The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1884-11-20
Hans Andersen.


It is q curious freak of fortune which
has associated the little country of Den
mark in most peoples minds with two
names representing the most contrasted
personalities Hamlet, the protagonist
Of human speculation, and Hans
Christian Andersen, the first child
author. He was not the first to write
for children, nor the first to introduce
the child into literature; another dis
tinction belongs to him: He was the
first child who had contributed to liter
AZURE. The work by which he is best
known is nothing more nor less than an
artistic creation of precisely the order
which is common among children.
1t is part of the common experience
of men TO endow inanimate things with
more or less life through the operation
of Imagination. Even mere symbols
are made to have a superfluity of life.
But the power of personifying that
which seems to have no personality is
strongest in childhood; it is very apt to
die out or become indistinct in later
years. Andersen never lost this power;
he cultivated it, and that which with
children is vivid but formless became
with him even more vivid, but ordered
and disposed as by the laws of art.
This, | think, may be taken as the
peculiar contribution of Andersen to
literature; he was theinterpreter to the
world of that creative power which is
significant of childhood; the child spoke
through him. He was himself, as his
autobiography and the unvarying testi-
mony of his friends show, child all
his life. The nGiUete which is so large
al clement in his stories was an ex-
preston of his own artless nature; his
was condition almost of arrested de-
yelopment. He was an excessively vain
man, but his vanity was the innocent
egotism of child who wants every body
to look at him when he is doing any
thing which pleases himself. He be-
means with amusing simplicity the in
difference which people showed to his
philosophical writings; he AYERS with
an air of injured Innocence that he
studied very hard, and was often read
ing difficult books at midnight when
people supposed he was amusing him.
self. He would have discontinued such
trivial matters as writing his little
tales, but they forced themselves upon
him.
1t was hard forAndersen's contempt
raries to withhold their ridicule of this
strange figure, and it is still difficult
for Danes to accept cordially the con-
spicuous position in their little creature
which he holds in the eyes of foreigners
He wrote novels, poems, books of travel,
and dramas. He ranked as an artist
and man of creative power in these
forms below others of his time and ma
ton, yet it will be found that when
Danish literature is named, Andersen
is quite the only figure in it of familiar
repute beyond the boundaries of his
own country, and this not by virtue of
these larger works, but through few
wonder-stories.
Andersen was by no means a man
who preferred to associate with chill
dren. When it was proposed in his life
time to erect in the Rosenberg Garden
in Copenhagen a statue in his honor,
various sculptors submitted designs.
One of them was pleasing one which
would probably reflect the sentiment of
most people regarding him; it repre-
sented the great story-teller with two
children by his knee while he told them
stories. Andersen objected positively
to the conception, for he said he was
not in the habit of taking children thus
into his arms. The design which was
chosen. and was presumably accepted
by him, presents him in curule chair,
9 cloak falling off his shoulders, while
he bends forward, holding, with his
finger between the leaves, thin book,
which might contain one of his stories,
and stretching forth the other hand
with an eager gesture. This eagerness,
too, is in his face and his parted lips;
he is reciting one of his stories. The
statue, which is of bronze, stands upon
a PEDESTAL bearing in front his name,
with dates of his birth and death, and on
the sides pretty reliefs, the one of the
"ugly Duckling'' group, the other of
child borne upon stork. A simple in
scription states that the statue was
erected in 1880 by the Danish people in
memory of the wonder-story poet
Horace b. Scudder, IN Harper's Maga-
zine.