INTRODUCTION
Hans Christian Andersen, without knowing it, prescribed a healthy tonic for more than one writer in England and America. It would be a pity not to acknowledge this.
He was not well known in either country when Mary Howitt published her translations of his stories in England. Perhaps her intimacy with Frederica Bremer, the Swedish novelist, opened the way to her acquaintance with the Danish story-teller.
The children of England and America had the first benefit of this invasion of the Dane. For, by a rather provoking law, it will happen that the literature of childhood is sadly apt to fall into the ruts of sentimentalists or of mechanics. “Anybody can write a child’s book” is the false theory of publishers in the decline which comes upon children’s books once in a generation. As an experienced editor once said to me, ninety-nine hundredths of the articles sent to him about boys and girls are written by ladies who never had the charge of either boy or girl.
Into the midst of books thus written down for children there comes, once in a generation, such a revelation as the publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales made early in this century, as the appearance in England of Andersen’s children’s stories, made. And again, such as children enjoyed when Stevenson’s poems for them appeared. Probably Stevenson’s poems would not have been written but for such prose poems as
Our reverent dirge shall here be said:
Them, when their martial leader called,
No dread preparative appalled,
But leaden-hearted, leaden-heeled,
I marked them steadfast in the field.
And smote each leaden hero low;
Proudly they perished one by one;
The dread pea-cannon’s work was done!
Oh not for them the tears we shed,
Consigned to their congenial lead;
But while unmoved their sleep they take,
We mourn for their dear captain’s sake,—
For their dear captain, who shall smart
Both in his pocket and his heart,
Who saw his heroes shed their gore,
And lacked a penny to buy more.”
I do not venture to describe the indescribable, and so I will not try to analyze the charm of Andersen’s children’s stories. They can speak for themselves. They do speak for themselves in the memories of all those young people who, if I may say so, were brought up on them. There is sentiment in them, because there is sentiment in all life; but it is not a morbid or manufactured sentiment. It is the sentiment which belongs to the occasion. Here is what I have meant when I say that he administered a healthful tonic to all those writers for children who had sense enough to wish to improve on their own methods. For the mere mechanics, the people who build stories up as a child makes a mud pie,—so much water and so much clay, without going farther than the water and the clay,—no tonic is possible.
People generally speak as if “The Improvisatore” were the autobiography of Andersen, and as if whoever has read that understands his life. This does not seem to me quite broad enough. His own memoir of himself, which has been translated by Mrs. Howitt, gives a very curious picture of life in Den-
