WHAT ONE CAN INVENT

                                  1872

                 FAIRY TALES OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

                          WHAT ONE CAN INVENT

                       by Hans Christian Andersen



There was once a young man who was studying to be a poet. He

wanted to become one by Easter, and to marry, and to live by poetry.

To write poems, he knew, only consists in being able to invent

something; but he could not invent anything. He had been born too

late- everything had been taken up before he came into the world,

and everything had been written and told about.

"Happy people who were born a thousand years ago!" said he. "It

was an easy matter for them to become immortal. Happy even was he

who was born a hundred years ago, for then there was still something

about which a poem could be written. Now the world is written out, and

what can I write poetry about?"

Then he studied till he became ill and wretched, the wretched man!

No doctor could help him, but perhaps the wise woman could. She

lived in the little house by the wayside, where the gate is that she

opened for those who rode and drove. But she could do more than unlock

the gate. She was wiser than the doctor who drives in his own carriage

and pays tax for his rank.

"I must go to her," said the young man.

The house in which she dwelt was small and neat, but dreary to

behold, for there were no flowers near it- no trees. By the door stood

a bee-hive, which was very useful. There was also a little

potato-field, very useful, and an earth bank, with sloe bushes upon

it, which had done blossoming, and now bore fruit, sloes, that draw

one's mouth together if one tastes them before the frost has touched

them.

"That's a true picture of our poetryless time, that I see before

me now," thought the young man; and that was at least a thought, a

grain of gold that he found by the door of the wise woman.

"Write that down!" said she. "Even crumbs are bread. I know why

you come hither. You cannot invent anything, and yet you want to be

a poet by Easter."

"Everything has been written down," said he. "Our time is not

the old time."

"No," said the woman. "In the old time wise women were burnt,

and poets went about with empty stomachs, and very much out at elbows.

The present time is good, it is the best of times; but you have not

the right way of looking at it. Your ear is not sharpened to hear, and

I fancy you do not say the Lord's Prayer in the evening. There is

plenty here to write poems about, and to tell of, for any one who

knows the way. You can read it in the fruits of the earth, you can

draw it from the flowing and the standing water; but you must

understand how- you must understand how to catch a sunbeam. Now just

you try my spectacles on, and put my ear-trumpet to your ear, and then

pray to God, and leave off thinking of yourself"

The last was a very difficult thing to do- more than a wise

woman ought to ask.

He received the spectacles and the ear-trumpet, and was posted

in the middle of the potato-field. She put a great potato into his

hand. Sounds came from within it; there came a song with words, the

history of the potato, an every-day story in ten parts, an interesting

story. And ten lines were enough to tell it in.

And what did the potato sing?

She sang of herself and of her family, of the arrival of the

potato in Europe, of the misrepresentation to which she had been

exposed before she was acknowledged, as she is now, to be a greater

treasure than a lump of gold.

"We were distributed, by the King's command, from the

council-houses through the various towns, and proclamation was made of

our great value; but no one believed in it, or even understood how

to plant us. One man dug a hole in the earth and threw in his whole

bushel of potatoes; another put one potato here and another there in

the ground, and expected that each was to come up a perfect tree, from

which he might shake down potatoes. And they certainly grew, and

produced flowers and green watery fruit, but it all withered away.

Nobody thought of what was in the ground- the blessing- the potato.

Yes, we have endured and suffered, that is to say, our forefathers

have; they and we, it is all one."

What a story it was!

"Well, and that will do," said the woman. "Now look at the sloe

bush."

"We have also some near relations in the home of the potatoes, but

higher towards the north than they grew," said the Sloes. "There

were Northmen, from Norway, who steered westward through mist and

storm to an unknown land, where, behind ice and snow, they found

plants and green meadows, and bushes with blue-black grapes- sloe

bushes. The grapes were ripened by the frost just as we are. And

they called the land 'wine-land,' that is, 'Groenland,' or

'Sloeland.'"

"That is quite a romantic story," said the young man.

"Yes, certainly. But now come with me," said the wise woman, and

she led him to the bee-hive.

He looked into it. What life and labor! There were bees standing

in all the passages, waving their wings, so that a wholesome draught

of air might blow through the great manufactory; that was their

business. Then there came in bees from without, who had been born with

little baskets on their feet; they brought flower-dust, which was

poured out, sorted, and manufactured into honey and wax. They flew

in and out. The queen-bee wanted to fly out, but then all the other

bees must have gone with her. It was not yet the time for that, but

still she wanted to fly out; so the others bit off her majesty's

wings, and she had to stay where she was.

"Now get upon the earth bank," said the wise woman. "Come and look

out over the highway, where you can see the people."

"What a crowd it is!" said the young man. "One story after

another. It whirls and whirls! It's quite a confusion before my

eyes. I shall go out at the back."

"No, go straight forward," said the woman. "Go straight into the

crowd of people; look at them in the right way. Have an ear to hear

and the right heart to feel, and you will soon invent something.

But, before you go away, you must give me my spectacles and my

ear-trumpet again."

And so saying, she took both from him.

"Now I do not see the smallest thing," said the young man, "and

now I don't hear anything more."

"Why, then, you can't be a poet by Easter," said the wise woman.

"But, by what time can I be one?" asked he.

"Neither by Easter nor by Whitsuntide! You will not learn how to

invent anything."

"What must I do to earn my bread by poetry?"

"You can do that before Shrove Tuesday. Hunt the poets! Kill their

writings and thus you will kill them. Don't be put out of countenance.

Strike at them boldly, and you'll have carnival cake, on which you can

support yourself and your wife too."

"What one can invent!" cried the young man. And so he hit out

boldly at every second poet, because he could not be a poet himself.

We have it from the wise woman. She knows WHAT ONE CAN INVENT.





                        THE END

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