—from On Anything (1910)
William Dean Howells
Never has a beautiful talent needed an introduction less than Hans Christian Andersen from the sort of glibness which is asked to officiate in that way at lectures and public meetings and in the forefront of books. Every one knows who this gentle Dane was, and almost every one knows what he did.... I suppose there never were stories with so little harm in them, so much good. Each of them has a moral, but so neatly tucked away that it does not stick out at the end as morals usually do, particularly in stories meant for children, but [it] is mostly imparted with the sort of gay wisdom which a friendly grown-up uses with the children when they do not know whether he is funning or not. The great beauty of them is the homely tenderness which they are full of, the kind of hospitality which welcomes all sorts and conditions of children to the same intimacy. They are of a simplicity always so refined that there is no touch of coarseness in them; with their perfect naturalness they are of a delicate artistry which will take the young children unaware of its perfection, and will only steal into their consciousness perhaps when they are very old children. Some may never live to feel the art, but they will feel the naturalness at once.
How wholesome, how good, how true, how lovely! That is what I think, when I think of any of Andersen’s stories, but perhaps I think it most when I read “The Ugly Ducking,” which is the allegory of his own life, finding its way to fame and honor through many kinds of difficulty and discouragement from others and from the consequences of his own defects and foibles. Nobody could have written those benignant fables, those loving parables, who had not suffered from impatience and misunderstanding such as Andersen exaggerates in his autobiography and travesties in that story; and his rise to good will above the snubs and hurts which he somewhat too plaintively records is as touching a thing as I know in literary history. His sole revenge takes in that sweet satire, and it is no great excess after owning himself an ugly duckling if he comes at last to see himself a swan. He was indeed a swan as compared with most ducklings that grow up to ordinary proportions of ducks from their humble origin, but I do not care if in his own nature and evolution he did not always get beyond a goose. There are many ducklings who do not get as far as being geese, and I mean what I say for high praise of our poet. Swans are magnificent birds, and as long as they keep in the water or the sky they are superbly graceful, with necks that curve beyond anything, but they are of no more use in the world than eagles; they have very bad tempers, and they bite abominably, and strike with their wings with force to break a man’s bones, so that I would have ugly ducklings mostly stop short of becoming swans.
But here I am, trying to put a moral in the poet’s mouth, not reflecting that a moral is the last thing he means in his fairy tales and wonder stories. They are of a witchery far beyond sermoning, in that quaint humor, that subtle suggestion, that fidelity to what we know of ourselves, of our small passions and vanities and follies as young children and our full-sized faults as old ones. You might go through them all with no more sense of instruction, if you pleased, than you would feel in walking out in a pleasant country, with here and there a friendly homestead, flocks grazing, and boys and girls playing. But perhaps such a scene, such a mild experience, makes one think as well as a direct appeal to one’s reason or conscience. The children, however, need not be afraid. I think I could safely assure the worst of them (and how much better the worst of them are than the best of us!) that they can get back to themselves from this book, for the present at least, with no more trouble of spirit, if they choose, than if they had been reading the Arabian Nights. Long afterward it may be that, when they have forgotten many Arabian Nights, something will come to them out of a dim memory of these fairy tales and wonder stories, and they will realize that our dear Hans Christian Andersen meant so and so for their souls’ good when he seemed to be merely amusing them. I hope so.
—from his Introduction to
Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Wonder Stories (1914)
W. H. Auden
Hans Andersen, so far as I know, was the first man to take the fairy tale as a literary form and invent new ones deliberately. Some of his stories are, like those of Perrault, a reworking of folk material—“The Wild Swans,” for example, is based on two stories in the Grimm collection, “The Six Swans,” and “The Twelve Brothers”—but his best tales, like “The Snow Queen,” or “The Hardy Tin Soldier,” or “The Ice Maiden” are not only new in material but as unmistakeably Andersen’s as if they were modern novels.
—from his introduction to Tales of Grimm and Andersen (1952)
Alison Lurie
Mutual romantic love is very rare in Andersen’s tales. Again and again, his protagonists are rejected by those they court—and in this they share the unhappy experience of their author. All his life, Andersen continually fell in love with upper-class or titled persons, both male and female. Though he made many acquaintances, he had almost no romantic success: these people liked having him come to their houses, tell stories to their children, and sign books, but their attitude always remained one of friendly, slightly distant patronage.
—from Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter (2003)
QUESTIONS1. Is there a philosophy, theory, thesis, morality, or conception of human life that holds these tales together?2. What do these tales reveal to us about Andersen’s understanding or feeling about the relations between the sexes?3. Money certainly holds a prominent place in Andersen’s tales. Can you think of anything in the tales that has greater value?4. If you were told you had to invent a tale of the sort Andersen wrote, what, in brief, would it be about? Compose a paragraph-length synopsis of your plot.
For Further Reading
TRANSLATIONS OF ANDERSEN’S WORKS IN ENGLISH
Andersen, H. C. Author’s Edition [Andersen’s Works]. 10 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1869-1908.
The Andersen-Scudder Letters. Edited and translated by Waldemar Westergaard; introduction by Jean Hersholt; interpretative essay by Helge Topsøe-Jensen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949. Andersen’s correspondence with American editor, publisher, and writer Horace Elisha Scudder.
Brothers, Very Far Away and Other Poems. Edited by Sven Rossel. Seattle, WA: Mermaid Press, 1991.
The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen. Edited and translated by Patricia Conroy and Sven Rossel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990.
The Fairy Tale of My Life. Translated by W. Glyn Jones. New York: British Book Centre, 1954.
The Fairy Tale of My Life. Translated by Horace Scudder. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871.
Hans Christian Andersen’s Correspondence with the Late Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Charles Dickens, etc. etc. Edited by Frederick Crawford. London: Dean and Son, 1891.