appeared originally in "The Dial" of
Chicago.

Hans Christian Andersen was a unique figure in Danish literature, and a
solitary phenomenon in the literature of the world. Superficial critics
have compared him with the Brothers Grimm; they might with equal
propriety have compared him with Voltaire or with the man in the moon.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scientific collectors of folk-lore, and
rendered as faithfully as possible the simple language of the peasants
from whose lips they gathered their stories. It was the ethnological and
philological value of the fairy-tale which stimulated their zeal; its
poetic value was of quite secondary significance. With Andersen the case
was exactly the reverse. He was as innocent of scientific intention as
the hen who finds a diamond on a dunghill is of mineralogy. It was the
poetic phase alone of the fairy-tale which attracted him; and what is
more, he saw poetic possibilities where no one before him had ever
discovered them. By the alchemy of genius (which seems so perfectly
simple until you try it yourself) he transformed the common neglected
nonsense of the nursery into rare poetic treasure. Boots, who kills the
ogre and marries the princess--the typical lover in fiction from the
remotest Aryan antiquity down to the present time--appears in Andersen
in a hundred disguises, not with the rudimentary features of the old
story, but modernized, individualized, and carrying on his shield an
unobtrusive little moral. In "Jack the Dullard" he comes nearest to his
primitive prototype, and no visible effort is made to refine him. In
"The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social
satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to
have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the fortune of some
unscrupulous clown while they themselves die in poverty. In "The
Porter's Son" he is an aspiring artist, full of the fire of genius, and
he wins his princess by conquering that many-headed ogre with which
every self-made man has to battle--the world's envy, and malice, and
contempt for a lowly origin. It is easy to multiply examples, but these
may suffice.

In another species of fairy-tale, which Andersen may be said to have
invented, incident seems to be secondary to the moral purpose, which is
yet so artfully hidden that it requires a certain maturity of intellect
to detect it. In this field Andersen has done his noblest work and
earned his immortal