Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  §

  What! All this about Aarhus? What has Aarhus done to you that you should be moved to such anger? ... Well, no doubt it was excessive: but still, Aarhus is Capitalism rampant and it is the more favourable because it boasts its capitalist growth in a Society that has fought Capitalism so well. For the Danes beyond all others in Europe except the Irish have restored property, thereby undermining Capitalism.

  It shows how cross-sections diversify and complicate political judgments, that the two nations which are now most active and successful in restoring property should be Ireland and Denmark!

  If you go by that popular and thoroughly misleading façade—language division—they belong to two quite separate and even opposing camps. The Irish speak at present, for the most part, the mixed language called modern English, with a large Teutonic element; the Danes a language with a still larger Teutonic element; but the Irish speak a language which has spread among them from others.

  Until 100 years ago, or rather more, until the movement of which Daniel O’Connell was the leader, they spoke a language mainly Celtic, or at any rate a good half of them still did so, for it seems that it was the Liberation Movement of the earlier nineteenth century with its great mass-meetings which spread the use of English in Ireland.

  If you go by the much more real division of religious culture, the Danes belong wholly to the Protestant culture, and those of the Irish in Ireland, who are chiefly concerned with the restoration of property, belong to the opposing Catholic culture.

  If you go by the unimportant (but to-day much exaggerated) categories of skull-measurement, or by colouring of the hair (for modern pedants will be foolish enough even to judge man by that!), the Irish are in the main dark, and the Danes quite abnormally fair. Even if you go by so just a test of difference as political and social history, the Danes have been free from foreign influence and invasion, let alone foreign oppression, from the beginning of record. The Irish had their land taken from them by force, wholesale—were ruined and at last almost starved out. The Danes have remained through all the development of the old class divisions (slave and noble and free), throughout all the mediaeval development of serfage, a continuously maintained agricultural society. The Irish peasantry have had to fight for their lives.

  There is no classification from the most fundamental to the most superficial in which you do not find these two peoples attached apparently to opposite poles of condition and experience. Yet here to-day you have them, the two peoples in the whole of Christendom, who are most successfully solving the economic problem of our time: successfully, that is, if you regard the re-establishment of property as success, and the destruction of property as failure. And the Irish and the Danes have, the one of them erected an almost universal peasant proprietorship outside the towns, while the other are far advanced towards the same goal. The one thing you have in common between the two is that they are both comparatively small communities: in everything else, save in this matter of economic freedom, they differ. Such similarity under such contrasted characters and experience is a very strong argument for the thesis that the instinct for property is normal to our race.

  Neither, however, has yet completed the business by the establishment of guilds for the non-agricultural activities. Until that is done, the scheme is dangerously incomplete.

  Well-divided property, the only alternative to slavery (wage-slavery or, still worse, Communist slavery, or, at last, chattel-slavery, for it will come to that), can without much novel organisation be restored in the matter of agriculture. With industrial work it is otherwise, as it is otherwise also in transport work and distribution. There the only solution is the Guild. Unless you have chartered guilds outside which no man may hold a shop for this or for that, or undertake mechanical work of this or that sort, for gain, the greater mass of capital will, under competitive conditions, eat up the smaller: the chain store will destroy the shopkeeper; the department store will do the same bad work; the small craftsman will be destroyed, and large machine-work will inevitably drift into becoming supreme—run by a few quasimonopolist groups of capital, reposing on a proletariat. Now the end of that is obviously Communism at first, at last individual slavery: men bought and sold by other men, and compelled to work for the advantage of other men. Of these two, Communism cannot but be an ephemeral stage on the way to that full servitude, that slave state, under which men lived until it was slowly transformed by the coming of our religion, and to which in the failure of our religion we seem doomed to return.

  Roskilde

  §

  I am tired of all this thinking—and so are you; let us turn to seeing and being. Let us talk of vision. The heavens opened and I found Roskilde.

  Roskilde is one of a lovely company: the company of the little, happy little, kind little, humble little, and therefore noble little, ancient little, glorious little, quiet little, select little, tender little, eternal little, towns.

  Would I could add ‘secluded’ to these adjectives. Would I could add ‘remote,’ or better still, ‘unknown.’ I can add them of most others in that heavenly group. I can say of Cherchel in Barbary that it is secluded. I can add of Sewen that it is remote, and I can add of Elizondo that it is unknown. I can add of Salm in the Ardennes gate that it is passed by. But Roskilde, alas! is the last stage on the high road to a capital city, Copenhagen. Petrol has put it but half an hour away from Copenhagen, the chief town of Denmark. Still, Roskilde remains all that I have said. It has gallantly held itself to be itself and has kept its titles and its soul.

  It is a dangerous thing to say of any place, town or man, that change shall not destroy them.

  I said it once of Sussex—and look at Sussex now! Garages and ghettoes. The Devil goes about sniffing for good things to destroy them, and the happy little town moves him to a special fury. He must have heard of Roskilde and he will destroy it if and when he can—but not yet. Roskilde still stands with Cherchel and with Elizondo. If any man would taste of peace in this murdered and murderous age, let him seek Cherchel—then let him seek Roskilde.

  The two journeys will be long and tiring, by sea and by land: more than 1,000 miles to Cherchel, thence 1,500 to Roskilde, passing through many States and peoples and tongues on the way, and witnessing innumerable disasters, the crimes and the follies of man. But Roskilde is worth the journey. There shall you find Refreshment, Light and Peace as the motor cycles go hooting and shattering by.

  Remember me, Roskilde, for I shall always remember you.

  The Sea, Kingship and the Centuries made Roskilde. It held for generations the chief palace of the Danish kings. Its name is made up in part of one such name sunk away below the horizon of time, hardly a man, hardly a memory, a chieftain before the light came to the North, a very eminent savage of the time, on whom a legend grew, older than the oldest records of mankind. He lived so long ago that the tiresome rigmarole of Beowulf, written a little before the Norman Conquest, only knows him as a name.

  Alas! Shameful it is to say that heavenly Roskilde is bound up in the minds of fools with wearisome old Beowulf, of which innocent boys and girls to-day are told that it is the ‘earliest monument of the English.’ Oh! God! Oh! Montreal! The schoolmarm got it from the dons and the dons call Beowulf fifth century! You might as well call Tennyson’s Revenge sixteenth century.

  The fun about Beowulf is that it happened to strike Oxford just at the right moment. It fell into the full orgy of Dons’ Nonsense.

  It is always fun dealing with lies. It is fun discovering their motive. It is fun examining the liar and in watching his tactics, his bravado, his confusions, his wrigglings.

  The lie about Beowulf was the lie that it was a great English poem: the first great epic of the English: the foundational thing. It was a lie so enormous that its crudity and magnitude alone are pleasing. The motive of the lie was fairly obvious; it was a multiple motive like the motive for most lies. The main motive was only half a lie. The passion for believing that the English were in some odd way G
ermans, or failing that, at any rate affiliated to Germany, was not a lying motive. The poor mutts honestly believed it, and undoubtedly we are affiliated to the Germans. We also are affiliated to Scottish highlanders, to Frenchmen, to Scandinavians, to Bretons, to Irishmen, and still more to the Dutch.

  To say that we are Germans—that was what the dons said and taught—is monstrous. Underlying this false motive was, of course, religion, the prime mover of mankind, as Lucretius and others have discovered. English people, in the mid-nineteenth century, liked to feel that they were related by blood to people with whom they agreed in other ways, and as your nineteenth-century don, especially at Oxford, agreed in morals and manners with the North Germans and Scandinavians and Danes of his day—or rather with the doctrines from which those manners proceeded—it was pleasing to him to pretend that they and we all made one happy family; and for Prussians our Victorian dons had a special fancy.

  As for the manner of the lie, it was this. That there was a fine old epic poem called Beowulf written in the night of time, centuries and centuries and centuries ago, before even the English came over in little boats from Germany, killed all the people in Britain and took their place.

  Now what was the reality on which this nonsense was embroidered? It was this:—

  There existed in the collection of manuscripts known as the Cottonian (from the name of the man who got them together) one manuscript written in an Anglo-Saxon dialed at the very end of the official use of Anglo-Saxon in England, that is, within a lifetime of the Norman Conquest. Of course no one knows who wrote that manuscript. It was the more difficult to understand it properly because certain pages of it were half burnt in a fire which destroyed some of the Cottonian manuscripts, and a learned Dane having copied it out with great care his house and manuscripts were burnt by the English Fleet in 1807 when they bombarded Copenhagen.

  Still, we have most of the text remaining, and it is, as anyone can see for himself, an Anglo-Saxon story in the short uncouth lines and turgid manner of the day. It deals with sundry complicated and tiresome adventures between a Scandinavian hero, a Danish king who took him in, and a monster. The monster is the most entertaining part in it, nor is he over-entertaining. There are various allusions in this old poem to memories or traditions older still, just as in Tennyson’s ballad of the Revenge, an infinitely better poem that Beowulf ever was, there are memories and traditions of Elizabethan things 300 years older than Tennyson; things moreover which Tennyson could never really have understood when he wrote his thoroughly modern, highly patriotic, and exceedingly unhistorical, but superb, piece of verse.

  On the strength of those vague allusions and traditions the dons got to work and worried poor old Beowulf as dogs worry a bone. They made up 347,222 explanations, glosses, guesses, affirmations and the rest, about it. Whether there ever was a Beowulf; if so, his date; how the story was written; why it was written; when it was written. All this was chewed and re-chewed and counter-chewed with guess upon guess until no one knew whom he was. But all agreed on one thing; that this Farrago was centuries older than it really was, and that a story all about Danes and Swedes and Monsters was a story about Englishmen.

  Some said that the poem dated from the third century, some from the seventh, some from the eighth. They none of them had any proofs, and that was the fun of the game. When anyone brings forward a real piece of proof in the middle of this sort of thing it is thought bad form, a kind of cheating. A game it was, and a game it continued, and for all I know the game may Still be played even to this day, yet it is not worth playing. We only know one thing about this poem Beowulf: it has nothing to do with English history, and is only an English poem in the sense that it was written certainly in England and in a dialed spoken and written in England a little before the Norman Conquest. Cetera fumus: yet so powerful are trick and humbug, self deception, mere bold affirmation and all forms of mythomania, that Beowulf still has a long life before him, and his ghost still inhabits the neighbourhood of Rosskille.

  §

  Rosskille arose from its haven. As you stand on the high hill-platform in front of the west end of the Cathedral, with its twin spires, you see below you the southern end of that fjord which runs so deeply into the land and makes a secure land-locked haven safe from all gales, a long calm narrow water ideal for the settlement of early sailors.

  When the Faith reached Rosskille centuries and centuries ago, some church was built among the walled huts above the beached boats, and this church was the second centre of the Danes after Jelling. Here the son of Old Gorm was buried, Harold Bluetooth, on the Gospel side of the Altar, and there, I am told, his tomb is marked to this day; and round him see the kings of Denmark for nearly a thousand years.

  The tall twin spires of Rosskille Cathedral and their roof cover that splendid series of the Danish royal tombs. Is there any dynasty in the world, I wonder, which has such continuity? Nothing of the sort happened in England; France might be a parallel, for the tombs at St. Denis did cover, as do the Danish tombs, a matter of ten centuries, but Robert the Strong, from whom in direct line all the kings of France descend, was even earlier than Gorm the Old.

  It is not only the names of the monarchs and the inscribed dates of the reigns that tell this story, but the monuments wherein you see the advancement and changing taste of men in sculpture from the beginning, after the Conversion, right down to to-day. It is a very fine record; may it continue for centuries more as the symbol of that happy nation, free from ambition and from fear, protected by its modest limits and nourished from the sea. It does a man good, it enlarges him, to feel this unbroken chain of time in the chapels of Rosskille Cathedral.

  Just across the narrow water the Swedes have no such thing. The Vasas appear suddenly and late and with no title at all. Hardly do they appear when their line becomes confused and broken; it jumps from one stirp to another and ends with the Bernadottes: Bernadotte, the French soldier of fortune, who betrayed his master. Yet was he not without excuse; Napoleon had wounded him violently by the language of the despatch from Wagram. None the less, I should have felt a little ashamed if I had been among the Swedish officers that third day of Leipzig when Bernadotte appeared upon the field to accomplish the ruin of his emperor.

  I hope that Rosskille will grow no larger, and I am fairly sure that it will escape that horrible doom, the doom of oidema, or swelling, which has destroyed so many things politically good. For mark this, that Rosskille is too far out from Copenhagen ever to become a suburb, that it has no metals nor mines of any kind. Its lovely fjord does not provide a sufficient harbour for modern days, even if there were enough local commerce to build up a large harbour town. Yet I tremble even for Rosskille, since all good things are watched jealously by the gods below who would make of them a prey.

  So much for Rosskille, blessed Rosskille, and so, on to Copenhagen, a day’s march away.

  Copenhagen

  §

  Copenhagen, being a capital, ought to be less pleasant than it is, but I found it is still the town which I had known all that long time ago, and I think the salt which keeps its savour is that powerful and merry sense of human equality which the Danes have inherited, developed and increased. It does not even kill its own suburbs, and nearly all big towns do; and then it has an immense advantage of being on the sea. Whatever is on the sea has life.

  It glories, of course, as does all Scandinavia, in sculpture, within its museums and outside its museums, and the richest of its rich men especially-endowed it with sculpture. The animals in front of the Town Hall are excellently done, notably the bull struggling with a serpent. It is full of vigour and life and exactitude combined.

  I suppose good animal sculpture is a test. Civilisations which have produced good animal figures have a special point. We have not done so, and I am sorry for it. I can remember nothing in the way of animal sculpture at home worth having, except a very good cart-horse carved in pear-wood which was shown at the Academy two or three years ago, also the lion squattin
g on its haunches, which came I know not whence, but is used as a motive in the neighbourhood of the British Museum; and the other lions outside the Imperial Institute, full of disdain. These last are worth meditating on. There are four of them, and they sneer more thoroughly than I have ever known an animal to sneer. For the rest, animals, which Englishmen love, are things which they do not copy well.

  Now this is odd, for in most matters of quite recent art we have done very well; better than our rivals. We have not fallen so far into the eccentric and affected as have our neighbours, and we have had in our portrait sculpture things as good as anything in Europe: but animals, no. It is probably a curse upon us for having made a sort of religion of animals, treating them as though they were human beings, and that—by the way—has a double edge, for if you treat animals sentimentally and ascribe to them human emotions, why, then you will probably oppress your fellow-men and treat them as though they were beasts.

  In architecture Copenhagen did not present anything very remarkable that I could see; but there was this to be noted, that when Copenhagen went in for the grotesque, in an earlier generation, it succeeded, and the great example is the Dragon Tower. The Dragon Tower is a spire on the outer part of which there wind great dragons, their tails mixing together at the point of the spire and finishing it off.

  Now, one would have thought that a motive of that kind would have been too grotesque to stand weathering. One would have thought that after a certain lapse of time it would date abominably, as does, for instance, the Sapientia at Rome, or some of our seventeenth-century monstrosities in London. For, all over Europe, in the decay of the Renaissance, grotesque things, or rather, grotesque experiments, were attempted, as they are in our time. Yet the Dragon Tower does not date. It was pleasant when it was made and it is perhaps more pleasant to-day. Why, I know not; unless it be that the man who made it had a sense of rhythm. The curves of those great beasts are harmonious.