STOCKHOLM
Here the dark woods, with many a patriarch tree,
In gloomy melancholy gaze on thee;
Here rocks on rocks up-piled upon the strand,
Seem the vast structure of some giant's hand;
While high aloft the lucid meteors glow,
And veins of iron in the mountains grow.
TEGNER'S _Svea_, translated by OSCAR BAKER.
One must be feeling in a particularly happy frame of mind not to be
conscious of a certain depression when approaching London from almost
any side. Nearly all large cities have to a greater or less extent
transformed and half spoilt their surroundings.
Stockholm has done nothing of the sort and there lies its unique
charm. A vast city of more than a quarter of a million souls rises
straight from the primeval forest and clear blue water. The Swedish
capital reposes on islands and spreads to the mainland north and south,
surrounded by the woods and the lakes. Westward to the Cattegat is a
shipway, hollowed partly by the spade of man and partly by the tooth
of time; northward stretches a natural waterway to the ancient capital
of Lofty Halls. And the winding fjord that leads up from the open sea,
through which the great lake drains, is of wonderful beauty. Low rocky
shores, island and mainland, spruce woods close to the water, recall
the loveliest scenery of the New England lakes, but there is the added
charm of heather wherever the trees leave room.
Small steamers lie in little coves so near the rockbound shore that it
almost seems their rigging is likely to get tangled among boughs of
oak, and their crews can pick wild strawberries the moment they step
on land. For a mile or two the channel from the Baltic to Stockholm is
most intricate and extremely narrow, then great lake-like expanses are
traversed before the vessel enters another narrow gate. Little painted
houses dot the woods, but they are few. The general effect of the
constantly shifting shores is of almost fairy-like beauty, especially
with the peculiarly Scandinavian interlocking of the water and the land.
At length across a stretch of island-dotted lake the spires and roofs
of the capital seem to rise right out of the woods. Eventually one
lands in the very middle of the town. The whole place is intensely
modern, the metropolis of a most progressive folk. Large numbers of
Stockholmers dwell in flats despite their love of flowers. One of the
chief landmarks of the city is the tall network tower of iron bars that
surmounts the telephone centre. This repose-disturbing, but extremely
useful, invention has fascinated the Swedes. The charges are extremely
low, and Stockholm actually boasts of having more telephone numbers
than New York.
The first impression is that of a distinctly striking town; the vast
Royal Palace and the huge Northern Museum produce a very individual
effect, though hardly perhaps one that can be called monumental. All
the conspicuous buildings are in some variety of the Classic style,
several erected during the last few years. The streets are broad, but
geography forbids any great regularity, excepting to the north and
south. All roads lead to the water, except a few that lead to the
woods; the chief ones pass through wide squares and parks. Immensely
improved is the city since 1847, when an English traveller wrote: "The
natural advantages of approach are not adequately appreciated, or
rather done justice to by the Swedes. Their whole style of architecture
is mean to a degree; and their houses on each side of the Mälar quite
unworthy that superb piece of water. With a few of the old palaces of
Venice on each bank, and trees at intervals, and a gondola or two
afloat, the northern capital, from its more romantic environs, would
far exceed the other."[112]
The site indeed is almost unexcelled. So far as natural beauty goes,
the owners of these nine bridge-linked islands[113] need not envy the
dwellers on the Seven Hills. From the narrows that the islands guard
broad waters spread far on almost every side; Lake Mälar ripples
gently for nearly eighty miles toward the west, splashing towns and
villages and rocks and woods, and pours its broad waters swiftly past
the islands toward the sea. Ocean steamers are moored by the wide busy
quays of the prosperous city: small steamboats supplement the trolley
trams to provide communications for the town. Toward the interior four
lines of railway thread their way among the farms and the woods. For
the vast silent forests of the North touch the immediate outskirts of
the town; and trees are planted wherever the streets leave a small
space unused.
By far the most conspicuous building, weirdly attractive by its
complete incongruity with its surroundings, is the immense Royal
Palace, a magnific pile in the heaviest French Classic style, whose
rectangular courtyard is enclosed by a block measuring no less than
408 by 381 feet, and rising in three storeys to a height of nearly
a hundred feet. These ample dimensions are increased by wings of
about half the elevation projecting eastward toward the water front,
and by another on the west that greatly lengthens the north façade.
This structure, whose simplicity and grandeur made an impression on
Fergusson, occupies quite a considerable portion of the original island
of Staden.
The architect was a Frenchman, Nicodemus de Tessin, and so much
impressed with the designs was Louis XIV. that he specially
congratulated his Swedish brother on the magnificent edifice he was
proposing to erect. This king had planned to incorporate part of an
older building on the site, but a fire which occurred while he was
himself lying-in-state in the unfinished structure nearly cremated
the body of the monarch and quite gave the architect complete liberty
of design. The present building was begun by the renowned Charles
XII. on his accession in 1697, and, much delayed by war and turmoil,
its erection dragged on till 1760. For a wonder the later architects
employed, including De Tessin's son, resisted the temptation to modify
the plans.[114] Simplicity is by far the chief merit of the palace,
only in the centre of each side are pilasters introduced; the top is
finished with the plainest cornice and balustrade and the sky line is
as horizontal as that of the sea.
The building made a great impression in Europe when it was erected, and
several travellers speak of it in terms of rather exaggerated praise.
Thus Laing,[115] himself a Scot, after a very appreciative description,
exclaims, "What are our public buildings about Edinburgh, our churches,
hospitals, squares, street-fronts, with all their pillars, porticos,
pilasters, cornices and carved work, compared to the composition and
effect of this chaste and grand building?--minced pies, pastry-cook
work in freestone." The only really serious defect is that the design
is not adapted to the site and the material is not adapted to the
design. Such a structure requires a vast space all round and looks
cramped on a small island; it needs material of the most substantial,
set off by avenues of trees and formal gardens on a lavish scale, but
amid the rocks of Stockholm it is plastered and in the City of Flowers
its immediate environs are comparatively destitute of vegetation.[116]
In the same general style as the palace and close to it are other
public buildings, but unfortunately the topography of the islands
forbids their forming parts of a single great design. The beautiful
Riddarhus, or Hall of Knights, the headquarters of the Swedish nobles
in the capital, is a seventeenth century structure of brick and stone,
designed by Simon de la Vallée, adorned with Corinthian pilasters
and floral bands between the storeys. The Riksdaghuset, or Houses
of Parliament, recently erected, form a fine block of red granite
buildings that rather crush the little island of the Holy Ghost, on
which they stand. The two upper storeys have Corinthian columns or
pilasters and the sky-line is broken by sculpture rising over the
balustrade. Both chambers are octagonal, and their members, for whom
women vote, reach them by a most striking stairway, excellently adorned
with marble, mottled, white and green. (See chapter-heading.)
Close to the palace, looking over the harbour, is a very impressive
statue of Gustavus III.; it was the work of J. T. Sergel, second only
to Thorwaldsen among the sculptors of the North. Brilliantly this
charmer king, this monarch of the double face,[117] taught Sweden to
sin, fatuously he sought to bring to the icy pine-woods of the North
the tinsel trinkets of Versailles. The country did not prosper, the
royal house was undermined, the king was murdered, and soon a brave
French soldier came to restore vigour and virtue to the long-suffering
land.
Still the reign that gave to Sweden Karl Mikael Bellman, the poet,
and other illustrious men was by no means altogether barren of good
results. The old French culture introduced is very far from being lost,
and the Swedish Academy, which Gustavus founded in 1786, is one of a
number of learned societies that have their homes in this city and have
done much to make the Swedish capital pre-eminent for its devotion
for letters. Another is the Academy of Sciences, in whose institution
the great Linnæus had no small share. Many of their members have a
reputation Europe-wide. Lost now is the position to which Sweden once
attained, chief military power in the North, but higher her place
in the world. The sword-won dominion of Gustavus Adolphus could not
endure for very long--geography forbade--but a nobler Swedish empire
was founded, or at any rate consolidated, by the genius of Linnæus,
and that shows no sign of decay. There will dawn a day when mere brute
force will no longer be the test of a nation's weal, but in Europe it
is hardly yet.
[Illustration: STOCKHOLM] [_Face page 206_
Across a monumental bridge, adorned with statues and lamps, on
the island of Djurgarden, stands a recently finished structure of
Renaissance character which looks like a great cruciform church, but
is in fact the Northern, or the Folk, Museum. The great hall contains
figures in armour, old coaches and such like to illustrate days that
are past, but more interesting are the little chambers that show us in
detail the life of Sweden in bygone years. Within an old cottage we see
a duck-coop under the sofa and shut-up cupboards against the walls.
Carved chests and spinning wheels and lace and little looms and fishing
implements and traps for bears, saddles and flutes and harps and drums
give the attentive student a very fair idea of how the peasants used to
pass their days. No servile breed these men who crushed the armies of
the Empire in the war of Thirty Years and first subdued the woods by
the Delaware.
A story told by W. W. Thomas[118] is fairly characteristic of the stern
and independent nature of the farmers who have made Sweden.
"A Swedish peasant, clad in homespun and driving a rough farm wagon,
pulled up at a post station in the west of Sweden. There were but two
horses left in the stable, and these he immediately ordered to be
harnessed into his wagon. Just as they were being hitched up, there
rattled into the courtyard in great style the grand equipage of the
governor of the province, with coachman and footman in livery. Learning
the state of affairs and wishing to avoid a long and weary delay, the
coachman ordered these two horses to be taken from the peasant's cart
and harnessed into the governor's carriage. But the peasant stoutly
refused to allow this to be done.
"'What,' said the governor, 'do you refuse to permit those horses to be
harnessed into my carriage?'
"'Yes, I do,' said the peasant.
"'And do you know who I am?' said the governor, somewhat in a rage. 'I
am the governor of this province, a knight of the Royal Order of the
Northern Star, and one of the chamberlains of His Majesty the King.'
"'Oh, ho!' said the peasant. 'And do you, sir, know who I am?'
"He said this in such a bold and defiant manner that the governor
was somewhat taken aback. He began to think that the fellow might be
some great personage after all--some prince, perhaps, travelling in
disguise.
"'No,'he said, in an irresolute voice, 'I do not know who you are. Who
are you?'
"'Well,' replied the peasant, walking up to his face and looking him
firmly in the eye, 'I'll tell you who I am--I am the man that ordered
those horses.'
"After this there was nothing more to be said. The peasant quietly
drove away on his journey, and the governor waited until such time as
he could legally procure fresh means of locomotion."
Along the "clearstorey" of the church-like museum are a series of
little chambers fitted and furnished to illustrate the life of the
middle classes from 1520 to the end of the nineteenth century. These
are far less distinctively Swedish than the objects taken from
cottages.[119]
So modern is Stockholm, bustling capital of a great industrial nation,
so entirely Classic its principal buildings, that it seems almost
incongruous that it should be a town of great historic interest, whose
story goes back to saga days. The site is heard of now and then in the
very earliest annals of the North.
Once a king of Upsala is fabled here to have celebrated his marriage
and gotten his bane. Round his neck he wore a great gold chain that
his sires had worn of yore. He desired to wed the lovely Skialf, whose
father, a monarch further east, he had just conquered and slain in war.
She only bargained that a funeral feast for her parent might decorously
precede the marriage feast for herself. The king of Upsala and his
warriors poured down the grave-ale right heartily so that they could
not stand. The bride and her friends had only feigned to drink so that
they were in better condition for action when the feast was done. They
contrived to slip one end of a rope through the great gold chain and
the other end over the bough of a large oak. Thus the monarch of Upsala
was hung and the bride unwed sailed home.[120]
Within the present limits of Stockholm too, Olaf the Holy as a
precocious viking youth showed some of that astuteness that was with
him all through life. He had been harrying in the neighbourhood of
Sigtuna, much to the annoyance of the Swedes, and "when autumn set in
Olaf Haraldson got to know that Olaf the Swede-king drew together a
great host, and also that he had done chains athwart Stocksound, and
set guard thereover. But the Swede-king was of mind that King Olaf
would there bide the frosts, and he held Olaf's host of little worth,
for he had but a small company. So King Olaf went out to Stocksound,
and might not get through there, for a castle was on the west side of
the sound and a host of men on the south. But when they heard that the
Swede-king was gone aboard ship, and had a great host and a multitude
of ships, King Olaf let dig a dyke through Agni's-thwaite into the sea.
At this time great rains prevailed.
"Now from all Sweden every running water falls into the Low, and out
to sea there is one oyce from the Low, so narrow that many rivers be
wider. But when great rains or snow-thaws prevail, the waters fall with
such a rush that through Stocksound the water runs in a force, and the
Low goes so much upon the lands that wide-about be floods. Now when the
dyke got to the sea, then leapt out the water and the stream. Then King
Olaf let take inboard all the rudders of his ships, and hoist all sails
topmast high. And there was a high wind at will blowing. They steered
with the oars, and the ships went apace out over the shoal, and came
all whole into the sea.
"Then the Swedes went to see Olaf the Swede-king, and told him that
by then Olaf the Thick had got him away out into the sea. So the
Swede-king rated soundly those who should have watched that Olaf gat
not away."
The fact that the sagas give the place (or neighbourhood) the only
distinctive part of the present name makes somewhat superfluous the
legends that have grown up to account for the designation Stockholm.
One of these declares that in the twelfth century by robber bands
the ancient capital of Sigtuna had been destroyed. So placing their
remaining valuables in a dug-out stock, the surviving citizens
committed it to the waters of the lake and followed in their boats the
drifting log. At the island where at last their stock came to shore the
future capital rose.
But the true founder of Stockholm was stout Birger Jarl, of royal race,
and father of kings, who ruled the land (as regent for his son) from
1251 till his death in 1266.[121] He desired to lock the Mälar with a
fortress town, and the advantages of doing this were so great that we
may safely reject the idle tale that he too cast a log into the lake
and vowed to build the town wherever the waters cast it up. Many a
legend has grown to account for a city's name, but men of the stamp
of Birger Jarl know what they want too well to trust to the decision
of the winds. The new town rapidly grew in importance and from its
splendid position gradually became the capital of the country.
Gone are the winding lanes of mediæval days, gone are all traces of the
city's youth except a couple of churches. A son of Birger Jarl, Magnus
Ladulaas, who reigned from 1279 till 1290, founded a Franciscan convent
and placed it on Riddarsholm, the island of the Knights. His surname,
which signifies the locker of barns, was gained by a most just law he
made compelling nobles like common folk to pay for any corn or straw
that they might require on travels. "No Roman Emperor," gratefully
exclaims the old _Swedish Chronicle_, "could wish himself a nobler name
that Ladulaas, and very few could have laid claim to it, for the name
of Ladu-brott (barn-breaker) would suit most rulers much better."[122]
It is sad to know that this evil custom, the right to demand
hospitality from unwilling hosts, was founded--largely at any rate--by
an Englishman and a saint (p. 188). Other natives of the British Isles
than he have bitterly complained of Continental inns. Henry had a
practical remedy; he instituted the custom, that was sure to be abused,
of making every peasant's house a free hostelry for travellers of
note.[123]
The ancient church of the Franciscans (now known as the
Riddarsholms-Kyrka) is a brick structure of the early fourteenth
century, raised a few years after the convent was founded; it is not
greatly impressive. Nave of five bays, quire of three, triple apse
to the east, clumsy-looking tower to the west. Round pillars hold up
a heavy vault, whitewash daubed, and, as is so commonly the case in
Scandinavia, unrelieved by any clearstorey. On to the tower has been
hoisted a cast iron spire that rises 290 feet into the clear air and
looks as awkward and unhappy as the similar feature over the cathedral
at Rouen. The great interest of the church is that it has become the
valhalla of warrior, sage and king; the floor is laid in gravestones,
the walls blaze with the painted arms of the Knights of the Seraphim
Order, the air is thick with the banners that Swedes have won in war.
In the quire is the effigy of the founder, but as space in the church
was small classic chapels have been added both north and south to be
the last resting-places of other of Sweden's honoured dead. On the
sun-warmed side of the quire a chapel bears date 1633, and its rather
indifferent architecture is forgotten from the fact that it contains,
within a later sarcophagus of green marble, the ashes of Gustavus
Adolphus, one of the noblest of mankind, the hero king who perished
victorious on the field of Lützen (1632).
Opposite on the north is the Carolinian chapel, a domed Classic
structure with detached columns outside where rest the renowned twelfth
Charles and other princes of the Vasa House. Another chapel bears the
name of Bernadotte, founder of the ruling line.
It was before the altar of this church during the fourteenth century
that the arrogant noble, Bo Jonsson, called Grip, because his arms were
a griffin's head, who "ruled the land with a glance of his eye,"[124]
uncontrolled by the helpless king, hewed in pieces his foe Karl
Nilsson, and was never called to account on this side of the veil.
Here, too, among the dead in later days, far into the night mused the
third Gustavus, hoping to receive some omen from his fathers' graves.
It is rather misleading to call this comparatively humble shrine the
Westminster Abbey of the land that holds the Cathedral of Upsala and so
many other glorious fanes. Instead of one of the grandest minsters on
the earth, echoing several times a day with Christian praise, it is a
somewhat commonplace church whose silence is broken only by the chatter
of tourists, save on the anniversary of some hero's death or when
another monarch has entered upon his last sleep. Nevertheless there is
a deep and haunting interest in this last earthly resting-place of so
many who have helped to shape the world.
Close to this church is a fine statue by Fogelberg to Birger Jarl.
The Storkyrka, or great church of St. Nicholas, has been Classicised
without. It is better so, for with the great palace forcing Classic
standards on the city, Gothic must look out of place, however much
better its general lines would have suited the untamed site and the
ancient traditions of Stockholm. Pastor here 1543-52 was the famous
Olavus Petri[125] who, with his brother, Laurentius, Archbishop
of Upsala, did much to shape the Swedish Reformation. Messenius'
_Rhyme-Chronicle_ tells us:
On Master Olof's wedding day
Our Lutherdom had made such way
That mass in Swedish first was sung.
So all men followed their own tongue.
For so had Master Olof seen
How things at Wittenberg had been;
There first at Carlstadt's marriage feast
Was German mass sung by a priest.
Chancellor of the kingdom he had been in earlier days (1532), but so
much of an idealist was Olof that he desired public penance to be
exacted from all who complained of the weather! This did not suit
the sternly practical king, Gustaf Vasa, who dismissed him with the
observation that he was as fit to be chancellor as an ass to play the
lute, or a kicking cow to spin silk.
In the Storkyrka[126] had been crowned in 1520 the last sovereign of
united Scandinavia, Christian II., a Dane of the Oldenburg line. Not
by any means a bad king on the whole (p. 143), he had nevertheless
by some inscrutable mental process got it into his head that the
destruction of the leading men of Sweden would benefit that country
and help to consolidate his own power. So during the very festivities
that followed the coronation, no other specific charge being handy,
he availed himself of the one complaint that can never fail, and on a
trumped-up charge connected with religion, he caused many of the nobles
and most honoured men of Sweden to be executed in the market-place of
the capital. But the effect of the fatal Blood Bath of Stockholm, on
November 8, 1520, was far other than the monarch planned. A deliverer
for the wronged nation rose up in the son of one of those who perished.
An outlaw fugitive, Gustaf Vasa had several very narrow escapes from
the machinations of Danish spies, but the peasants of Dalekarlia were
sufficiently sympathetic to shield him, though at the risk of their
lives. They had no very particular grievances and merely desired
to live in peace; to his first patriotic harangue they listened in
irritating silence. So, sick at heart and weary of body, the hero was
plodding through the snow to seek a secure retreat for himself among
the remote mountains of Norway. He heard himself hotly followed, but,
looking round, was joyed to see not pursuing Danes, but penitent
dalesmen. They had heard of the Blood Bath and of many other acts of
cruelty and had come to agree with Gustaf. They now asked no more than
to be led against the forces of the tyrant king. "For our country we
will fight like men," they cried. "Come back, Gustaf, and be our chief."
And with them he returned to found one of the most brilliant lines of
sovereigns that Europe ever knew. The Danes could make little stand
before the enthusiastic fury of the rising Swedes; one of their own
leaders declared that the devil himself could not subdue a people who
lived by drinking water and eating bread baked from the bark of trees,
and in 1523 Gustaf entered Stockholm as king, and knelt in thanksgiving
before the same altar that had witnessed the coronation of the tyrant
only three years before. His spirit broods over the city to-day, before
the Hall of Knights and in the Northern Museum his colossal statue
stands.
But it was to a capital in ruin that he came, and only three hundred
families were camping amidst its broken walls. So serious did
conditions seem to the new king that he ordered every other town in
Sweden to pay Stockholm a tax of ten stout burghers, compensation
to be sought from neighbouring farms. The natural forces of these
town-extending times have, in Sweden as elsewhere, made such
legislation more than superfluous to-day. Though on the very edge
of the forest modern Stockholm is in some districts over-crowded,
underhoused.
Till far into the nineteenth century the Scandinavian countries had
the bad distinction of being the most drunken in Europe: Linnæus as a
scientist called attention to the national danger of drink. That Swedes
and Norwegians are now the most abstemious of Europeans is a striking
comment on the early Victorian maxim: "You can't make men sober by Act
of Parliament."[127]
So heavenly are the environs of the city that they could not easily
be spoiled; the Swedes have made the very most of the lavish gifts of
Nature to add to the delights of their capital. They are not infected
with a mania for cutting trees and building mile-long lines of slate
and brick, nor apparently is every landowner consumed with a burning
zeal to pile as many dwellings as he possibly can onto each square inch
of ground. Parks are numerous and beautiful, largely because the woods
are left alone.
Of the nine islands the largest except one and by far the most
interesting is Djurgarden, so called because there was a deer-park in
days gone by. A great part of its area is still left alone, forming
a park almost unrivalled in the world. Wide stretches of primeval
forest, miles of rockbound coast lapped by the rippling waters of the
lake. At Skansen, midst the woods on elevated ground, is a splendid
museum in the open air. Among the trees one keeps discovering all
sorts of interesting things. Log houses with old furniture in which
Swedes dressed as their fathers dressed play on musical instruments
used of old. Other old cottages, moved from far, are boulder-built,
turf-roofed, and hard mud-floored. Animals in cages, which are partly
cut in rock, old Runic stones, old gravestones, old milestones are
there too.
And in parts the aborigines are housed, just as if in their native
wilds. A wonderful people are these Lapps. For more than a thousand
years they have lived in close proximity to one of the most cultured
of all races, with which they have had constant intercourse and trade;
yet here they are, exactly as Tacitus describes the Fenni, untaught
barbarians and a standing contradiction to Rousseau's theories about
the noble savage. Modern anthropology smiles at Dr. Johnson's crude
remark, "One set of savages is like another." Nevertheless the huts of
the Lapps seem strangely to reproduce the general atmosphere of those
of the South African Kafirs.[128] The way in which the Lapps have so
long resisted the seductions of civilisation is all the more remarkable
in contrast with their near cousins the Finns.
On the highest land, called Bredablick, rises a tall tower from which
may be enjoyed a view that is one of the most individual upon earth.
Miles and miles of rolling woodland, chiefly pine and birch, spread in
almost endless folds and display almost every shade of green. Arms of
water stretch away in all directions till in many cases they become
so narrow that they are lost among the trees; the broad end of Mälar,
myriad island lake, suggests itself on the western horizon, and, the
very last thing one would naturally expect to see amid the silent
woods, rises the great modern city with its towers and spires and domes
and factory chimneys--the Venice of the North. Round the far horizon
stand peaceful, peakless hills.[129]
A few miles north of Stockholm, far enough away to be beyond the
furthest suburb of the town, a beautiful park slopes down to where the
now narrowing and now widening Edsvik runs into the land. The property
was once owned by Prince Ulrik, son of Charles XI., and from him has
its name, Ulriksdal. Some of the most characteristic features of the
scenery of two continents seem to be epitomised in the district all
around. By the eternal forest of northern trees, and the constant
clearings in glacial boulder-earth for farms, with wooden house
and barn, by electric trolley cars and muddy roads, New England is
recalled. Wide heather-covered wastes and gnarled old firs, thatched
buildings here and there, do much to suggest the delightful landscapes
of old Scotland.
Presumably it is the best of the land that has been cleared for crops,
though it is not always very easy to declare why one acre is bearing
artichokes[130] and the next one is left to the woods.
Approached through grand avenues of maple and lime and oak, surrounding
three sides of a squared pierced by three tiers of windows, and
surmounted by a black clock turret, smaller than many English country
houses, is the Ulriksdal summer palace of the Swedish kings. It was
erected in the seventeenth century by the renowned Field-Marshal Jacob
de la Gardie, he who became the husband of Ebba Brahe, dearly loved by
Gustavus Adolphus, to whom she was betrothed, though never wed. For the
great king, whom half Europe in arms could not withstand, was unable to
resist the pressure of his mother, intriguing queen, who would not have
royal blood allied with common human clay. And by his German princess
wife, whom he could never love, the king had no other child than the
erratic Christina, brilliant and irresponsible as Mary Queen of Scots.
At this palace in 1871 the famous American explorer of Africa, Paul
Du Chaillu, was received by King Charles XV. with Arcadian lack of
ceremony that was rather disconcerting to the American conception
of what royalty should do. The explorer could get no attention at
the front door, but eventually raised some underling by going within
and shouting up the stair. This official looked over the balusters
and asked the intruder what he wanted. The king, he averred, was not
at home, but when he learned that an invited guest stood there, he
admitted that the monarch of two kingdoms was within. His Majesty was
found at last, working on a picture in his shirt-sleeves, for he was a
landscape painter of repute. As soon as he saw Du Chaillu approaching
he proceeded to put on his coat.
Wearing a broad-brimmed soft felt hat, the monarch led the explorer
through the house from room to room.[131] The general effect is
splendid, but not unhomelike. One chamber is lined with old Dutch
tiles, another with stamped leather in colours of the softest and most
restful, other apartments have fine old panelling, while the northern
sunlight streams in through some beautiful pieces of painted glass,
the oldest about 1504 in date. The richness of the effect is greatly
enhanced by fine old inlaid cabinets, choice china and some very good
pictures.
Some cities, such as Oxford and Rome, owe almost everything to the
activities of man: few would linger long by the Isis or the Tiber if
their magnificent old buildings were gone. Some cities owe nearly
everything to splendour of site and to the lavish gifts of God. Such
a one pre-eminently is Stockholm. Other towns have sites more stately,
streets more monumental, buildings more magnificent, but none can be
compared with Stockholm in the features of water and island and forest
that are peculiarly its own. There is another city built on islands by
flowing waters near the open sea, but New York has pushed the forest
far away except for a space on the New Jersey side, and both islands
and city are far too big to bear any resemblance to Stockholm.
Though no such impression could well be sustained in the streets of
a great modern city, the first view of the Swedish capital suggests
nothing so much as an enchanted town, the capital of fairyland in the
middle of a wood that one dreamed about as a little child.
[Illustration]