The Story of My Life
By . New York: Hurd and Houghton.
“MY life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident,” says our poet, as he begins to tell it, and truly it seems the Mährchen that he calls it. In 1805 he was born of the lowliest parentage (his father was a shoemaker and his mother a peasant) in Odense, Denmark, and in 1867 he was, with all public ceremony, made a citizen of Ins native place, which was illuminated in his honor and held a great festival for him, — “just as it did for the king and queen,” said the poor old woman who had known him as a babe, and who now wept over him in her pride and joy. If in many ways Andersen was favored by fortune, he was sharply persecuted in others. It was his fate to have influential and affectionate patrons from the moment when, a simplehearted boy, he set out from Odense for the capital, and to be persecuted by the harshest criticism from the beginning of his literary efforts. Kings and nobles were his friends, but they could not protect him against the newspapers, and he was known and loved throughout Europe before his genius was fairly acknowledged by the reviewers of his own country. At last the cumulative effect of his foreign repute, and the sort of personal affection with which a generation born since he began to write regarded the poet in gratitude for the pleasure his stories had given its youth, created a criticism all in his interest, and called out public honors, of which the greatest was the festival at Odense. This, indeed, Andersen considers the crowning glory of his life ; and in the chapters which he adds to his autobiography, for the complete American edition of his works, he dwells proudly and gratefully upon it.
“The Story of my Life” formerly ended with the record of the year 1855, but it is here brought down to 1867, and the whole is now for the first time translated into English. It might be better translated, for it has the faults which mar nearly all the versions of Andersen’s books since the Howitts ceased to make them ; it seems done by one not native to English, and it not only abounds in Danish idioms, but has here and there grotesque infelicities of expression that seem due to the translator’s ignorance of English. Much of the flavor of the original must be lost in this awkward process, and we suspect that the author’s meaning suffers at times. The book is exceedingly entertaining, as autobiography always is, and the author makes us thoroughly acquainted with his character as well as his fortunes. We do not think that for the sake of the tender regard we all have for him, we could have desired to know him quite so well, and yet the truth about men of genius is no doubt the best after all, as it is about everything else. Andersen’s character, tried by our Anglo-Saxon standard, is not what we should call a manly one ; though here there may be some fault in our standard, which we ought not to apply too freely to the emotional people of Continental Europe. An American or an Englishman of Andersen’s character we should have no scruple in describing as a sentimental snob. He is everywhere bursting into tears of grief or joy ; he regards himself with wonder and awe on account of the personal friendship borne him by the great; he basks in the condescension of nobles, and hugs himself upon the favor of kings. He is not altogether to blame for this, for royalty and aristocracy stood by him when the reviews and the theatres would none of him. Hut he must always have been difficult to manage by those who could not patronize him, and the reader feels that for much of his suffering at the hands of critics and people he had himself to thank. When we have said all this, however, we feel that we have done him a tacit injustice, and we must acknowledge that, in spite of his obsequiousness, there is a sturdy sympathy with the people of his own origin, and a hatred of aristocratic pretension, of which there can be no more doubt than of his genius or his vanity. He affects you very often as a man grown conscious of his own simplicity of nature, and resolved to make the most of it; his naïveté appears studied, his emotions premeditated, only his humor and his ideality seem at all times unstrained. You weary of his meek diligence in recording the honors and the compliments paid him, and wish that he had either more modesty or not so much.
The earlier and the latter parts of his book are the most entertaining, especially the former; and the first pages are exquisitely humorous and tender in their description of his child-life before the death of his romantic, ambitious father, and while they all dwelt together in their poor home at Odense. Nothing can be more amusing or more touching than the description of the bed in which the poet was born, and which his father had ingeniously fashioned out of the catafalque of a deceased nobleman, leaving tbe funereal trappings of black velvet still on it.
The book is useful in making known the literary world of Denmark, with its surprising treasures of poetry and drama, and its not at all surprising jealousies and enmities. This is done in a more fragmentary way, of course, than could have been wished, but Andersen is essentially sketchy, and what he cannot indicate by a few touches must remain obscure. It is right to say, however, that upon his own griefs from the Copenhagen literati he dwells very fully, and presents a very finished picture of the sufferings a tender-hearted, vain, weak man of genius endures at the hands of a sarcastic and critical public. Andersen’s lamentations are not very respectable, but on the other hand it is not creditable to the Danes that his recognition was in a manner forced upon them by outside pressure.