company a nursery tale to the printed page. If you
tell a child about a horse, you don't say that it neighed, but you
imitate the sound; and the child's laughter or fascinated attention
compensates you for your loss of dignity. The more successfully you
crow, roar, grunt, and mew, the more vividly you call up the image and
demeanor of the animal you wish to represent, and the more impressed is
your juvenile audience. Now, Andersen does all these things in print: a
truly wonderful feat. Every variation in the pitch of the voice--I am
almost tempted to say every change of expression in the story-teller's
features--is contained in the text. He does not write his story, he
tells it; and all the children of the whole wide world sit about him
and listen with, eager, wide-eyed wonder to his marvellous
improvisations.[18]

[18] Brandes: Kritiker og Portraiter, p. 303.

In reading Andersen's collected works one is particularly impressed with
the fact that what he did outside of his chosen field is of inferior
quality--inferior, I mean, judged by his own high standard, though in
itself often highly valuable and interesting. "The Improvisatore," upon
which, next to "The Wonder-Tales," his fame rests, is a kind of
disguised autobiography which exhibits the author's morbid sensibility
and what I should call the unmasculine character of his mind,[19] To
appeal to the reader's pity in your hero's behalf is a daring
experiment, and it cannot, except in brief scenes, be successful. A
prolonged strain of compassion soon becomes wearisome, and not the
worthiest object in the world can keep one's charity interested through
four hundred pages. Antonio, in "The Improvisatore," is a milksop whom
the author, with a lavish expenditure of sympathy, parades as a hero. He
is positively ludicrous in his pitiful softness, vanity, and humility.
That the book nevertheless remains unfailingly popular, and is even yet
found in the satchel of every Roman tourist, is chiefly due to the
poetic intensity with which the author absorbed and portrayed every
Roman sight and sound. Italy throbs and glows in the pages of "The
Improvisatore"--the old vagabond Italy of pre-Garibaldian days, when
priests and bandits and pretty women divided the power of Church and
State. Story's "Roba di Roma," Augustus Hare's "Walks in Rome," and all
the other descriptions of the Eternal City, are but disguised
guide-books, feeble and pale performances, when compared with Ande