He was a
tuft-hunter of a rare and curious sort; not because he valued the glory
reflected upon himself by royal acquaintances, but because the pomp and
splendor of a court satisfied his thirst for the marvellous. A king
seemed to him, as to the boy who reads his fairy-tales, something grand
and remote; and in invading this charmed sphere he seemed to have
invaded his own fairy-tales, and to live actually in the fabulous region
of wonders in which his fancy revelled. He conceived of his life as a
fairy-tale, and delighted in living up to his own ideal of living. The
very title of his autobiography in Danish (_Mit Livs Eventyr_) shows
this conclusively; and it ought to have been rendered in English "The
Fairy-Tale of My Life." "The Story of My Life," as Mr. Scudder has
translated it, would have been in the original "Mit Livs Historie," a
very common title, by the way, for an autobiography, while _Mit Livs
Eventyr_ is entirely unique.
The feeling of the marvellous pervades the book from beginning to end.
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