, I maintain that the shoemakers’ guild is the most famous, for I am the son of a shoemaker ‘
Hans Christian Andersen painted in Dresden by August Grahl 1846. Foto Lars Bjørnsten Odense
Andersen : What was he like ? by Elias Bredsdorff Nr.3 a
Nothing but the show-dish – entirely insipid
In some posthumously printed aphorisms Andersen writes: “There is no other true nobility than that of the mind, and in times to come princes will choose their great men from it. In Denmark nobility means Tordenskjold, Bartholin, Griffenfeld, Tycho Brahe, Ørsted, Thorvaldsen. ..Most of those of noble birth are no more than the shield-bearers of the nobility of the mind; they are nothing but the show-dish, entirely insipid.”
After Andersen’s death one of his literary executors found among his papers a draft entitled “Which guild is the most famous?” from which the following is an extract:
I maintain that the Shoemakers’ Guild is the most famous, for I am the son of a shoemaker. By all means, let the other guilds, the carpenters’, the blacksmiths’, the tailors’, the braziers’, the watchmakers’ -indeed, all the many indispensable artisans skilful at their respective trades, send their spokesmen, prove their fame to be greater than that of the shoemakers. Phidias and Ahasuerus, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker! …An eagle is part of royal coats-of-arms,. the shoemakers have such a one too, even with two heads, and nobody has ever made any complaint about it. In London, that great metropolis, they have begun publishing a Shoemakers’ Journal in our time. No aristocratic family has been written so much about as the Wandering Jew, a shoemaker. He lives in legends and songs and is immortal. From Nuremberg, at the time of the Mastersingers, the name of Hans Sachs, the shoemaker, shines forth. Our age has given each trade its own right, each man is free to speak his mind; the word nobility applies to anything that is clever, whether coming from behind the plough, from the workshop, or from science and art. It has been said, it has been written. But now let us confine ourselves to the workshop, that of the shoemaker. I who write these lines was born down there.