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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Hans Christian Anderson Biography ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN (1805-75). A celebrated Danish writer styled the "children's poet," whose best poetry is his prose. He was born at Odense, Denmark, April 2, ) 805. The child of poor and shiftless parents he had little instruction and few associates, but his dramatic instinct was stimulated by La Fontaine and the Arabian Nights and a visit of a theatrical company to Odense, in 1818, led him to seek his dramatic fortune in Copenhagen (1819), where for four years he worked diligently, but produced nothing of note. Ile gained a scholarship, however, and friends, who in 1829 enabled him to publish A Journey on Foot from Hohn Canal to the East Point of Amager an arabesque naively plagiarized and parodied from the German romanticists. Fantasies and Sketches, sentimental and rather mawkish poems, followed in 1831 after which he made a tour of Germany, the first of many wanderings. This inspired Silhouettes, a book with admirable pages of description. In 1835 be essayed the Fairy Tales, by which be was to achieve world-wide recognition. The classic Tinderbox and Big Claus and Little Claus are also of this year. He was, however, disposed to underrate his "sleight of band with fancy's golden apples," devoting himself to novels, The Improvvisatore (1835) , 0. T. (1836) , and Only a Fiddler (1837) , which gave him a European reputation for picturesque description, humor, and pathos of the romantic type. In the last, there are interesting autobiographical touches; but there is no clear character-drawing in any of them, and this lack made his repeated dramatic essays uniform failures. He was still to write delightful impressions of travel, as in A Poet's Bazaar (1842), In Sweden (1849) , and In Spain (1863) . He wrote other novels, The Two Baronesses (1849) and To Be or Not To Be (1857) , and an epic failure, Ahasuerus (1847) ; but the Picture Book Without Pictures (1840) had revealed his best talent to him as an interpreter of child nature. Between 1852 and 1862 he printed nine small volumes of stories and finished the last of them in 1872. His last years were unharassed by criticism and attended by all the honor and love that should accompany old age. His literary jubilee occurred in 1869, and he died at Copenhagen, Aug. 4, 1875, after a brief and painless illness. In appearance, Andersen was limp and very ungainly. His nose was large, his neck and limbs long and lank, and his hands and feet very large; yet he fancied himself distinguished looking and had a child's delight in dress and decoration. His character, too, hovered between the child-like and the childish. He never realized the limitations of his genius. Curiously enough, he did not like children, and he was not personally attractive to them. He was a shrewd observer, but self-absorbed and out of touch with his political generation. His literary style is faulty, but it reflects marvelously the vivid imagery of juvenile fancy. He had at his finger-tips all the venerable devices of the nursery to spur attention and kindle sympathy, No writer looks at nature so wholly with the child's eyes as he, none so interpenetrates narration with the smiles, the fears, and the very intonations of childhood. His personifications may tease the adult fancy, but they are the natural drama of children. Andersen's works are Englished in ten uniform but unnumbered volumes. Mary Howitt's is still the best of many translations of the Tales, though it is far from faultless. A sumptuous centenary edition of the Tales appeared (1900) under the patronage of the Danish government simultaneously in six languages. Andersen's Autobiography was compiled by Jonas (Berlin, 1879). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. I. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 611. |