So one way and another the Baltic traffic has had to use the Sound, and that is why Copenhagen grew up on the Sound and became at last the capital when civilisation developed in the Middle Ages, and that is also the reason why Elsinore, the northern gate of the Sound, was for centuries all-important and may at any moment become all-important again, if in some way the Kiel Canal were blocked. Copenhagen shows how it came to be by its name: it means ‘the haven of the merchants.’ There was here a long island standing along the main part of the Zealand shore and giving shelter. The water between the island and the Zealand shore was always calm, even in a northerly wind, and therein the shipping crowded. Thereto also came the shortest road across the island from Funen and from Jutland and the mainland.
Elsinore had no commercial meaning, but an all-important strategic meaning, and commanded whatever shipping passed. That noble royal roof, the Kronberg, was a symbol of the mastery held by the Danish Crown over those seas.
A great good fortune it was of mine to have gone to Denmark in my youth by Elsinore, before seeing any other Danish place, and to have landed under the walls of such a shrine (for it became a shrine in my mind as well as a castle).
But Elsinore is not only the Kronberg: it is also the happy little town lying round its little harbour outside the castle walls. It has not grown since I saw it first, and I hope it never will: it is better as it is. There is no reason why it should grow. There is much more reason why Halsing-borg, just opposite, twenty minutes away on the Swedish shore, should grow, for Halsingborg is cursed with coal. But there is nothing industrial about Elsinore to my knowledge—only beauty, immemorial time, and legend; that is, bad history, and therefore wonderfully good verse. For I am wholly with that excellent Anglo-Saxon from overseas who, having lived in wide places all his life and being advised in London to see Hamlet, rose up in the middle of the play from the stalls and looking backwards over the dull faces of the sated public cried,’ Doesn’t he pull it off!’
That is as true a thing of William Shakespeare as was ever said, and particularly of Hamlet; which, if I had my own way, would be re-christened Elsinore.
Also there is good fish in Elsinore: I mean even better fish than you get elsewhere in Denmark—which is saying a good deal. There is also a bronze statue of the Greek hero (whose name I forget) getting the better of the Hydra which writhes about him with its seven heads and fourteen eyes, for all the world like High Finance seeking what it may devour.
But there, I must not continue on Elsinore, for if I did I should go on for ever. I will go inland again to little Ribe.
Ribe
§
No man can know Denmark unless he know Ribe. I had not known it on my first acquaintance with the Danes, all those years ago, and I am indeed glad that I know it now. There is no excuse for missing Ribe. By whichever way you come into Denmark or by whichever way you go out of it, it lies to your hand, whether you go by car or by rail it lies to your hand. And yet, by a very proper privilege it has remained entirely itself, and will, I hope, always so remain, though the word ‘always’ is a word one should never use of mundane things, even in Denmark, even in Ireland. The little countries keep things longer than anybody else, but ‘always’ is not a word for mortals. Remember that when you sign a letter: not ‘always yours,’ but ‘yours for the moment.’
I suppose it is a strong hall-mark of ignorance upon the past and, indeed, of ignorance upon all human kind, when men despise the Little Countries. They alone preserve and they alone are happy, and they alone can be free from pride.
That word ‘pride’ is one of the most irritating words in the English language, for the English language is vague enough in all conscience, and one never knows what a word means until one knows in what connection it is used. But this word ‘pride’ is the worst of them. It is used to mean honour, it is used to mean self-respect, and it is used to mean the worst weakness of mankind. It is a pity there are not at least three words to mean these three things in English. For pride, pride the sin, Superbia, is not only an abomination but a weakness. It rots individuals and it ruins whole societies. It is defined as putting oneself in the place of God, and that definition, though it sounds violent, is exact. Pride warps the judgment and at last ruins it. I suppose out of ten lost campaigns, seven have been lost through pride; and when you lose a campaign, you may lose the whole commonwealth.
Anyhow, the Little Countries are free from such pride, and their best towns know nothing of that vice. So it is with Ribe. Ribe is modest, content and wholly itself: Stable, enduring, demanding no more than it deserves and receives. I think there is a sort of mystery about Ribe whereby it was preserved from the contamination of Prussia. For when Prussia tried to murder Denmark in our fathers’ time, in the ‘sixties, Ribe was marked down for annexation; but it was saved, I know not how, and remained Danish.
After the Great War, in the follies then committed by Wilson and his equally ignorant colleagues, in the raving nonsense of Kant and his League of Nations, they submitted to a public vote that part of Denmark which the Prussians had torn away. The falsehood of such methods any child could have discovered, and its absurdity is best branded by the absurd name given it, of ‘Plebiscite ’: outlandish rubbish! The conqueror can pack with new immigrants the land he conquers; he can train in his enforced schools a new forgetfulness of the past; those who vote dread the revenge of the greater Power. In fifty ways the issue is a false issue. It is only true in cases where there is a real and permanent feeling. It was true in the Saar, for instance, but it was not true in Schleswig-Holstein.
Anyhow, Ribe was spared that ignominy of Prussian rule. The neighbouring belt to the south gave a majority for reunion, but Ribe had not even to decide. Had it had to do so it would have been unanimous for Denmark.
Ribe is so thoroughly European and Christian that it is still the town of its great church.
Nothing else usurps primacy there. It is a pity that that church has lost its original use, but it is still a church, after all, and the Mother of Ribe. There is a manufactory of sorts not far away, but it does not overwhelm the church. It is rather a modest manufactory, as manufactories go, and makes no effort to be more than it is. Nor does Ribe house discontented, destitute men. It houses citizens and their traditions. Yet is Ribe not one of your accursed playthings, like Nuremberg, or a village in the Cotswolds which, for the honour I bear it, I will not name. Ribe is natural. It is the child of its fathers. And if it ever builds any more, as I suppose it will have to in the nature of things, it will build in continuity with itself.
There are many matters to be remembered about Ribe and to be set down. A mill stream, a little lake with swans on it, a fountain, recalling a Saint whose name I forget—which it is wrong of me to do, because he or she must have counted—but then, the fountain is quite new. If it were old I should not have forgotten the name. Rising above the fountain and the trees, is yet another church, very native to the place. There is also in Ribe, or rather just outside it, the site and emplacement of what was once the castle, to remind one of the part the town played and now is too happy to have to play it any longer. I was at pains to visit that abandoned moat and low earthwork, because I believe it to be still inhabited by those who had once been soldiers there.
THE FOUNTAINS AND OLD CHURCH OF RIBE.
To face page 50.
Ribe is frontier-like: a human place, standing on the edge of the marshy flats. Ribe is a refuge. A wise man might do worse if he had nowhere to die in, than to totter home to Ribe and die there. The Ribecolse would be kind to him, for they are kind to everyone. I should like to make Ribe a test, sending into exile there all manner of people poisoned by the life of the great cities, their slave-crowds and their pointless fevers. It would be the death by boredom for ninety-nine out of a hundred, but the hundredth would be saved.
I know not whether any famous man has ever been born in Ribe, or has died there, for that matter; but I doubt any such particularity, for if it were so, there would be
streams of alien men and women visiting Ribe. As it is there are none such: at least, I saw none, beside myself and my companion. Nor were we so very alien, because after an hour or two of the place we were naturalised. I am a burgess of Ribe in petto. Let them know my name, for now I must get back to the sea, to the water, whereby I have said all Denmark should be re-visited and known, and so to Aarhus, the port on the eastern shore over against the greater islands.
Aarhus
I spoke of Aarhus in connection with the seaways of the Danish archipelago; it is one of the starting points for travel across those waters, and there is one main line which I think most people know who know Denmark at all, the line which takes you by a short cut north of Funen and right into Kalundborg fjord, where the five-towered church looks so young, and is so old: it has had its face lifted. That is, I suppose, it has had its face lifted. I did not go to peer at it too closely.
Aarhus, had it developed slowly, might have been fascinating enough, and the old part still pleases. Unfortunately the curse of industrialism struck it, at its worst, industrial capitalism, industrial mercantile conditions. It has thus had the glory of becoming the second town in Denmark, but not the most Danish. The most Danish things in Denmark are the older things, especially most venerable Jelling and splendid Elsinore: little places.
Ill-apportioned wealth and machinery have not mortally wounded Aarhus; its people are still happy because, like everything else in Denmark, they are good. But they would be happier if the fields were nearer by. I should like to have met Aarhus first when it was still a homely town, when its great cathedral dominated it altogether.
That church is a very fine building, dignified, and full of mastery; and a great landmark for men at sea, and it is full of the sea. Hanging in the nave there is a little model ship, fully rigged, of the seventeenth century; I will not call it an ex voto for I take it that by that time men no longer made votive offerings to the gods. But whoever hung up that little model did well. Wherever men used ships they ought to make little models of ships and if they use these little models in their worship, so much the better. I know a church in Devon on the river of which I suppose no ship of any size ever sailed, but that church was put up by someone who was full of the sea, for he carved little ships all round it. A very pleasing sight. I wonder how many of all the thousands who come across the Atlantic and enter Europe by the bad gate of Havre take the little ferry across to Honfleur? Not very many, for the last time I was at Honfleur (which was but the other day) I found it much the same as it was when I came there as a child in 1878, with its old church and its honest small seventeenth century quays. Now at Honfleur, if you will go up the hill, past the great trees which have here not been killed by the salt wind but are sheltered, as they often are in Devonshire (where also you get that mixture of forest and sea which is so good), at the top of the hill you will find a tiny chapel to Our Lady, and models of ships, votive offerings, hanging from the roof within. Query: Will any man ever hang up a little model in tin of an ocean steamer from the roof of the new cathedral of Liverpool now built, or in that other one now building? Perhaps by the time the first such model is ready Liverpool will be no longer a port. The marvel is that it should have lasted so long, with such a bar and such a climate. No wonder Southampton replaced it as a jumping-off place for America.
Marvel also it is that men took so many generations to discover Southampton Water. It is Southampton Water that is now the main terminus of the Atlantic voyage, and there it was, a fine landlocked harbour, shaped like a trident, and clamouring for use, yet unused until the great dock strike of 1889 gave it a chance. Since then, as they say of the millionaires, it has never looked back. But it will have to look to itself, for there is not too much room for monsters in its channel, though they do keep it carefully dredged at the worst part by Calshot.
All this does not tell you much about Aarhus, but really I have little to tell. It is flippant to recall that I found in Aarhus a shop sign, the meaning of which I know not. It may be a trade, it may be a private name: at any rate it is remarkable. Here it is: EAR TICKLER. In one case I found it emphasised. Not only was there written up EAR TICKLER, but BORN EAR TICKLER. Thus a rhymster, quorum ego, might sign himself “Poet at large,” as I did in a little church of North England, or being filled with vanity, secure of inspiration, as uppish as any Milton, he might write upon his shop sign ‘Born Poet,’ which means ‘true poet,’ for they say that poets are born not made.
That, however, is only half a truth, and too great reliance on it has proved the early death of many a poet. For if a man thinks he may trust to inspiration and need not work up his verse he will fail. A poet means a maker first of all, it is only by addition that he becomes a seer, that he is in touch with the immortals, that he is the Mouthpiece of a Message, lives in a garrett, and either starves to death or, more probably, bows under the weight of debt in all the last years before the grave. After the grave if he has become famous, they put him up a monument, which does him about as much good as a sick headache, and how long will it take for him to become famous? Who would have heard of Fitzgerald had it not been for Andrew Lang finding the Rubaiyat in a twopenny box of secondhand books? Vixere fortes is all very well: but for poets the fame of great men would wilt badly, still more the fame of unworthy little men. But where would the fame of poets be but for patrons, the rich men that have nourished them? Like that admirable fellow in the Odyssey whose daughter said to the half-drowned, naked Ulysses, ‘You will easily recognise my father; you will find him sitting on an oaken throne, drinking red wine out of a gold cup.’ That is the sort of patron poets need—and this patron was politic—if indeed it was he who produced the Odyssey, as I am inclined to believe, though Samuel Butler thought the poem was written by Nausicaa herself. It is all one to me.
§
Aarhus—the ‘River Dwelling’ I am told it means—has, once again, a taint about it—a thing Denmark, that happiest of northern countries, has been in the main spared: It is tainted with urban Capitalism. More than the capital, by far more than the transport system, Aarhus speaks subtly of the poor enslaved to the rich,’ of big business,’ of all the abominable mechanical order under which Christendom may die. I felt in Aarhus a certain figure brooding above the roofs, the figure of the Successful Business Man, which means the rapidly enriched speculator: the inhuman drone or spider who has cut off relations between Man and Man, who draws wealth impersonally and substitutes the State for charity and thinks that the order of Society was arranged to secure his dividends.
There are many things of our day that are novel, repulsive and doomed to a swift decay and a certain not distant end—which doom is the only good about them. One of these is our ‘modern’ architecture. The term is already a reproach and a warning; but there is another novel repulsive thing which is also doomed, and that is the Successful Speculator. Not the organiser, not the maker, but the Gambler, is a novelty all know who can compare to-day with yesterday, even with the yesterday of only fifty years ago.
Not that sudden wealth is novel, but that the worship of those who acquire it is novel. Men and things are what they are wholly in relation to other men and things, and it is the sudden trickster in millions, he and his relation to us and to the world—to his Creator for that matter—which is an abomination hitherto unknown.
That he is repulsive all know who can taste and smell a character, and all who will think a little will know why: it is because he is a thief by all his motives, necessarily a liar, and after his success fed in his vanity by the base world of our time.
So much is certain. But when I call him ephemeral I may be challenged by many, for we have as yet little experience whereby to test that statement.
In the past great fortunes, accumulated by men who were incapable of making anything and who had no quality but cunning, could at least endure; to-day they cannot endure—and that is a consolation. This particular thing the shadow of which now sprawls all over our society will disappear. No doubt it wil
l be replaced by something worse: but at any rate by an evil of another kind.
Now, why is the Successful Business Man in this sense ephemeral? For this reason, that he has no roots in reality. The Successful Business Man of to-day has no talent or quality of his own. He cannot make, and therefore he cannot endure. He is of exactly the same substance and of exactly the same form as the innumerable failures of his own class: indeed, he is often first successful, then a failure and then successful again, and then a failure again, counting at last as a success or failure according to the moment in which he gives up his worthless spirit to judgment.
Of the successful painter, actor, advocate, builder, scientist, this cannot be said; for to succeed in any real and creative activity, even though that activity be misused, demands certain qualities. You may be eminent as a poet although your poetry is rotten; you may be eminent as a painter although your painting makes men of judgment ill and faint, but you could not have been eminent as a bad poet or a bad painter unless you could at least write verse or paint. Something in you has been recognised by your fellow-men, even though their judgment may be faulty. But your Successful Speculator, by which I mean your man not engaged in real commerce but in the universal gambling of our time, has nothing of the creative about him. When a coin which he tosses comes down heads men speak of his sure instinct and prevision, when it comes down tails they shake their heads and say that they always knew him to be a fraud; but he is the same man, and it is the same coin whether it comes down heads or tails. He is often called a brigand, but he is nothing half so grand.
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