But why did he do such an uncalled-for thing, you will ask? Because there is a systematic effort on the part of Sweden to suppress the very name of Norway, and to give the impression, throughout the world, that there is no such nationality as the Norwegian. Therefore every Norseman (unless he chooses to be a party to this suppression) is obliged to assert his nationality in season and out of season. But Jonas Lie has, indeed, in a far more effective way borne aloft the banner of his country. His books have been translated into French, German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Russian, and Bohemian; and throughout Europe the literary journals and magazines are beginning to discuss him as one of the foremost representatives of modern realism. HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN[17] [17] A portion of this essay appeared originally in "The Dial" of Chicago. Hans Christian Andersen was a unique figure in Danish literature, and a solitary phenomenon in the literature of the world. Superficial critics have compared him with the Brothers Grimm; they might with equal propriety have compared him with Voltaire or with the man in the moon. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scientific collectors of folk-lore, and rendered as faithfully as possible the simple language of the peasants from whose lips they gathered their stories. 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. In "The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the fortune of some unscrupulous clown while they themselves die in poverty. In "The Porter's Son" he is an aspiring artist, full of the fire of genius, and he wins his princess by conquering that many-headed ogre with which every self-made man has to battle--the world's envy, and malice, and contempt for a lowly origin. It is easy to multiply examples, but these may suffice.