which is pointed out to him by the instinct of his innermost
being, by the purely individual and yet so complicated being which is
the result of his nature.



II.


The power which an individual obeys as an artist, necessarily becomes
the power which in his works is exalted to the place of honor. That is
the reason why Heyse as an author glorifies nature. Not what a human
being thinks or desires, but what he is by nature interests Heyse in
him. The highest duty in his eyes is to honor nature and heed her
voice. Sin against nature is the true sin. Give her free scope, and let
her act her own pleasure.

There are, therefore, not many authors who are such marked fatalists as
Heyse. In free will, according to the traditional sense of the word,
he does not believe, and is evidently quite as sceptically opposed to
Kant's categorical imperative as his Edwin or his Felix.[2] But if he
does not believe in innate ideas, he does believe in innate instinct,
and this instinct is sacred to him. In his "novellen" he has described
how unhappy the soul feels when this instinct is either disturbed or
rendered uncertain. In his "Kenne Dich Selbst" (Know Thyself) it is
intelligence, in his "Reise nach dem Glück" (Journey after Happiness)
it is morality that is the disturber of the peace.

In the first of these "novellen" Heyse has represented the anguish
which proceeds from a too early or a premeditated invasion on the
instinctive life of the soul. "That beautiful stupor of youth, that
dreamy, unconscious plenitude of the powers, the pure faculty of
enjoyment of the yet unexhausted senses, was lost to young Franz
through his premature struggle for self-consciousness."[2] He here
portrays the sleeplessness of the mind, which is as dangerous for the
health of the soul as actual sleeplessness is for the welfare of the
body, and shows how one in whom the reflex faculty is maimed "loses
that mysterious, obscure substance which is the very pith and marrow of
our personality."

In "Die Reise nach dem Glück" it is conventional morality, which by
supplanting instinct has shattered the soul. A young girl, having
conquered her own natural impulses from motives of inculcated morality,
has banished her lover from her presence late at night, and thereby
become the innocent cause of his death. The remembrance of this
misfortune haunts her constantly. "If one's own heart does not point
out the way, one is sure to go astray. Once before in my life I was
made wretched because I refused to hearken to my heart, let it cry as
loudly as it would. Now I will pay heed if it but whispers to me, and I
will have ear for nothing else."[3]

In instinct the entire nature is present. Now if the inner devastation
which results where instinct has lost its guiding power, be in Heyse's
eyes the most profound of all misfortunes, to the characters he
delights most in delineating, the consciousness of life presents the
exact opposite; that is, the most profound sense of happiness in the
enjoyment of the totality and harmony of their natures. Heyse, as a
matter of course, is far removed from considering self-introspection
as a principle inimical to the healthy sense of life. His own views
appear to be about the same as those expressed by the invalid in
"Kenne Dich Selbst" in the words: just as agreeable as it may be for
him to awaken in the night, to consider and to know that he is able to
sleep still longer, just so glorious it appears to him to arouse from
his dreamy state of happiness, to collect his thoughts, to reflect,
and then, as it were, to turn over on the other side and indulge in
further enjoyment. At all events, in his romance "Kinder der Welt"
(Children of the World), he has permitted Balder, the most ideally
fashioned character in the book, to carry out this last thought in a
still more significant way. Melancholy views have just been expressed,
speculations regarding the sun which shines indifferently on the
just and on the unjust, and looks down upon more wretchedness than
happiness, and about the infinite, ever-recurring miseries of life, and
more to like effect. Franzel, the young socialist printer, has been
expatiating upon the opinion that one who had truly considered the
lot of humanity, could never find rest or peace, and in his distress
has called life a lie when Balder attempts to show him that a life
in which repose was possible, would no longer deserve the name. And
then Balder explains to Franzel in what the enjoyment of life for him
consists; namely, in "experiencing past and future in one." With the
utmost originality he declares that he could have no enjoyment if
his experiences were incomplete, and that in his silent moments of
contemplation all the scattered elements of his being were united in
one harmonious whole. "Whenever I have wished to do so, that is to
say, as often as I have desired to make for myself a genuine holiday
of life and to enjoy to the utmost my little existence, I have, as it
were, conjured up all the periods of my life at once: my laughing,
sportive childhood, when I was yet strong and well, then the first
glow of thought and feeling, the first pangs of youth, the foreboding
of what a full, healthy, mature life must be, and at the same time the
renunciation which usually becomes a habit only to very old people."
To such a conception of life, human existence is not divided into
moments, which vanish, leaving us to bemoan their disappearance, nor
is it broken into fragments in the service of reciprocally contending
impulses and thoughts; to one who possesses the faculty of casting out
an anchor at any moment, of realizing the totality and reality of one's
own being, life cannot lacerate like a bad dream. "Do you not think,"
says Balder, "that he who can generate within himself at any moment,
if he but choose, such a fulness of the sense of existence, must
consider it empty talk when people say, it were better never to have
been born?"[4] It must be remembered that it is a cripple whose days
are numbered, who utters these words; and a cripple, moreover, whom
the poet has evidently modelled after the image of the so differently
thinking Leopardi. The peculiar kind of epicurean philosophy expressed
by them, and which, through a synthetic reflection, gathers together
all time in the eternal present, is in reality the poet's conclusive
conception of life. It is the hearkening of harmoniously planned
nature to her own harmonies. The infinite gods make all their gifts to
their favorites complete, all the infinite joys and all the infinite
sorrows. This life-philosophy admits into its inner harmony even the
discord of infinite pain, and succeeds in finding for it a satisfactory
solution. Here is the point wherein Heyse most sharply differs from
Turgenief and the other great modern pessimists of poetry. He makes
bold to impute to his favorite characters even the most unlovely and
shocking errors, in order that he may restore to them, after divers
trials and afflictions, their inner peace. The young baron in the
romance, "Im Paradiese" (In Paradise), is an instance of this. A sin
against his better self weighs upon his conscience. He has lost that
inner harmony with his own emotional nature, "on which everything
depends." It becomes manifest in the course of the book that through
this failing, he has, besides, transgressed against his best friend.
Nevertheless, through all the mistakes and misfortunes, which are the
inevitable result, he finds himself again. The harmony of nature was
but temporarily set aside; not, as he had feared, hopelessly destroyed.

Instinct is directly the voice of the blood. Hence it comes that
Heyse's characters are deeply rooted in family and race. Like the
law of Moses, they seem to teach that the soul is in the blood. They
follow the voice of the blood, and to it they appeal. The undeveloped
ones among them are the vigorous expression of the type of a race;
the developed ones know their own nature and respect it; they accept
it as it is with the feeling that it cannot be altered; they are
as thoroughly guided by the instinct of their natures as are the
characters of Balzac by selfishness. In order to render clear my
meaning, let me quote a few passages from the "Kinder der Welt."
When Edwin falls passionately in love with Toinette, his brother
Balder, unknown to him, goes to her to implore her not to reject his
brother, through caprice or frivolity, and throw herself away on a
stranger. Her answer to his appeal is that she has but just learned
and comprehended wherefore it is that in her whole life she has never
been able to gain happiness. She has been informed of the secret of
her origin, namely, that her unhappy mother had been betrayed into
her father's power through force, and from this fact she draws the
certainty that it is impossible for her to love. "My friend," says
she, "I feel sure you mean well by me, you and your brother, but it
would be criminal in me to persuade myself that you could help me now
that everything is so clear to me, and that I am convinced that my
destiny irrevocably _lies in the blood_." (The words are emphasized in
the text.) This is in her eyes the last irrefutable argument. In all
the characters of the book this respect for nature, almost bordering
on superstition, is prominent. As it is with Toinette, so it is in
the case of her opposite pole Lea. They are contrasts in every point;
in this one particular alone they accord. After Lea, who has become
the wife of Edwin, has learned how much power the memory of Toinette
still exercises over his heart, and is overpowered with grief at the
discovery, she is one day reading a book by Edwin, and for a time
consoling herself by considering how much she understands of his
writings that would be above the comprehension of another woman, when
suddenly she flings away the book, for the thought rushes through her
brain "how powerless is all comprehension of _minds_ in comparison with
the blind, irrational elemental attraction of _natures_ which enslaves
all freedom and infatuates the wisest." She is a woman apparently of
a purely intellectual mould. A lively, ardent desire for knowledge
and for clearness of mental vision has led her to Edwin; he gave her
instructions in--philosophy. One would therefore suppose that she,
on her part, would at this crisis have attempted to combat the magic
power of the blood by an appeal to the intellectual forces which have
for so long united her with Edwin. On the contrary. Far from being
characterized as all mind and soul, she is beyond all else a _nature_.
She has always loved Edwin passionately, but she has feared that his
love, less ardent than her own, would be made to recoil by outbursts
of her passion, and yet she--the philosopher--has said to herself, in
her loneliness: "Love is folly--blissful madness--laughter and weeping
without sense or meaning. Thus I have always loved him until reason was
lost and forgotten." Now that the happiness of her wedded life is at
stake, she breaks out into the words: "If he perceives that the blood
of my mother flows in my veins,--hot Old Testament blood,--perhaps he
will discover that he made a grievous mistake when he thought that
he could form with such a being 'a marriage of reason.' Perhaps the
day may come when I dare tell him everything, because he himself is
no longer satisfied with a modest life-happiness, because he has come
to demand something prouder, more unrestrained, more overwhelmingly
profuse--and then I can say to him, 'You need not seek far; still
waters are deep.'"[5] Everything is here characteristic, the tracing
back to origin and race, as well as the protest of this ardent,
passionate nature against the disguise of spontaneous passion as a
reasonable sacrifice. Only those who are familiar with this fundamental
trait of Heyse will have true comprehension of and interest in one of
his dramas which might otherwise be considered his weakest, and which
in many respects appears to me not wholly worthy of him; I mean "Die
Göttin der Vernunft" (The Goddess of Reason). Is it not extremely
singular that Heyse, with the whole gigantic French Revolution to
choose from, should single out this theme of all others and treat it in
precisely the way he has done? Many a poet in the selection of such a
subject would have in view an organ for the pathos of the revolution,
or would allow the purely ideal inspiration of the goddess of reason
in the historic crisis to ennoble a past which, though frivolous and
undignified, has nevertheless tragically avenged itself. Such a poet
as Hamerling could no doubt make something appropriate out of the
theme. Heyse, true to his temperament, paused awestruck before this
apparition: a woman, a bit of nature, with feminine instincts and
feminine passion, is proclaimed to be reason, the goddess of reason,
that is to say, the dry, rigid, dead, rationalistic reason of the
eighteenth century! Thereupon Heyse creates a fictitious woman who
by virtue of the depth of her nature (upon the whole, far in advance
of her time) is overpowered by the feeling that vast, all-embracing
life does not admit of being traced back to any scholastic formula,
a woman who loves and fears, suffers and hopes, who trembles for the
life of her father and that of her lover, who in her anguish lest her
lover should misunderstand her, falls into a state of despondency,
who as a genuine child of her author has said: "To me the highest aim
is to do nothing which causes me to be at variance with myself," and
then permits this woman--her every fibre quivering with passion, in
a frenzy of personal despair, without a thought of the universal and
the abstract, of the Republic or of intellectual freedom, and while
her father is being murdered before the church door--to be driven to
proclaim from the altar the new gospel of reason, which she herself has
once mockingly designated the world's law that two times two make four.
This drama appears to me of far greater value as a contribution to the
psychology of its author than from a poetic point of view.

Nevertheless, it would be an injustice to Heyse to infer from what
has hitherto been made prominent, that he recognizes nothing higher
than elemental nature and its impulses. By the word instinct is meant
something wholly different from _isolated_ impulses. Instinct is the
inner need of being true to one's self. Therefore, it is that Heyse
can consistently permit an independent sympathy to triumph over the
ties of blood, and even over the closest bonds of relationship. In
the novel "Der verlorene Sohn" (The Lost Son), a mother conceals, and
tends unawares the innocent murderer of her son, and after he, through
his amiability, has won the heart of the mother as well as that of the
daughter, the poet makes him lead home the daughter as his bride. "The
lost son" had been killed in honorable self-defence in the midst of
great peril, and his opponent did not even know his name. Even when
the mother learns the particulars concerning the death of her son, she
places no hindrances on account of them in the way of the marriage, but
bears alone, and without confiding her secret to a living mortal, the
misfortune that has befallen her. Here, then, with the full accord of
her character, a purely spiritual tie enters into the place of the ties
of blood; the mother adopts as a son him through whose hand her own
son has fallen; but in so doing she acts in harmony with the depths of
her nature, and preserves her soul intact. It is the same in all cases
where Heyse allows the personality, through considerations of duty, to
repress a genuine passion, a deep love. Wherever this takes place (as
in the drama "Marie Moroni," in the novelette "Die Pfadfinderin"--The
Path-finder--or in the romance "Die Kinder der Welt") it is in order
to maintain loyalty to self, in order not to forfeit the unity and
healthfulness of the individual being, and duty may be seen to flow
freely forth from the well-springs of one's own nature, inasmuch as the
command not to be at variance with self is esteemed the highest law of
duty. So far is Heyse removed from conceiving nature to be inimical to
spirituality and duty.

In his eyes nature is all-embracing; everything that lies within the
range of our possibilities, all that we perform or achieve, so far as
it be of any value, bears infallibly her stamp, and over all which
is not within our power, over our entire hereditary destiny, she
rules directly, immediately, all-powerfully, and absolutely. Even the
most unfortunate character which Heyse has portrayed, however badly
fate may have dealt with him, finds consolation in the fact that he
is a child of nature; that is to say, that he has not been shorn of
his birthright. "If the elements of my being, which exclude me from
happiness, have met and become intermingled through a great blind
dispensation of the universe, and if I be doomed to ruin because of
this combination, it is an unpleasant, but by no means an unendurable
thought. On the other hand, a Heavenly Father, who _de cœur léger_, or
perchance through pedagogic wisdom, would permit me, poor creature, to
drift about so sorrowfully between heaven and earth, in order to accord
me later a recompense throughout eternity, for my wasted time--no, dear
friend, all the royal or unroyal theology in the world cannot make that
seem plausible to me."[6]

Thus with Heyse, even he whose life has been the most aggravating
failure, takes his refuge in the conception of nature as the last
consoling thought; and thus he himself, in the most painful moments
of his life, takes refuge therein, and to this the marvellous poems
"Marianne" and "Ernst," the most profound and most touching of all his
writings, have remained as witnesses. Nature is his starting-point and
his final goal, the source of his poetry and its last word, his one and
all, his consolation, his creed.



III.


What he honors, worships, and represents, expressed in a general way,
is, therefore, nature. Now as he follows his own nature, it is his
own nature which he represents, and its fundamental trait is to be
elementally harmonious. Such a designation is very broad and vague. In
its indefiniteness it may make Heyse seem, at first, like a follower
of Goethe, and would be equally appropriate for the great master
himself. This harmony, more closely defined, is not a world-embracing
one, however; it is one that is comparatively narrow, it is an
aristocratic harmony. There is much which it excludes, much which it
fails to conciliate, does not, indeed, come into contact with. Not as
a naturalist, but as a worshipper of beauty does Heyse contemplate
the motley doings of life. It is plainly manifest that he fails to
comprehend how an artist can take pleasure in depicting forms that in
real life he would close his doors upon; in fact, he has himself, with
great frankness, declared that he has never been able to draw a figure
devoid of some lovable trait, or a female character, in whom he was
not, to a certain degree, in love.[7] That is the reason why his entire
gallery of human forms, with but few exceptions (such as Lorinser or
Jansen's wife), consists of homogeneous characters. They have not only
lineage, but noble lineage, that is, innate nobility. The quality they
have in common is what Heyse himself calls _nobility_ (_vornehmheit_).
How does he understand this word? Nobility in all his characters is
the inherent incapacity to commit any low or base deed; in the child
of nature this is regulated by the simple goodness and healthfulness
of the soul; in the person of culture, by the conscious sense of
his human worth, mingled with the conviction of the privileges of a
full, vigorous, human life, which bears within itself its norm and its
tribunal, and rather dreads incompleteness than error. Heyse himself
once defined his favorite terminus. In Salamander we read:[8]--

    "I never yet of virtue or of failing
    Have been ashamed, nor proudly did adorn
    Myself with one, nor thought my sins of veiling.

    "Beyond all else betwixt the nobly born
    And vulgar herd, this marks the separation,--
    The cowards whose hypocrisy we scorn.

    "Him call I noble, who, with moderation,
    Carves his own honor, and but little heeds
    His neighbors' slander or their approbation."

And in almost similar words Toinette, once so blinded by aristocratic
display, expresses the following fundamental thought: "There is
but _one_ genuine nobility: to remain true to one's self. Ordinary
mortals are guided by what people say, and beg others for information
regarding how they themselves should be. He who bears within himself
the true rank, lives and dies through his own grace, and is, therefore,
sovereign."[9] Genuine nobility is the stamp borne by the entire race
of beings that has sprung from this poet's brain. They all possess it
from the peasant to the philosopher, and from the fisher-maiden to the
countess. The simple barmaid in "Der Reise nach dem Glück" expresses a
conception of life fully coinciding with what has just been stated;[10]
and any one who will take the pains to turn over the leaves of
Heyse's works will discover that the little word "vornehm" (noble), or
an equivalent, is always one of the first the author brings forward
as soon as he makes any attempt to characterize or to extol. It is
sufficient to examine a single volume of his "novellen" to see how the
word "vornehm" is applied to the external appearance, look and bearing:
in "Mutter und Kind" (Mother and Child); in "Am todten See" (On the
Dead Lake); in "Ein Abenteuer" (An Adventure).[11] Or in order to be
convinced of the thrilling significance of this characteristic, it is
only needful to glance through Heyse's two romances. In his "Kinder
der Welt" all the personages that appeal to the sympathies of the
reader, respectively call each other noble spirits: Franzelius styles
Edwin and Balder "the true aristocrats of humanity"; Edwin in his most
extravagant transports of passion can find no more exalted praise for
Toinette and Lea than that they bear the impress of nobility, and
when Toinette, after her interview with Lea, acknowledges the latter
to be the worthy wife of Edwin, it is the same expression which as a
matter of course presents itself to her; in her letter, she designates
Lea "Edwin's _noble_, wise, and most charming life companion."[12]
And in the romance "Im Paradiese," the first draught of which we
doubtless possess in the versified fragment "Schlechte Gesellschaft"
(Bad Society), the so-called "bad" coterie of artists is represented
throughout as the truly good and noble, in contrast with the so-called
aristocratic society.[13] Not one of the artists is an aristocrat,
in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Their origin, like that
of the heroes in "Kinder der Welt," is extremely insignificant. But
their nobility lies in the blood; they belong to the chosen ones of
the earth, who act wisely and rightly, not from a sense of duty, or
through the wearisome conquering of evil propensities, but because of
their natures. What Toinette somewhere calls "the honest intention
to put humanity to no shame," is represented, too, in the romance
"Im Paradiese" as the natural nobility, in contradistinction to that
_noblesse_ which is based upon artificial principles.

Few poets, therefore, have portrayed such a series of characters
without guile and without vulgarity as Heyse. No one has had more
perfect faith in humanity. The most substantial proof of how urgent is
his need of rendering prominent upon every occasion the genuine metal
in human nature, is afforded by the fact that whenever a change in the
character of any of his _dramatis personæ_ does prepare a surprise
for the reader or the spectator, it is always in the way of exceeding
the expectations and showing the personality to be far better and
more admirable, far more noble-minded, than any one had supposed. In
almost all other poets the disappointment is of an opposite character.
In Heyse's "novellen," as, for instance, in "Barbarossa" or "Die
Pfadfinderin" (The Female Pathfinder), the reconciliation is effected
by permitting the bad character to repent, and since the germ of the
nature of the person in question was originally good, and although
possessing many irritable and evil qualities, he yet had no really
vicious blood in his composition, there comes about a sort of treaty of
peace between him and the reader to the astonishment of the latter. Far
more significantly, however, than in his "novellen" this characteristic
optimism comes out in Heyse's dramas. They unquestionably owe to it
their best and most effective, perhaps their most decidedly dramatic,
scenes. Let me cite a few examples. In "Charlotte Elizabeth" the
Chevalier de Lorraine has availed himself of all manner of unworthy
means in his efforts to undo the heroine and banish from France the
chief male character of the piece, the German ambassador, Count Wied.
Challenged by the count, the chevalier is severely wounded; and when
the count, caught in the meshes of political intrigue, is sent to
the Bastille, the chevalier appears in the fifth act in the audience
chamber of the king. What can he want? To present still more damaging
charges against the count? To continue his dishonorable conduct which
has already been productive of so much misfortune to his opponent, and
of a wound to himself? Will he have revenge? Does he mean to avail
himself to the utmost of the position? No; he comes to make the solemn
declaration that the count has acted like a true nobleman, and that he
himself is to blame for the duel. He even desires to be himself sent to
the Bastille in order that his opponent may not think that he, wholly
losing sight of honor, has reported a false cause of the duel; in other
words: even in this corrupt courtier there lives a sense of honor as
the residue of the ancient French spirit of chivalry, taking the place,
to a certain degree, of conscience, and compelling him, at the decisive
moment, to rise from his couch of pain in order to interpose in behalf
of the enemy whom he has pursued with savage thirst for revenge and
without any regard of consequences.

In the beautiful and national play "Hans Lange," there is a scene
which, when performed on the stage, holds the spectator in breathless
suspense, and whose close always elicits tears from many eyes; it is
the scene where the life of the young squire is at stake. He is lost
if the horsemen surmise that it is he who, disguised as the son of the
Jew, is lying on the bench. Then the head servant Henning is ushered
in by a party of horsemen, who have heard him muttering in the stable
that he knew very well how to solve the difficulty for them. Henning
has been supplanted by the young squire; before the latter came to
Lanzke, Henning was like a child of the house; now he has become less
than a stepchild, and he has always owed a grudge to the man who has
been thus preferred before him. With the most artistic skill, the scene
is now so conducted that Henning, in spite of the entreaties and curses
of those who are initiated into the secret, gives the surrounding group
clearly to understand that he means to be revenged on the young squire,
that he knows where he is, and that no power in the world will restrain
him from betraying his enemy,--until he has heaped coals of fire on the
head of the other; and then, contenting himself with the fright he has
caused, finally speaks out plainly, in order to put the pursuers, who
by this time, of course, blindly trust him, on the wrong scent.

And, finally, of precisely the same nature is the decisive and most
beautiful scene in the patriotic drama "Colberg." A council of war is
being held, and even the burghers are called upon to take part in it,
for the importance of the crisis makes it desirable that every voice
should be heard. All hope for the beleagured city seems to be gone.
The French general has issued a proclamation, summoning Gneisenau to
honorable capitulation. The entire corps of officers resolve forthwith
that there can be no question of a surrender of the citadel, and
Gneisenau thereupon lays before the citizens the proposal to entreat
the enemy to grant them a truce in order that the burghers, their
wives, and children, may leave the city, which is exposed to all
possible horrors. Then the pedantic old pedagogue Zipfel, a genuine,
old-fashioned German philologist, rises to act as spokesman for the
burghers. With many circumlocutions, with Latin form of speech, he
spins out his remarks, amid the impatience of all. He is interrupted;
he is given to understand how very well known it is that he is only
aiming at leaving the dangerous defence of the city to the commandant
and the troops. Finally, he succeeds in making clear the object he had
in view in his long narration about the great Persian war, and Leonidas
with his Spartans; it was to give force to the opinion that it behooved
them one and all to remain and die at their posts. This scene Heyse has
written _con amore_. It embraces, so to say, his entire system. For
nowhere does his good faith in humanity so triumph as in cases where,
in the old fogy, he can reveal the hero, and, in the poor pedant, show
the man of inflexible will, which no other has discovered him to be
than the poet who so well knows that every one of his creations bears
within the depths of its soul an indelible stamp of nobility.



IV.


Those authors who, as Spielhagen, for instance, most frequently linger
over the conflicts of consciousness and of the will, and are fondest
of depicting great social and political conflicts, will as a matter
of course have better success in portraying men than women. Such a
male character as Leo, in the romance "In Reih und Glied" (In Rank and
File), would seek in vain for its equal, but a female character of
the same excellence Spielhagen has not drawn. Any one, on the other
hand, whose spirit seeks the nobility and grace of the absolutely
natural, of visible and spiritual beauty, will as a matter of course
give the preference to women, and draw them better than men. Herein
Heyse resembles his master, Goethe. In almost all of his productions
the female characters are placed in the foreground, and the male forms
serve mainly to render them prominent, or to develop them. As woman's
nature unfolds its secret being, and shoots forth its fairest bloom in
love, since in love, nature as nature, through a thousand illusions,
becomes ennobled and spiritualized, so Heyse glorifies in an eminent
way the love of woman. He renders homage to love, and he renders
homage to woman; nevertheless, it is his greatest delight to represent
these two great powers in conflict one with the other. For when love
gains the victory, when it appears as the power to whose mandates
the feminine heart may not bid defiance, it sparkles with radiance,
vanquishing resistance, as though possessed of omnipotent might, and
producing the effect that every woman under its influence, in defiance
against it, in conflict with it, animated by it, rouses in all the
pride of her sex, and is invested by love with that aristocratic
beauty, which no one represents better than Heyse.

Inherent maidenly pride is to Heyse the most beautiful thing in nature.
An entire group of his "novellen" might bear the title "Mädchenstolz"
(Maidenly Pride) Kierkegaard somewhere calls the essence of woman "a
surrender, whose form is resistance." This is an utterance as from
Heyse's own heart, and it is this resistance which, as a token of the
noble-born nature, interests and charms him. It is that eternally
impenetrable stronghold in the feminine disposition which captivates
him, the sphinx-like element of her nature, whose riddle he feels ever
impelled to solve. The sweet kernel is doubly sweet in its hard shell,
the fiery champagne doubly flaming in its surroundings of ice. The
feminine natures which Heyse depicts (from L'Arrabbiata to Julie and
Irene in his "Im Paradiese") are enveloped in a coat of ice-mail, which
conceals, repels, misleads, breaks, and melts away. Woman asserts her
nobility by refusing, as long as possible, to give her _ego_ out of her
own keeping,--by guarding and cherishing the treasure of her love.
She maintains her nobility by placing her _ego_ exclusively in the
hands of one single person, and offering resistance to all the rest of
the world. She is subject to no blind force. But once let her maidenly
pride be broken, and conquered, she finds herself again on the opposite
side of the gulf, and yields freely, I might almost say as freely as
nature. A seduction never occurs among Heyse's creations; if such a
thing be alluded to a single time, as a past event, as in "Mutter und
Kind" (Mother and Child), it only serves to place in the sharpest
possible light proud self-assertion and equally proud conscious
self-surrender.

This self-assertion, this power of resistance (Rabbia), is portrayed
by Heyse with manifold variations: Atalanta, in the drama "Meleager,"
possesses the entire untamed wildness of the Amazon type; she prefers
life and sport amid the freedom of nature--the race, feats of skill
with the lance, and the occupation of the wildwood--to effeminate
luxury and flattering caresses; she would rather wear the crown of
victory than the bridal wreath. In Syritha we see the first coyness,
which, roused by marriage, flees; in "L'Arrabbiata," maidenly pride,
which feels how close to the timid request, in the soul of man, lies
coarse desire; in the maiden of Treppi, we have the instinctive refusal
of maidenhood; in Marianne ("Mutter und Kind"), womanly pride which
increases twofold in the so-called fallen woman, under her sense
of unmerited shame; in Madeleine ("Die Reise nach dem Glück"), the
sense of duty opposed to the conceptions of morality inculcated from
childhood; in Lore ("Lorenz und Lore"), the feeling of shame of a young
girl, from whose lips a confession of her love has escaped in the
presence of death; in Lottka, the melancholy reserve caused by a sense
of inherited degradation; in fair Kätchen, the indignant despair of
a young girl at finding herself attractive to every one, which makes
her wish all her admirers and her own beauty far away; in Lea, the
aversion of a highly developed and reserved woman to allowing any one
to have a suspicion of her weakness; in Toinette, the abhorrence of an
ice-bound heart to feigning a passion it does not yet feel; in Irene,
the strict conventionality of a little princess; in Julie, the coldness
of a Cordelia nature--until the supreme moment arrives when all these
bonds are burst, when all these hearts are kindled, when the man-hatred
of the Amazon, and the coyness of the young maiden, and the modesty of
dawning womanhood, and the pride of the wife, and the sense of duty of
those who have been strictly brought up, and the melancholy of those
who have been humbled, and the mantle of the snow-queen, all, all flame
up, like wood on one mighty funeral pyre, and ascend in sweet incense
on the altar of the god of love.

For not in resistance, which is only the form and the cloak, but in
self-surrender, does Heyse see the essence of womanhood and woman's
true nature; and adorer of nature as he is, he does honor to Eros as
the irresistible one who breaks through all barriers. Woman never
regrets having subjected herself to his power, but she may repent her
defiance. Bettina, somewhere in her letters, makes about the following
remark, "The strawberries I plucked I have forgotten; but those I left
untouched are still branded on my soul." Heyse has made more than one
variation on this theme; after the maiden of Treppi has repented her
youthful coyness during seven long years, chance brings the object of
her affections once more to her native village, and she overcomes, by
virtue of an enthusiastic and superstitious conviction of the power
and justice of her love, all external and internal obstacles, even the
indifference and coldness of the returned wanderer himself. Madelina,
in the "Reise nach dem Glück," as before mentioned, has driven her
lover at night from her door, and having been compelled to ride away in
the dark, he had a fall from his horse which killed him on the spot.
Remorse for this defiance of love gives her no rest. "Of what avail
was my virtue?" said she; "it was sound and whole, and by no means
threadbare; and yet it chilled me to the innermost recesses of my
heart."[14] It is not enough, though, that she regrets having followed
the dictates of conventional morality: the image of the deceased haunts
her year after year; it seems to be jealously watching over her each
time in her life that she thinks it possible to forget the past, and
find happiness anew; she hears the finger of the dead man knocking at
the door, as he knocked that night she drove him from her. Severe are
the punishments of Eros for those who do not sacrifice on his altar.
And Heyse in other of his creations still further amplifies this idea.
Here the repulsed lover meets his death, simply as an accidental result
of the rigor shown him by the being for whose presence he yearned
so ardently. Let us suppose the case to be one where, instead of an
humble petitioner, one who threatens violence approaches, and that
the resistance of the proud woman be not based on a sense of duty
that conquers temptation, but is merely self-defence at the time of
a dreaded invasion, how then? Even then Eros bestows chastisement,
as a zealous god. The drama "Die Sabinerinnen" (The Sabine Women)
was evidently written by Heyse for the sake of one single character.
How, otherwise, could it have occurred to him to choose for tragic
treatment this purely burlesque material, so little adapted to tragedy.
This character is Tullia, the Sabine king's daughter. Carried off by
a Roman warrior, held captive in his house, she kills him, when, on
the bridal night, he dares approach her. If a tragic woe should now
befall the rash woman in order that the Roman might be avenged, no one
would be surprised; but the psychological point is in harmony with
Heyse's entire erotic system; for through the murder of her husband she
endeavored to kill the awakening impulse of her own heart, and thus
sacrilegiously rebelled against Eros.

                           "And stooping,
    He bowed his face until it reached my brow;
    His flutt'ring breath went rippling over me,
    And stealthily, like streams of poison, ran
    His low-toned voice through all my veins."

Now left alone with her shattered soul, she recoils with horror at a
deed which is so genuinely feminine, and in which she is so entirely
justified. The apparition of the dead man haunts her wherever she goes,
but still more than the aspect of his dead body, the remembrance of
his caresses. "Only a day and a night have passed since that deed was
accomplished," says she, "and yet it lies behind me as a thousand years
and a thousand deaths. One thing alone is, and ever will be, present
with me: his kiss upon my eyelids, his hand within my own." Toward the
end she expresses to her sister the fundamental idea in these words:--

                     "From Love, oh, do not flee!
    She will o'ertake you if you do. Go humbly
    And kneel before her shrine. For deadly anger
    She heaps on those who dare defy her will,
    And sucks their blood. And is not every maiden
    In bondage stern to this grim god? O sister,
    I only must atone for free resistance."[15]

Even the man that has approached her through violence, cannot be hated
by the young virgin. He broke the peace; but what else does Love? He
outwitted her; but is not Love crafty? He mocked; but does not Love
scoff even at the most powerful and most free? In other words: is not
Eros himself a worker of violence, without shyness or shame, a criminal
who overleaps all customary bounds.

All? That is saying too much. Heyse has indeed sometimes, as in the
instances cited, shown a tendency, reminding one of Kleist, for all
purely pathological erotic problems; but his nature is entirely too
harmonious, too mature, and by far too typically German, to admit of
his describing passion as bursting all the law and order of society.
He is developed enough to see clearly that the laws of passion and
the laws of society are two wholly dissimilar things, which have very
little in common; yet he pays the latter the respect it deserves,
that is, a conditional one. From his earliest youth it has interested
and pleased him to show how relative is the truth, and how limited
the worth of these laws; to bring forward in his poetic creations
instances where their boundaries are overstepped in such a way that
the exceptions to the rule seem right, and even the most hardened and
narrow-minded person would hesitate to condemn them. In his anxiety
to do full, incontestible justice to the exceptional cases, Heyse
has sometimes--as in his first drama, "Francesca von Rimini," which
is not included in his "Gesammelte Werke"--sought out extremely
quaint exceptions; but it is his universal endeavor so to enclose
the case with palisades, that no assault of usual morality can cause
the downfall of the barricade. When Goethe brings together Egmont
and Clärchen, he does not present the case as though it required an
apology; the beauty of the relationship is its defence. Heyse, the less
grand poet, whose caution is quite equal to his daring, has always
fixed an eye on conventional morality, and has continually endeavored
to conciliate it, either by ceding the point to it, so to say, in all
other cases but just this one where its infringement was unavoidable,
or by so atoning for the offence that the individual who is guilty of
it is allowed to purchase the forbidden happiness, with his eyes fully
open, and of his own free will, at so high a price that it appears too
costly to be alluring to any Philistine.

In "Francesca von Rimini" the circumstances are as follows: Lanciotto
is ugly, coarse, and corrupt; his brother, Paolo, noble and handsome.
Lanciotto is inflamed with passion for Francesca. Misguided by
brotherly love for the thoroughly unworthy Lanciotto, Paolo has allowed
himself to be deluded not only into playing the part of suitor, but
even disguised as bridegroom on the wedding day, to take the place of
his brother, who feared that with his hideous person he could never
obtain the maiden's consent. Not until shrouded by the darkness of
the bridal chamber, does Lanciotto dare approach his bride. Now Paolo
also loves Francesca, as she loves him in return. Therefore, it is no
wonder that the young wife, upon discovering this gross deception, the
victim of which she has become, feels dishonored by the caresses of her
husband, and far from viewing her love for Paolo as a sin, she regards
it as justified and sacred.

    "The kiss thou gavest me the holy wafer was
    Which my dishonored lips did purify from taint."

In order to make his intrenchment as solid as possible, it will thus be
seen that the poet, in this naïve work of his youth, has constructed
the most improbable, most far-fetched, case in the world; for what
can be more preposterous than for Paolo out of pure, simple-hearted
kindliness to a despicable brother, to expose the woman he loves to the
basest deception, which, moreover, annihilates his own life-happiness.
But in this exaggerated example will, nevertheless, be found the
type according to which, in Heyse's numerous later "novellen," with
their plentiful tact and exquisite delicacy, the moral collision
is constructed. Let me single out at random several examples. In
"Beatrice" it is legal marriage which breaks up the love romance, a
forced marriage, as unholy as the marriage of Francesca, although
stronger reasons are given for it. In "Cleopatra" the young German
resists the love of the fair Egyptian, as stubbornly as Kleist's Count
Wetter von Strahl resists the passion of Kätchen von Heilbronn. Not
until her yearning for him brings Cleopatra to the brink of the grave,
is the liaison between them formed. The proud Gabrielle in the work
"Im Grafenschlosse" does not allow herself to be persuaded into the
"conscience marriage" with the Count, until he has jeopardized his
life for her sake. The young wife in "Rafael" purchases a few hours of
companionship with her lover through a lifelong incarceration in the
cloister; the self-surrender of Garcinde and Lottka is ennobled by the
fact that the outwardly fettered but inwardly free _ego_ was unable to
conceive of a self-surrender, forbidden by circumstances, under any
other conditions than those whose consequences are death. The right to
the happiness of a fleeting moment is purchased by suicide.

The goblet of bliss, drained by these personages, has seasoned their
destiny with poison. Heyse, therefore, affirms for these _heroic_ souls
the right to solve the problem of a conflict of duties in a different
way than is customary for "the timid Philistine whose half-way measures
are circumscribed by petty customs and considerations," and in the
introduction to his "Beatrice"[16] he himself formulates his ethic
heresy in the following words: "Genial, self-dependent natures can
do much toward extending the boundary lines of the moral sphere, by
permitting the measure of their inner power and magnitude to shine
forth as an example, through their actions, just as genial artists can
burst through those barriers of their art that have been handed down to
them by tradition."

No less than through this intimately allied association with ruin
and death does Heyse ennoble love, legitimate or illegitimate, as
indicated above, through the nature of the self-surrender. It is always
conscious. These women whom he characterizes never allow themselves to
be carried away by their emotions; they give themselves up as a free
gift--when they yield at all. Thus it is in works dating from Heyse's
earliest youth, as "Der Kreisrichter"[17] (The Circuit Judge), thus in
"Rafael," in "Lottka," and in so many of the "novellen" in prose and in
verse. Everywhere the self-sufficiency and the right of spontaneity of
the individual is preserved. The woman gives herself as a free gift to
her lover, she goes freely forth to meet her own destruction, or with
her own hand inflicts death upon herself; and where the bliss of love
is not ennobled by the price it costs, it is at least exalted by the
pride with which it is bestowed and received. By virtue of this pride
the personality, itself governed by the strongest power of nature,
feels independent and regal in the assertion of its sovereign dignity.
In the romance "Im Paradiese" Heyse has for the first time treated as a
main problem the freedom of love in antithesis to the laws of society,
and maintained its justice. The fundamental idea of this romance is
none other than that the morality and dignity, of love between man and
woman is independent of the outward ratification of the marriage tie.
According to his wont, Heyse has provided the case here given with
the most forcible motives. Jansen cannot, without putting his friend
to shame, become free from his despicable wife, and without Julie all
his hopes as an artist and a man would perish. Yet when Julie in the
presence of the assembled friends, adorned with the myrtle-wreath,
freely weds Jansen, a decided attack is aimed at the purely exterior
morality of society, although the incident is not brought forward
as an example for imitation. The poet who in the "Kinder der Welt"
urgently impresses it upon the consciences of his contemporaries, that
the morality of the individual is not dependent on his metaphysical
convictions, in his "Im Paradiese," strives to teach that the purity
and dignity of a union of love must not be judged by the laws of
outward morality, but that love both without and within the marriage
relation may be true and false, moral and immoral. Everything depends,
according to Heyse's views, upon the true nobility of the heart.



V.


I have already said that Heyse as a poet is originally a pupil of
Eichendorf. Like the hero in his "Ein Abenteuer" (An Adventure), he
appears to have chosen for the companion of his first journeyman-years
the romantic "Taugenichts" (Good-for-nothing). Where, in one of his
"novellen" (Lottka), he introduces himself as a youth, he sings in
Eichendorf's own key, and we recognize that very early in life he has
been in the habit of whistling, with rare skill, the melodies of
romance. Musje Morgenroth, in the collection of romantic folk-lore
tales for children, which as a student he published under the title
"Der Jungbrunnen" (The Fountain of Youth), is a genuine brother of the
celebrated Eichendorf hero. The book is the work of a boy, and yet it
is not without a certain interest, as it marks the first standpoint
of our poet. It shows also with what talents he was equipped from the
outset: the boyish, yet never inelegant prose flows smoothly, and the
verse, which is of a vastly higher character, with all its echoes, is
unaffected, fresh, and regular in form. His song is not original, but
it is pure; it is in the usual key of romance, but it is sung with
youthful freshness and grace. The fact of producing naïvely during the
years of boyhood is in itself a phenomenon, and the unusual amount of
innate command of language secures the student author from exaggeration
or mannerism. The gift of language, inherited evidently from his
father, the well-known philologist, develops in the son into a fluency,
a facility for handling words and rhythm, which even in his earliest
youth was not far removed from virtuoso-ship. This almost Rückert-like
flow of language, as a fundamental element in Heyse's natural
endowments, influenced all the other peculiarities which he gradually
developed. From the very beginning he sang not because he had more in
his heart than the rest of mankind, but because it was far easier and
more natural for him than for others to express that of which his heart
was full. Since, no mighty inward revolutions or startling outward
occurrences were necessary to unseal his lips, as are usually required
to rouse the creative fancy of those for whom it is difficult to find
form of expression, and who succeed only in moments of passion in
bringing forth to the light of day the treasures of their inner being,
he turned his gaze not within but without, pondered but little on his
_ego,_ his calling, and his capabilities; but fully conscious that he
bore within his own soul a clear mirror, which reflected everything
within his immediate surroundings that interested him, he allowed his
gaze, with the keen susceptibility and true creative impulse of a
plastic artist, to wander in all directions.

Of a plastic artist, I said; for he did not long continue to carol
forth the music of romance. He himself has said,--

    "Fair is romantic poesie,
    Yet what we call _beauté de nuit._"

True men, Heyse thinks, understand how to grasp their ideas in the
light of day, and he is too thoroughly a child of the sun to be able
to linger in the twilight of romance. A lyric poet he is not in the
main, and the strength of romance, conformably to its nature and of
necessity, lies in lyric poetry. Nor did the surroundings of nature
imbue him with an independent poetic interest; such a freshness of
the sea and of the landscape as is breathed for instance by the
Danish novels of Blicher will not be found in his works; he is not a
landscape-painter, and has always availed himself of the landscape
merely as a background. What first and earliest met his gaze, as soon
as he was developed enough to see with his own eyes, was man; and let
it be observed, not man as an intelligence served by organs, or as
a will walking on a pair of legs, or as a psychological curiosity,
but man as a plastic form. Like the sculptor or the figure-painter
it is his wont, according to my opinion, on closing his eyes, to see
his horizon first and foremost populated with outlines and profiles.
Beautiful external forms and movements, the poise of a graceful head,
a charming peculiarity of carriage or walk, have occupied him in
precisely the same way as they engross the attention of the plastic
artist, and are reproduced by him with the same partiality, indeed,
at times with technical exactness of expression. And not only the
narrator, but the personages that appear on the scene, often form the
same kind of conceptions. Thus, for instance, the main character in
"Der Kreisrichter" (The Circuit Judge) says: "The young people here
are healthy, and health constitutes half of the beauty of youth. There
is also race development. _Notice the refined form of their heads, and
the delicate moulding of their temples, and the natural grace of their
bearing in walking, dancing, and sitting down_."[18] A striking example
of the poet's method of contemplation may be found in "Die Einsamen"
(The Solitary Ones), where his dissatisfaction at being able to paint
so imperfectly with the means which his art affords, breaks forth in
the following words: "Only the mere outlines!" he raved to himself.
"Only a few dozen lines! How she went trotting about on her little
donkey, one leg thrown across the back of the animal, resting firmly
and securely, the other almost grazing the ground with the tip of her
foot, and her right elbow supported on the knee that was in repose,
her hand playing gently with the chain about her neck, her face turned
toward the sea. What a mass of black tresses on the neck! Something
red lends a radiance thereto. A coral necklace? No; fresh pomegranate
blossoms. The wind plays with the loosely knotted kerchief; how dark
is the glow of the cheeks, and how much darker the eye!"[19] Such are
the pictures of plastic figures, simple, picturesque situations, with
which Heyse's imagination has had to operate upon from the beginning,
and which serve to form for it a starting-point. And though it may
be felt ever so keenly how much more sensible it is to describe a
poet than to praise him, still it were scarcely possible to restrain
an outburst of admiration upon considering how exceedingly well
Heyse, in every instance, has succeeded in presenting his characters,
especially, however, his female characters, to the reader's eye. He
does not belong to the descriptive school; he does not characterize
in detail, as either Balzac or Turgenief; he describes with a few
delicate strokes: yet his creations remain fixed in our memories, from
the simple reason that they all have defined style. A peasant maiden
from Naples or Tyrol, a servant girl, or a young fräulein from Germany,
all obtain, when depicted by his hand, a higher, more visionary, and
yet ever-memorable life, because they are all ennobled by strictly
ideal methods and the art of representation. They are as perfect in
form as statues; they have the carriage of queens. With the exception
of the painter Leopold Robert, of whom some of Heyse's Italian works
are reminders, no one, to my knowledge, has displayed so grand a style
in the delineation of peasants and fishing people as Heyse. And as
the forms of the outer person, so those of the inner being are of an
exquisitely finished style. Did not the expression seem almost too
daring, I should say that Heyse's descriptions of love are plastic.
The romantic school always conceived love to be of a lyric nature. If
Heyse's love stories be compared with the love stories of the romantic
school, it will be found that while the romantic writers give their
strength in analyzing their romantic transports as such, and forming
a nomenclature for the rarest moods which it has usually been thought
impossible to name, in Heyse's writings every psychological force
is mirrored in a look or in a gesture; everything becomes with him
contemplation and visible life.



VI.


I remarked that the faculty of preserving and idealizing forms
constituted _one_ of the starting-points of this poet's imagination.
It has, however, another. Quite as inherent as his capacity for
delineating character is his fondness for experiencing and inventing
"adventures." By adventures, I understand events of a peculiar
and unusual nature, which--as is scarcely ever the case in real
adventures--have a sure outline, and so clearly defined a beginning,
middle, and end, that they appear to the imagination like a work
of art enclosed in a frame. From any chance, outward or inward,
observation--the fragment of a dream, an encounter on the street, the
sight of a tower dating from the Middle Ages, in some ancient city,
in the glow of the setting sun--there springs up for him, through the
most rapid association of ideas, a history, a chain of events; and
as he is by nature an artist, this series of events ever assumes a
rhythmic form. Like the beings he creates, it has clear, firm outlines
and inner equilibrium. It has its skeleton, its filling up of flesh;
above all, its well-defined and slender shape. The faculty of relating
a story in brief, concise form, of imparting to it, so to say, a
harmonious rhythm, has its origin directly in Heyse's thoroughly
harmonious nature.[20] The "novellen" form, as he has carved it out
and engraved it, is an entirely original and independent creation, his
actual property. Therefore he has become especially popular through
his prose "novelle." The "novelle" with him always has extremely few
and simple factors, the number of the personages introduced is small,
the action is concise and may be surveyed with a single glance. But
his fiction does not exist for the sake of the personages alone, as
in the modern French novels, which only satisfy a psychological or a
physiological interest; it has its own peculiar mode of development and
its independent interest. A novel like Christian Winter's "Aftenscene"
(Evening Scene), whose quaint, old-fashioned grace of style renders it
so fascinating, possesses the fault of having no incident. With Heyse
the "novelle" is not a picture of the times, or a _genre_ painting;
something always _does happen_ with him, and it is always something
unexpected. The plot, as a rule, is so arranged that at a certain point
an unforeseen change takes place; a surprise which, when the reader
looks back, always proves to have had a firm and carefully prepared
foundation in what went before. At this point the action sharpens; here
the threads unite to form a knot from which they are spun around in an
opposite direction. The enjoyment of the reader is based upon the art
with which the purpose of the action is gradually more and more veiled
and hidden from view, until suddenly the covering falls. His surprise
is caused by the skill with which Heyse apparently strays farther and
farther away from the goal which rose beyond the starting-point, until
he finally discovers that he has been led through a winding path and
finds himself exactly above the point where the story began.

Heyse himself, in his introduction to his "Deutscher Novellenschatz,"
has expressed his views on the principle to which he does homage in
his "novellen" compositions. Here, as in the introduction to the
"Stickerin von Treviso" (The Embroidery Woman of Treviso), he calls the
attention of those who would place the entire importance on style and
diction, to the fact that the narrative as a narrative, what children
call the story, is unquestionably the essential foundation of the
"novelle" and possesses its own peculiar beauty. He lays stress on the
statement that according to his æsthetic taste, he would give the
preference to _that_ "novelle" whose main motive is most distinctly
finished, and--with more or less intrinsic worth--betrays something
peculiar, specific, in the original design. _"A strong silhouette_,"
he continues, "should not be lacking in what is called a 'novelle' in
the proper sense of the word."[21] By the term "silhouette" Heyse means
the outlines of the story, as shown by a brief summary of the contents;
and he illustrates his idea with a striking example and a striking
description. He gives the synopsis of one of the novels of Boccaccio,
as follows:--

"Frederigo degli Alberighi loves, without meeting with any return;
roving in knightly fashion, he squanders all his substance, and has
nothing left but one single falcon; this, when the lady whom he loves
is led by chance to his house, and he has nothing else with which to
prepare a meal for her, he places on the table before her. She learns
what he has done, suddenly changes her resolution, and rewards his love
by making him the lord of her hand and her fortune."

Heyse calls attention to the fact that in these few lines lie all
the elements of a touching and delightful "novelle," in which the
fate of two human beings is accomplished in the most charming manner,
through an accidental turn of affairs, which, however, serves to
give deeper development to the characters; and he therefore invites
modern story-tellers, even when engaged on the most touching and rich
materials, to ask themselves where "the falcon" is, the specific object
that distinguishes this story from a thousand others.

In the demand he makes on the "novelle," he has especially
characterized the task he has imposed on himself and faithfully
fulfilled. He prefers eccentric to typical everyday instances. As
a rule, we are quite as sure of finding "the falcon" in his prose
narratives, as a certain judge was of finding a woman at the bottom
of every crime. In "L' Arrabbiata," the biting of a hand is "the
falcon"; in the "Bild der Mutter" (The Mother's Portrait) it is the
elopement; in "Vetter [Cousin] Gabriel," it is the letter copied from
the "lover's letter-writer." If the reader will himself search for the
aforesaid wild bird, he will gain an insight into the poet's method of
composition. It is not always so easily captured as in the cases just
cited. With a power of investigation, a nimble grace, which is rare
in a man who is not of Roman race, Heyse has understood how to tie
the knots of events and disentangle them again, to present and solve
the psychologic problem which he has _isolated_ in the "novelle." He
has the faculty of singling out exceptional, unusual cases from the
general state of culture, and the condition of the society of which
he is a member, and presenting them purely and sharply in the form of
a "novelle," without permitting the action to play into the unreal
and fabulous, as is the wont of romantic novelists, and without ever
allowing it to run into a merely epigrammatic point. His "novellen"
are neither brief romances nor long anecdotes. They have at the same
time fulness and strictly-defined form. And circumscribed as this form
may be, it has yet proved itself sufficiently flexible to be able to
embrace within its limits the most diverse materials. The "novellen"
of Heyse play on many strings; most abundantly on the tender and
the _spirituelle_, but also on the comic (as in the amusing tale,
"Die Wittwe von Pisa"--The Widow of Pisa), the fantastic (as in the
Hoffman-like "Cleopatra"); indeed, in a single instance, the awful (in
the painful nocturne, "Der Kinder Sünde der Väter Fluch"--The Sins of
the Children the Curse of the Fathers). The "novelle" as it is treated
by Heyse borders on the provinces of Alfred de Musset, Mérimée, Hoffman
and Tieck; but has, however, its own special domain, as well as its
very individual profile.



VII.


Meanwhile, ready as I am to recognize the significance of this sharp
profile as the individual characteristic of the Heyse "novelle," and
its significance for the novel in general as a work of art, it is
equally hard for me to allow this to pass as the decisive norm for the
estimation of individual stories.

The novel is, indeed, as every work of art, an organism in which
beautiful proportions, relatively independent of one another and of
a totally dissimilar character, contribute to produce a combined
impression. We have been dwelling upon the characterizations, and the
action; style is the third element. According to my convictions, these
three elements are not subordinate one to the other, but co-ordinate;
and each one of them, when developed in a masterly way, affords the
reader an equally perfect enjoyment.

It is very certain, as Heyse makes evident, that a one-sided
development of diction leads to clever capriciousness without any
scheme; whoever places too great importance on "the plot" is in danger,
on the other hand, of retrograding into mere sensational literature.

"Spring Floods," by Turgenief, is a novel whose action moves on in
an unsatisfactory manner,--of the style, in the stricter sense of
the word, I cannot judge, as I have never read the story in the
original,--but is this lack of much importance in such a masterwork of
individual characterization? Does not the description of the Italian
family, in and by itself, outweigh every imperfection in the plan of
occurrences? What matters it if the reader would rather have had the
end somewhat different, and cannot read it a second time, even though
he may read three-quarters of the novel over and over again with
unchanged enjoyment?

Blicher's "Diary of a Village Sexton" is a novel in which the action
is of but little moment, and most of the characters are absolutely
repellant, on account of their coarseness; but it is, nevertheless,
a work of the highest artistic worth; its main strength lies in its
style, in the masterly execution of the honest sexton's language, which
belongs to a period of almost two hundred years past. This language is
a guarantee for the cutting truth of the narrative, a truth which is
not reached by the path of idealism, and which, therefore, is neither
sought nor found by Heyse; I mean that truth which by the French is
designated "la vérité vraie."

And cannot Heyse be attacked with his own weapons? I think he can. By
the stress he lays on what the novel within the novel is, he seems to
oppose alike the overestimation of style, and of ideal purport. But of
all his "novellen" in verse "Der Salamander" (The Salamander) appears
to me to stand the highest; of his prose works "Der letzte Centaur"
(The Last Centaur) is one of my favorites. The first of these seems to
me to bear off the palm on account of the diction; the last, on account
of the idea.

There is no need of taking pains to seek for a "falcon" in Salamander;
there is no plot in it, the characters have no development worth
mentioning, and yet every reader of any susceptibility will experience
such lively enjoyment under the influence of the magic of these
terzettos, that it will seem to him as if this poem, in addition to
its own merits, possessed also all those which it lacks. Of the epic
repose, of the objective style, which is Heyse's precise ideal in the
domain of the "novelle," not much will here be found. This epic repose
is perhaps less adapted on the whole to the restless spirit of our
time. The realization of this ideal of Heyse's has, properly speaking,
only perfectly succeeded in the few prose "novellen," which do not
touch upon the civilization of modern society, as in those genial
pasticcios of the olden time: "Die Stickerin von Treviso" and "Geoffroy
und Garcinde," where the noble, simple style of the old Italian or
Provençal form of narrative is idealized, or when the materials are
taken from the life of the people in Italy or Tyrol; for the people in
those lands are themselves a simple piece of the Middle Ages cast in
_a form_. Such a story as that little jewel "L' Arrabbiata," which was
the foundation of Heyse's fame, actually attains its rights through its
plain, rigid setting; adorned with the decorations of style, or with
psychologically polished facets, it would lose its entire beauty, if
not become impossible. In the same way "Die Stickerin von Treviso,"
which probably, next to the work just named, has reaped the greatest
harvest of applause, in its touching simplicity and grandeur, is so
thoroughly one with its chronicle form, that it cannot be conceived
of without this. But in instances where scenes from purely modern
civilization are described, the style cannot be too individual and
nervous. Heyse himself cannot avoid making his aim in this respect
proportionate to his materials; how feverish is the recital in the
pretty invalid story in letters "Unheilbar" (Incurable.) However,
it is apparently with the utmost reluctance, and without the free
exercise of his will, that he permits himself to be carried away into
such a passionately surging and trembling style as in "Salamander."
This creation is pure style, its beauty depends wholly and entirely
on the captivating charm of its metric diction, and yet throughout
not a word will be found that is not to the purpose. The entire work
teems with active life, every change in style is deeply felt and
transparent; the struggling soul of the writer lies like an open book
before the reader. The situations are insignificant and commonplace; no
Bengal illumination, not even a final tableau. But these remarkable,
incredibly beautiful, unnaturally easy, nervously passionate
terzettos, which question and answer, jest, sing and lament, invest
the theatrical, the enamored yet thoroughly composed blasé coquette,
the heroine, and the passion she inspires, with such a charm that
no exciting story, with crisis and pole, could be more captivating.
Toward the close of the poem the glorious terzettos, which throughout
have been transformed into quite a new species of metre, ring out in
a manner as surprising as it is genial and bold, in the chords of a
triple ritornelle, invested with all the freshness of nature. Such a
poem as this will maintain its place in spite of all theories.

Upon the whole, however, it seems to me that Heyse has formed
an incorrect conception of the significance of poetic style.
Theoretically, he fears its independent development, and cannot
tolerate any works which are "mere diction and style." Nevertheless,
in such poems as "Das Feenkind" (The Fairy Child), and still more
in such poems as "Frauenemancipation" (Female Emancipation), he has
himself furnished productions of this kind. The first of these poems is
refined and graceful, but the raillery in it is of too ample length--we
do not care to eat an undue amount of whipped cream; the other, whose
tendency, however, is the best, suffers from a loquacity without any
salt. But a distinctly marked style is by no means the same thing
as the formal virtuosoship of diction. That an artist of language
like Heyse, the translator of Giusti, of the troubadours, of Italian
and Spanish folk-songs, must possess this in the fullest degree, is
understood as a matter of course. And yet the truly artistic style is
not that formal grace which spreads uniformly over everything. Style,
in the highest sense of the word, is fulfilment, a form completed from
every point of view. Where the coloring of language, the phraseology,
diction, and personal accent, still possess a certain abstract
homogeneousness, where the author has failed to mirror the character at
every essential point in all the outer forms, the drapery of language,
of however light a texture it may consist, will hang stiff and dead
about the personality of the speaker. The perfect modern style, on the
contrary, envelops it as the flowing robe envelops the form of the
Grecian orator, serving to relieve the attitude of the body and every
movement. The diction of the mere virtuoso, even when "brilliant," may
be traditional and trivial; genuine style is never so. With the mode
of narration of Heyse's "novellen," I have not much fault to find; his
dramatic diction, on the contrary, does not please me so well.

There are no doubt many who think that if Heyse's historic dramas have
not gained the recognition accorded his "novellen," it is because
they are invested with too little action, and too much style. If the
word style, however, be understood as I have here defined it, it
should certainly rather be asserted that the iambic form used was worn
threadbare, and that these works have not style enough. The diction
in "Elizabeth Charlotte," for example, neither sufficiently bears
the coloring of the period in which the scenes are laid, nor of the
persons who speak. Only compare it with the dry posthumous memoirs of
the princess. The poet who, with his fabulous facility for orienting
himself in every poetic form, can produce a drama as easily as he
can tell a story, has taken his task almost too easily. The little
tragedy "Maria Moroni," a drama which may be ranked next to his
"novellen," through its plan as well as through its characterization,
might worthily stand side by side with the Italian dramas of Alfred
de Musset, of which it reminds us, were not its language-coloring by
far too dull and cold. The dialogues of Musset not only sparkle with
wit, but glow with ardor and with life. In his dramas Heyse is not
personally present with his whole soul at every point. And yet this "at
every point" is the style.

Inasmuch, therefore, as I have placed the highest estimate on
"Salamander," of all the versified "novellen," on account of its
excellence of diction, so for the sake of its idea I would give a high
place to the prose narrative, "Der letzte Centaur" (The Last Centaur),
although the latter is, at the same time, farthest removed from the
requirements of the definition. It does not treat of an occurrence or a
conflict in a defined sphere of life, nor of any especial psychologic
instance, but of life itself; it permits the entire modern life to
be mirrored at once within a narrow frame. A shot at the central
point is so refreshing; why deny it? The peripheric character of some
others of Heyse's works is to blame for their not being of greater
interest. After reading through a long series of "novellen" one cannot
help longing for an art form which is capable of embracing the more
significant, universally current ideas and problems in poetic form.



VIII.


Heyse's dramas are in the highest degree heterogeneous: civil
tragedies, mythological, historic, patriotic plays of the most
dissimilar artistic nature. His talent is so pliant that he feels at
liberty to enter upon any theme. A strong impulse for the historical,
Heyse has never had; his historical dramas have all sprung from a
patriotic sentiment, and are effective chiefly through this sentiment.
The one of his groups of dramas for which the poet is most noted is
that which deals with antique subjects. At a time when modern political
action was everywhere demanded of the higher drama, this employment
of old Grecian and Roman materials was lamented over and derided in
Germany, with an utter lack of comprehension. People asked what in all
the world there was in such a subject as the rape of the Sabine women,
or Meleager, or Hadrian, that could possibly interest the poet or any
one else. To those who read critically it is very evident what must
have attracted Heyse to these themes. They incorporate for him his
favorite ideas concerning woman's love and woman's destiny, and his own
being is mirrored in them. Any one who will compare the warm-blooded
drama "Meleager" with Swinburne's "Atalanta in Kalydon," which
handles the same material, will find occasion for many interesting
observations, concerning the peculiarity of the two poets. "Hadrian"
has perhaps perplexed the critic the most. What could attract the poet
to a relation so wholly foreign to us as that between Hadrian and
Antinous, one, too, that is so decidedly a reminder of the shady side
of antique life, seems almost incomprehensible. I, for my part, rank
"Hadrian" highest of all of Heyse's dramas. I have never been able to
read this tragedy of the handsome young Egyptian who, passionately
loved by the ruler of the world, surrounded by all the pomp and
splendor of the court, free in every respect, and bound alone to his
imperial admirer, languishes for freedom,--I have never been able to
read this tragedy, I say, without thinking of a certain young poet who,
already in his earliest youth summoned to a South German court, soon
became an object of envy as the favorite of an amiable and intelligent
monarch, as the darling of fortune, while in many a secret moment he
wished himself far from court, and in many a fettered moment felt
how little even the favor of the best master weighed in the balance
against the freedom of one who was entirely unprotected, but entirely
independent.

In this drama, by way of exception, all that is scenic is of the
highest effect. The actual reason why Heyse, with all his great ability
for the stage, still failed to meet with decided success in his dramas,
is unquestionably because he does not possess the German pathos
proper, that of Schiller. Not until the pathos is broken, not until
it has become half pathological, is he able to treat it with entire
originality. Genuine dramatic pathos from the depths of the heart, with
him easily becomes inartistically national, patriotic, and somewhat
commonplace. This is the reason why the representation of manly action
proper is not his province. To however high a degree he may have
command in his poetry over the passive qualities of manhood, such as
dignity, earnestness, repose, dauntless courage, he nevertheless,
like Goethe, wholly lacks the active momentum. A vigorous, effective
plan of action that follows a defined goal is as little the essential
part of his dramas as of his novels and romances. If there now and
then appear an energetic action, it is occasioned by despair; the
individual is forced into a dilemma in which the only apparent means
of escape may be gained through the utmost daring alone. (Compare the
action of the young forester in "Mutter und Kind," when he kidnaps the
son of his sweetheart, or the elopement in "Das Bild der Mutter"--The
Mother's Portrait.) In the romance "Im Paradiese" a good example of
this will be found in the scene where Jansen, in exasperation at all
the incompleteness amid which his life has been passed, dashes to
pieces the models of his saints. It was an unmanly thing in Jansen
to carry on a saint factory,--the whole idea is amusing as a passing
jest, but does not admit of being made permanent without disfiguring
the character,--but it is a still more unmanly, aye, a truly womanish
course of action, when he pours out the vials of his wrath against
the dead plaster images. Although from the reason already cited the
genuine dramatic nerve and sinew are almost always lacking in Heyse's
works, the hindrances which are placed in the way of the poet's
decided success on the stage are not of such importance that he may
not overcome them with time and celebrate a scenic triumph. By way of
preliminary, a few years ago he made his début, to the astonishment of
every one, in a species of poetic composition which seemed to be wholly
remote from his province, but in which, in a very short time, he won
the greatest success.

It is still fresh in the public memory what an excitement the "Kinder
der Welt" created when it first appeared in Spener's "Zeitung." For a
whole month this feuilleton was the universal theme of conversation.
The guileless novelist, who was so completely an alien to worldly life,
had suddenly unveiled himself as a purely modern thinker, who ended a
philosophic romance with the words of Hölderlin:--

    "Cease not to guard with heav'nly buckler
    Fair innocence; thou guardian of the bold,
    Forsake her not!"

It had been apparently overlooked previous to this that through Heyse's
insinuating poetry there ran a vehement demand for freedom, a complete
independence of dogmas and conventional fetters. At his new departure,
therefore, people were more astonished than they had any reason to be.
Heyse is of a mixed origin: from his Teutonic father he has inherited
the positive side of his character, the fulness and beauty of his
disposition; from his mother, who was a Jewess, a critical vein. For
the first time both sides of his nature were revealed to the great
public. It must have produced a marked impression on the minds about
him that this Fabius Cunctator who had so long held aloof from the
problems of the day, now felt that the moment had come for him to
take his position in their ranks, and fight the fight of the times.
The romance is a dignified and noble protest against those who would
fetter freedom of thought and instruction in our day. It has to back
it all polemics against dogmas. All its main personages, with a clear
consciousness of their position, are made to live in that atmosphere
of freer ideas, which is the vital air of modern times. It is one
of those works which possess the intensity of a long-repressed,
late-matured personal experience, and therefore has a vitality to
which no awkwardness of form, no lack of form, can be prejudicial. The
book, as a first attempt, is wanting in many of the elements of the
genuine romance; the hero, as might have been expected, lacks much in
resolution, in active manly vigor; it does not concentrate itself in
a single, absolutely dominating interest; the all-engulfing erotic
element does not permit the idea to stand forth clear and central, as
it was conceived by the poet. The decisive turning-point of the work
seems to be impending where Franzelius, after the burial of Balder, is
thrown into prison on the denunciation of Lorinser. Here Edwin says
expressly:[22] "You desire open war, you yourself demand it, and there
shall be no peace until it has been honestly fought out." But the
_open_ war does not take place; the entire little band of heroes of the
book content themselves with the defensive, and when Edwin has finally
completed his epoch-making work, the romance ends. Closely associated
with this lack is the undue softness of feeling in those parts which
treat of Balder. The absence of that strict observance of proportion
and limits which distinguish Heyse's "novellen," is plainly felt in
this romance. But how would it be possible that great merits in a work
of such extent should not be purchased with some lacks. Not only have
the ideal female characters here the same points of excellence as in
the "novellen"; but the poet has also enlarged his sphere in a high
degree; even the least ideal figures, Christiane, Mohr, Marquard, are
incomparable. And what a flood of genuine humanity streams through this
romance! What a fund of true, versatile culture it contains! It is not
only a courageous book, it is also an edifying one.

On certain foul attacks which it drew down upon its author, I will
not linger. The denunciations of a couple of insignificant German
sheets alone interest me because one of these abusive articles, which
so stated the purport of the book that it was represented as dealing
solely with the coarsest sensuality, was brought out in Norway by the
Norwegian translator of Goethe's "Faust," with an introduction in which
all Norwegian fathers of families were warned against allowing the book
to cross their thresholds.[23]

For a sharp thrust from France, Heyse had every reason to be prepared.
It came not unmerited; for the remarks concerning the literature and
intellectual tendency of that country occurring in his romance are
quite in the style of the general German sentiment; but the cut might
have been given in a more chivalrous and skilful manner than the very
ignoble and narrow-minded article by Albert Réville in the "Revue des
Deux Mondes," which was dictated by national hatred and a love of
self-amusement.

Freedom of thought was the fundamental idea of the "Kinder der Welt";
freedom of moral action is the fundamental idea of the romance "Im
Paradiese," yet not in such a way that this work must be considered an
attempt at justification; for if the freedom of thought Heyse advocates
may be designated as absolute, the freedom of moral action is only
relative. Moreover, "Im Paradiese" is a work of quite a different
character than the first romance. Even the fact that the scenes of
the early romance are laid in keen, critical Berlin, the second one
in merry, pleasure-loving Munich, indicates the difference. While the
"Kinder der Welt" may be called a philosophic romance, "Im Paradiese"
is a sort of _roman comique,_ light, graceful, and full of a raillery
blended with earnestness. Its greatest value is in being the psychology
of an entire city of importance, and the portrait of the social and
art circles of this city. All Munich is embraced in this book, and, as
a matter of course, the artist life of this city of artists occupies
the main place. The conversations and reflections on art have not the
useless and abstract character in the pages of this book that they
assume in the ordinary art-romance; we feel that it is no theorist but
a connoisseur who speaks, and a genuine studio atmosphere is diffused
throughout all portions of the book. The entire æsthetics of the author
may be condensed into Ingre's old definition, _"l'art c'est le nu."_

So far as the entanglements and composition of the plot are concerned,
"Im Paradiese" denotes an undoubted progress. The interest is sustained
throughout, and what is more, it continually increases; a commendation
that cannot be bestowed on "Kinder der Welt." Now and then, however,
the means used to forward the plot are applied in rather an unskilful
manner. For instance, the entire rôle played by the dog Homo as _deus
ex machina_ is especially marked in its exaggerations. He reminds us,
with his superhuman penetration, of those lions of the sculpture of the
"Zopf" period, with human and majestic countenances, framed in masses
which too strongly resemble the big wigs of real life. Yet in German
romances not the plot, but the delineation of character is the main
thing, and in almost all its subordinate figures this book reveals
a new side of Heyse's talent. Such forms as Angelica, Rosenbusch,
Kohl, Schnetz, have sportive, manifold life that formerly had been
almost entirely excluded from Heyse's style. In a word, Heyse's mind
has gained humor, the humor of mature manhood, one might almost say,
of forty years of age; but a delicate, sagacious, quiet humor which
renders complete the gift of the poet and invests its coloring with the
true blending.



IX.


We have run through the circle of ideas and forms in which this poetic
soul has found its expression. We have seen how Heyse, at last, in the
romance accommodated himself to the thought agitating modern times,
and to which the "novellen" form was not able to give adequate space.
Moreover, I pointed out one "novelle" which was not less distinguished
by its fundamental thought than "Der Salamander" was by its style.

Each time that Heyse has attempted to gain a modern interest for
ancient myths, he has been fortunate. The charming little youthful
poem, "Die Furie" (The Fury), is among the best that he has written.
In a little drama, "Perseus" (not included in his collected works), he
has given a new interpretation of the Medusa myth; he has felt pity for
poor, beautiful Medusa, to whom was allotted the cruel fate of turning
every one into stone, and he informs us that the envy of the goddesses
who were jealous of her love for Perseus is alone to blame for this.
Her head falls by the hand of her own lover, while she, in order not
to harm him through her pernicious gaze, buries her face in the sand.
Heyse has transformed the ancient myth into an original and sorrowful
Mährchen. The story of the "Centaur" is bright, and full of profound
thought. We are not astonished when "Im Paradiese" informs us that this
story inspired the favorite fresco of the painter Kohle. The pilgrimage
"unserer lieben Frau von Milo," which as a picture we almost think we
see before our eyes, so vividly is the fresco described, is intimately
related as a poem to "Der letzte Centaur" (The last Centaur)! That
sounds almost like the last of the Mohikans! What does Heyse know of
the last Centaur? How could he possibly introduce him into a regular
"novelle"? It is done with consummate art, and yet in the most natural
way in the world. He first, so to speak, brings together two circles,
then a third circle, and in the latter he conjures up the Centaur.
The first circle is the world of the living, the second the world of
the dead, the third easily and naturally comprises the world of the
supernatural. The story begins, contrary to Heyse's custom, in a purely
autobiographical way, therefore with the strongest possible elements
of reality. The author, late one evening, approaches a wine-house,
where, in his youth, he was in the habit of meeting every week his
dearest friends and comrades, all of whom are now dead, and lets them
pass in review before his mind's eye. Finally he enters the wine-house,
feels weary, and--suddenly it seems to him as though he were summoned
to join the old circle, and as the door is opened, lo! his friends
all sit together. But not one of them extends a hand to him who is
entering, and their faces wear an expression of formality, seriousness,
and sorrow. Every now and then they drink long draughts from their
wineglasses, while their pale cheeks and dim eyes sparkle and glow for
a moment, but directly afterward they sit rigid and silent once more,
staring into their glasses. One of them alone is not bowed down by the
destiny that has overtaken them, and of which, from a mute agreement,
not a word is spoken in the society. It is Genelli, the distinguished
painter, whose "Centaur" in the "Schackschen Sammlung" at Munich is
the admiration of all travellers. One of the company remarks that such
a Genelli creation looks so life-like that one is almost inclined to
believe that the artist himself was a participator in the scene. And as
the master calmly replies "And so he was," we glide imperceptibly from
the realm of the dead to the world of fiction. He has seen the Centaur
with his own eyes, one beautiful summer afternoon, as it came trotting,
without thought of evil, into a little Tyrolese village, where Genelli
sat over his wineglass. In olden times, the Centaur was a country
physician by profession, had grown weary during a professional tour
across the mountains, had laid himself down to sleep in a glacier-cave,
was then frozen in--and now, after the lapse of centuries, the ice had
melted about him, and he could freely gaze on the changed world with
his wondering eyes. It is Sunday, and just church time, when, with his
mighty body,--a Farnese Hercules above, a superb, heroic battle-charger
below,--with floating mane and long, trailing horse tail, with a spray
of roses behind one ear in his thick hair, he trots through the empty
streets, only now and then terrifying some old woman, who flees, with
shrieks of alarm, from the strange apparition. He sees the church door
open, the building full of people, and a marvellously beautiful woman
with a child on her arm, painted over the altar. Filled with curiosity,
meaning no harm, he trots through the portal, over the stone flags,
and approaches the altar. It can easily be comprehended what a hubbub
is caused by this monster, newly arisen from hell. The parson shrieks
aloud, waves toward the beast whatever consecrated thing he may happen
to hold in his hand, and cries "Apage! apage!" (which the Centaur
understands because it is Greek). The congregation makes the sign of
the cross over and over again; and filled with astonishment, this beast
of ancient story then trots out of the door again, and accompanied
by all the old women and all the children of the village, who are
naturally very much shocked to see "the lofty traveller so lightly
clad," presses onward to the village inn, where Genelli is sitting on
the balcony. The master then informs the Centaur that he has awakened
to life either a couple of hundred years too late or too early. At the
time of the Renaissance he would doubtless have been well received.
"But at the present day, among this narrow-chested, broad-browed,
enervated, unmanned, worn-out race that is called the modern world!"
Genelli could not venture to make out a very cheering horoscope for
him. "Wherever you may show yourself, in cities or in villages, the
street-urchins will run after you and pelt you with rotten apples,
the old women will cry murder, and the priest will report you to be
the foul fiend himself, etc." And it comes to pass as Genelli has
prophesied. While the worthy Centaur, with the good nature that belongs
to the strong, allows the public to stare at him, to feel his soft,
velvety hide, while he, in genial mood, drains glass after glass of
wine, and hands back his empty glass over the railing of the arbor to
the pretty bar-maid, to whom he at once gave his rose, hatred and envy
are lying in ambush to work his destruction. A complete conspiracy has
been formed against him. "At the head stood, of course, the reverend
clergy, who deemed it detrimental to the spiritual welfare of their
parishioners to come into closer contact with a certainly unchristian,
wholly naked, and no doubt, very immoral beast-man." Equally incensed
was an Italian who had been exhibiting on the market-place a stuffed
calf with two heads and five legs. The horse-man could be seen gratis,
he was alive and drank and talked, and who knew whether he might
not even be moved to treat the by-standers to some skilful feats of
horsemanship. The calf, on the other hand, was a peaceful genius, and
gave no signs of any such extravagant undertakings. The Italian cannot
enter into competition. "There is a difference," he explains to the
parson, "between a legalized, natural sport, that is carried on with
the full approval of the police, and a monster that is wholly beyond
the limits of probability, such a one as has never been known to exist
before, who, travelling without passport or license, makes the country
unsafe and steals the bread from the mouths of honest five-legged
calves." But the most passionate opponent of the Centaur is the little
bow-legged village tailor, the bridegroom elect of the pretty bar-maid.
The tailor, too, discloses his mind to the parson, and expresses his
anxiety lest the new fashion introduced by the unknown should ruin
the whole tailor's trade, and, moreover, overthrow all conceptions
of decency and good morals. So, while the Centaur, in his cheerful
mood, is just engaged in carrying the fair Nanni on his back round
the court-yard of the inn, and, at the same time, entertaining the
by-standers with an exceedingly graceful and peculiar dance, all the
conspirators appear with a company of mounted gens-d'armes to capture
him. Without honoring them with the slightest attention, he continues
his dance, and softly pressing the maiden's hands on his breast, he
makes a magnificent leap over the heads of the peasants and away he
goes. Pistol-balls follow him, with sharp reports, without hitting him,
and soon he stands free on the next mountain slope. There, moved by the
piteous entreaties of the maiden, he allows her to glide gently down to
the ground. "Greatly as she had been flattered by the chivalrous homage
of the stranger, and pitiful as was the figure her own sweetheart
displayed beside him, she could not expect a solid support from this
mounted foreigner." Her practical nature triumphs, and like a hunted
chamois she springs from stone to stone into her tailor's arms. An
expression of divine scorn glides over the countenance of the Centaur;
he is seen to move away, and shortly afterward he has vanished from the
eager gaze of those who are staring after him.

Here Genelli's voice is hushed, the little circle breaks up, and the
poet awakens in the ante-room of the inn.

All the qualities which make a poetic work an enjoyment to the reader
are combined in this "Märchen"; an exalted humor, which casts a gentle
glow over all the details, the tenderest semi-tone and the finest
clair-obscure, that permits the action of the piece to glide gently
from the light of day into a dream of a circle of the dead, and then
again allows the twilight of the shadow-world to be illumined by a
sunbeam from old Hellas. Add to this a profound thought, which is
entirely original to its poet. For this sportive tale is in reality
a hymn to freedom in art as well as in life, and to freedom as Heyse
has conceived it. In his eyes freedom does not consist in a struggle
for freedom (as, for instance, in the case of the Norwegian author
Henrik Ibsen), but it is the protest of nature against dogmas in the
religious sphere, of nature against conventionality in the social and
moral sphere. Through nature to freedom! that is his path and that his
watchword. Thus the Centaur as half human being, half divinity, is to
his fancy a beloved symbol. How beautiful is the Centaur in his proud
strength gained from the remnant of old Grecian blood he has preserved
in his veins! What must he not have suffered, the poor Centaur, for the
remnant of heathenism, that has arisen in him, and that, after having
been frozen in a few thousand years, has ventured out into the light of
day in our age when all the glaciers are beginning to melt away! How
much more instructive, how much more sedate and moral, does the whole
civilized world about him find his interesting rival, the stuffed calf,
with two tongues and five legs, which are by no means intended for
progress, but are conservative legs that with all due propriety keep
the place ascribed to them. Such curiosities never exceed the limits
of any civil custom, never exhibit themselves without permission from
the public authorities and the clergy, and are therefore none the less
unusual. They will always remain rivals of the Centaur, considered by
some as his equal and by others as far outshining him.

And is not the poet himself, on his Pegasus in this petty modern social
world of ours, the living representative of "the last Centaur"?



X.


I have noted down some expressions of opinion concerning Heyse,
favorable and unfavorable all mixed together.

"Heyse," says one, "is the woman's doctor, the German woman's doctor,
who has thoroughly understood Goethe's saying,--

    'Es ist ihr ewig Weh und Ach
    So tausendfach u.s.w.'

That he is no poet for men, Prince Bismarck has rightly felt."

"On the contrary," says another, "Paul Heyse is very masculine. He is
pronounced weak by some because he is pleasing, because a finished
grace has lent its impress to his creations. People do not realize how
much strength is requisite in order to have this exquisite charm!"

"What is Heyse?" says a third. "The denizen of a small town, who has
so long played hide and seek with Berlin, with the social life of the
world, with politics, that he has estranged himself from our present,
and only feels at home among the troubadours in Provence. I always
scent out something of the Provençale and of the provincialist in his
writings."

"This Heyse," remarks a fourth, "in spite of his fifty years and the
maturity of his authorship, has the weakness to wish to persuade us
throughout that he is an immoral, lascivious poet. But no man believes
him. That is his punishment."

"I have never in my life been so greatly envied," once said a lady, an
old friend of Heyse's youth, in my presence, "as I was to-day, in one
of our higher schools for young ladies, which I was visiting, when the
rumor was circulated that I was about to pass the evening in a circle
where I would meet him. The little damsels (Backfische) unanimously
commissioned me to carry to him their enthusiastic greetings. How
gladly would they one and all have thrown themselves into his arms! He
is and always will be the idolized author of young maidens."

"One can define Paul Heyse," said a critic, "as the
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy of German poetry. He appears like Mendelssohn
when compared to the great masters. His nature, like that of
Mendelssohn, is a German lyric, sensitive temperament, permeated with
the most refined Southern culture. Both men lack the grand pathos,
the energetic power, the storm of the dramatic element; but both have
natural dignity in earnestness, charming amiability and pleasing grace
in jest, they are thoroughly cultured in regard to form, they are
virtuosos in execution."


[1]

    One's movements, step by step to measure,
      Mars all one's chances.
    Who dares not follow one's own pleasure (sich gehen zu lassen)
      Not far advances.--_P. H._


[2] Gesammelte Werke, iv. 135.

[3] Ibid., v. 199.

[4] Kinder der Welt, ii. 162.

[5] Kinder der Welt, iii. 210, 242, 256.

[6] Kinder der Welt, iii. 109.

[7] Kinder der Welt, i. III; Gesammelte Werke, vi. 206.

[8] Gesammelte Werke, iii. 300.

[9] Kinder der Welt, ii. 47.

[10] Gesammelte Werke, v. 201. On page 175 the word "vornehm" is used
by her.

[11] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 44, 246, 321.

[12] Kinder der Welt, ii. 355. "That you are the best, deepest, purest,
noblest of women"--"Poor, brave, free-born breast--bow well it has
preserved its patent of nobility." Kinder der Welt, iii. 309.

[13] Im Paradiese, iii. 6.

[14] Gesammelte Werke, v. 197.

[15] Gesammelte Werke, ix. 73.

[16] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 168.

[17] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 71: "I have been sold once in my life. How
mankind will now blame me if I give myself as a free-will offering in
order to suppress the anguish of that disgrace!"

[18] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 40.

[19] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 5.

[20] Heyse und Kurz, Novellenschatz des Auslandes, Bd. VIII.

[21] Heyse und Kurz, Deutscher Novellenschatz, Bd. I. s. xix.

[22] Kinder der Welt, ii. 265.

[23] Did not a critic of this sort take it upon himself to get up a
"warning" in the same style, against Goethe's "Faust"? "The purport
of this immoral work," he wrote, "is the following: A physician (Dr.
Med.), already pretty well advanced in years, is weary of study, and
hankers after carnal pleasures. Finally he signs a bond with the
devil. The latter leads him through divers low diversions (which, for
instance, consist in making half-drunk students still more drunk) to
a burgher's daughter, a young maiden, whom Faust (the doctor) at once
attempts to seduce. A couple of rendez-vous at the house of an old
procuress prepare the way for this. As the seduction, however, cannot
be brought about speedily enough, the devil gives Faust a jewel-case
to present to the young maiden. Wholly powerless to resist this gift,
that is to say, not even seduced, simply purchased, Gretchen yields
to Faust; and in order to be all the more undisturbed with her lover
she doses her old mother with a narcotic, which kills the old woman.
Then after being the cause of her brother's death, she destroys her
child, the fruit of her shame. In prison she employs herself in
singing obscene songs. That her lover left her in the lurch we cannot
wonder when we consider his religious principles. He is, as the scene
in which his donna questions him about his faith clearly proves, no
Christian; indeed, he does not even seem to believe in a God, although
he endeavors to grasp at all sorts of empty subterfuges to conceal his
absolute unbelief.

"As this wicked book, notwithstanding all this, finds, as we hear to
our astonishment, many readers, indeed, even lady readers, and is in
constant demand at the circulating libraries in our city, we beg of
all fathers of families to watch over the spiritual welfare of those
belonging to them, to whom such profligate reading is all the more
dangerous because its immoral teachings are veiled in a polished,
insinuating form."


[Illustration: HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.]




HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.[1]


1869.


He who possesses talent should also possess courage. He must dare trust
his inspiration, he must be convinced that the fancy which flashes
through his brain is a healthy one, that the form which comes natural
to him, even if it be a new one, has a right to assert its claims; he
must have gained the hardihood to expose himself to the charge of being
affected, or on the wrong path, before he can yield to his instinct
and follow it wherever it may imperiously lead. When Armand Carrel, a
young journalist at the time, was censured by the editor of the paper
for which he wrote, who, pointing to a passage in the young man's
article, remarked, "That is not the way people write," he replied, "I
do not write as people write, but as I myself write," and this is the
universal formula of a gifted nature. It countenances neither fugitive
rubbish, nor arbitrary invention, but with entire self-consciousness
it expresses the right of talent, when neither traditional form nor
existing material suffices to meet the peculiar requirements of its
nature, to choose new material, to create new forms, until it finds a
soil of a quality to give nurture to all of its forces and gently and
freely develop them. Such a soil the poet Hans Christian Andersen found
in the nursery story.



I.


In his stories we meet with beginnings like this: "Any one might
have supposed that something very extraordinary had happened in the
duck-pond, there was such a commotion. All the ducks--some swimming,
some standing in the pond with their heads downward--suddenly jumped
on land, leaving the traces of their feet in the wet clay, and sending
forth a loud, startled cry," or like the following: "Now, then, let
us begin. When we are at the end of the story, we shall know more
than we know now: but to begin. Once upon a time there was a wicked
sprite, indeed, he was the most mischievous of all sprites!" The
construction, the position of the words in individual sentences, the
entire arrangement, is at variance with the simplest rules of syntax.
"This is not the way people write." That is true; but it is the way
they speak. To grown people? No, but to children; and why should it not
be proper to commit the words to writing in the same order in which
they are spoken to children? In such a case the usual form is simply
exchanged for another; not the rules of abstract written language, but
the power of comprehension of the child is here the determining factor;
there is method in this disorder, as there is method in the grammatical
blunder of the child when it makes use of a regular imperfect for an
irregular verb. To replace the accepted written language with the
free, unrestrained language of familiar conversation, to exchange the
more rigid form of expression of grown people for such as a child
uses and understands, becomes the true goal of the author as soon as
he embraces the resolution to tell nursery stories for children? He
has the bold intention to employ oral speech in a printed work, he
will not write but speak, and he will gladly write as a school-child
writes, if he can thus avoid speaking as a book speaks. The written
word is poor and insufficient, the oral has a host of allies in the
expression of the mouth that imitates the object to which the discourse
relates, in the movement of the hand that describes it, in the length
or shortness of the tone of the voice, in its sharp or gentle, grave
or droll character, in the entire play of the features, and in the
whole bearing. The nearer to a state of nature the being addressed,
the greater aids to comprehension are these auxiliaries. Whoever tells
a story to a child, involuntarily accompanies the narrative with many
gestures and grimaces, for the child sees the story quite as much as
it hears it, paying heed, almost in the same way as the dog, rather to
the tender or irritated intonation, than to whether the words express
friendliness or wrath. Whoever, therefore, addresses himself in writing
to a child must have at his command the changeful cadence, the sudden
pauses, the descriptive gesticulations, the awe-inspiring mien, the
smile which betrays the happy turn of affairs, the jest, the caress,
and the appeal to rouse the flagging attention--all these he must
endeavor to weave into his diction, and as he cannot directly sing,
paint, or dance the occurrences to the child, he must imprison within
his prose the song, the picture, and the pantomimic movements, that
they may lie there like forces in bonds, and rise up in their might
as soon as the book is opened. In the first place, no circumlocution;
everything must be spoken fresh from the lips of the narrator, aye,
more than spoken, growled, buzzed, and blown as from a trumpet: "There
came a soldier marching along the high-road--_one, two! one, two!_"
"And the carved trumpeters blew, 'Trateratra! there is the little boy!
Trateratra!'"--"Listen how it is drumming on the burdock-leaves,
rum-dum-dum! ram-dum-dum!' said the Father Snail." At one time he
begins, as in "The Daisy," with a "Now you shall hear!" which at once
arrests the attention; and again he jests after the fashion of a
child: "So the soldier cut the witch's head off. There she lay!" We
can hear the laughter of the child that follows this brief, not very
sympathetic, yet extremely clear presentation of the destruction of an
imposter. Often he breaks into a sentimental tone, as for instance:
"The sun shone on the Flax, and the rain-clouds moistened it, and this
was just as good for it as it is for little children when they are
washed, and afterward get a kiss from their mother; they become much
prettier, and so did the Flax." That at this passage a pause should be
made in the narrative, in order to give the child the kiss mentioned
in the text, is something to which every mother will agree, and which
seems to be a matter of course; the kiss is really given in the book.
This regard for the young reader may be carried still farther, inasmuch
as the poet, by virtue of his ready sympathy, so wholly identifies
himself with the child and enters so fully into the sphere of its
conceptions, into its mode of contemplation, indeed, into the range
of its purely bodily vision, that a sentence like the following may
readily flow from his pen: "The biggest leaf here in the country is
certainly the burdock-leaf. Put one in front of your waist, and it is
just like an apron, and if you lay it upon your head, it is almost as
good as an umbrella, for it is quite remarkably large." These are words
which a child, and every child, can understand.

Happy, indeed, is Andersen! What author has such a public as he? What
is, in comparison, the success of a man of science, especially of one
who writes within a limited territory for a public that neither reads
nor values him, and who is read by four or five--rivals and opponents!
A poet is, generally speaking, more favorably situated; but although
it is a piece of good fortune to be read by men, and although it is an
enviable lot to know that the leaves of our books are turned by dainty
fingers which have employed silken threads as book-marks, nevertheless
no one can boast of so fresh and eager a circle of readers as Andersen
is sure of finding. His stories are numbered among the books which we
have deciphered syllable by syllable, and which we still read to-day.
There are some among them whose letters even now, seem to us larger,
whose words appear to have more value than all others, because we
first made their acquaintance letter by letter and word by word. And
what a delight it must have been for Andersen to see in his dreams
this swarm of children's faces by the thousands about his lamp, this
throng of blooming, rosy-cheeked little curly-pates, as in the clouds
of a Catholic altar-piece, flaxen-haired Danish boys, tender English
babies, black-eyed Hindoo maidens,--rich and poor, spelling, reading,
listening, in all lands, in all tongues, now healthy and merry, weary
from sport, now sickly, pale, with transparent skin, after one of
the numberless illnesses with which the children of this earth are
visited,--and to see them eagerly stretch forth this confusion of white
and swarthy little hands after each new leaf that is ready! Such devout
believers, such an attentive, such an indefatigable public, none other
has. None other either has such a reverend one, for even old age is not
so reverend and sacred as childhood. In considering this public we can
conjure up a whole series of peaceful and idyllic scenes: yonder some
one is reading aloud while the children are listening devoutly, or a
little one is sitting absorbed in its reading, with both elbows resting
on the table, while its mother, in passing by, pauses that she too may
read over the child's shoulder. Does it not bring its own reward to
write for such a circle of auditors? Is there, indeed, one that has a
more unspotted and ready fancy?

There is none, and it is only needful to study the imagination of
the audience, in order to become acquainted with that of the author.
The starting-point for this art is the child's play that makes
everything out of everything; in conformity with this, the sportive
mood of the artist transforms playthings into natural creations, into
supernatural beings, into heroes, and, _vice versa,_ uses everything
natural and everything supernatural--heroes, sprites, and fairies--for
playthings, that is to say, for artistic means which through each
artistic combination are remodelled and freshly stamped. The nerve
and sinew of this art is the imagination of the child, which invests
everything with a soul, and endows everything with personality; thus,
a piece of household furniture is as readily animated with life as
a plant, a flower as well as a bird or a cat, and the animal in the
same manner as the doll, the portrait, the cloud, the sunbeam, the
wind, and the seasons. Even the leap-frog, made of the breastbone of
a goose, becomes thus for the child a living whole, a thinking being
endowed with a will. The prototype of such poesy is the dream of a
child, in which the childish conceptions shift more rapidly and with
still bolder transformations than in play; therefore, the poet (as in
"Little Ida's Flowers," "Ole Shut Eye," "Little Tuk," "The Elder-Tree
Mother") likes to seek refuge in dreams as in an arsenal; therefore,
it is, when he busies his fancy with childish dreams, such as fill and
trouble the mind of childhood, there often come to him his wittiest
inspirations, as, for instance, when little Hjalmar hears in his
dream the lamentation of the crooked letters that had tumbled down
in his copy-book: "'See, this is how you should hold yourselves,'
said the Copy. 'Look, sloping in this way, with a powerful swing!'
'Oh, we should be very glad to do that,' replied Hjalmar's letters,
'but we cannot; we are too weakly.' 'Then you must take medicine,'
said Ole Shut Eye. 'Oh no,' cried they; and they immediately stood
up so gracefully that it was beautiful to behold." This is the way a
child dreams, and this is the way a poet depicts to us the dream of
a child. The soul of this poetry, however, is neither the dream nor
the play; it is a peculiar, ever-childlike, yet at the same time a
more than childlike faculty, not only for putting one thing in the
place of another (thus, for making constant exchange, or for causing
one thing to live in another, thus for animating all things), but
also a faculty for being swiftly and readily reminded by one thing of
another, for regaining one thing in another, for generalizing, for
moulding an image into a symbol, for exalting a dream into a myth,
and, through an artistic process, for transforming single fictitious
traits into a focus for the whole of life. Such a fancy does not
penetrate far into the innermost recesses of things; it occupies
itself with trifles; it sees ugly faults, not great ones; it strikes,
but not deeply; it wounds, but not dangerously; it flutters around
like a winged butterfly from spot to spot, lingering about the most
dissimilar places, and, like a wise insect, it spins its delicate web
from many starting-points, until it is united in one complete whole.
What it produces is neither a picture of the soul nor a direct human
representation; but it is a work that with all its artistic perfection
was already indicated by the unlovely and confusing arabesques in "The
Foot Journey to Amager." Now while the nursery story, through its
contents, reminds us of the ancient myths ("The Elder-Tree Mother,"
"The Snow Queen"), of the folk-lore tale, on whose foundation it
constructs itself at times, of proverbs and fables of antiquity,
indeed, sometimes of the parables of the New Testament (the buckwheat
is punished as well as the fig-tree); while it is continually united
by an idea, it may, so far as its form is concerned, be compared with
the fantastic Pompeian decorative paintings, in which peculiarly
conventional plants, animated flowers, doves, peacocks, and human
forms are entwined together and blend into one another. A form that
for any one else would be a circuitous route to the goal, a hindrance
and a disguise, becomes for Andersen a mask behind which alone he
feels truly free, truly happy and secure. His childlike genius, like
the well-known child forms of antiquity, plays with the mask, elicits
laughter, awakens delight and terror. Thus the nursery story's mode
of expression, which with all its frankness is masked, becomes the
natural, indeed, the classic cadence of his voice, that but very rarely
becomes overstrained or out of tune. The only disturbing occurrence
is that now and then a draught of whey is obtained instead of the
pure milk of the nursery story, that the tone occasionally becomes
too sentimental and sickly sweet ("Poor John," "The Poor Bird," "Poor
Thumbling"), which, however, is rarely the case in materials taken from
folk-lore tales, as "The Tinder-Box," "Little Claus and Big Claus,"
etc., where the naïve joviality, freshness, and roughness of the
narrative, which announces crimes and murders without the slightest
sympathetic or tearful phrase, stand Andersen in good stead, and invest
his figures with increased sturdiness. Less classic, on the other hand,
is the tone of the lyric effusions interwoven with some of the nursery
stories, in which the poet, in a stirring, pathetic prose gives a
bird's-eye view of some great period of history ("The Thorny Path of
Honor," "The Swans' Nest"). In these stories there seems to me to be
a certain wild flight of fancy, a certain forced inspiration in the
prevailing tone, wholly disproportionate to the not very significant
thought of the contents; for thought and diction are like a pair of
lovers. Thought may be somewhat larger, somewhat loftier, than diction,
even as the man is taller than the woman; in the opposite case there
is something unlovely in the relation. With the few exceptions just
indicated, the narrative style of Andersen's nursery stories is a model
of its kind.

Let us, in order to know them thoroughly, watch the poet at his
work. Let us, by studying his manner of procedure, gain a deeper
comprehension of the result. There is one instance wherein his method
may be clearly followed, and that is when he remodels anything. We do
not need, in such a case, merely to observe and to praise in vague
generalities, by making comparison with a different mode of narrative;
we can sharply and definitely declare, point for point, what he has
omitted, what he has rendered prominent, and thus see his individual
production grow up under our eyes. One day, in turning over the leaves
of Don Manuel's "Count Lucanor," Andersen became charmed by the homely
wisdom, of the old Spanish story, with the delicate flavor of the
Middle Ages pervading it, and he lingered over Chapter VII., which
treats of how a king was served by three rogues.

"Count Lucanor spoke one day with Patronio, his counsellor, and said
to him, There is a man who has come to me and addressed me on a very
important subject. He gives me to understand that it would conduce
in the highest degree to my advantage. But he says that no man in
the world, however highly I may esteem him, must be allowed to know
anything about it, and he so earnestly enjoins upon me to keep the
secret that he even assures me all my possessions and my life itself
will be imperilled if I reveal it to any one. And as I know that
nothing can come to your knowledge that you cannot determine whether it
be meant for a blessing or with deceitful intent, I beg of you to tell
me how this matter strikes you. Sir Count, replied Patronio, in order
that you may be able to comprehend what should, in my opinion, be done
in this matter, I beg of you to hearken unto how a king was served by
three rogues, who sought his presence. The count asked what it was that
took place." This introduction resembles a programme; we first learn
the bold question to which the story following is to be the answer, and
we feel that the story owes its existence solely to the question. We
are not permitted to draw for ourselves from the narrative the moral
that it seems to us to contain; it must be directed with a violent
effort to the question concerning the amount of confidence that is due
people who are shrouded in mystery. Such a method of telling a story
is the practical, not the poetic one; it places undue limits on the
pleasure the reader takes in discovering the hidden moral for himself.
True, the fancy is gratified to find its work made easy, for it does
not really desire to exert itself; but neither does it like to have its
easy activity anticipated; like old people who are permitted to keep up
a semblance of work, it does not wish to be reminded that its work is
mere play. Nature pleases when it resembles art, says Kant; art, when
it resembles nature. Why? Because the veiled purpose gives pleasure.
But no matter, let us read further in the book.

"Sir Count, said Patronio, there once came three rogues to a king
and stated that they were most superior masters in the manufacture
of cloth, and that they especially understood how to weave a certain
stuff which was visible to everyone who was actually the son of the
father whom all the world supposed to be his, but which was invisible
to him who was not the son of his supposed father. This pleased the
king greatly, for he thought that with the aid of this fabric he could
learn which men in his kingdom were the sons of those who were legally
accredited to be their fathers, and which were not, and that in this
way he could adjust many things in his kingdom; for the Moors do not
inherit from their fathers if they be not truly their children. So he
gave orders to have the men conducted to his palace in which they could
work."

The beginning is delightful, there is humor in the story; but Andersen
thinks that if it is to be rendered available for Denmark, another
pretext must be chosen, one better adapted to children, and to the
well-known northern innocence. And, besides, this king in the story is
merely like a figure on the chess-board. Why was it that the rogues
came to him? What sort of character does he possess? Is he fond of
show? Is he vain? He does not stand out distinctly before the reader's
eye. It would be better if he were an absolute fool of a king. He ought
in some way to be characterized, to be stamped by a word, a phrase.

"And they told him that, in order to be sure they were not deceiving
him, he might lock them up in the palace until the fabric was finished,
and this pleased the king vastly!" They now receive gifts of gold,
silver, and silk, spread abroad the tidings that the weaving has begun,
and through their bold indication of pattern and colors cause the
king's messengers to declare the fabric admirable, and thus succeed in
obtaining a visit from the king, who, as he sees nothing, "is overcome
by a deathly terror, for he believes that he cannot be the son of the
king whom he has considered his father." He therefore praises the
fabric beyond measure, and every one follows his example, until one
day on the occasion of a great festival he puts on the invisible
garment; he rides through the city, "and it was well for him that it
was summer." No one could see the fabric, although every one feared
to confess his inability to do so, lest he should be ruined and
dishonored. "Thus this secret was preserved, and no one dared reveal
it, until a negro who tended the king's horse, and had nothing to lose,
went to the king" and affirmed the truth.

    "Who bids you keep a secret from a faithful friend,
    Will cheat you too as surely as he has a chance."

The moral to this neat little story is most ludicrous and at the same
time but poorly indicated. Andersen forgets the moral, puts aside, with
a sparing hand, the clumsy precept which causes the story to deviate
from the point which is its true centre, and then tells, with dramatic
vivacity, in the form of a dialogue, his admirable story about the
vain emperor, of whom it was said in the city, "The Emperor is in the
wardrobe." He brings the narrative quite home to us. There is nothing
whose existence people are afraid to deny for fear of passing for a
bastard, but there is much concerning which people dare not speak the
truth, through cowardice, through fear of acting otherwise than "all
the world," through anxiety lest they should appear stupid. And this
story is eternally new and it never ends. It has its grave side, but
just because of its endlessness it has also its humorous side. "'But
he has nothing on!' said the whole people at length. That touched the
Emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought
within himself, 'I must go through with the procession.' _And so he
held himself a little higher,_ and the chamberlains held on tighter
than ever, and carried the train which did not exist at all." It was
Andersen who made the narrative comic.

But we can enter still more closely into relation with Andersen's
method of story-telling; we have seen him place before us in a new form
a foreign tale; we can now also see how he remodels his own attempts.
In the year 1830 Andersen published in a volume of poetry, "The
Dead Man, a Folk-lore Tale from Fünen," the same which he remoulded
later under the tide of "The Travelling Companion." The narrative,
in its original form, is aristocratic and dignified; it begins in
the following way: "About a mile from Bogensee may be found, on the
field in the vicinity of Elvedgaard, a hawthorn so remarkable for its
size that it can even be seen from the coast of Jutland." Here there
are pretty, rural descriptions of nature, here may be detected the
masterly hand of a skilful author. "The first night he _quartered_ on a
haystack in the field, and slept there like a _Persian_ prince in his
resplendent chamber." A Persian prince! This is an idea quite foreign
to little children. Suppose we put in its place: "The first night he
slept on a haystack, out in the fields, for there was no other bed for
him; but it seemed to him so nice and comfortable that even a king
need not wish for a better." This is intelligible. "The moon hung,
like an _Argantine_ lamp, from the vaulted ceiling, and burned with a
perpetual flame." Is not the tone a more familiar one when we say: "The
moon, like a large lamp, hung high up in the blue ceiling, and he had
no fear of its setting fire to his curtains." The story of the doll's
comedy is rewritten; it is sufficient when we know that the piece
treats of a king and a queen; Ahasuerus, Esther, Mordecai, who were
named in the original, are too learned names for children. If we hit
upon a life-like stroke, we hold fast to it. "The queen threw herself
on her knees, took _off_ her beautiful crown, and, holding it in her
hand, cried: 'Take this from me, but do rub (with healing ointment) my
husband and his courtiers.'" Such a passage is one of those in which
the nursery story tone penetrates the polished form; one of those in
which the style that says "thou" to the reader thrusts aside the one
that says "you." In illustration, a whole swarm of comparisons throng
upon us. "From the host our travellers learned that they were in the
realm of the King of Hearts, an excellent ruler, and nearly related to
the King of Diamonds, Silvio, who is sufficiently well known through
Carlo Gozzi's dramatic folk-lore tale, 'The Three Pomegranates.'" The
princess is compared with Turandot, and of John it is said: "It would
seem as though he had recently read Werther and Siegwart; he could
only love and die." A shrill discord for the nursery tale style. The
words are not those of the child's treasury of language; the tone is
elegant, and the illustrations are abstract. "John spake, but he knew
not himself what he was saying, for the princess bestowed on him so
blessed a smile, and graciously extended her white hand for him to
kiss; his lips burned, an _electric_ current ran through him; he could
enjoy nothing of the _refreshments_ the pages offered him, he saw only
the beautiful vision of his dreams." Let us once hearken to this in the
style so familiar to us all: "She looked wonderfully fair and lovely
when she offered her hand to John, and he loved her more than ever. How
could she be a wicked witch, as all the people asserted? He accompanied
her into the hall, and the little pages offered them gingerbread nuts
and sweetmeats; but the old king was so unhappy, he could eat nothing,
and, besides, gingerbread nuts were too hard for him."

In his youth, Andersen, who then took Musæus for his model, had not
advanced far enough to understand how to mingle jest and earnest in his
diction; they were always at variance; scarcely was utterance given to
a sentiment before the disturbing parody made its appearance. John says
a few words, in which he expresses his love, and the author adds: "O,
it was so touching to hear! The poor young man, who was at other times
so natural, so amiable, now spoke quite like one of Clauren's books;
but then, what will not love do?" On this point, with this pedantic
frivolity, Andersen still persisted in 1830; but five years later the
transformation process is at an end; his talent has shed its skin; his
courage has grown; he dares speak his own language.

The determining element in this mode of speech was from the outset
the childlike. In order to be understood by such youthful readers as
those to whom he addressed himself, he was obliged to use the simplest
possible words, to return to the simplest possible conceptions, to
avoid everything abstract, to supply the place of indirect with direct
language; but in thus seeking simplicity, he finds poetic beauty, and
in attaining the childlike he proves that this childlike spirit is
essential to true poetry; for that form of expression which is naïve
and adapted to the general comprehension is more poetic than that which
reminds the reader of industry, of history, of literature; the concrete
fact is at once more life-like and more transparent than that which is
presented as proof of a proposition, and the language which proceeds
directly from the lips is more characteristic than the pale paraphrase
with a "that."[2]

To linger over this language, to become absorbed in its word-treasury,
its syntax, its intonation, is no proof of a petty spirit, and does
not take place merely through love of the vocables or the idiom.
True, language is but the surface of a work of poetic fancy; but if
the finger be placed upon the skin, we may feel the throbbing pulse
which indicates the heart-beats of the inner being. Genius is like a
clock; the visible index is guided by the invisible spring. Genius is
like a tangled skein, inextricable and knotted, as it may seem, it is
nevertheless inseparably one in its inner coherence. If we but get hold
of the outer end of the thread, we may slowly and cautiously endeavor
to unravel even the most tangled skein from its coil. It is not harmed
by the effort.



II.


If we hold fast to the clue, we shall comprehend how the childlike
in diction and sphere of conception, the true-hearted manner with
which the most improbable things are announced, is just what invests
the nursery story with its poetic worth. For what renders a literary
production significant, what gives it circulation in space and lasting
value in time, is the force with which it is able to present that
which is propagated through space and which endures through time. It
preserves itself by means of the vigor with which, in a clear and
polished way, it renders perceptible the constant. Those writings which
support tendencies or emotions whose horizon is limited in time or
space, those which revolve about purely local circumstances or are the
result of a prevailing taste, whose nourishment and whose image are
found in these circumstances, will vanish with the fashion that has
called them forth. A street song, a news-paper article, a festival
oration, reflect a prevailing mood which for perhaps a week has
superficially occupied the population of the city, and therefore have
themselves a duration of about equal length. Or, to mount to a higher
level, suppose there suddenly arises in a country some subordinate
proclivity, as, for instance, the fancy for playing private comedies,
which became an epidemic in Germany in the time of "Wilhelm Meister,"
or in Denmark between 1820 and 1830. Such a tendency in itself is
not wholly devoid of significance, but psychologically considered
it is thoroughly superficial and does not affect the deeper life of
the soul. If it be made an object of satire, as it was in Denmark,
by Rosenkilde's "The Dramatic Tailor," or in "Sir Burchardt and his
Family," by Henrik Hertz, those works which, without representing the
epidemic from a higher point of view, merely imitate and render it
laughable, will be just as short-lived as it was. Let us now take a
step higher, let us turn to the works which mirror the psychological
condition of an entire race, an entire period. The good-natured
drinking-song poetry of the past century, and the poetry written for
political occasions, are such literary productions. They are historic
documents, but their life and their poetic value are in direct ratio
to the depth at which they approach universal humanity, the constant
in the current of history. With greater and more marked significance
in this gradual ascent stand forth these works, in which a people has
seen itself portrayed for a half or for a whole century, or during
an entire historic period, and has recognized the likeness. Such
works must of necessity depict a spiritual condition of considerable
duration, which, just because it is so enduring, must have its geologic
seat in the deeper strata of the soul, as otherwise it would much
sooner be washed away by the waves of time. These works incorporate
the ideal personality of an epoch; that is to say, the personality
which floats before the people of that time as its reflection and
model. It is this personality which artists and poets chisel, paint,
and describe, and for which musicians and poets create. In Grecian
antiquity it was the supple athlete and the eagerly-questioning youth
who was athirst for knowledge; during the Middle Ages it was the knight
and the monk; under Louis XIV the courtier; in the beginning of the
nineteenth century it was Faust. The works which represent such forms
give expression to the intellectual condition of an entire epoch, but
the most important of them express still more; they mirror and embody
at the same time the character of an entire people, of an entire race,
an entire civilization, inasmuch as they reach the most profound, most
elementary stratum of the individual human soul and of society, which
concentrates and represents them in its little world. In this way,
with the aid of a few names, the history of an entire literature could
be written, by simply writing the history of its ideal personalities.
Danish literature, during the first half of the nineteenth century,
is placed, for instance, between the two types, Oehlenschläger's
Aladdin and Frater Taciturnus in Kierkegaard's "Stages in the Path of
Life." The former is its starting-point, the latter its perfection
and conclusion. Now since the worth of these personalities, as before
stated, depends upon how deeply they have their growth in the character
of the people, or in human nature, it will readily be recognized that
such a personality, for instance, as that of Aladdin, in order that
it may be comprehended in its peculiar beauty, must be compared with
the ideal personality which from the beginning of the period beamed
upon us from the fancy of the Danish people. We find this personality
by bringing together a large number of the oldest mythic and heroic
characterizations of the people. If I were to cite a single name, I
would choose that of Uffe the Bashful.[3] In virtues as well as in
faults he is a colossus of a Danish hero. It can readily be perceived
how great a degree of resemblance all of Oehlenschläger's best
characters, his calm Thor, his nonchalant Helge, his indolent Aladdin,
bear to this hero, and it will be seen during the contemplation how
deeply Aladdin is rooted in the character of the people, while at
the same time he is the expression of the ideal of an epoch whose
duration was about fifty years. It could just as easily be rendered
perceptible how Frater Taciturnus is one variety of the Faust type.
Sometimes, therefore, it is possible to show how ideal personalities
extend through the most divers countries and peoples, over an entire
continent, leaving behind them their indelible stamp in a whole group
of literary works which resemble one another as impressions of one and
the same intellectual form, impressions of one and the same gigantic
seal, with wafers of the most varied colors. Thus the personality that
becomes most prominent in Danish literature, as "Johann, the Betrayer"
(in Kierkegaard's "Either--Or") is derived from Byron's heroes, from
Jean Paul's Roquairol, from Chateaubriand's René, from Goethe's
Werther, and is at the same time represented in Lermontow's Petschorin
("The Hero of Our Time"). The usual billows and storms of time will not
suffice to overthrow such a personality; it was the Revolution of 1848
that first succeeded in setting it aside.

Extremes meet. For the same reason that a universal spiritual malady
which exercises a powerful influence over humanity will spread
simultaneously through the whole of Europe, and, because of its
profundity, will cause the works that were first created as its
portraits to live as its monuments; for the same reason, too, those
works attain general European fame and become long-lived that reflect
that which is most _elementary_ in human nature--childlike fancy and
childlike emotion, and consequently summon up facts which every one has
experienced (all children lock up kingdoms with a key). They depict
the life which existed in the first period of the human soul, and
thus reach that intellectual stratum which lies the deepest with all
peoples and in all lands. This is the simple explanation of the fact
that Andersen alone of all the Danish writers has attained a European,
indeed, more than a European, circulation. No other explanation has
reached my ears, unless it be the one that would have his renown due
to his having journeyed about and provided for his own fame. Ah,
if journeys would accomplish such results, the travelling stipends
for artists of all kinds that _must_ of necessity be awarded each
year would in the course of time provide Denmark with a rich bloom
of European celebrities, as they have already furnished poet after
poet. To be sure, the poets correspond with the way in which they
are made. But even the remaining, less malicious explanations that
may be brought forward, as, for instance, that Andersen alone among
the greater Danish authors has written in prose, and is therefore
the only one whose works can be translated without effort into other
languages, or that his genre is so popular, or that he is so great a
genius, state either too little or too much. There is more than _one_
genius in Danish literature who is greater than Andersen; there are
many who with respect to their endowments are by no means inferior to
him; but there is none whose creations are so elementary. Heiberg, as
well as Andersen, possessed the courage to remodel a form of art (the
vaudeville) in accordance with his own peculiarities, but he did not
have the good fortune to find any one art form in which he could reveal
his entire talent, combine all his gifts, as Andersen was able to do
in the nursery story, nor to find materials in which interests of time
and locality are of such enduring importance. His best vaudeville "The
Inseparable Ones" (De Uadskillelige) would only be understood where
there exists, as in the Scandinavian countries, a "Temperance Society
for Happiness" (Ibsen's expression for long betrothals), at which this
vaudeville aims its shafts. But as the possessor of talent should also
possess courage, so the possessor of genius should also possess good
fortune, and Andersen has lacked neither good fortune nor courage.

The elementary quality in Andersen's poetry insured him a circle of
readers among the cultivated people of all lands. It was still more
effectual in securing him one among the uncultivated people. That
which is childlike is in its very essence of a popular nature, and
a wide circulation corresponds with an extension downward. Because
of the deep and grievous but most natural division of society into
grades of culture, the influence of good literature is confined
almost exclusively to one class. If in Denmark a series of literary
productions like Ingemann's romances make an exception, it is chiefly
because of qualities which remove them from the cultivated classes
through lack of truth to nature in the character delineations and in
the historic coloring. With Ingemann's romances it is the same as with
Grundtvig's theories: if one would defend them, it could not be done by
proving their truth, but by practically laying stress on their outward
usefulness, the advantage they have been to the Danish cause, to the
interests of enlightenment and piety, etc. Ingemann's romances stand,
moreover, in noteworthy relation to Andersen's nursery stories. The
latter are read by the younger, the former by the older children. The
nursery story harmonizes with the luxuriant imagination and the warm
sympathy of the child, and the somewhat older maiden; the romance, with
the fantastic desire for action of the child and especially of the
somewhat older boy, with his growing taste for deeds of chivalry, with
his conceit, his love of pleasing and daring. Romances are written for
grown people; but the healthy mind of the nation has slowly dropped
them until they have found their natural public in the age between
ten and twelve years. Truth is something relative. At twelve years
of age these books seem just as fall of truth, as at twenty they seem
full of innocent lies. But they must be read before the twelfth year
be gone, for at twelve and a half it is already too late for those who
are a trifle advanced in intellectual development. With the nursery
story the reverse is the case. Written in the beginning for children
and constantly read by them, they speedily rose to the notice of grown
people and were by them declared to be true children of genius.

It was a lucky stroke that made Andersen the poet of children. After
long fumbling, after unsuccessful efforts, which must necessarily throw
a false and ironic light on the self-consciousness of a poet whose
pride based its justification mainly on the expectancy of a future
which he felt slumbering within his soul, after wandering about for
long years, Andersen, a genuine offspring of Oehlenschläger, strayed
into Oehlenschläger's footsteps, and one evening found himself in
front of a little insignificant yet mysterious door, the door of the
nursery story. He touched it, it yielded, and he saw, burning in the
obscurity within, the little "Tinder-Box" that became his Aladdin's
lamp. He struck fire with it, and the spirits of the lamp--the dogs
with eyes as large as teacups, as mill-wheels, as the round tower in
Copenhagen--stood before him and brought him the three giant chests,
containing all the copper, silver, and gold treasure stores of the
nursery story. The first story had sprung into existence, and the
"Tinder-Box" drew all the others onward in its train. Happy is he who
has found his "tinder-box."

Now in what sense is the child Andersen's ideal form? There comes to
every land a certain epoch in which its literature seems suddenly
to discover what has long remained unobserved in society. Thus in
literature are discovered by degrees the burgher (in Denmark by
Holberg), the student, the peasant, etc. In the time of Plato, woman
was not yet discovered, one might almost say not yet invented. The
child was discovered at different periods in the literatures of
different countries; in England, for instance, much earlier than
in France. Andersen is the discoverer of the child in Denmark. Yet
here, as everywhere else, the discovery does not take place without
pre-suppositions and stipulations, and here, as everywhere in Danish
literature, it is Oehlenschläger to whom thanks are due for the first
impetus, the fundamental discovery which prepares the way for that of
almost every later poet. The installation of the child in its natural
poetic rights is only one of the many phenomena of the ascension
to the throne of naïveté, whose originator in Danish literature is
Oehlenschläger. The eighteenth century, whose strength lies in its
critical understanding, whose enemy is its imagination, in which it
sees but the ally and bondman of antiquated tradition, whose queen
is its logic, whose king is Voltaire, the object of whose poetry
and science in the abstract is the enlightened and social human
being, sends the child, which is neither abstract, nor social, nor
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![4]

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),[5] 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.[6]
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.
We see her before us as she really is, fantastic and true, her and her
reindeer, whose neck she "tickles every evening with her sharp knife."

We have seen how sympathy with child-nature led to sympathy with the
animal which is doubly a child, and to sympathy with the plants, the
clouds, the winds, which are doubly nature. What attracts Andersen to
the impersonal being is the impersonal element in his own nature, what
leads him to the wholly unconscious is merely the direct consequence
of his sympathy. The child, young though it may be, is born old; each
child is a whole generation older than its father, a civilization of
ages has stamped its inherited impress on the little four-year-old
child of the metropolis. How many conflicts, how many endeavors, how
many sorrows have refined the countenance of such a child, making
the features sensitive and precocious! It is different with animals.
Look at the swan, the hen, the cat! They eat, sleep, live, and dream
undisturbed, as in ages gone by. The child already begins to display
evil instincts. We, who are seeking what is unconscious, what is naïve,
are glad to descend the ladder that leads to the regions where there
is no more guilt, no more crime, where responsibility, repentance,
restless striving and passion cease, where nothing of an evil nature
exists except through a substitution of which we are but partially
conscious, and which, therefore, robs our sympathy of half its sting.
An author like Andersen, who has so great a repugnance to beholding
what is cruel and coarse in its nakedness, who is so deeply impressed
by anything of the kind that he dare not relate it, but recoils a
hundred times in his works from some wanton or outrageous deed with
the maidenly expression, "We cannot bear to think of it!" Such an
author feels content and at home in a world where everything that
appears like egotism, violence, coarseness, vileness, and persecution,
can only be called so in a figurative way. It is highly characteristic
that almost all the animals which appear in Andersen's nursery stories
are tame animals, domestic animals. This is, in the first place, a
symptom of the same gentle and idyllic tendency which results in making
almost all Andersen's children so well-behaved. It is, furthermore,
a proof of his fidelity to nature, in consequence of which he is
so reluctant to describe anything with which he is not thoroughly
familiar. It is, finally, an interesting phenomenon with reference to
the use he makes of the animals, for domestic animals are no longer
the pure product of nature; they remind us, through ideal association,
of much that is human; and, moreover, through long intercourse with
humanity and long education they have acquired something human, which
in a high degree supports and furthers the effort to personify them.
These cats and hens, these ducks and turkeys, these storks and swans,
these mice and that unmentionable insect "with maiden's blood in
its body," offer many props to the nursery story. They hold direct
intercourse with human beings; all that they lack is articulate speech,
and there are human beings with articulate speech who are unworthy
of it, and do not deserve their speech. Let us, therefore, give the
animals the power of speech, and harbor them in our midst.

On the almost exclusive limitation to the domestic animal, a double
characteristic of this nursery story depends. First of all, the
significant result that Andersen's animals, whatever else they may be,
are never beastly, never brutal. Their sole faults are that they are
stupid, shallow, and old-fogyish. Andersen does not depict the animal
in the human being, but the human in the animal. In the second place,
there is a certain freshness of tone about them, a certain fulness of
feeling, certain strong and bold, enthusiastic, and vigorous outbursts
which are never found in the quarters of the domestic animal. Many
beautiful, many humorous and entertaining things are spoken of in
these stories, but a companion piece to the fable of the wolf and the
dog--the wolf who observed the traces of the chain on the neck of
the dog and preferred his own freedom to the protection afforded the
house dog--will not be found in them. The wild nightingale, in whom
poetry is personified, is a tame and loyal bird. "I have seen tears
in the Emperor's eyes; that is the real treasure to me," it says. "An
emperor's tears have a peculiar power!" Take even the swan, that noble,
royal bird in the masterly story, "The Ugly Duckling," which for the
sake of its cat and its hen alone cannot be sufficiently admired,--how
does it end? Alas! as a domestic animal. This is one of the points
where it becomes difficult to pardon the great author. O poet! we
feel tempted to exclaim, since it was in your power to grasp such a
thought, to conceive and execute such a poem, how could you, with your
inspiration, your pride, have the heart to permit the swan to end thus!
Let him die if needs must be! That would be tragic and great. Let him
spread his wings and impetuously soar through the air, rejoicing in
his beauty and his strength! let him sink down on the bosom of some
solitary and beautiful forest lake! That is free and delightful.
Anything would be better than this conclusion: "Into the garden came
little children, who threw bread and com into the water. And they ran
to their father and mother, and bread and cake were thrown into the
water; and they all said, 'The new one is the most beautiful of all!
so young and handsome!' and the old swans bowed their heads before
him." Let them bow, but let us not forget that there is something which
is worth more than the recognition of all the old swans and geese and
ducks, worth more than receiving bread-crumbs and cake as a garden
bird,--the power of silently gliding over the waters, and free flight!

Andersen prefers the bird to the four-footed animal. More birds
than mammals find place with him; for the bird is gentler than the
four-footed beast, is nearer to the plant. The nightingale is his
emblem, the swan his ideal, the stork his declared favorite. It is
natural that the stork, that remarkable bird which brings children into
the world,--the stork, that droll, long-legged, wandering, beloved,
yearningly expected and joyfully greeted bird, should become his
idolized symbol and frontispiece.

Yet plants are preferred by him to birds. Of all organic beings, plants
are those which appear most frequently in the nursery story. For in the
vegetable world alone are peace and harmony found to reign. Plants,
too, resemble a child, but a child who is perpetually asleep. There is
no unrest in this domain, no action, no sorrow, and no care. Here life
is a calm, regular growth, and death but a painless fading away. Here
the easily excited, lively poetic sympathy suffers less than anywhere
else. Here there is nothing to jar and assail the delicate nerves
of the poet. Here he is at home; here he paints his Arabian Nights'
Entertainments beneath a burdock leaf. Every grade of emotion may be
experienced in the realm of plants,--melancholy at the sight of the
felled trunk, fulness of strength at the sight of the swelling buds,
anxiety at the fragrance of the strong jasmine. Many thoughts may flit
through our brain as we follow the history of the development of the
flax, or the brief honor of the fir-tree on Christmas evening; but we
feel as absolutely free as though we were dealing with comedy, for
the image is so fleeting that it vanishes the moment we attempt to
render it permanent. Sympathy and agitation gently touch our minds, but
they do not ruffle us, they neither rouse nor oppress us. A poem about
a plant sets free twofold the sympathy to which it lays claim; once
because we know that the poem is pure fiction, and again because we
know the plant to be merely a symbol. Nowhere has the poet with greater
delicacy invested plants with speech than in "The Fir-Tree," "Little
Ida's Flowers," and in "The Snow Queen." In the last named story, every
flower tells its own tale. Let us listen to what the Tiger-lily says:
"Hearest thou not the drum? Bum! bum! those are the only two tones.
Always bum! bum! Hark to the plaintive song of the old women! to the
call of the priests! The Hindoo woman in her long robe stands upon the
funeral pile; the flames rise around her and her dead husband, but the
Hindoo woman thinks on the living one in the surrounding circle; on him
whose eyes bum hotter than the flames; on him, the fire of whose eyes
pierces her heart more than the flames which soon will bum her body to
ashes. Can the heart's flame die in the flame of the funeral pile?"
--"I do not understand that at all," said little Gerda.--"That is my
story," said the Tiger-lily.

Yet a step farther, and the fancy of the poet appropriates all
inanimate objects, colonizes and annexes everything, large and small,
an old house and an old clothes-press ("The Shepherdess and the Chimney
Sweep"), the top and the ball, the darning needle and the false collar,
and the great dough men with bitter almonds for their hearts. After
it has grasped the physiognomy of the inanimate, his fancy identifies
itself with the formless all, sails with the moon across the sky,
whistles and tells stories like the wind, looks on the snow, on sleep,
night, death, and the dream as persons.

The determining element in this poetic mind was, then, sympathy
with all that is childlike, and, through the representation of such
deep-seated, elementary, and constant spiritual conditions as those of
the child, the productions of this imagination are raised above the
waves of time, spread beyond the boundaries of their native land and
become the common property of the divers classes of society. The time
when genius was looked upon as a meteor fallen from the skies, has
long since passed away; now it is known that genius, as all else that
comes from nature, has its antecedents and its conditions, that it
holds relations of general dependence with its epoch, is an organ for
the ideas of the age. Sympathy for the child is only a phenomenon of
the sympathy of the nineteenth century for whatever is naïve. Love of
the unconscious is a phenomenon of the love of nature. In society, in
science, in poetry and in art, nature and the child had become objects
of veneration; in the realms of poetry, art, science, and society,
there takes place a reciprocal action. If there arise, therefore,
a poet whose affections are attracted to the child, whose fancy is
allured by the animal, by plants, and by nature, he dares follow his
impulses, he gains courage to give utterance to his talent, because a
hundred thousand mute voices about him strengthen him in his calling,
because the tide he believes himself to be stemming, rocks him gently
as it bears him onward to his goal.

Thus it will be seen we can study the poet's art by studying the ideas
which are his inspiration. To contemplate these in their origin and
their ramifications, in their abstract essence and their concrete
power, is, therefore, no superfluous act, when it becomes our task to
make a study of individual poetic fancies. For the bare idea cannot
make poetry; but neither can the poet make poetry without the idea
and without the surroundings which give it its impetus. About the
fortunate poet there gathers a multitude who, in a less felicitous way,
are working in his own vein; and about this multitude the people swarm
as mute but interested fellow-laborers. For genius is like a burning
reflector, which collects and unites the scattered rays of light.
It never stands alone. It is merely the noblest tree in the forest,
the highest ear in the sheaf, and it is first recognized in its real
significance and in its true attitude when it is seen in its rightful
place.



III.


It does not suffice to indicate the quarter of the globe in which a
genius dwells; we cannot travel through Denmark with a map of Europe
for our guide. In the first place, it is necessary to see the locality
more accurately described, and, even then, we no more know a genius
because we happen to be familiar with his relations and surroundings
than we know a city because we have walked around its walls. For though
a genius may be partially, he cannot be exhaustively, explained by
the period in which he lives. What is transmitted to him he combines
under a new law; a product himself, he brings forth products which he
alone of the whole world is able to bring forth. We need only exert
our powers of observation a little, or hearken perhaps to the opinion
of a foreigner, to feel how much there is that is national, local,
and individual in Andersen's nursery stories. I was once talking with
a young Frenchman about Denmark. "I am very well acquainted with
your country," said he. "I know that your king is named Christian,
that your greatest author is an unrecognized genius whose name
is Hr. Schmidt, that Hr. Ploug is your fatherland's most valiant
warrior, whom no battle-field ever saw retreat, and that Hr. Bille
is the Gambetta of Denmark. I know that you have a body of learned
men who are distinguished for their scientific independence and free
investigations, and I know Hr. Holst, whom you call the 'Tyrtäus
of Danebrog.'" Seeing that he had oriented himself pretty well, I
interrupted him with the question, "Have you read Andersen's nursery
stories?" "Have I read them?" cried he, in reply. "Why, I have read
no other Danish book." "What do you think of them?" asked I. "_Un peu
trop enfantin,_" was the answer, and I am convinced that if Andersen's
nursery stories were submitted to a French child five years old, he,
too, would find them '_un peu trop enfantin_.'

I have stated that the childlike element in Andersen is universally
intelligible. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. This
childlike tone has a decidedly Teutonic impress; it is best understood
in England and in Germany, less well in any of the Latin nations, least
of all by the French. In fact, Andersen is very little known and read
in France. England is the only land in which romances and semi-romances
are devoted to the portrayal of the spiritual life of little children
(Dickens's "Paul Domby" and "David Copperfield," Miss Wetherell's
"The Wide, Wide World," George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss"), and
English child nature is unique of its kind. It is only needful to open
the first illustrated French book for children that comes to hand to
observe the difference. The English child and the French child are as
dissimilar as the acorn and the beechnut. Moreover, Andersen could
never gain firm foothold in France for the reason that the field is
already occupied, having been taken possession of long since by La
Fontaine.

There are two kinds of naïveté. One is that of the heart, the other
that of the understanding; the former is frank, free, simple, and
touching, the latter has a distorted appearance, is jocose, full of
ready wit, and subtile. The one evokes tears, the other a smile; the
former has its beauty, the latter its charm; the former characterizes
the good child, the latter the _enfant terrible;_ and Andersen is the
poet of the former, La Fontaine of the latter naïveté. The latter form
of naïveté is that expression of precocity which utters the appropriate
word without exactly knowing what it says, and which has, therefore,
the appearance of a cloak; the other naïveté is that of innocence which
takes it for granted that its Garden of Eden is the whole world, and
consequently puts the whole world to shame without being aware that it
is doing so, and at the same time with so appropriate a choice of words
that it assumes the appearance of a mask. If we compare Andersen's
nursery stories with the fables of La Fontaine, we shall find a
fundamental difference in the contemplation of life exhibited and thus
become acquainted with the limits of the Northern mode of viewing life,
for every attempt at definition is in itself a limitation.

One of the most marked traits in La Fontaine's and the Gallic mode of
contemplating life is the war against illusion. The humorous play in
La Fontaine's naïveté is dependent on the fact that, harmless as this
naïveté is, good-natured and gentle as it always shows itself to be,
it now and then gives undoubted evidence that it is not altogether
foolish, that it will not allow itself to be duped, that it knows very
well how to estimate and value all the stupidity and hypocrisy, all the
preaching and all the empty phrases with which humanity permits itself,
as by common consent, to be led by the nose or by the heart. With a
smile it passes by all the earnestness at whose core is corruption and
hollowness, all the greatness which at bottom is but audacity, all
the respectability whose essence is a lie. Thus it puts "Everything in
its Right Place," which is the title of one of Andersen's most popular
tales. The key-note of its earnestness is poetic enthusiasm, and its
keen wit has a sting which is carefully concealed. French satire is
a rapier with a provisional button. In "Tartuffe," "Candide," and
"Figaro," it effected a revolution before the revolution. Laughter is
the oldest Marseillaise of France.

The most marked trait in Andersen's mode of viewing life, is that which
gives the ascendency to the heart, and this trait is genuinely Danish.
Full of feeling itself, this method of contemplation takes every
opportunity to exalt the beauty and significance of the emotions. It
overleaps the will (the whole destiny of the Flax, in the story of its
life, comes from without), does combat with the critique of the pure
reason as with something pernicious, the work of the Devil, the witch's
mirror, replaces pedantic science with the most admirable and witty
side-thrusts ("The Bell," "A Leaf From the Sky"), describes the senses
as a tempter, or passes them over as unmentionable things, pursues and
denounces hardheartedness, glorifies and commends goodness of heart,
violently dethrones coarseness and narrowness, exalts innocence and
decorum, and thus "puts everything in its right place." The key-note
of its earnestness is the ethic-religious feeling coupled with the
hatred felt by geniality for narrowness, and its humorous satire is
capricious, calm, in thorough harmony with the idyllic spirit of the
poet. Its satire has only the sting of a gnat, but it stings in the
tenderest places. Which of the modes of contemplation is the best? Such
a question is not worthy of an answer. I love the beech, but I love the
birch as well. Only because they please me, not in view of casting the
balance in favor of either of these modes, I quote the following lines
of George Herwegh:--

    "My eyes with tears have often been bedewed,
    When hearts I've seen all bruised and maltreated,
    By hounds of understanding, too, pursued.

    "Within the breast one little word is seated,
    Yet wisely is its utterance subdued,
    For hearts that beat too high will be defeated."

As different as these modes of contemplating life are the poetic
endowments of the two authors. La Fontaine writes clear, elegant,
highly melodious verse, whose poetry is a light enthusiasm and a
gentle melancholy. Andersen writes a grotesque, irregular prose, full
of harmless mannerisms, and whose poetry is a luxuriant, gushing,
rapturous conceit. It is this fantastic element which makes Andersen
so foreign to the French people whose rather gray poetry wholly lacks
the bright-hued floral splendor found among the Northern people and
attaining its highest beauty in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's
Dream," a splendor which may be detected throughout Andersen's nursery
stories, and which imparts to them their finest perfume. And as the
fantastic caprice of this element is Norse-Danish, its idyllic key-note
is purely Danish. No wonder that the earliest and most original of
these nursery stories were written during the reign of Friedrich VI.
and bear the stamp of his day. We recognize this monarch in all the
fatherly, patriarchal old kings represented in them; we find the spirit
of the age in the complete lack of social, to say nothing of political
satire, that we detect in them. No wonder, too, that Thorwaldsen could
never weary of hearing these stories read aloud as he counted his
numbers in the game of Lotto, for his Danish temperament was naïve,
and his art, with all its greatness, was as idyllic as the art which
produced these poetic creations.

A genius, born in an age whose every influence opposes his development,
is either hopelessly crushed or goes to ruin like any inferior talent.
An Andersen born in Denmark in 1705, instead of 1805, would have been
a most unfortunate and thoroughly insignificant individual, perhaps
even a maniac. A genius born at a period when everything unites to
come to its aid, produces classic, genial creations. Now, this first
harmony between a poet and his era (in a measure also, his country)
corresponds to a second one between the individual faculties of genius,
and to a third one between genius and its peculiar type of art. The
nature of genius is an organically connected whole; its weakness in one
direction is the condition of its strength in another; the development
of this faculty causes that one to be checked in its growth, and it
is impossible to alter any single particular without disturbing the
entire machinery. We may wish that one quality or another was different
than it is, but we can readily comprehend that any decided change is
out of the question. We may wish our poet had stronger personality,
a more manly temperament, and more mental equilibrium; but we have
no difficulty in understanding that the lack of defined personality,
and the incompleteness of the character whose acquaintance we make in
"The Story of my Life," stand in the most intimate relationship with
the nature of his endowments. A less receptive mind would not be so
susceptible to poetic impressions, a harder one would not unite so
much flexibility with its more rigid attitude, one more susceptible to
criticism and philosophy would not be so naïve.

Since, then, the moral attributes are requisite to the intellectual,
so, too, they are mutually contingent one upon the other. An
overflowing lyric sentiment, an exalted sensibility, cannot exist with
the experience and method of a man of the world, for experience chills
and hardens. A lightly vaulting fancy that hops and soars like a bird,
does not admit of being united with the logically measured crescendo
and decrescendo of dramatic action. An observation by no means inclined
to be cold-blooded cannot possibly penetrate psychologically to the
heart of things; a childlike, easily quivering hand cannot dissect a
villain. If, therefore, we place genius of this kind face to face with
sundry defined and well-known types of art, we can determine beforehand
precisely what its relations with each of them will be.

The romance is a species of poetic creation which demands of the mind
that would accomplish anything remarkable in it, not only imagination
and sentiment, but the keen understanding, and the cool, calm power
of observation of the man of the world; that is the reason why it is
not altogether suited to Andersen, although it is not wholly remote
from his talent. In the entire scenery, the background of nature,
the picturesque effect of the costumes, he is successful; but where
psychological insight is concerned, traces of his weakness may be
detected. He will take part for and against his characters; his men
are not manly enough, his women not sufficiently feminine. I know no
poet whose mind is more devoid of sexual distinctions, whose talent is
less of a nature to betray a defined sex, than Andersen's. Therefore
his strength lies in portraying children, in whom the conscious sense
of sex is not yet prominent. The whole secret lies in the fact that
he is exclusively what he is,--not a man of learning, not a thinker,
not a standard-bearer, not a champion, as many of our great writers
have been, but simply a poet. A poet is a man who is at the same time
a woman. Andersen sees most forcibly in man and in woman that which
is elementary, that which is common to humanity, rather than that
which is peculiar and interesting. I have not forgotten how well he
has described the deep feeling of a mother in "The Story of a Mother,"
or how tenderly he has told the story of the spiritual life of a woman
in "The Little Sea-Maid." I simply recognize the fact that what he has
represented is not the complicated spiritual conditions of life and
of romance, but the element of life; he rings changes on single, pure
tones, which amid the confused harmonies and disharmonies of life,
appear neither so pure nor so distinct as in his books. Upon entering
into the service of the nursery story all sentiments undergo a process
of simplification, purification, and transformation. The character
of man is farthest removed from the comprehension of the poet of
childhood, and I can only recall a single passage in his stories in
which a delicate psychological characteristic of a feminine soul may
be encountered, even this appears so innocently that we feel inclined
to ask if it did not write itself. It occurs in the story of the new
porcelain figures, "The Shepherdess and the Chimney-Sweep."

"'Have you really courage to go forth with me into the wide world?'
asked the chimney-sweep, tenderly. 'Have you considered how large it
is, and that we can never come back here again?' 'I have,' said she.
And the chimney-sweep gazed fixedly upon her, and then he said: 'My way
lies up the chimney. Have you really courage to go with me through the
stove, and to creep through all the flues?' ... And he led her towards
the door of the stove. 'It looks quite black,' said she, but still
she went with him and on through all the intricacies of the interior,
and through the flues, where a pitchy darkness reigned." After long,
long troublesome ascent they reached the top of the chimney and seated
themselves on its edge. "The heaven and all its stars were above them,
and all the roofs of the town below them; they could see far around,
far away into the world. The poor shepherdess had never pictured it
to herself thus; she leaned her little head on her sweep, and wept so
bitterly that all the gilding of her girdle came off. 'O this is too
much!' said she; 'I cannot bear it. This world is too large. O were I
but again on the little table under the looking-glass! I shall never be
happy till I am there again. I have followed you into the wide world;
now, if you really love me, you may follow me home again.'"

A more profound, more mercilessly true, more self-evident analysis
of a certain kind of feminine enthusiasm and its energy when it
undertakes to act boldly without regard to consequences, and without
looking backwards, can be found, I think, in the works of no other
Danish writer. What delicacy of presentation: the momentary resolute
enthusiasm, the heroic conquering of the first horror, the endurance,
bravery, firmness, until the moment which requires courage, when the
firmness is shattered, and the yearning for the little table under
the looking-glass is awakened. Many a voluminous romance would have
been exalted by such a page, and we find in it a compensation for the
fact that Andersen is no master in the province of the romance. The
drama is a species of poetic production that requires the faculty for
differentiating an idea and distributing it among many characters;
it requires an understanding of conscious action, a logic power to
guide this, an eye to the situation, a passion for becoming absorbed
and overwhelmed in the inexhaustible study of individual, many-sided
characters. Therefore it is that the drama is still farther removed
from the genius of Andersen than the romance, and that his lack of
capacity for the dramatic style increases with mathematical exactness
in the same ratio as each variety of dramatic art is removed from the
nursery story, and consequently from his gifts. He naturally succeeds
best with the nursery-story comedy; although, to be sure, it possesses
little more of comedy than the name. It is a mixed species, and if it
were put to the test of the Spanish story, it would be recognized as a
bastard. In the comedy of special situations he is happy with respect
to the poetic execution of single scenes ("The King's Dream"), but
singularly unfortunate in the execution of the idea as a whole ("The
Pearl of Good Fortune"). The comedy proper is not poorly suited to his
gifts. Certain of his nursery stories are, indeed, veritable Holberg
comedies; "The Happy Family" is a Holberg character-comedy, and "It is
Quite True" possesses a decided Holberg plot. In stories of this kind
character delineation comes easier to him than in the grave drama, for
in them he walks directly in the footsteps of Holberg, so strikingly
does his talent accord in a single direction with that of this early
Northern dramatist. Andersen is, as I have already remarked, no direct
psychologist; he is rather a biologist than an especially well-informed
student of human nature. His predilection is for describing man through
animals or plants, and seeing him develop from the rudiments of his
nature. All art contains an answer to the question, What is man?
Inquire of Andersen how he defines man, and he will reply, Man is a
swan hatched in the "duck-yard" of Nature.

To a person who takes an interest in psychological investigations, who,
without being able to grasp a complex character, possesses a refined
development of observation for single qualities, for characteristic
peculiarities, animals, especially those with which we are familiar,
afford great relief. We are usually accustomed to credit each animal
with an individual attribute, or at all events, with a limited group
of attributes. The snail is slow, the nightingale is the unpretending
singer with the glorious voice, the butterfly is the fair inconstant
one. There is nothing then to prevent the poet who possesses the gifts
needed to represent these striking little traits, from following in the
footsteps of Holberg, the man who wrote "Den Vægelsindede" (The Fickle
One), as Andersen did in "The New Lying-In Room." He betrays here,
moreover, one of his many points of similarity with Dickens, whose
comic characterizations are frequently limited to a few traits repeated
_ad infinitum._

In the epopee, which belongs in our day to the impossible forms of
poetry and which demands all the qualities that Andersen lacks, he can
merely find play for certain petty fancies, as for instance, when he
characterizes the spirit of China, in his "Ahasuerus," in a droll lyric
episode, or when he permits the twittering swallows (exactly as in a
nursery story) to describe the festal hall of Attila.

In his descriptions of travel very naturally a large number of his
best qualities come to light. Like his favorite, the migratory bird,
he is in his element when he travels. He observes with the eye of
a painter, and he describes like an enthusiast. Yet even here two
faults are apparent: one is that his lyric tendency at times runs
away with him, so that he chants a hymn of praise instead of giving a
description, or exaggerates instead of painting (see, for instance, the
gushing and untrue description of Ragatz and Pfäffers); the other, that
the underlying, personal, egotistical element of his nature, giving
evidence that his innermost personality lacks reserve, occasionally
obtrudes itself in a most disturbing manner.

The latter tendency characterizes with especially marked force the
style of his autobiography. The criticism that can with justice be made
on his "Story of My Life" is not so much that the author is throughout
occupied with his own private affairs (for that is quite natural in
such a work); it is that his personality is scarcely e

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