Hans Andersen Exhibit

Last year the city of Copenhagen paid a graceful compliment to the Gothic intellect by holding a memorial exhibit of reliques, papers, letters, reminiscent of the life of Wolfgang Goethe. To reciprocate, the Prussian State Library recently opened a similar exhibit for a Scandinavian genius, Hans Christian Andersen. First editions of his books, illustrations for his earliest fairy tales, letters from Hugo, Heine, Balzac, Lamartine, De Vigny, the Grimm brothers and the Grand Duke of Weimar, ladies' favors, gentlemen's favors, and the souvenirs of princes, are shown there, and the German schoolchildren who went to gaze at them were told first the fantastic plot of his life, which was, after all, one of the strangest fairy stories he had anything to do with.

A sickly young shoemaker of Odense, in Fuenen, Denmark, married when he was 20 a woman still younger than himself and was very well content when she bore him a son. They called the baby Hans Christian, and all three lived together, with little to eat, in a room which was also the home of their fine black pig.

Little Hans was not a manly lad; he had, for instance, a terrible fear of the great geese that were driven in flocks through the streets of Odense, marching with a military step, their eyes glistening like buttons, and their red bills pointing forward in a row. When he beheld them he would run and hide behind the black pig, which was his friend.

Now his father the cobbler, who, like Hans Christian, was sick a good deal, died one day, and after that Frau Andersen had no time to think about Hans. He stopped going to school; instead, he built himself a toy theatre and sat about all day in the cobbler's shop, making clothes for marionettes or reading plays. Such conduct irritated the Dominie of Odense. He had no liking for Hans; what was more, the boy did not know his catechism. So he took Hans away and had him confirmed by a Bishop. After the ceremony he took him into the grim vicarage and shook a forefinger in his face:

"Now, Hans," he said, "your father is dead and your mother is penniless and you are confirmed. It is about time for you to make your way in the world. What are you going to do?"

Hans did not know.

"The clothes you make for your marionettes are not bad," said the dominie. "Perhaps you had better be a tailor. Yes, I will apprentice you to a tailor."

But Hans would not agree. Rather than do that, he said, he would become an opera singer.

So off he went to Copenhagen. At the opera they took him for a lunatic. He tried to be a dancer, but his feet were too big and his legs were too thin. So there was nothing left for him to do but turn writer.

His first story interested a man who knew King Frederick VI. This friend persuaded the monarch to send him to school. He was very backward in his classes. He graduated, wrote dramas which were never played, books which were never published, until a novel, The Improvisatore, brought him suddenly to fame. In his spare moments he had written a few fairy tales, idle things for which he had no regard. He wanted to be a dramatist. He traveled through Europe; after his triumphant visit to England, Charles Dickens saw him off from Ramsgate Pier. His plays were refused. People asked for more fairy stories. In 1847 and 1848 two new volumes were published. He wrote a romance, a book of travel; they failed to sell. "Fairy stories," readers begged. So, still disdaining them, he wrote more of these small tales that enchant children and philosophers, poets and delinquents, because in their translucence the mind sees its own reflection. One evening Hans, whose first friend was a pig, and his last a king, fell out of bed so awkwardly that he gave himself a hurt from which he never recovered. He died in 1875.