Introductory: Europe, Denmark, the World

Europe and Denmark – Andersen's work is born of the relationship between the two, and his own relation to both. If, during important years of his life, Andersen had to look outside Denmark for the degree of appreciation he felt his due, if his creative mind was constantly sharpened by travel, by encounters with European writers, his own art owed quite inestimably to Danish tradition, to Danish artists and pundits of the Golden Age, and to the Danish language itself, its characteristic rhythms and idioms. Conversely, while much of the appeal of his writings (and of his own personality), both at home and abroad, depended on his Danish provenance – a freshness, an intelligence comparatively free of dogmatic or political alignments, the factions and commercialism of elsewhere – it is also the case that they were admired, even loved, because they articulated the tensions and hopes, the trials and satisfactions, of a whole continent undergoing re-formation.

On 26 January 1852 the newspaper Fædrelandet (The Fatherland)1 published Hans Christian Andersen's prose-piece ‘Om Aartusinder’ (‘Thousands of Years to Come’) envisaging the remote future and linking two continents. Two days later – on 28 January – the oldest Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende (Berling's Times)² featured ‘Svanereden’ (‘The Swan's Nest’) dealing with Denmark itself, its distinguished past, its present difficulties, its survival in increasingly uncertain times.

The last few years had been peculiarly testing ones for Denmark. Between 1848 and 1850 the country – from 1849 a Constitutional and not, as it had been since 1660, an Absolute Monarchy – was engulfed by Treårskrigen,³ the Three Years War with Prussia over the disputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. In 1850 Andersen, whose feelings about his native country had often been at best equivocal, at worst actively resentful, wrote a patriotic song: ‘I Danmark er jeg født, der har jeg hjemme’, (‘In Denmark was I born, there I have [my] home’).⁴

The Danish victories of 1850 brought about a resolution of the conflict, and this was endorsed two years later by the London Protocol of August 1852 which decreed the unity of Denmark a ‘European necessity and standing principle’.5 But the settlement did not prove durable, and not the least interesting aspect of Andersen's two newspaper pieces is their underlying unease.⁶

The opening sentence of ‘Thousands of Years to Come’⁷ introduces hordes of young Americans regularly travelling over the Atlantic to Europe, through the air on wings of steam. An airship is crowded with passengers living up to their favourite book, Europa set i otte Dage (Europe seen in eight days). Thanks to the electromagnetic wire beneath the sea they have all telegraphed their hotel reservations in advance. The first country they see below them is Ireland, but they go on sleeping until above England, their first stop: Shakespeare's land to the more cultured, the land of politics or machines to the others. This first day of their European tour takes in Scotland as well as England, after which they proceed via the Channel Tunnel to France, which gave the world Charlemagne, Molière, Napoleon. By this unspecified date, observes Andersen, many illustrious French men and women whose names we do not know will have been born in ‘Europe's Crater’, Paris. And thence to Spain which still corresponds to the old images, with beautiful dark-eyed women and ballad-singers extolling El Cid.

Next they travel through the air to Italy, and here we readers are in for a grim surprise. The Eternal City of Rome no longer exists; only one wall of St Peter's stands, and the authenticity of that is in doubt. The Campagna – the countryside round Rome so esteemed by nineteenth-century painters – has become a desert. Many readers would have recalled the rich evocations of Italy in Andersen's first novel, Improvisatoren (The Improvisatore, 1835), actually narrated by an Italian, a performing artist whose personality and early circumstances mirror his creator's. But sadly the fate of Italy is, we soon learn, not unique; the future has treated the tourists' next stops, Greece and Turkey, subjects of Andersen's best-received travelogue, En Digters Bazar (A Poet's Bazaar, 1842), no more kindly. As it is something to boast about back home, these Americans stay in a luxury hotel on top of Mount Olympus. In similar spirit they relax for a few hours by the Bosporus, on the site of great Byzantium, idly watching poor fishermen repair nets or listening to stories of long-ago harems, a far cry from the great bustling metropolis and palimpsest of successive civilisations honoured in Andersen's travel book. Then the young Americans re-board their airship to fly north-west along the length of the Danube. The large cities once flourishing on its banks are now in ruins, but with enough monuments of former greatness to warrant a respectful visit.

The remaining two days of the Americans' excursion are given to Germany (not a nation state in 1852) and Norden (Scandinavia). Germany was once criss-crossed with railways and canals, Andersen reminds us, but is so no longer. The famous names the tourists think of here are Luther, Mozart and Goethe, nobody of any later date, though Andersen concedes that many renowned Germans will have been born in the long interim period. The Americans revere Scandinavia because of Linnaeus, the great Swedish naturalist, and H.C. Ørsted,8 the eminent Danish writer and scientist and discoverer of the electromagnetism that made the telegraph wire possible. Norway is allocated no representative figure but honoured as ‘de gamle Heltes og de unge Nordmænds Land,’ (‘the old eternal heroes' and the young Norwegians' country’), surely a covert plea for the independence it still did not enjoy. Iceland, flown over on the way home, disappointingly lacks its famed geysers and active volcanoes, but its great cliffs stand in tempestuous seas ‘som Sagas evige Stentavle’, ‘as evige stone memorial to the sagas’.⁹ And so back to the United States with a happy feeling of accomplishment.

By the time ‘Thousands of Years to Come’ came out between hard covers, an actual airship had taken off, on 24 September 1852, designed and flown by Henri Gifford (1825–58). Filled with hydrogen, it used a steam engine to drive its propeller, so Andersen's phrase ‘wings of steam’ is not inapt. Ever since the Montgolfiers in 1783, steerable balloons (or airships) were desiderata for the progress-minded. Alfred Tennyson's great poem, Locksley Hall (1842)¹⁰ presents both inspiring and alarming images of their likely forms and uses.

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

But commerce, Tennyson realised, invariably means competition, and all too frequently that means warfare.

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain' d a ghastly dew,

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.'

But in the end our young visionary sees how ‘the battle-flags were furl'd/In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.’

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen' d with the process of the suns.

Unlike Tennyson's, Andersen's airships are associated exclusively with peaceful activity: with tourism, so fast-growing in the mid-nineteenth century and so much more accessible to ordinary men and women than at any previous period, the author himself being one of its most enterprising proselytisers. His understanding of the growing new phenomenon was totally consonant with his lively interest in technical advance generally. That year of 1852 he was fascinated by the laying of the telegraph line connecting Helsingør (Elsinore) with Hamburg, via Copenhagen and Fredericia (to be opened in February 1854). In a letter of 3 June 1853 to his friend, the writer, Carsten Hauch (1790–1872)11 occasioned by his delight in the latter's new novel, Robert Fulton about the inventor of the steamship, he would declare, ‘I feel and see God's infinite love also in every new insight which he allows us into the laws and powers of nature, and the elevated power he thereby grants mankind.’ Through technology, ‘people are drawn closer to each other; ideas may be exchanged more easily, more and more we become one people, one nation of spirit.’ Had he appreciated when younger the magnificent capabilities of science, ‘I would probably have taken an avenue in life other than the one I now follow, or rather I would have attained knowledge within such fields that my authorship would have blossomed quite differently than is now the case.’ In all this he is surely at one with that last-quoted couplet from Locksley Hall with its sure belief that behind evolving history ‘one increasing purpose’ existed, by implication benevolent.

But benevolence cannot have characterised a good deal of what mankind (or at any rate, European mankind) has been up to in the centuries leading to ‘Thousands of Years to Come’, to judge from its cameos: Rome and Danubian cities destroyed, the main edifice of Catholic Christendom reduced to a single, probably fake wall, the Campagna and all Greece laid waste, Constantinople an impoverished wreck, Germany depredated by the removal of railway lines and canals, and seemingly lacking in great men. In what direction was Andersen's mind moving?

As a young man Andersen had not been a fortnight in Italy before noting in his diary – on 2 October 1833¹² – that this was the country of the imagination as France was that of reason, and Germany and Denmark of the heart. But any ideal of Italian unification¹³ had become harder to believe in after Austria's defeat of Sardinia–Piedmont and of Lombardy–Venetia in 1849, while the Republic of Rome had lasted a mere six months of the same year. The French interventionist restoration of Pope Pius IX in Rome, and the consequent mounting anti-clerical feeling among Italians (Cavour's legislation in Piedmont–Sardinia) must clearly have aroused doubts in the Andersen of 1852 that the Church could survive as a power beyond his own century, though in both his private and his creative writings he had treated Catholic practice and practitioners with real warmth.

Perhaps there was another reason for presenting the desolations of Italy. On his visit of 1833/34 the abundant ruins of classical civilisation had made a tremendous impression on Andersen, nowhere more so than the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii destroyed by the eruptions of Vesuvius. He evoked them both memorably in The Improvisatore and singled out Pompeii for the Twelfth Evening in Billedbog uden Billeder (Picture-Book Without Pictures, 1839–40).14 The deserted, once-buried streets and houses provided lasting images of the harsh truth that Respice finem! (‘Remember the end!’) applies not only to human beings but to what they have made and left behind, their monuments, their homes, their workplaces, a truth in need of emphasis in an age so triumphantly sure of its material achievements as his own.

As astonishing as the absence of Italy on the Americans' itinerary is the unimportance of Germany and Austria to them. Andersen had enjoyed creative friendships with Ludwig Tieck, Adelbert von Chamisso, Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, among others. He had been the beneficiary of a large, appreciative German readership, which indeed put him on the international literary map. But how after the carnage of the First Dano-Prussian War could Andersen look on the German lands with equanimity? Some of his most cordial and cherished relationships had suffered the gravest knocks already. Yes, he paid visits of reconciliation and renewal to Germany in 1851, and, after a strained interval and a fraught exchange of letters, returned to his beloved Weimar in May 1852, to restore his friendship with its Hereditary Grand Duke and his wife. But he could never forget the realignment of priorities that the war had enforced. Moreover what had occasioned these hostilities was very far from over and done with. Schleswig and Holstein, economically vital to Denmark's strength, might now be obliged by international agreement to acknowledge no other head of state than the Danish monarch, but Schleswig still retained significant ethnic Germans, while in Holstein these formed a clamorous, discontented majority. Pan-Germanism continued its rise, and Prussia its determination to be dominant both within the German Confederation and outside it.

The future, by inference, would seem to lie with Britain (England and Scotland) and France. Andersen's own lionised visit to Britain – during which he met Dickens and was much moved by his friendliness – had taken place only six years earlier, in 1847; London Society had positively fallen over itself to invite and entertain him, while Shakespeare and Scott had long been fixed stars in his literary firmament. He could even have felt that Dickens, in David Copperfield (1848), owed a creative debt to his own Improvisatore. Britain and France had supported Denmark, without intervening on its behalf, in the Schleswig-Holstein war, and both powers were now moving towards taking Turkey's part against Russia. The tumultuous events of the last few years in France which Andersen had followed very attentively – the 1848 Revolution, the founding of the Second Republic with the election of Louis-Napoleon as president, and then, in 1851, the coup d'état leading to his 1852 proclamation of the Second Empire – were as impressive, as undeniable, as those leading French writers, intellectuals and artists Andersen had respectfully encountered. Small wonder then that he could hail, even in a short and basically non-polemical piece like this, Paris as ‘Europe's crater’.

The reference in it to Scandinavia if brief is entirely honorific, but, apart from saluting Ørsted, he makes no specification of Denmark. This absence was made good by ‘The Swan's Nest’, of just two days later.

Mellem Østersøen og Nordhavet ligger en gammel Svanerede, og den kaldes Danmark; i den er født og fødes Svaner, hvis Navne aldrig skulle døe.15

Between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea lies an old swan's nest and it is called Denmark; in it have been and will be born swans whose names shall never die.

Andersen's placing of his country geographically on the map of Europe makes a brilliant beginning for his reflection on its identity and destiny. Denmark's situation, where the Skaggerak and the Kattegat connect the North Sea with the Baltic, accounts for its inhabitants' most substantial achievements – their extensive voyaging, their colonies, their wide mercantile endeavours – and also for their vulnerability. Andersen's own early life was spent in the shadowed consequence of that vulnerability: the pre-emptive attacks by Britain in 1801 and 1807; the virtually obligatory alliance with Napoleon's France; the subsequent humiliations after 1813 dealt them by the victorious powers, entailing a long period of bankruptcy that lasted until 1830. But the by no means inconsiderable compensation for this last was the country's ability, suspended as it was from certain external pressures, to realise its immense social, artistic and intellectual potential as never before – and this despite a still archaic governmental system and political censorship.

Not only is Andersen's opening to his piece topographically exact, it is a beautiful, unforgettable literary conceit – of his sea-girt homeland, consisting of one sizeable peninsula (Jutland) and over four hundred named islands, as a swan's nest. Swans, together with storks, were the birds of greatest imaginative importance to the writer from childhood onwards. One of his earlier stories closest to actual folk tale was ‘De vilde Svaner’ (‘The Wild Swans’, 1838)¹⁶ based on a Danish story collected by his older compatriot, Matthias Winther, while in arguably his most famous story of all, ‘Den grimme Ælling’ (‘The Ugly Duckling’, 1844), he celebrated his artistically gifted self – and by extension the selves of all sensitive others – in the form of a newly fledged swan once considered an unsatisfactory, unappealing duck. Now, in 1852, he makes the swans stand for the Danes themselves, collectively and individually, though Andersen is most concerned with those emanations from the nest which have made the greatest impression on the wider world.

In earlier periods, he reminds us, the nest released fierce menacing birds whose strength, scope and stamina for undertaking enormous distances terrified whole swathes of Europe, and who ventured considerably beyond that continent: the Vikings. The aggressive qualities of the Vikings and of the religion that animated them troubled Andersen as much as, if not more than, their creativity and ambition impressed him. Since the Viking age, however, Danes have distinguished themselves more by intellectual and imaginative daring than by brute force, and Andersen provides us with four examples, only one of whom he actually names, and that only after paying him poetic, metaphoric homage. This first bird, he tells us, flapped its wing and behold, the mists concealing the heavens dispersed so they were more clearly visible from Earth: ‘det var Svanen Tycho Brahe’, ‘that was the swan Tycho Brahe.’17 Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) refined astronomic instruments to an unprecedented accuracy and clarity. He identified comets as celestial bodies, not terrestrial as previously thought, and, through the studies he carried out at his great observatories on the Danish island of Hven, established the Tychonic System, a cosmology which, though incorrectly setting the sun and moon in motion round the earth (which Brahe saw as a constant centre ‘at rest’), correctly identified the other five known planets as in rotation round the sun.

But have there been no swans nearer to us in time than Brahe? Of course! There was one who touched a golden harp with his wings and set the stark mountains of Norway glowing anew with light while in the forests beneath the Northern gods and heroes and heroines walked again. This was a reference, perfectly obvious to his readers, to Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850)¹⁸ with his Nordiske Digte (Northern Poems, 1807) and Nordens Guder (Gods of the North, 1819). Another swan beat a cliff so strenuously with its wings that the beautiful marble within was revealed: unmistakably sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844).¹⁹ Finally there was a swan responsible for linking countries so words could travel between them at the speed of light: H.C. Ørsted (1777–1851).

What unites these Danish swans? They were all leading figures of that period c.1800–1850 to be christened in 1890 by the Danish philosopher Valdemar Vedel,²⁰ Guldalderen, ‘The Golden Age’. This term quickly passed into intellectual currency, outside as well as inside Denmark. Heirs to, if not actual followers of, the European Enlightenment, its leaders as well as their admirers shared a belief in disinterested activity for the general good and the individual's enhancement. Though all of them won both national and international recognition, and held highly responsible positions, their prime concerns were the furtherance of knowledge and the development of (artistic) forms which nevertheless respected the work of their predecessors. They did not spare themselves; they saw their work sub specie aeternitatis, and in truth eternity itself greatly preoccupied them, its definition in astronomical, mathematical, philosophic and theological terms. Yet personally they were warm-hearted men who believed in assisting others, in bringing out their talents. To use appropriately Kantian terminology – and Ørsted's university dissertation was on Kant,21 while Oehlenschläger brought into Danish literature the ideas of the eminent Kantian, Johann Gottlieb Fichte²² with his Universal Mind or Ur-Ich – they pursued ‘the true, the good and the beautiful’, the expressed goals of the scholar-protagonist in Andersen's powerful, gravely alarming tale, ‘Skyggen’ (‘The Shadow’ 1846/1847).

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Adam Oehlenschläger, Hans Christian Ørsted, these giants in their fields, were all friends, and in the deepest sense colleagues or co-workers, and to any study of Hans Christian Andersen they are vital. They make many appearances as themselves in Andersen's work too, Thorvaldsen and Ørsted being central to more than one tale.²³ When Andersen wrote 'The Swan's Nest’, he did so as one regretfully appreciating that the lives of all three men had come to an end: Thorvaldsen, with whose humble beginnings his own had something in common, had died eight years earlier; he had been dining with Oehlenschläger and Andersen on the last day of his life, before going to the Royal Theatre where he suffered a fatal aneurysm. The death of Oehlenschläger, whom the young Andersen had set out to emulate, rival and even overtake, had occurred just two years previously, and only the year before he had lost Ørsted, to whom he owed an immeasurable amount – not least the notion of the airship with which we opened. For the scientist, who gave the world electromagnetism, aluminium and the ‘thought experiment’ (Gedankenexperiment)²⁴ was also a distinguished man-of-letters, and in 1836 produced a series of semi-humorous poems called what else but Luftskibet (The Airship)? …²⁵

After Oehlenschläger died on 20 January 1850, three newspapers²⁶ published Andersen's verse tribute, ‘Farvel, Du største Skjald i Norden’ (‘Farewell, you greatest poet in Scandinavia’). As for Ørsted, Andersen was with him all the day he was dying (though he missed the actual moment of death by taking a short break to see his friends, the Collins). By the time he was writing their elegy as swans who had sung their last, Andersen must surely have felt that the epoch they had helped to create and had endowed with their own character and ideas, that still untitled Golden Age, was itself turning into the past. His own art, while still in progress and addressing the future, (he was, after all, not yet fifty) was so bound up with its main figures and prevailing ethos that it also would, sooner or later, stand as a monument of this unequalled period of Danish achievement. And it is true to say – though this study hopes seriously to redress this imbalance in his reputation – that almost all Andersen's now most famous or best-loved stories are from before the year with which Vedel seals his period, with ‘The Shadow’ as a dark climactic masterpiece. Posterity has not accorded the same honours to ‘Dynd-Kongens Datter’ (The Marsh King's Daughter’ 1858), ‘Vinden fortæller om Valdemar Daae og hans Døtre’ (‘The Wind tells [the story] of Valdemar Daae and his Daughters’ 1859) or ‘En Historie fra Klitterne’ (‘A Story from the Dunes’ 1859) as it has to, say, ‘Sneedronningen’ (‘The Snow Queen’, 1844) or even ‘The Shadow’ itself, though Andersen knew full well that artistically and intellectually they were as good as anything he had written before, with adventurous features all their own. And even during his lifetime, there were those – to his intense irritation – who persisted in thinking of him in terms of his earlier achievements. And while ‘Iisjomfruen’ (‘The Ice Maiden’, 1861) has, rightly, earned admiration – partly as a result of Stravinsky's ballet Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy's Kiss, 1928) – even that indisputable masterpiece does not hold the firm place in the canon to which its complexity and artistry entitle it. Perhaps then the mutedly valedictory tone of ‘The Swan's Nest’ had something personally prophetic about it.

But in fact Andersen decided to end the piece optimistically, or at least in exhortatory mode:

Aarhundreder vil endnu gaa hen, Svaner flyve fra Reden, ses og høres rundt i Verden, før den Tid kommer, at der i Aand og Sandhed skal kunne siges, ‘Det er den sidste Svane, den sidste Sang fra Svanereden.’27

Centuries will yet go by, the swans will fly from the nest, be seen and be heard around the world, before that time comes when in spirit and truth it could be said: ‘That is the last swan, the last song from the swan's nest.’

The more that was known (and read) about Andersen's personal history – that journey from an impoverished section of the proletariat to inclusion, and later eminence, within his nation's vigorous, productive intelligentsia and upper class, paralleling Denmark's own ascent from the disaster of the Napoleonic Wars – the more it was felt to reflect the forward movement of Europe itself. This movement was indisputably towards a wider prosperity and a higher standard of living than history had ever witnessed anywhere. But who dared predict what crises lay head? And were there not signs, which Andersen, like every major writer, not only sensed but embodied in art that, for this sizeable and uniquely favoured section of humanity, conflicts of potentially catastrophic dimensions were probable, not to say inevitable? In making such signs artistically palpable Andersen proved his deep universality for he repeatedly transcended his Europeanness. Continually he lighted on constant, basic human, not to say animal, characteristics to be discovered in every continent, at every period, and he realised, and often named, these in unforgettable metaphors that are now the the property of the whole reading and listening world.