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.
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