THE most interesting thing, to the complete stranger, in a large foreign city that does not live on its own past is not the museums, but the restaurants and cafÉs, even in the dead season. We were told that August was the dead season in Copenhagen, and that all the world was at the seaside resorts. We had, however, visited a number of Danish seaside resorts, and they were without exception far more dead than Copenhagen. In particular Marienlyst, reputed to be the haunt of fashion and elegance, proved to be a very sad, deserted strand. Copenhagen was not dead.
We went for our first dinner to Wivels Restaurant, signalized to us by authority as the finest in Denmark, a large, rambling, crimson-and-gold place, full of waiters who had learned English in America, of hors-d’ouvre, and of music. The hand was much better than the food, but it has to be said that we arrived at half-past seven, when Danish dinner is over and Danish supper not begun. Still, many middle-class people were unceremoniously and expensively eating—in the main hors-d’ouvre. The metropolitanism of Copenhagen was at once apparent in this great restaurant. The people had little style, but they had the assurance and the incuriousness of metropolitans, and they were accustomed to throwing money about, and to glare, and to stridency, and to the idiosyncrasies of waiters, and to being in the swim. Wivels might show itself on Fifth Avenue or in the Strand without blushing. And its food had the wholesale, crude quality of the food offered in these renowned streets to persons in the swim.
Next we went to the HÔtel d’Angleterre, which was just the restaurant of the standardized international hotel. Once within its walls, and you might as well be at Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Harrogate, Rome, Algiers, Brussels, as at Copenhagen. The same menu, the same cooking, the same waiters, the same furniture, the same toothpicks, and the same detestable, self-restrained English travelers, with their excruciating Englishness. The cafÉ on the ground floor of this hotel, overlooking a large and busy circular place, with the opera and other necessaries of metropolitan life close by, was more amusing than the restaurant. It was a genuine resort in the afternoon. The existence of Copenhagen rolled to and fro in front of its canopied terrace, and one might sit next to an English yachting party of astounding correctness and complacency (from one of those conceited three-hundred-ton boats, enameled white, and jeweled in many holes, like a watch), or to a couple of Danish commercials, or to a dandy and his love. Here we one night singled out for observation a very characteristic Danish young man and young woman with the complexions, the quiet, persuasive voices, and the soothing gestures of the North. It was an agreeable sight; but when we had carried our observation somewhat further, we discovered that they were an English pair on their honeymoon.
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In a day or two, feeling more expert in things Danish, we wanted a truly Danish restaurant, unspoiled by cosmopolitanism. We hit on it in the Wiener CafÉ, appanage of the Hotel King of Denmark. A long, narrow room, anciently and curiously furnished, with mid-Victorian engravings on the somber walls. The waiters had the austerity of priests presiding at a rite. Their silent countenances said impassively: “This is the most select resort in our great and historic country. It has been frequented by the flower of Danish aristocracy, art, and letters for a thousand years. It has not changed. It never will. No upstart cosmopolitanism can enter here. Submit yourselves. Speak in hushed tones. Conform to all the niceties of our ceremonial, for we have consented to receive you.”
In brief, it was rather like an English bank, or a historic hotel in an English cathedral town, though its food was better, I admit. The menu was in strict Danish. We understood naught of it, but it had the air of a saga. At the close of the repast, the waiter told us that, for the prix fixe, we had the choice between cake and cheese. I said, “Will you let me have a look at the cake, and then I ‘ll decide.” He replied that he could not; that the cake could not be produced unless it was definitively ordered. The strange thing was that he persisted in this attitude. Cake never had been shown on approval at the Wiener CafÉ of the Hotel King of Denmark, and it never would he. I bowed the head before an august tradition, and ordered cheese. The Wiener CafÉ ought to open a branch in London; it was the most English affair I have ever encountered out of England.
Indeed, Copenhagen is often exquisitely English. That very night we chose the restaurant of the Hotel————for dinner. The room was darkly gorgeous, silent, and nearly full. We were curtly shown to an empty table, and a menu was dung at us. The head waiter and three inefficient under waiters then totally ignored us and our signals for fifteen minutes; they had their habituÉs to serve. At the end of fifteen minutes we softly and apologetically rose and departed, without causing any apparent regret save perhaps to the hat-and-coat boy, whom we basely omitted to tip.
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We roved in the wet, busy Sunday streets, searching hungrily for a restaurant that seemed receptive, that seemed assimilative, and luck guided us into the CafÉ de l’Industrie, near the Tivoli. The managers of this industrious cafÉ had that peculiar air, both independent and amicable, which sits so well on the directors of an organism that is firmly established in the good-will of the flourishing mass. No selectness, no tradition, no formality, no fashion, no preposterous manners about the CafÉ de l’Industrie, but an aspect of solid, rather vulgar, all-embracing, all-forgiving prosperity. It was not cheap, neither was it dear. It was gaudy, but not too gaudy. The waiters were men of the world, experienced in human nature, occupied, hasty, both curt and expansive, not servile, not autocratic. Their faces said: “Look here, I know the difficulties of running a popular restaurant, and you know them, too. This is not heaven, especially on a Sunday night; but we do our best, and you get value for your money.”
The customers were samples of all Copenhagen. They had money to spend, but not too much. There were limits to their recklessness in the pursuit of joy. They were fairly noisy, quite without affectation, fundamentally decent, the average Danish. Elegance was rarer than beauty, and spirituality than common sense, in that restaurant. We ate moderately in the din and clash of hors d’ouvre, mural decorations, mirrors, and music, and thanked our destiny that we had had the superlative courage to leave the Hotel ————, with its extreme correctitude.
Finally, among our excursions ‘n restaurants, must be mentioned a crazy hour in the restaurant of the Hotel ————, supreme example of what the enterprising spirit of modern Denmark can accomplish when it sets about to imitate the German art nouveau. The ———— is a grand hotel in which everything, with the most marvelous and terrifying ingenuity, has been designed in defiance of artistic tradition. A fork at the ———— resembles no other fork on earth, and obviously the designer’s first and last thought was to be unique. It did not matter to him what kind of fork he produced so long as it was different from any previous fork in human history. The same with the table-cloth, the flower-vase, the mustard-pot, the chair, the carpet, the dado, the frieze, the tessellated pavement, the stair-rail, the wash-basin, the bedstead, the quilt, the very door-knobs. The proprietors of the place had ordered a new hotel in the extreme sense, and their order had been fulfilled. It was a prodigious undertaking, and must certainly have been costly. It was impressive proof of real initiative. It intimidated the beholder, who had the illusion of being on another planet. Its ultimate effect was to outrival all other collections of ugliness. I doubt whether in Berlin itself such ingenious and complete ugliness could be equaled in the same cubic space. My idea is that the creators of the Hotel ———— may lawfully boast of standing alone on a pinnacle.
It was an inspiration on the part of the creators, when the hotel was finished to the last salt-spoon, to order a number of large and particularly bad copies of old masters, in inexpensive gilt frames, and to hang them higgledy-piggledy on the walls. The resulting effect of grotesquery is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the ———— justly ranks as one of the leading European hotels. It is a mercy that the architect and the other designers were forbidden to meddle with the cooking, which sins not by any originality.
The summary and summit of the restaurants and cafes of Copenhagen is the Tivoli. New York has nothing like the Tivoli, and the Londoner can only say with regret that the Tivoli is what Earl’s Court ought to be, and is not. The Tivoli comprises, within the compass of a garden in the midst of the city, restaurants, cafÉs, theater, concert-hall, outdoor theater, bands, pantomime, vaudeville, dancing-halls, and very numerous side-shows on both land and water. The strangest combinations of pleasure are possible at the Tivoli. You can, for instance, as we did, eat a French dinner while watching a performance of monkeys on a tightrope. The opportunities for weirdness in felicity are endless. We happened to arrive at Copenhagen just in time for the fÊtes celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Tivoli, which is as ancient as it is modern. On the great night the Tivoli reveled until morning. It must be the pride of the populace of Copenhagen, and one of the city’s dominating institutions. It cannot be ignored. It probably uses more electric light than any other ten institutions put together. And however keenly you may resent its commonplace attraction, that attraction will one day magnetize you to enter its gates—at the usual fee.
I estimate that I have seen twenty thousand people at once in the Tivoli, not a bad total for one resort in a town of only half a million inhabitants. And the twenty thousand were a pleasant sight to the foreign observer, not merely for the pervading beauty and grace cf the women, which was remarkable, but also for the evident fact that as a race the Danish know how to enjoy themselves with gaiety, dignity, and simplicity. Their demeanor was a lesson to Anglo-Saxons, who have yet to discover how to enjoy themselves freely without being either ridiculous or vulgar or brutish. The twenty thousand represented in chief the unassuming middle-class of Copenhagen.
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There were no doubt millionaires, aristocrats, “nuts,” rascals, obelisks, and mere artisans among the lot, but the solid bulk was the middle-class, getting value for its money in an agreeable and unexceptionable manner. The memory of those thousands wandering lightly clad in the cold Northern night, under domes and festoons and pillars of electric light, amid the altercations of conflicting orchestras, or dancing in vast, stuffy inclosures, or drinking and laughing and eating hors-d’ouvre under rustling trees, or submitting gracefully to Wagnerian overtures in a theater whose glazed aisles were two restaurants, or floating on icy lakes, or just beatifically sitting on al-fresco seats in couples—this memory remains important in the yachtsman’s experiences of the Baltic.
