In Spain and a Visit to Portugal

By HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. Author’s Edition. New York : Hurd and Houghton.

PRETTY nearly what sort of book Herr Andersen would write about Spain any one could tell from a general knowledge of his other books ; and no one having this acquaintance need be surprised to find the present volume entertainingly sentimental and quaint, with a current of real or well-affected simplicity, and touches of delicate poetry — in the prose parts. We wish to be careful in regard to the locality, for Herr Andersen has seen fit to intersperse the account of his travels in the Peninsula with many copies of verses, which we suspect not to have been poetry in the original Danish, and which in the translation are made out very melancholy doggerel.

For example, here is a pretty sketch in prose, and the usual metrical appendage, which will illustrate what we have been saying in praise and blame of the author ; but it is to be noted that the verse is rather better than it commonly is. An awkwardness in the versification of these undesirable lyrical bursts, and more than occasionally in the prose expression, forbids us to believe the translator’s work quite well done, though we think he renders the author spirit well ; and at any rate, we enjoy the characteristic Andersen flavor in the book.

“ Here you come out again upon the Alameda, and if you continue straight up the river Guadalmedina you find yourself in that part of Malaga where the life of the lower classes is the most stirring ; and that is not on the Plaza above but down below, nearly in the river’s bed. The river has been almost for a year entirely without water, and now, in its dried-up state it had been converted into a market-place. Horses and asses stood in it bound in pairs ; viands were being cooked in pots and pans over blazing fires ; tables and plates were laid, — it would have made a good sketch ! . . . . Collin and I drove for at least a mile in the empty bed of the river. One of the rich merchants of Malaga, M. Delius, to whom I had brought an introduction, had invited us to make this excursion. He wished to take us to his villa and his beautiful garden. An impenetrable hedge of gigantic cacti crowding the sides of the hill fenced it in. The garden, laid out in the form of terraces, was rich in trees of every variety ; there was a grateful shade under the orange-trees and the bananas. Tall pepper-trees, with their reddish-colored berries, like strings of beads, were drooping as willows do their boughs over the clear greenish water in the basins. Here stood lofty palm-trees and rarer pines. Here also were citro-trees and high-blossoming geraniums ; passion-flowers hung in masses like the honeysuckle on our village hedges. Here flourished in the sunshine extraordinary lily-shaped flowers, — I thought I recognized them from the arabesque designs of gold and silver I had seen in the old story-books. The most expensive plant here, I was told, was the green grass. A couple of large fields looked so fresh and were kept in such beautiful order that it seemed as if each blade were trimmed and washed. The air was cool, almost too cool, for us, who had come from the deep, hot valley beneath, and had now ascended on foot to the highest terrace m the garden. Malaga lay below us ; the immense cathedral looked like an ark upon a petrified foam-white sea. We visited another villa on our way home. It had been forsaken by its owner; he had ruined himself by speculating in water, — that is to say, he had spent his whole fortune in constructing in has garden enormous stone basins in which to collect the rain-water from the hills, intending to distribute it widely for consumption. The garden was now overgrown with weeds, the water stood stagnant and green in the deep cisterns, as if it knew its importance, and yet it was not fit to drink. Reptiles were in abundance, but not a bird was heard to sing. The sunbeams were scorching here, but they were still more scorching as we drove through the dry, stony river-bed ; we were devoured by thirst. It was very refreshing to get a cactus-fruit, — chumbos it was called. I vowed, in gratitude for its cooling drink, that I should put it into song, — it whose flowers and fruit bear the colors of Spain.

Our poet (for such he is when he writes prose) travels partly by railway through Spain, yet he finds it full of romance and quite the Spain of most people’s castles. In fact, it would probably be hard to destroy the world of fantasy in which he lives by any excess of modern conveniences ; and in Spain the railway has really adapted itself to the national humor, and trains arrive and depart with Castilian gravity arid deliberation. Nobody, we dare say, will expect much information, strictly speaking, from such a traveller as Herr Andersen, but abundance of bright and happy pictures of the outside of life, done in the spirit of that we have given, he will expect and will get. Here is one from the chapter on Granada : — " The following morning the scene of the fray appeared in its usual beauty and tranquillity. The sunbeams played through the branches of the trees ; the fountains splashed; the clear water in the ditches streamed onward, bearing with it freshly plucked roses. Castanets sounded ; a handsome young lad, clad in velvet, with wellcombed hair, danced in the middle of the dusty road, with a little girl, scarcely twelve years of age, poorly but neatly dressed ; she wore a corn-flower blue frock, a rose-red apron, and a yellow dahlia drooped in her black hair. The dance was graceful, and as it proceeded full of passion..... There passed, too, a band of gypsies in holiday attire, probably a whole family, the women equipped in violent colors, and with fiery red flowers in their shining black hair. Even the tiny children, who were being carried, had each stuck a blossom into its hair.”

This family the author later saw figuring in a part of the Alhambra which was being photographed.

“They stood and lay in groups round the court; some of the smallest children were perfectly naked ; two young girls with dahlias in their hair stood in a dancing position holding castanets ; an old, fearfully ugly gypsy, with long gray hair, was leaning against a slender marble column, as he played the zambomba, a sort of kettle-drum ; a stout but extremely pretty woman, in a tucked-up embroidered dress, struck the tambourine.”

Wherever he goes, in Africa, in Portugal, in Castile, as well as in Andalusia, he finds the picturesque and the sentimental, and his volume is really a series of sketches of the surface of life in those parts. Generally, a photograph goes as deep as these ; the study of the people, when there is any, is entirely subjective, and whatever is below the surface is Andersenish rather than Spanish. Yet it is an agreeable book, not certainly to be read unbrokenly, but to be resorted to again and again, as the impression of each successive picture and sentimentalization fades away. Of course the verses are not to be read at all, under any circumstances.