Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  Jelling, the earliest historic home of Danish monarchy, is a source, and therefore do I here take it first; but my memories of a lifetime ago do not cover it, for I did not know Jelling in those days. My most vivid memory of that day attaches rather to Elsinore, and, therefore, having made my obeisance in Jelling and there worshipped the Origins, as is right, to Elsinore will I turn.

  Elsinore

  §

  There are two things about Elsinore, the Narrows and Beauty.

  Our fathers naturally instinctively adapted the works of man—that is, their own works—to the earthly place on which those works were raised. It was no very mysterious task, it requires no very special or rare talent. It is a common instinct of mankind and until the modern chaos began, that common instinct worked, as it were, of itself. The heights were crowned with the palaces and strongholds fitting to their outline. On the great plains rose the towers appropriate to their skies: for nowhere does the Tower—among the chief works of man—affirm its mission more strongly than on the great flats, and especially those which approach the sea and invite shipping.

  What should we to-day make of Elsinore? It makes me sick to think of it. Perhaps—most probably—we should put up a jumble of manufactories, chimneys, blank walls, corrugated iron roofs, and then, amid them, by way of showing the kind of people we were, we should set up some impossible cubic thing or other, Stages of flat dead concrete pierced with oblong holes. What our fathers made of Elsinore is there for all the world to see.

  The straits, the Narrows of Elsinore, are watched by a turn of land which is hardly a promontory, a point where the shore of Sweden comes nearest to the last of the Danish islands, and where it is in the nature of things that some sentinel should mount guard.

  That sentinel is the Castle of Elsinore.

  By a happy fate, the building of it came at the moment when the transition from the Middle Ages had given back full freedom to the desire for beauty. Not that our fathers did not find opportunity for beauty everywhere, even in the necessities of sheer defence. I suppose that in the Dark Ages—by which I mean the centuries between the breakdown of the Old Pagan civilisation and the awakening of the twelfth century—they would have made something like the noble, the severe, the silent Castle of Angers: a sort of rock: a thing without eyes, with no apparent entry. That was sheer defence. But even so, how admirably did they express what they had in mind, and how well does Angers Castle marry with the river strand which it defends. Some such thing might have been raised in Elsinore, guarding the waterway through which all the shipping passed from the Baltic to the West.

  But the North was not yet awake.

  In the thirteenth century they might have made—indeed, they may have made for all I know—something diversified by the new demands of war and the new opportunities for arresting the eye. What they did make in that transition time was the glorious Castle of Elsinore, a very emblem of the change between the old days and the new.

  It is certainly a stronghold. It is no less certainly a habitation; and the chief quality of habitation, beauty, clothes it everywhere. No man could desire a better house nor a better symbol of his greatness as a ruler than Elsinore. I think some sketch or model of it should be put up as a warning in every lecture hall where there is danger of the asinine ‘Theory of Function’ being heard, to the confusion of human effort, and to the degradation of building. For you must know that on all sides to-day there has come to maturity and proceeds to the bearing of its evil fruit the silliest perversion that ever distorted and debased Man the Maker. It is the theory that in building beauty depends on function. ‘Let a thing be built to fulfil its function,’ they say, ‘and it will breed beauty of itself.’ Thus a bank is built to house masses of paper which the banker wants to hide from those whom it does not concern. It is even built sometimes to house masses of metal, which the banker is still more desirous of hiding. Therefore the chief function of the bank will be found either in vaults underground or in huge metal boxes securely locked. But a bank also needs a great number of proletarians scribbling away at a bare wage, and such is their function that unless they are vigorously overlooked and unless their irregularities are visited by starvation or prison, the bank would cease to bear its beneficent fruits. Therefore according to ‘functionism’ a bank above ground should all be glass, with a minimum of iron to support the glass, for in this way all that the keepers of accounts perform may be seen through the glass by their masters.

  A bank further needs one or two very private rooms indeed where negotiation may take place. These must be quite different from the glazed cells. They must be unapproachable save after due warning, fairly sound-proof—and so on. When the function is fulfilled with precision and without any frills, then you have the functional bank. Oddly enough, it does not breed beauty. The outsides of banks are often beautiful. I do not know if they will long remain so. They are often beautiful to-day because the bankers hide their profits by giving a free range to the architects, and the architects having among their number not a few who still cherish beauty, they build up a façade which shall attract the passer-by and satisfy the maker’s own desire. How long this anomaly, the excellence of the outside of banks, shall continue, no man can tell. As a guess, I should say that we should begin to get banks ‘functional,’ outside as well as inside, when there is some restriction upon the power they now enjoy of hiding their profits under such externals. Then I presume we shall have the bank showing to the street something which the factory has shown to the street for a hundred years, and something which more and more hotels and newspaper offices are showing to the street to-day: the stuff called modern.

  Well, Elsinore came long before all that. It came when Man was free to seek and express beauty. It came when Man understood—or rather, felt—the supreme value of ornament. You see it in the outline, you see it in the manifold detail, you see it in the proportions of Elsinore. In every light, in the dusk or in the full day or by the moon at night, Elsinore satisfies you.

  It is odd that such a setting should have been provided for one of the great other works of Mankind, the work, not of Man the Maker in Stone, but of Man the Maker in that which is more enduring than Stone—the Word. For Elsinore means Hamlet. Odd, but so it is. Angers means the whole Arthurian cycle, but no one thinks of Angers, that rock-like thing, when they read the translations from the Welsh or the late Mediæval Legends or the Morte d’Arthur or what is admirable or what is execrable in the efforts of Alfred Tennyson. No one thinks of Angers when he reads of the great water above which the moon was full, nor of Angers when he reads that Elaine was ‘fair, lovable, a lily-maid’—and reading, gnashes his teeth. But all men who hear of Elsinore remember Hamlet.

  That also is odd, for the story of Hamlet (I am assured) goes back to the beginning, that is, right into the night, long before these Northerners could write as we write, or keep records in any way save by repetition and memory and a few Runes. The Usurper who was also a poisoner, the revenge of the rightful heir and all the rest of it, was heard, they say, in the days when the South had only just begun to bring the North to life, in the days before rude Paganism was conquered by the Faith.

  Now mark here something delightful about Man the Maker when he is at it with the Word. Poet means Maker; and when Man takes to Poetry (or to good Prose for that matter), he brings something into being out of nothing; a high achievement indeed, that in which he most resembles (after Virtue) his own Maker. So it is that they show you to this day a stagnant ditch wherein Ophelia drowned, though Ophelia never was, and so it is that you may find in London to-day the Old Curiosity Shop of Charles Dickens: yes, there actually present before your eyes, though it all came out of a book.

  And Elsinore is responsible—the noise and the sound of it—for another very fine thing in Letters: I mean Campbell’s Ode. When we repeat, as must always be repeated, the prime truth that bad History makes good verse, let us especially remember that glorious line, ‘By thy dark and stormy Steep, Elsinore!’ That man
had certainly an ear! Perhaps when he wrote the words he had a vision of some towering cliff hanging like a shield above the deep and awful with thunder clouds. But the real Elsinore is as flat as a pancake. A man swimming in the sea will hardly see it peeping above the disturbing waves. No Steep, nor as a rule any Storm, nor as a rule any darkness. What is more, Elsinore, your romantic famous shore, only carries that trumpet sound in the form which the English language has given it. Its true name, its native name, is quite different. It is Helsingor, and I defy Shakespeare or Campbell or the sublime Kipling or anybody else to make English splen-dour out of the syllables ‘Helsingor.’ But ‘Elsinore ’ is as good a bit of sound for English purposes, as good a morsel of meat for English poets, as could be imagined.

  §

  ‘By thy dark and stormy Steep, Elsinore!’

  Rhetorical? Yes, certainly! And what the devil is the matter with rhetorical verse? More power to its elbow.

  §

  So much for Elsinore, the word and the beauty of the word, and that lovely building which may God preserve in these days when the last of dying Christendom seems determined on its own destruction.

  §

  I have said that Elsinore is not only Beauty, but also the Narrows.

  Now Sea Narrows are everywhere very important things. No man can understand the history of his race or of the world who does not meditate upon Narrows: the places where opposing shores constrain the passage of ships to a stream commanded, if not by direct fire, by frequent sally from either Strand. These are the Gates, and they are such that those who hold the gates hold also and challenge the trade and the strategy of the world.

  It is strange how few they are. One recalls Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, Bab-el-Mandeb, Singapore and this last one, Elsinore. To hold Gibraltar and the opposing shore was for centuries to hold the gates of the Mediterranean, even when the same Power did not hold both sides, Gibraltar, impregnable under the old conditions, was sufficient. To-day it has lost its function, a truth which angers so many that they will not hear it told. The Bosphorus, which Napoleon called the ‘Key of the World,’ loses half its value when Russia drops out of civilisation, or when the great wheatfields and the oil can no longer use the Black Sea. It loses half its value when Asia Minor has been broken away from Christendom, and when Syria cannot find its way westward by that gate. The Bab-el-Mandeb is still the gate to India. England held it absolutely until the other day, when, with astonishing improvidence, she allowed Dumeira to slip from her; and now we try to put that right by pretending that Dumeira does not exist and forbidding its name to appear in our public prints—a piece of ostrich work which suits our rivals admirably. As for Singapore, it is so much, so overwhelmingly, the key to the Far East that its possession will certainly be challenged. All come and go of Trade and Men from vast China to the Indian Seas and Europe must pass by the fortifications of that very narrow salt stream.

  All this is not true of Elsinore. Elsinore is not on that scale. Nevertheless, Elsinore is the Messina of the North. You are not bound to sail past Elsinore in order to get in or out of the Baltic, you can go round by the Great Belt, but this is the longer way round, and in practice men will nearly always pass under the guns of Elsinore—when it has guns. Elsinore used to levy a toll on all the Baltic shipping, until it was bought out almost in our own time. But Elsinore, like a hundred other human things, keeps up the effigy of its old use; so that a man sailing by says “What is that guardian stronghold on the Narrows?” And hearing it is Elsinore, he worships and understands. It was the first place I ever saw of the Denmark of my youth, and I came upon it as it should be come upon, by sea, and how it moved me!

  There is at Elsinore a baby harbour, one of the many miniature harbours in the world. They are all delightful, as large-scale models must of their nature be. From that little harbour the steamer takes one across the Narrows to the Swedish bank, and so to new things—but of these I will write when the time comes to say good night to Denmark and good morning to Sweden later on.

  §

  You will understand Elsinore a great deal better if you will regard the Danish archipelago as the bar of the great Baltic River and Jutland as the sandbank which has grown up along one side of that bar.

  Jutland is joined to the mainland by that narrow neck of the Danework and the Eider just to the south, but all the rest of Denmark is the archipelago. It is an island group gathered under one Crown and making one people, and an island group of which Jutland itself is almost an island, and has tried to make itself strategically an island by defence against the Empire to the south.

  Denmark as the bar or delta of the great Baltic River is not a mere fantasy or parallel. The Baltic is essentially a river. The fresh water which is received from all around is fed by rivers, the catchment areas of which are three or four times the size of the Baltic itself. When the winter snow and ice are melting the Baltic is fresh far down south. I have drunk water from over the side of a ship near the Aaland Islands. How much further on one can still find it only brackish, I do not know, but the Baltic is essentially a great inland river or estuary which makes its way to the main sea through the maze of the Danish islands.

  These islands Stand, as I said earlier, in very shallow water. The bank on which Jutland itself stands is covered by no more than a film of ten fathoms: you do not get twenty fathoms for miles and miles west of the Jutland coast, and eastward, in the channels between the islands of the archipelago though there are occasional pockets or holes of as much as twenty fathoms, more like ten is the general rule, and a great deal of that sea is shallower Still. The surplus of fresh river water pouring out of the Baltic is checked by the winds. The prevailing winds which blow over the Danish land are the same south-western summer winds which give so much of her character to England, and these coming up the deeper water, which may be regarded as the very mouth of the Baltic River beyond the bar, the broad bit between the north of Jutland and the Gulf of Oslo, forces the water back. Therefore, although the current out of the Baltic is normally northward, past the Danish islands, sometimes it sets, even on the surface, the other way, both under the impulsion of the wind blowing into the Scandinavian gulf from the outer sea and from the height of water piled up by the wind.

  This Scandinavian gulf, which makes a broad crooked elbow north of Denmark, is called the Skager Rack, but English sailors have also long learnt to call it ‘the Sleeve,’ just as in the French of the Middle Ages the Channel was called ‘the Sleeve ’; and the French to-day still retain that name—la Manche. The mediaeval sleeve got broader towards the wrist: men used it as a pocket; and it is this shape, which is the more striking in this Scandinavian ‘Sleeve ’ than in the Channel one, that adds to the aptitude of the name.

  The Sound

  §

  There is no tide to speak of, and within the narrows there is, of course, none at all. Yet under the effects of the wind there will come great differences of level. A lifetime ago there was measured under the stress of a gale as much as ten foot of water above the mean level at the Sound.

  Just as in the gates of the Mediterranean there is an outward undercurrent flowing, not only the inflowing current, so in these gates of the Baltic there is a current naturally going south out of the main sea while the general surface current goes north. Sometimes the undercurrent comes near the surface, making a whirlpool in conflift with the top layer of water, and when the south-west wind has piled water up in the Sleeve north of the narrows and sets the current southward against this, you get these whirlpools again. Narrows breed whirlpools: witness Charybdis off the straits of Messina, though Charybdis is nothing to write home about. A boat pulls out of it easily to-day. Perhaps she was more formidable in her youth as was her sister Scylla.

  What between the variation of level and the tricky contrast between a current generally going northward but occasionally southward, the steering out to the open sea through the Danish archipelago is difficult indeed. The passages lie between a mass of sandbanks and shoals, and
smaller and larger islands, besides the main islands, and the shape of the shores has made exit more difficult still.

  There are three main channels. The first is called the Little Belt, and is the most westerly going along the Jutland shore; the middle one is called the Great Belt; and the eastern one is called the Sound. The Little Belt would not naturally be used by shipping, for it is tortuous, in some places very shallow, and at its narrowest no more than a gut which is dominated from either bank by short range fire.

  When you look at the land-map you might imagine that commerce out of and into the Baltic would naturally go by the Great Belt, but there are two very good reasons against its doing so. The first reason is that it is a longer way round than through the Sound. A ship making out of the Baltic for the North Sea and the Channel to the south has an extra 100 sea miles to go if it uses the Great Belt instead of passing up the Sound along the Swedish shore. The second reason is that the Great Belt is a nest of shoals and islands and here and there a rock. It is abominably hard navigation. Although you do not see any very conspicuous narrows as you go along it, there are two narrows in the middle, immediately under the surface. By Sproo and the lightship off Halskov Head the Korsar Narrows are even more constricted than the Little Belt or the Gate of Elsinore. It is a squeeze.