-boy's troubled dream. It has the delectable
absurdity of the dream's inverted logic. You feel with what beautiful
zest it was written; how childishly the author himself relished it. The
illusion is therefore perfect. The big child who played with his puppet
theatre until after he was grown up is quite visible in every line. He
is as much absorbed in the story as any of his hearers. He is all in the
game with the intense engrossment of a lad I knew, who, while playing
Robinson Crusoe, ate snails with relish for oysters.

Throughout the first series of "Wonder Tales" there is a capital air of
make-believe, which imposes upon you most delightfully, and makes you
accept the most incredible doings, as you accept them in a dream, as the
most natural thing in the world. In the later series, where the didactic
tale becomes more frequent ("The Pine Tree," "The Wind's Tale," "The
Buckwheat"), there is an occasional forced note. The story-teller
becomes a benevolent, moralizing uncle, who takes the child upon his
knee, in order to instruct while entertaining it. But he is no more in
the game. A cloying sweetness of tone, such as sentimental people often
adopt toward children, spoils more than one of the fables; and when
occasionally he ventures upon a love-story ("The Rose-Elf," "The Old
Bachelor's Nightcap," "The Porter's Son"), he is apt to be as
unintentionally amusing as he is in telling his own love episode in "The
Fairy-Tale of My Life." However, no man can unite the advantages of
adult age and childhood, and we all feel that there is something
incongruous in a child's talking of love.

It is a curious fact that his world-wide fame as the poet of childhood
never quite satisfied Andersen.[22] He never accepted it without a
protest. It neither pleased nor sufficed him. He was especially eager to
win laurels as a dramatist; and in 1839 celebrated his first dramatic
success by a farcical vaudeville entitled "The Invisible at Sprogoee."
Then followed the romantic drama "The Mulatto" (1840), which charmed the
public and disgusted the critics; and "The Moorish Maiden," which
disgusted both. These plays are slipshod in construction, but
emotionally effective. The characters are loose-fibred and vague, and
have no more backbone than their author himself. J. L. Heiberg thought
it high time to chastise the half-cultured shoemaker's son for his
audacity, and in the third act of "A Soul after Death," held him up to
ridicule. Andersen,