Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  One ought not, I suppose, to write a word about Copenhagen without talking of Thor-waldsen. Were I to write a word about him, it would be in praise, in spite of the reaction against him. He was so enormously famous in his own day and just after, that when the reaction came he was called all manner of names and particularly was he called insipid—which very often he is. But he had a fine note of perfection about him all the same. He strove for and achieved exact balance, and that is no small thing. I doubt whether he will rank in the long run among the great European names, but he will always be very high in the second flight. For my part, I prefer Flaxman; also, I think Flaxman more intimately possessed the Greek mind than Thorwaldsen did. However, the reason I am not writing about Thorwaldsen is that I did not see his work whilst in Copenhagen. I have seen it elsewhere; but in Copenhagen where I ought specially to have visited it, I was too much interested in the things in the outside of the town and the business of my travel to go into the building that houses the great Thorwaldsen collection.

  It is a pity, I think, that so many people coming from the North to Europe get their impression of Denmark through the capital by which they enter. It is the main gate served by the ferry from Malmo. All central cities form resting places for the birds of passage, but Copenhagen is not so peculiarly Danish as are the lesser towns, in particular those two I have rightly praised—Ribe and Roskilde.

  I suppose of all the large towns of Europe the one that is most filled with the national spirit is also the largest of them all; I mean London. Although London has grown out of all due size and is dying of elephantiasis, it still remains intensely English—especially through the temper of its people. For the English excel in irony, and the populace of London has a shining genius for irony. It is this that cuts them off by an impassable gulf from the other English-speaking people of the United States and of the Dominions, and certainly of Ireland. Yes, the people of London excel in irony; but, unlike the Irish, they have no wit. However, I would rather have irony in the speech of a populace than any other quality whatever. The appreciation of irony is one of the two main marks of civilisation; the other being self-criticism, in which we are as wholly lacking as we are perfected in irony. Indeed, self-praise is becoming a positive disease with us. It was bad enough in my youth. It has been growing ever since; and now you cannot read a public speech, or leading article, or any general comment whatsoever, without the detestable note of self-praise coming in. I have had this bad symptom explained to me as a consequence of aristocracy. ‘Where you have class government,’ they tell me, ‘you must keep the mass of men contented by every means in your power and the easiest method open to everyone is flattery.’ But England was in the hands of a governing class long before this plague of boasting came upon her, and note you, it is not only repellent in morals, but politically dangerous. When a people get to believe that they are stronger and better than they are, when they never hear their institutions nor their public men criticised, let alone remodelled, they are already half disarmed before foreign conflict begins.

  To such a warning men blinded by flattery will reply that somehow or other they have always succeeded. It is the argument of the man who has begun to drink and who, in just the last stages of his going down, confidently assures you that it does him no harm. It is the argument of the gambler, who tells you that he can continue indefinitely because he has been hitherto fortunate.

  And yet there is a compensation, for a habit of universal deeply rooted boasting gets men into the mood where even disasters do not seem disasters, and where some point of vanity can be served under any circumstance whatever. So that if we lost half our population and more than half our foreign tribute, there would still be people to point out how nobly we came out under the ordeal of poverty.

  Stockholm

  §

  With that conclusion I will pass over the water to Sweden, which (I have heard) is as aristocratic in temper as Denmark is egalitarian.

  §

  When I get over the narrow sound and into Sweden and come to renew acquaintance with that land the first thing I recall from the memories of so long ago is the way in which Stockholm, right up hours away by train, is, as it were, Sweden itself. Copenhagen is not Denmark. But Stockholm is Sweden. The preponderance of the capital in the one country and its domestic character in the other is one of the main contrasts between these opposed and dissimilar twins.

  Stockholm is an opportunity largely wasted because no sense of unity has inspired its development. The site is admirable: deep water for shipping, a group of islands approachable by water; there, within, the country and there the Baltic, without. There is also enough rising land within or close to these islands to give a skyline to the city. But because no one wanted the city to become one thing it has lost a great chance.

  Stockholm as it is now is three towns. There is the small architectural monumental group, thoroughly successful, the kernel of which is the Royal Palace, and the old House of Assembly of the nobles on the next island close at hand. All that bit of work, covering a very small space, is in tune with the classical spirit which ruled all Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wherever you get that note you have something permanent, dignified and satisfying.

  Spreading outwards beyond the water on the mainland is the modern city proper, or at least one half of it, the other half stretches out also on the mainland, but to the other side of the main stream. Both these ‘extra halves,’ as it were, of the main city are haphazard: the streets small and unimpressive and narrow. The modern extension as it proceeds is what one might expect, false to a tradition and therefore jarring to anyone of traditional taste. The big blocks of flats, for instance, are just what you get at its worst in Paris to-day. The new Town Hall, of which so much is talked and written, suffers from the same note of modern extravagance. For there is an extravagance of oddity and ‘starkness ‘just as there is an extravagance of overladen ornament. There is certainly no excess of ornament in the new Town Hall of Stockholm, nor in any of these modern ‘functional’ buildings. Indeed there is no ornament at all. There is nothing to tell you, as you come up the water, that the building on the left with the big tower is the chief building of the town and presumes to be representative of its spirit. As one thinks what beauty might have been set up here, mirrored in that water, this one failure, the new Town Hall, is a tragedy.

  So much for what I may call the second half of Stockholm—without majesty or tradition, without so much as an effort at beauty. But there is a third area which properly belongs to Stockholm, which is quite modern and which is admirable, and that is the development of gardens, parks, private houses in their grounds, and, best of all, good statuary, to the East, by the water.

  There is here not only a thorough understanding of how to use the full site, but, so far as I could find, no jarring note at all. Everywhere what has been built and planted corresponds to that mass of inland waterways and to the pine forests and to all that is Sweden. I can imagine a merchant having made his fortune and settling in his age on one of those islands or shores of the bays, in one of those new, excellently built, well-proportioned homes and feeling strong, full communion with his country. Not a few of the cities of Europe, especially in the North, have understood this trick of marrying the waterside to the urban area and of setting up a belt or margin of natural and human beauty, but I think Stockholm has done it best of all. There is a drive out through the public land immediately east of the city where the use of sculpture in the right place and of the right kind has enhanced all this effect. That plastic genius in stone and bronze which the Scandinavians discovered in the last two centuries and which they have not yet lost is here successfully made use of. The rare statues, as you come upon them, fit in with the woodland drive, surprise and yet satisfy. It is good work.

  §

  I think it was in Stockholm that I felt, more than anywhere else, the gap of those forty-three years between my first sight of it as a young man and my present return. For one
thing, certain social habits have changed, notably in the way of drinking, which is as good a test as you could have of the spirit of a community. Modern Scandinavia has made many experiments in the control of what its citizens drink. Each of these contrasting, and sometimes half hostile, provinces of Scandinavia, which are also separate kingdoms, has its own laws in this matter and each has had its own problems to solve. The foreigner cannot decide on the solution, and even if he could it would not be his business to offer any criticism. It is certain that there has had to be control; it is equally obvious that the control has been of a different kind in Sweden from what it has been in Denmark for instance. But the upshot has been a different set of regulations and consequent difference of social habit from that which I so well remember in my youth. Further, these policies mark a rather sharp division between Sweden and Denmark. In Denmark there is more liberty and more popular life in this matter—but why, I know not.

  In the days of Gustavus Adolphus the beer which the Swedes made for themselves and drank at home was a glory to them. Nothing is pleasanter in that great man’s correspondence than his vivid recollection of the brew which he had known at home and which he could not get beyond the Baltic during that marvellous episode, the Single Year, in which he very nearly founded a new Protestant German Empire, and did actually strike the old Catholic Empire a blow from which it never recovered. (It lingered on till Bismarck; after Bismarck it took to its bed; the other day it died.)

  Well, the great Gustavus, though he did so much harm, was at least not a dram drinker: he drank as had his fathers; an excellent rule of life; and that is why, by the way, in England a gentleman should drink wine. When the abuse of spirits began to invade the normal use of the immemorial national drink in Sweden I am not learned enough to say, but I suppose it began, like so many other evils, in the later seventeenth century. We know in some detail how in England that plague fell. The new dram drinking was the curse of England, coincident with the Revolution of 1688 and its sequel; coincident, that is, with the disastrous advent of Dutch William and his cronies.

  From the new Sweden of the Vasas, centred in Stockholm already, did Gustavus Adolphus go out on his mission of making all the Baltic Swedish.

  The Vasa

  §

  The Baltic ought to be a perfect Mediterranean, and so it would be if it were all of it open all the year round, but it is handicapped by the freezing of its harbours in winter.

  When you get across that very narrow bit of water you are in a new land. The change is subtle, but perceptible at once. It is the more perceptible through the similarity of language and the recurrent political connection.

  But what has made more difference than anything else has been the contrast in foreign outlook.

  Sweden, after the abrupt change of the Reformation and the establishment of the new Vasa dynasty, looked outward for conquest, and her new kings were based upon the special conception of divorce from Europe: an idea which is the political core of any active Protestant State. Denmark stood for continuity, and although there had been there also a cutting off from the religion of Europe, the separation was not aggressive. Denmark always tended to the European idea of a State, the Roman imperial inheritance. Denmark instinctively aimed at the making of a Scandinavian unity, and had in the past more than once achieved it. The new Sweden of the Vasas was all for separation and therefore for a local dynasty opposed to Scandinavian unity. At the moment the Vasas stood for a liberation of Sweden from the Crown of Denmark, and that side issue—of far less moment than the religious issue—has in school and textbook, yes, and in popular memory, taken a chief place; so that Gustavus Vasa has become a ‘Pater Patriae.’

  But his main work was, like that of his contemporaries elsewhere, a disruption of Christendom. We are enjoying the final fruits of that break-up of Europe to-day.

  Moreover, from their origins and from their nature, the Vasas were usurpers and robbers. They had no title. They must consolidate their title by adding to their revenues, and by the prestige of foreign victory. This was not to the disadvantage of the Swedish name. Wealth and successful foreign adventure are not a disadvantage to a country, and just as that first Gustavus, without thought of right, based himself upon a general loot and the energy of greed, so he favoured the merchants and commercial expansion.

  To understand the Vasas you cannot do better than stand and meditate before the statue of the Ancestor standing on the Riddarholm in front of the Upper House, the place of assembly of the rich, in collusion with whom this grabber firmly established his power and their own. It is a statue thoroughly recalling to life its original; Gustavus in armour, bold, holding the staff of command.

  Admire the stance! How he thrusts forward his strong leg, how he sweeps his arm, how he bears backward, with insolent strength, the posture of his body! It has about it a superb confidence, a man sure of his future, of his backing by fate, of mastering his opponents.

  Men of this sort in history have at least as much cunning as vigour. He had risen, be it remembered, as the leader of a revolt largely popular. The peasants, especially the wealthier farmers, had looked to him for the destruction of those who claimed dues from them—especially the clergy. Here as everywhere in Christendom, the movement which had appealed to the commons as an emancipation, turned quickly into a new and worse servitude for the masses, the more obscure husbandmen.

  They rebelled again but in no general or effectual fashion, and the new parvenus easily got the better of them. The wealth which the Vasa had raped from the Church supplied him with mercenaries, and with that best of powers, stronger than troops, the power to bribe. And he had much more to rely upon, for he had shared the swag with the greater nobles, and even the intermediate landowners. The merchants were with him of course, and as everywhere in that moment some few prominent among the learned—and the Roman centre was very far away. It is no wonder that the work was thoroughly done.

  In Denmark men keep to this day many affectionate memorials of the old religion enshrined in their speech. I am told that you may hear the word Mass used in country parts for the Lutheran service, and, like all other Lutherans, the Danes keep something of the old symbolism: more than that there is the atmosphere of memory.

  In Sweden it is not so. There is a certain atmosphere of restoration rather than of recollection. You feel it strongly enough under St. Brigitt’s roof, but you do not greet there the ghost of the past as you do in some kind under the roof of that Church of Aarhus.

  When the deed had been done, the doers dug themselves in, and it is amusing to read on the base of the statue of old Gustavus the epithets of praise. He is the ‘Liberator,’ he is the ‘restorer of religion.’ I confess to a sardonic pleasure when I remember that on the point of death he scrawled a few words, bidding his people to maintain the ‘gospel’ —the common term of the moment for the new economic revolution and the seizure of Church lands.

  As you admire that figure, watch also narrowly the face, and study it in the engravings too. See how the eyes are not only determined but observant: prominent: wide apart: watching on either side. Such a face also his grandson of the second usurpation inherited. The great Gustavus Adolphus looked like that: a round determined head, the despair of any don on the lookout for his dolichocephalics: nothing of the horse face about him.

  If you want a good illumination of what was going on in the mind of the time, a good ‘eye-opener,’ read the proceedings at the acceptation of Sigismund, the legitimate heir, in so far as usurpers can be called legitimate at all so early in their usurpation.

  Gustavus the Great, Gustavus the First, Gustavus the very confident, Gustavus the cunning, Gustavus the beginner, the robber, the renewer, and all the rest of it, had ‘made good’ (as they say of commercial adventurers) in 1523. He had a run of thirty-seven years for his money. He had begun his fighting well under thirty after a boyhood of fine adventure, disguises, escapes, prison, and obscure labour with the common people. He had grasped Stockholm when he was twenty-
seven. He lasted on to be sixty-four, the age at which, upon his death bed, he made his final recommendation of pure reformed religion.

  Long possession of power in one hand did wonders for the new movement everywhere, and in Sweden it did what was done by the Cecil dynasty in England.

  At the back of their minds the leading men still kept a lingering respect for hereditary right and constitutional rule, but their new possessions were too much for them. The eldest son of Gustavus, Eric, was not happy at the loss of religion, and would perhaps have restored the Faith. He was got rid of in eight years.

  They put up his brother John, who was the next lawful heir, and John, in his long reign of more than twenty years, hated the religious revolution at heart. It was John’s son, Sigismund, who at last provided a test between the love of money and the love of ancestral things. John had been elected King of Poland. His mother was Polish, and Poland had rallied, after hesitation and confusion, to the Faith of which she has ever since been so noble a champion.

  When his father died, Sigismund, now the rightful heir of the new Vasa dynasty, was made king. Decency demanded that; but such a coronation endangered the new fortunes, the new rich, just as the coronation of Mary Queen of Scots, had Elizabeth died, would have endangered the same sort of people in England. He was made to promise, of course, that the Church loot should be sacred to its present possessors, but, as in the English parallel, the new rich felt unsafe. When Sigismund tried to claim his own, he was, in the last year of the century, turned out. A younger son of Gustavus, the champion of the new fortunes, a man who would certainly allow the loot of religion to be retained, usurped the throne. It was his son, the second Gustavus, who was called to the throne to continue the usurpation. He inherited that something of madness which lurked in the Vasa blood, and in his case, madness turned into genius. He was that great soldier Gustavus Adolphus, the scourge of Germany, who so nearly did what Bismarck was to do.