museum of things older than any nation, of the
dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When the English romantics wanted to
find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small
country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost
comically crowded. There they found what we call an original writer, who
was nevertheless the image of the origins. They found a whole fairyland
in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the
English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen more than to any of
their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that
domesticity is not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the
fairyland of furniture, and the travel and adventure of the farmyard.
His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward
allegory: it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are.
Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like
a wooden horse. Through him children and the happier kind of men did
feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast
domestic fowl; and feel common doors like great mouths that opened to
utter welcome. In the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted to
England a living bush that can still blossom into candles. And in his
tale of "The Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of romantic
militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the
nursery. He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-tales, that the
dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his
smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of
larger and lower things. These things, alas, were an allegory. When
Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into
France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to
justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and
simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and ribaldry
of France. But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more
pious and simple than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with
silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a
toy. Here again, it is enormously probable that England would have
struck upon the right side, if the English people had been the English
Government. Among other coincidences, the Danish princess who had
married the English heir was something very like a fair