Part 27 (1/2)

Since her visit to England I wonder she does not add to her open avowal of disregard of all the laws and moralities which decent people hold in esteem, ”By permission of the Queen,” or ”To the Royal Family.”

But this is not telling you about Copenhagen. It was five o'clock when we landed, and before seven I had driven with the commissionnaire to each one of the four first-cla.s.s hotels in Copenhagen in search of _sunny_ rooms. None to be had! All four of the hotels were fully occupied, as I said, by Sara Bernhardt in some shape or other. So we made the best of the best we could do,--breakfasted, slept, lunched, and at two o'clock were ready to begin to see Copenhagen. At first we were disappointed, as in Christiania, by its modern look. It is a dreadful pity that old cities will burn down and be rebuilt, and that all cities must have such a monotony of repet.i.tions of blocks of houses. By the end of another century there won't be an old city left anywhere in the world. There are acres of blocks of houses in Copenhagen to-day that might have been built anywhere else, and fit in anywhere else just as well as here. When you look at them a little more closely, you see that there are bits of terra-cotta work in friezes and pilasters and brackets here and there, which would not have been done anywhere except in the home of Thorwaldsen. If he had done nothing else for art than to stamp a refined and graceful expression on all the minor architectural decorations of his native city, that would have been worth while. There is not an architectural monstrosity in the city,--not one; and many of the buildings have an excellent tone of quiet, conventional decoration which is pleasing to the eye. The brick-work particularly is well done; and simple variations of design are effectively used. You see often recurring over doorways and windows terra-cotta reproductions of some of Thorwaldsen's popular figures; and they are never marred by anything fantastic or bizarre in cornice or moulding above or around them.

Among the most noticeable of the modern blocks are some built for the dwellings of poor people. They are in short streets leading to the Reservoir, and having therefore a good sweep of air through them. They are but two stories and a half high, pale yellow brick, neatly finished; and each house has a tiny dooryard filled with flowers.

There are three tenements to a house, each having three rooms. The expression of these rows of gay little yellow houses with red roofs and flower-filled dooryards and windows, and each doorway bearing its two or three signs of trade or artisanry, was enough to do one's heart good. The rents are low, bringing the tenements within easy reach of poor people's purses. Yet there is evidently an obligation--a certain sort of social standard--involved in the neighborhood which will keep it always from squalor or untidiness. I doubt if anybody would dare to live in those rows and not have flowers in his front yard and windows.

For myself, I would far rather live in one of these little houses than in either of the four great palaces which make the Royal Square, Amalienborg, and look as much like great penitentiaries as like anything else,--high, bulky, unadorned gray piles, flat and straight walls, and tiresome, dingy windows, and the pavements up to their door-sills. They may be splendid the other side the walls,--probably are; but they are dreary objects to look at as you come home of an evening. The horse-cars are the most unique thing in the modern parts of Copenhagen. How two horses can draw them I don't see: but they do; and if two horses can draw two-story horse-cars, why don't we have them in America, and save such overcrowding? The horse-cars here not only have a double row of seats on top as they have in London, but they have a roof over those seats, which nearly doubles the apparent height. As they come towards you they look like a great square-cornered boat, with a long pilot-house on top. Of course they carry just double the number. Women never ride on the top; but men do not mind going upstairs outside a horse-car and sitting in mid-air above the heads of the crowd; and if two horses really are able to draw so many, it is a gain.

The one splendid sight in Copenhagen is its great dragon spire. This, one could stand and gaze at by the day. It is made of four dragons twisted together, heads down, tails up; heads pointing to the four corners of the earth; tails tapering and twisting, and twisting and tapering, till they taper out into an iron rod, which mounts still higher, with three gilded b.a.l.l.s, and three wrought gilded circles on it, and finally ends in a huge gilded open-work weather-c.o.c.k. This is on an old brick building now used as the Exchange. It was built early in 1600 by Christian IV., who seems to me to have done everything best worth doing that was ever done in Denmark. His monogram (C) is forever cropping out on all the splendid old things. They are enlarging this Exchange now; and the new red brick and glaring white marble make a very unpleasing contrast to the old part of the building, although every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is long, and not high, the wall divided into s.p.a.ces by carved pilasters between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a woman,--arms cut off at the shoulders, b.r.e.a.s.t.s and shoulders looking from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,--a lion's head, or a man's, or a bull's,--some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw from it by the week. Pa.s.sing this and crossing an arm of the sea,--which, by the way, you are perpetually doing in Copenhagen to go anywhere, the sea never having fully made up its mind to abandon the situation,--you come to another quaint old building in the suburbs, called Christianshaven. This is Vor Frelser's Church (Our Saviour's Church), built only fifty years later than the Exchange. It is a dark red brick church, with tiny flat dormer windows let in and painted green on a s.h.i.+ning tile roof; a square belfry; clock face painted red, black, and blue; above this, a spire, first six-sided and then round, 288 feet high, covered with copper, which is bright green in places, and wound round and round by a glittering gilded staircase, which goes to the very top and ends under a huge gilt ball, under which twelve people can stand. This also is a fine kind of spire to have at hand at sunset; it flames out like a ladder into the sky.

One more old church has a way up, which is worth telling, though you can't see it from the outside. This is another of that same Christian IV.'s buildings,--it was built for an observatory, and used for that for two hundred years, but then joined to a church. The tower is round, 115 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of two hollow cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a clatter the five horses' hoofs must have made, with stone above, below, and around them; and what a place it would have been to have knocked brains out if the horses had been frightened! In this inside cylinder all the University treasures were hidden when the English bombarded the city in 1807, and a very safe place it must have been.

Opposite this church is still another of Christian IV.'s good works,--a large brick building put up for the accommodation of poor students at the University. One hundred poor students still have free lodgings in this building, but part of it looks as if its roof would fall in before long.

Along the arms of the sea which stretch into or across the city--for some of them go way through, come out, and join the outer waters again--are rows of high warehouses for grain, some seven and eight stories high. These have two-storied dormer windows, and terraced roofs, and a great beak like a s.h.i.+p's prow projecting from the ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and hoisted to and from the s.h.i.+ps below. The s.h.i.+ps lie crowded in these narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make picturesque lanes of mast-tops through the city. On many of them are hung great strings of flounders drying, festooned on cords, from rope to rope, scores of them on a single sloop. They look better than they smell; you could not spare them out of the picture.

The last thing we saw this afternoon was the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, which has just been put up in the great garden of Rosenborg Castle. This garden is generally called Kongen's Have (”The King's Garden”). It was planned by the good Christian, but contains now very little of his original design. Two splendid avenues of horse-chestnut trees and a couple of old bronze lions are all that is left as he saw it. It is a great place of resort for the middle cla.s.ses with their children. A yearly tax of two kroners (about fifty cents) permits a family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. ”The children come here every day,” said the commissionnaire; ”and that is the reason they put him here, so they can see him.” He looked as if he also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never wrought in bronze. He sits, half wrapped in a cloak, his left hand holding a book carelessly on his knee, the right hand lifted as if in benediction of the children. The statue is raised a few feet on a plain pedestal, in a large oval bed of flowers: on one side the pedestal is carved the ”Child and the Stork;” on the other, the group of ducks, with the ”ugly” one in the middle,--pictures that every little child will understand and love to see; on the front is his name and a wreath of the bay he so well earned. Written above is,--

”PUT UP BY THE DANISH PEOPLE;”

and I thought as I stood there that he was more to be envied than Christian IV. with his splendors of art and architecture, or than the whole Danish dynasty, with their priceless treasures and their jewelled orders. And so ended our first day in Copenhagen.

The next morning, Sunday, I drove out to church in the island of Amager, of which that paradoxical compound of truth and falsehood, Murray, says: ”It offers absolutely nothing of interest.” I always find it very safe to go to places of which that is said. Amager is Copenhagen's vegetable garden. It is an island four miles square, and absolutely flat,--as flat as a piece of pasteboard; in fact, while I was driving on it, it seemed to me to bear the same relation to flatness that the Irishman's gun did to recoiling,--”If it recoiled at all, it recoiled forrards,”--so it was a very safe gun. If Amager is anything more or less than flat, it is bent inwards; for actually when I looked off to the water it seemed to be higher than the land, and the s.h.i.+ps looked as if they might any minute come sailing down among the cabbages. Early in the sixteenth century it was filled up by Dutch people; and there they are to this day, wearing the same clothes and raising cabbages just as they did three hundred years ago. To reach Amager from Copenhagen, you cross several arms of the sea and go through one or two suburbs called by different names; but you would never know that you were not driving in Copenhagen all the time until you come out into the greenery of Amager itself. It was good luck to go of a Sunday. All the Dutch dames were out and about in their best, driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women were ”sights to behold.” The poorer ones wore s.h.i.+rred sunbonnets on their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind.

They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight sleeves; a full bright blue ap.r.o.n, reaching half-way round the waist and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt, completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human creature; and it is as ugly and unpicturesque a thing as malignity itself could devise. The better cla.s.s of women wore a plain black bonnet, made in the same poke shape as the sunbonnets, but without any cape at all on the back, only a little full crown tucked in, and the fronts coming round very narrow in the back of the neck, and tied there with narrow black ribbons. Don't fancy these were the only strings that held the roof in its place,--not at all. Two very broad strings, of bright blue, or red, or purple, as it might be, came from somewhere high up inside the front, and tied under the chin in a huge bow, so that their faces looked as if they had first been tied up in broad ribbon for the toothache, and then the huge bonnet put on outside of all. Strangely enough, the effect on the faces was not ugly. Old faces were sheltered and softened, double chins and scraggy necks were hid, and younger faces peered out prettily from under the scoop and among the folds of ribbon; and the absolute plainness of the bonnet itself, having no tr.i.m.m.i.n.g save a straight band across the middle, gave the charm of simplicity to the outline, and vindicated the worth of that most emphatically when set side by side in the church pews with the modern bonnets,--all bunches and bows, and angles and tilts of feathers and flowers and rubbish generally.

The houses were all comfortable, and some of them very pretty. Low, long, chiefly of a light yellow straw, latticed off by dark lines of wood-work, some of them entirely matted with ivy, like cottages in the English lake district, all of them with either red-tiled or thatched roofs, and the greater part surrounded by hedges. The thatched roofs were delightful. The thatch is held on and fastened down at the ridge-pole by long bits of crooked wood, one on each side, the two crossing and lapping at the ridge-pole and held together there by pins. The effect of a long, low roof set thick with these cross-pieces at the top is almost as if dozens of slender fishes were set there with forked tails up in the air; and when half a dozen sparrows are flitting and alighting on these projecting points of board, the effect is of a still odder tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. Some of the red-tiled roofs have a set pattern in white painted along the ridge-pole, corners, and eaves.

These are very gay; and some of the thatched roofs are grown thick with a dark olive-green moss, which in a cross sunlight is as fine a color as was ever wrought into an old tapestry, and looks more like ancient velvet.

The church in Amager is new, brick, and ugly of exterior. But the inside is good; the wood-work, choir, pulpit, sounding-board, railings, pews, all carved in a simple conventional pattern, and painted dark-olive brown, relieved by claret and green,--in a combination borrowed no doubt from some old wood-work centuries back.

In the centre a candelabra, hanging by a red cord, marked off by six gilded b.a.l.l.s at intervals; the candelabra itself being simply a great gilded ball, with the simplest possible candle-holders projecting from it. Two high candle-holders inside the railing had each three bra.s.s candlesticks in the shape of a bird, with his long tail curled under his feet to stand on,--a fantastic design, but singularly graceful, considering its absurdity. The minister wore a long black gown and high, full ruff, exactly like those we see in the pictures of the divines of the Reformation times. He had a fine and serious face, of oval contour; therefore the ruff suited him. On short necks and below round faces it is simply grotesque, and no more dignified than a turkey-c.o.c.k's ruffled feathers. He preached with great fervor and warmth of manner; but as I could not understand a word he said, I should have found the sermon long if I had not been very busy in studying the bonnets and faces, and choir of little girls in the gallery. More than half the congregation were in the ordinary modern dress, and would have pa.s.sed unnoticed anywhere. All the men looked like well-to-do New England farmers, coloring and all; for the blue-eyed, fair-haired type prevails. But the women who had had the sense and sensibility to stick to their own national clothes were as pretty as pictures, as their faces showed above the dark olive-brown pews, framed in their front porches of bonnets,--for that is really what they are like, the faces are so far back in them. Some were lined with bright lavender satin, full-puffed; some with purple; some with blue. The strings never matched the lining, but were of a violent contrast,--light blue in the purple, gay plaid in the lavender, and so on. The ap.r.o.ns were all of the same shade of vivid blue,--as blue as the sky, and darker. They were all s.h.i.+rred down about two inches below the waist; some of them trimmed down the sides at the back with lace or velvet, but none of them on the bottom. One old woman who sat in front of me wore a conical and pointed cap of black velvet and plush, held on her head by broad gray silk strings, tied with a big bow under her chin, covering her ears and cheeks. The cap was shaped like a funnel carried out to a point, which projected far behind her, stiff and rigid; yet it was not an ungraceful thing on the head. These, I am told, are rarely seen now.

When the sermon was done, the minister disappeared for a moment, and came back in gorgeous claret velvet and white robes, with a great gilt cross on his back. The candles on the altar were lighted, and the sacrament was administered to a dozen or more kneeling outside the railing. This part of the ceremony seemed to me not very Lutheran; but I suppose that is precisely the thing it was,--Luther-an,--one of the relics he kept when he threw overboard the rest of the superst.i.tions.

Before this ceremony the s.e.xton came and unlocked the pew we occupied, and I discovered for the first time that I and the commissionnaire had been all that time locked in. After church the s.e.xton told us that there would be a baptismal service there in an hour,--eleven babies to be baptized. That was something not to be lost; so I drove away for half an hour, went to a farm-house and begged milk, and then, after I had got my inch, asked for my habitual ell,--that is, to see the house. The woman was, like all housekeepers, full of apologies, but showed me her five rooms with good-will,--five in a row, all opening together, the kitchen in the middle, and the front door in the back yard by the hen-coop and water-barrel! The kitchen was like the Norwegian farm-house kitchens,--a bare shed-like place, with a table, and wall-shelves, and a great stone platform with a funnel roof overhead; sunken hollows to make the fire in; no oven, no lids, no arrangement for doing anything except boiling or frying. A huge kettle of boiling porridge was standing over a few blazing sticks. _Havremels grod_--which is Norwegian, and Danish also, for oatmeal pudding--is half their living. All the bread they have they buy at the baker's.

The other rooms were clean. Every one had in it a two-storied bed curtained with calico, neat corner cupboards, and bureaus. There were prints on the wall, and a splendid bra.s.s coffee-pot and urn under pink mosquito netting. But the woman herself had no stockings on her feet, and her wooden shoes stood just outside the door.

When we reached the church again, the babies were all there. A wail as of bleating lambs reached us at the very door. A strange custom in Denmark explained this bleating: the poor babies were in the hands of G.o.dmothers, and not their own mothers. The mothers do not go with their babies to the christening; the fathers, G.o.dfathers, and G.o.dmothers go,--two G.o.dmothers and one G.o.dfather to each baby. The women and the babies sat together, and rocked and trotted and shook and dandled and screamed, in a perfect Babel of motion and sound.

Seven out of those eleven babies were crying at the top of their lungs. The twenty-two G.o.dmothers looked as if they would go crazy.

Never, no, never, did I see or hear such a scene! The twenty-two fathers and G.o.dfathers sat together on the other side of the aisle, stolid and unconcerned. I tried to read in their faces which men owned the babies, but I could not. They all looked alike indifferent to the racket. Presently the s.e.xton marshalled the women with their babies in a row outside the outer railing. He had in his hand a paper with the list of the poor little things' names on it, which he took round, and called the roll, apparently so as to make sure all was right. Then the minister came in, and went the round, saying something over each baby and making the sign of the cross on its head and breast. I thought he was through when he had once been round doing this; but no,--he had to begin back again at the first baby and sprinkle them. Oh, how the poor little things did scream! I think all eleven were crying by this time, and I couldn't stand it; so at the third baby I signed to my commissionnaire that we would go, and we slipped out as quietly as we could. ”Will there be much more of the service?” I asked him. ”Oh, yes,” he said. ”He will preach now to the fathers and to the G.o.dfathers and G.o.dmothers.” I doubt if the G.o.dmothers knew one word he said. The babies all wore little round woollen hoods, most of them bright blue, with three white b.u.t.tons in a row on the back. Their dresses were white, but short; and each baby had a long white ap.r.o.n on to make a show with in front. This was as long as a handsome infant's robe would be made anywhere; but it was undisguisedly an ap.r.o.n, open all the way behind, and in the case of these poor little screaming creatures flying in all directions at every kick and writhing struggle. I was glad enough to escape the church; but twenty-two women must have come out gladder still a little later. On the way home I pa.s.sed a windmill which I could have stayed a day to paint if I had been an artist. It was six-sided; the sails were on red beams; a red balcony all round it, with red beams sloping down as supports, resting on the lower story; the first story was on piles, and the s.p.a.ces between filled up solid with sticks of wood,--the place where they kept their winter fuel. Next to this came a narrow belt painted light yellow; then a black belt, with windows in it rimmed with white; then the red balcony; then a drab or gray s.p.a.ce,--this made of plain boards; then the rest to the top s.h.i.+ngled like a roof; in this part one window, with red rims in each side. A long, low warehouse of light yellow stuccoed walls, lined off with dark brown, joined the mill by a covered way; and the mill-owner's house was close on the other side, also with light yellow stuccoed walls and a red-tiled roof, and hedges and vines and an orchard in front. Paint this, somebody; do!

This is the tale of the first two days in Copenhagen. In my next I will tell you about the museums if I come out of them alive; it sounds as if n.o.body could. One ought to be here at least two weeks to really study the superb collections of one sort and another.

I will close this first section of my notions of Denmark with a brief tribute to the Danish flea. I considered myself proof against fleas. I had wintered them in Rome, had lived familiarly with them in Norway, and my contempt for them was in direct proportion to my familiarity. I defied them by day, and ignored them by night. But the Danish flea is as David to Saul! He is a cross between a bedbug and a wasp. He is the original of the famous idea of the Dragon, symbolized in all the wors.h.i.+ps of the world. I bow before him in terror, and trust most devoutly he never leaves the sh.o.r.es of Denmark.

Good-by. Bless you all!

II.

Dear People,--I promised to tell you about the museums in Copenhagen.

It was a very rash promise: and there was a rash promise which I made to myself back of that,--that is, to _see_ the Copenhagen museums. I had looked forward to them as the chief interest of our visit; they are said to be among the finest in the world, in some respects unequalled. One would suppose that the Dane's first desire and impulse would be to make it easy for strangers to see these unrivalled collections, the pride of his capital; on the contrary, he has done, it would seem, all that lay in his power to make it quite out of the power of travellers to do anything like justice to them. To really see the three great museums of Copenhagen--the Ethnographic, the Museum of Northern Antiquities, and the Rosenborg Castle collection--one would need to stay in Copenhagen at least two weeks, and even then he would have had but fourteen hours for each museum.