COPENHAGEN

Dumb was the sea, and if the beech-woods stirred,
'Twas with the nesting of the grey-winged bird
Midst its thick leaves....

Great things he suffered, great delights he had,

Unto great kings he gave good deeds for bad;
He ruled o'er kingdoms where his name no more
Is had in memory, and on many a shore
He left his sweat and blood to win a name
Passing the bounds of earthly creatures' fame.

Ogier the Dane, by William Morris.

Though the capital of an Empire which spreads from the Tropics to the near vicinity of the Northern Pole,[58] and by far the largest of Scandinavian cities, Copenhagen is yet so placed that many of her citizens look from their own windows over foreign soil. The capital is almost at the very eastern point of the wide-flung yet restricted dominions of Denmark.

A flight of but a dozen miles would carry an aeroplane on to Swedish soil; only twice that distance off is the University city of Lund, so famous in the annals of the Northern Church and so long on Danish soil.

Copenhagen is a very pleasant town, and almost all its chief buildings exemplify the architectural ideals of the Renaissance. Street upon street of houses, white stucco or red brick, adorned with pilaster and pediment and cornice, covered with tall pantiled roofs; many bearing the dates of their birth-years two or three centuries ago; these give the capital an old-world, most attractive look, a picturesqueness that is sternly denied to most so modern towns. Steeples of character to match, frequently tower above the roofs, while very constant parks and squares, long avenues of broad-leafed trees and cool-looking fountains, some of them real works of art, do much to make this town a very delightful place.

Canals, somewhat numerous open-air markets and innumerable cafÉs, whose tables and chairs under trees or awnings encroach on the broad pavements, make the Danish metropolis a rather characteristic Continental town. In some ways, perhaps, it has less individuality than the other capitals of the Northlands. Less romantically situated, much larger, far easier to reach from more southern parts, it has much of the bright boulevard atmosphere of Paris. Tivoli Park and the cafÉs, with many other like attractions, draw crowds of visitors, not only from every part of the small kingdom, but also from the very prosperous section of Sweden across the Sound, which was Danish till 1658, and has by no means lost its affection for the city that it knew as the capital of old.

Copenhagen is an epitome of Denmark herself, the prosperous metropolis of an extremely industrious and well-ordered community that likes to be amused. There is but little rotten in the state of Denmark to-day. Though fallen from possessing the widest empire of the north to the limits of a mere province, she yet thrills with vigorous life, an object lesson on many points that no land can afford to ignore. Copenhagen is not really very unlike a large German town, though the Danes are not pleased to be told so, and it lacks the numerous uniforms and those minute and detailed regulations for the welfare and good order of the population that so characterise the Fatherland itself. Magnificently equipped with boulevards, palaces and parks, cut through by fine waterways and roadways, the city rather strangely lacks any conspicuous central point. The Danes boast that their large buildings are schools, while those of England are factories and those of Germany barracks, but the headquarters of one of the chief Universities of earth possess little architectural splendour. The view of the city from the deck of an approaching steamer is not particularly impressive; nothing except a few steeples rises above the general line of the houses.

Life is lived in the Danish capital. Some of the numerous bright restaurants do not close their doors till 3 a.m., and there is much of the all-night activity that is the unrestful pride of many of the cities of America. To-morrow blends with to-day; some citizens have not reached their beds while others are starting on the activities of next morning. But happily this unquiet atmosphere does not seem to penetrate individuals. The Copenhagener does not desire to be for ever talking about his hustling town.

While so much that is of the old world still survives in Copenhagen, it is on the whole an intensely modern town, rather dominated by its stretches of asphalt and trolley-trams and ever growing lines of flats. A really magnificent feature, by the chief square next the Tivoli Park, emblematic of the soaring ambition of the place, is the new Raadhus or City Hall. Built in 1894, it is a beautiful specimen of Renaissance architecture in brick, raising a tall spire toward heaven, enclosing a couple of courts, one of them an open garden with a fountain in the centre, the other cloistered and roofed with glass. The adornments are very pleasing, appropriate to the style and use, tile mosaic of fish and bird, tree designs in relief or stencilling over the walls. The upper portions may be gained by a lift that never stops; on one side the cars are always going up and on the other down.

The site of the city, like its name, Copenhagen or merchants' harbour, is not romantic, though extremely convenient for travel and trade. It looks straight over the Sound to Sweden and the entrance to the Baltic; the arm of the sea that divides Zealand from the small island of Amager (p. 143) also penetrates the town and adds to the water-front available for wharves. It was on a little backwater of this channel that in the twelfth century Bishop Axel (Absalon) raised on Church lands a castle, which was called by his own name, to protect the merchants from the pirates infesting the Sound.[59] Little he suspected that round it would grow up a town to supplant his cathedral city.

Copenhagen was made the capital in 1443 by Christopher, the Bavarian, just after he had been recognised as King in Sweden and Norway as well as in Denmark itself. He was not a popular monarch. The Swedes called him the stumpy little German, and he thought them a free-spoken folk. When men complained that pirates were ravaging the coasts and were probably supported by Eric, the king who had been deposed, Christopher answered that, having been deprived of three kingdoms, a man could hardly be blamed for stealing a dinner now and then. Perhaps if the dinners had been stolen from the palace and not from their own houses the people would more readily have seen the joke.

Thus, Copenhagen is a mediÆval town, but it has no buildings earlier than the creations of that most accomplished sovereign, Christian IV., who could sail a ship and navigate the fjords and swim and leap and fence and fight and ride and drive and speak many languages and explain the course of the stars and drink enough wine and beer to astonish the court of his brother-in-law, James I. of England. If he really designed the buildings that he raised, as it seems he truly did, he was also an architect of no mean power.

The Bourse, which he erected about 1624, presents a long low faÇade to one of the quays and its high roof is relieved by large gabled dormer windows. From the top of the tower in the centre four dragons look down and coil their tails heavenward together to form a spire about a hundred and fifty feet high.[60] Another of his works is the Round Tower,[61] originally used as the observatory. It is entirely filled by a brick slope up which one may walk with ease to the top, corkscrewing round a pillar. Over the metal parapet that bears the date 1643, there is a splendid view across wide miles of steep roofs covered with curving tiles, relieved by many a tree and the tall masts of many a ship. And the other spires and towers and domes of the city make a really splendid array, especially the quaint steeple of Vor Frelsers Kirke, round whose outside an open stairway winds to the gold ball at the top. Across the Sound loom up low Swedish hills, but the city is too vast to allow a view of Danish country of any decipherable sort. Over thirteen miles of choppy sea appears the small isle of Hveen, now famous for its hares, where in 1580 Tycho Brahe built his observatory and "wielded the sword, not to smite flesh and blood, but to strike out a clearer path up to the stars of heaven. For Holger Danske (p. 146) can come in many forms; so that through all the world one sees the might of Denmark."[62]

In this teeming womb of royal kings one expects to see palaces, and very numerous they are, now in many cases put to every kind of useful purpose, from the framing of laws to the display of things curious and rare. But the sneer of Samuel Laing in 1839 that Copenhagen has more palaces in her streets and squares than ships in her harbour has long ceased to be true. The haven of merchants again has a busy trade; canals and shipping and docks are met with on every hand.

Two palaces, Rosenborg and Fredericksborg, were erected (or begun) by the same fourth Christian king, and fine specimens of Danish Renaissance they are, far better in general effect than in detail. Walls mostly of brick, carved work of stone, tall metal-covered roofs and lofty open windowed spires. The palace of Rosenborg contains a beautiful array of furniture and weapons and china and jewels, the collection of several kings.

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Other of the palaces are fine examples of the severer Classic work of the eighteenth century erected when Europe had learned to call barbaric all that the Christian centuries had raised, so ceased merely to apply Classical details to Gothic designs, and could admire nothing but plain copies of the work of Greece and Rome. The Amalienborg (Winter Palace, etc.) surrounds a fine octagonal court with Ionic pilasters, balustrades and urns, over which rise high tiled roofs. In the centre of the court is a metal statue to King Frederick V., famed as the patron of science and art. It was erected by the Asiatic Trading Company which once made Denmark an Indian power, for the king's interest in the East was great, and he dispatched Niebuhr to Arabia in 1761.[63]

Another eighteenth century palace, called Prindsens because the Crown Prince adorned it when in 1744 it was erected round its court, is now the National Museum. Even in the earliest age when "beasts were slaying men" Denmark was the abode of oyster-eating humanity which has left us the world-famed kitchen middens that make so fascinating to us the first beginnings of our race. This collection is of extraordinary interest as letting us trace in a general way the whole story of mankind from the time when he chipped flints into implements and built cromlechs of unshapen stones to the days when he learned to preach the message of peace from pulpits of Renaissance architecture and to shoot his fellows with long guns.

As is natural in Denmark the collection of prehistoric implements is extremely representative and large. We see man armed with rude axes of flint or variegated marble and women adorned with amber beads, during the long, long millenniums of the two ages of stone. We see the swords and knives and the tree-trunk coffins of those who had learned the secret of the metals and substituted for stone first blunt bronze and then sharp iron. We see the works of Egypt and Assyria, of Greece and Rome, and of all the cultured races of the South. We see the beginning of civilisation in the North and the spoils of the Viking Age, the gold and jewels brought to Denmark by foray or by trade. We see the North becoming Christian and building churches of stone or staves and the Scandinavian countries moulding themselves into what they are to-day.[64] For purely educational purposes and for stimulating the imagination few museums on earth have quite the same power as this one.[65]

Denmark is a country where education is a serious thing, and in few capitals may one learn so much as here. No amount of merely technical instruction would give the Danes the technical skill that they possess. If any doubt the real and practical usefulness of good general education, this small country can supply the object-lesson that he needs; if any do not know just what education means, the Danes have hit upon a definition that is of real value and much comfort too. "Education is that which survives when all that was learned has been forgotten."

Much of the spirit of the Norse fills the air of the Danish capital, but the town is too young to be mentioned in the sagas; to many of the heroes of the Danes there are monuments in streets and memorials in galleries, but they do not give their atmosphere to the town. The spirit of the city is rather that of solid achievement by a great people which no longer rests its pride on glory gotten in war. And if the nations of mankind were to be judged on the same principle that was applied to the holders of the Talents Denmark would be very near the top. The extreme richness of her small homeland is a still unexploded myth. If it were an American state it would be one of the most thinly settled areas of the country, outside the actual mountains. Denmark's place in the modern world is due to education and to nothing else. The sole fertility of the land is in the brains of her children. If America were occupied by a sufficient population of Danes she might almost take a contract to supply the solar system with food.[66]

Even in a city of so many associations and despite the noble army of Danish worthies who have written their names in broader or fainter type across its streets, it is still the great name of Thorwaldsen that more than any other dominates Copenhagen. "Sylvanus" tells the truth in his remark: "Men speak not, think not of the king; they ask you, 'Have you seen the Frue kirk?' or Church of our Lady, within whose walls are the twelve apostles of Thorwaldsen, with the grandest, most holy conception of the Saviour, the chisels of future ages may vainly essay to surpass. The figures, larger than life and thrown into life by the immortal Icelander, teem with varying expression and deep feeling."

The exterior of the church is severely plain; indeed, it is very ugly, with two ranges of windows and a tower stuck through the sloping roof, a hexastyle Doric portico against it. This last feature in itself is, however, a thing of much beauty and its tympanum has sculptures by Thorwaldsen.[67]

The inside is very truly one of the most impressive in Europe. Not that the actual architecture rises very far above the commonplace. The aisles open by round arches with heavy piers between; Doric colonnades above sustain the deeply panelled tunnel vault; there is an unlighted apse. Here, over the altar, stands the famous statue of Christ, one of the most striking in the world; the face radiates divine compassion, the hands are stretched out to all who come. In front an angel holds a font-shell, and against each pier is the figure of one of the Apostles. The supreme excellence of these glorious statues in white marble with their effective drapery and the absence of any other attempt at ornament renders the interior of this church striking in an extraordinary degree. There is an element of almost barbaric display in the huge number of works of art collected in many Gothic churches, and there is truth in the Japanese contention that not more than a single picture or figure should be displayed at the same time. If the statues were removed from the church one would hardly cross the street to see it, but were they erected in St. Paul's Cathedral they would lose more than half their effect.

The only criticism that one can possibly make on Thorwaldsen is that his long sojourn in Rome seems to have given him a little trace of the softness of the South, a certain absence of virility that, slight as it is, attracts instant attention in the North. Not a trace of this appears in the figure of St. Paul: determination on every line of the strong face, clinched by the position of the left hand on the sword.[68] There is a large collection of the Master's works in the mongrel-Egyptian Valhalla next Christiansborg Palace (p. 131), in the centre of whose court Thorwaldsen sleeps beneath ivy trailing on the ground. Grace, tenderness, youth, beauty, and gentle mirth—these were the inspirations that gave his hand power. Nothing fearful or terrible is among his works. No agony like the Niobe or the Laocoon, never even the crucifixion of the Saviour. Even in sepulchral monuments he strove to lessen the gloom of death by symbols of a deathless life.[69]

Even with Thorwaldsen fresh in mind, it is probably safe to say that the name of no Copenhagener, past or present, is so well-known in England and America as that of Hans Andersen, unrivalled as the teller of fairy tales. Few would maintain that he was the greatest of the Danes or the most illustrious alumnus of the University, but not very many are seriously interested in statuary, and in science still fewer, while all children love stories and there is an atmosphere about those of Hans Andersen of which most of us are conscious more or less from the cradle to the grave.

In the rather risky work of foretelling the future Andersen was at any rate as successful as any one else. "Yes, in years to come we shall fly on the wings of steam high in the air, over the mighty ocean. The young inhabitants of America will visit the old Continent of Europe. They will come to admire the ancient monuments and ruined cities, just as we make pilgrimages to the fallen glories of Southern Asia.

"In years to come they will certainly visit us....

"The airship comes: it is crowded with passengers, for the journey is quicker than by sea.... The passengers will tread the country of Shakespeare, as the intellectual ones of the party have it—the home of politics and machinery, as others say.

"Here they stay for a whole day: they are a busy race, but they can afford so much time for England and Scotland.

"On they go, through the tunnel under the Channel to France.

"One whole day is given to Germany and one to the North—the birthplace of Oerstedt and LinnÆus—to Norway, home of the ancient heroes and of the Normans. Iceland is taken on the return journey: the Geyser foams no longer, Hekla is extinguished; but an eternal stone table of the Saga still holds fast the island rock in the midst of the stormy seas."

A delightful description of the writer himself is given us by Lady Wilde: "Hans Andersen was described to me as a tall, white-haired old man, with the most gentle and lovable manners. The son of a poor tailor, with no inheritance from nature or fortune save his genius, he gained a distinguished position in society and was an immense favourite in Copenhagen. He read nothing but his own works, and always talked as if fresh from Fairyland. The children adored him, and he was never so happy as when he gathered a circle of them round him, while he enchained their attention with some magical story fresh woven from his brain, and made them laugh or weep as he chose, with the mirth or pathos of his strange fancies."

Southward the city leaps a narrow arm of sea and spreads on to the kitchen-garden island of Amager or Amak. During the early sixteenth century King Christian II., brother-in-law to the Emperor Charles V. famed for his noble work in organising schools in the cities and instituting a system of posts, but infamous for a stupendous crime that crushed the achievement of the great Margaret in the dust (p. 217), invited farmers and gardeners from the Low Countries to colonise Amak. Great was the benefit both to immigrants and Danes; the fertile island still retains much of old Flemish ways and imports the old costumes of Holland into the markets of the Danish capital.

Of Anglo-Danish relations during the Napoleonic wars, of Nelson's victory in 1801 and Wellesley's in 1807, silence is better than words. The conqueror at Trafalgar has immortal fame without the added laurels won in the Sound, the hero of Waterloo needs not to add to his victories the operations against this town. No Dane could be expected to look back on those miserable events but with indignation, few English but with very deep regret. Necessary, perhaps, those actions, but wretched all the same. We live in better days. The presence of the Church of St. Alban in the lovely gardens by the very citadel, a sanctuary to whose erection Danish Queen Alexandra contributed, is a witness for all time that the relations between Denmark and England to-day are of no ordinary kind. The tall Gothic spire is an ornament to the city and one of its landmarks from the harbour, but there might have been advantages in less purely English architecture and perhaps dedication to some Danish saint.[70]

The environs of the capital are made as delightful as those of Paris by the lovely beech-woods that cover so much of the land, and by the haunting beauty of the views across the Sound. A few miles north of the city is the famous Dyrehaven, or deer-park, a vast expanse of gently undulating woods or grass land with a large water-lily-covered pond, where deer roam about under a few old oaks and many beeches, often so close together that they have soared instead of being allowed to spread. Beech woods are very dear to the Danes, and in the Kunst Museum at Copenhagen there is a striking picture by Philipsen of which they form the subject.[71] On a low hill in the park is the Eremitagen, a hunting-lodge, in which the king can look out from his own house over soil that another rules.

Along the Sound front there peep out from the woods just one or two old thatched cottages with heavy logs along their ridges, but far more prominent are the modern villages, which are largely made up of restaurants and hotels. Very many too are the summer cottages of prosperous citizens; far toward the north they spread along the shore, the bungalow kind of thing that has long been frequent in America and is beginning to become naturalised in England too.

A tale is told of a Danish husband, not famous for the best of tempers, who proposed to his wife that they should celebrate their silver wedding, but rather weariedly she suggested that instead they might wait five years and then commemorate their Thirty Years' War. This must have been a most exceptional state of affairs, if one may judge from Danes one has the pleasure of knowing, or from what one may see of the race making holiday at these seaside resorts. No European people seems to get more out of life and into life than the always cheerful inhabitants of this small land. It is the mark of true genius that, shut out from so much, they have made still more of what remains.

Less than thirty miles north of Copenhagen, where the Sound is straitest, stands the town that is next best known to the world of all on Danish earth. The call of the future dominates Copenhagen, but the romance of the past still broods over Elsinore, or HelsingÖr, where Kronborg Castle looks across the narrow sea. How it seems to Danish minds can hardly be better told than in Hans Andersen's simple and yet holding tale.

"Kronborg Castle stands in Denmark, close to the Oere Sound, through which tall ships sail by in hundreds, English, Russian, and Prussian. They all greet the old fortress with their cannon, 'Boom!' And the castle answers, 'Boom!' That is the way the cannon say 'Good morning' and 'Good evening.' In the winter, when no ships sail by, and the Sound is covered with ice right up to the Swedish coast, it looks just like an inland street. Danish and Swedish flags are flying; Danes and Swedes cry to each other, 'good morning,' and 'good night,' but not with cannon—no, with a kindly clasp of the hand. One brings to the other biscuits and white bread, for foreign fare is always the sweetest. But the most beautiful sight of all is the grand old castle, in whose deep inaccessible vaults sits Holger Danske. He is clad in mail armour; his head rests on his strong arms; his long beard has grown into the marble table, where he sits asleep. He dreams, and in his dream he sees all that happens in his native land. Every Christmas Eve an angel comes to him, and tells him that his dreams are true, but that he may sleep on undisturbed for a while longer. Denmark is not yet in danger, but if the danger ever comes Holger Danske will spring to his feet, the table will shiver to pieces as he draws away his beard, and the hero will lay about him, so that every land shall ring with the story.

"An old grandfather sat one evening telling his little grandson all this tale of Holger Danske, and the child knew well that what his grandfather said was true. As the old man spoke, he finished off a large wooden figure of Holger Danske which was to ornament the prow of a ship, for the grandfather was a carver in wood, and had carved many a figure-head from which a good ship was to take her name. Now he had just carved Holger Danske, standing proudly with his long beard; in one hand he held his flashing sword; in the other the Danish shield.

"'It is the finest national arms in the world,' said the old man. 'Lions and hearts—emblems of strength and love!' He looked at the topmost lion and thought of King Knut, who chained England fast to Denmark's throne; he looked at the second lion and thought of Waldemar, who gave peace to Denmark, and subdued the Vandal's lands; he looked at the third lion and thought of Margaret, who united into one Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But as he looked at the hearts they burned and brightened into flames; each stirred in its place, and by its side stood a spirit.

"But the little child in bed saw clearly the old Kronborg towering above the Oere Sound; he saw the real Holger Danske, sitting alone in the deep vault, his beard grown fast to the marble table, dreaming of all that happened overhead. Holger Danske dreamed too of all that went on in the little room; he heard every word, and nodded in his dreams.

"'Yes,' he cried, 'keep me in your hearts and in your memory, ye Danish folk. In the hour of danger, I shall be at hand.'

"And the clear daylight fell over Kronborg; the wind bore along the sound of the hunting horns from the country round; the ships sailed by with their greeting 'Boom, boom!' And Kronborg answered 'Boom! Boom!' But Holger Danske woke not, let them thunder as loud as they might, for they only meant 'good morning!' 'good evening!'"

In this castle too in 1589 James VI. (and afterwards I.) was married to his Danish bride. That was only by proxy so far as the Scot was concerned, but the next year Queen Anne brought her husband to sojourn at the well-loved spot.

By the sea is a long sandy beach and dark woods cover the flat lands behind. The superb castle was rising, or re-rising, from the ground during Shakespeare's younger years (1577-85); he first went to London the year after it was done. A grand sample of Renaissance work, it stands four-square to all the winds and protects a court within; details are carved in solid stone. And at each angle rises a tower, all different in design and height. A light for the shipping burns in one.[72] The architect was G. F. Stahlmann.

The world fame of Elsinore is owed very largely to the immortal English bard who probably never was there. On the flat terrace between castle and sound Hamlet spoke with his father's ghost. The tale of Amlet or Hamlet seems to be derived from some old saga of a Jutish prince,[73] and the Ambales Saga gives an Icelandic form of the legend.

True, indeed, that Shakespeare's Hamlet, like his other plays, whose scene is laid abroad, lacks special local colour. But it is no weak link between Denmark and the world of English speech that the scene of one of the great masterpieces of Saxon literature, indeed of all the writings of the earth, is laid on Danish soil.