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Chapter II Denmark and the Danes

This chapter is not a lesson in geography, either physical or political. I fear it is not even relevant to the scheme of the book that I have just outlined in the first chapter. But a book of this sort has really no business to have anything so formidable as a "scheme," so the sooner it's departed from the better.

But although I have become, I hope, as good an Englishman as another, I am by birth and parentage a Dane; and my ancestors have been Danes on both sides for a number of generations. I still retain my mother-tongue, and was for many years, in the strictest sense, bi-lingual. Moreover, for a long time after I came to New Zealand I was "binational"—if the coinage be permissible—to my own great puzzlement and embarrassment. It was not till the Salisbury-Chamberlain policy of the middle nineties, culminating in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations—not quite, perhaps, till the part this Colony took in the Boer War stirred our hearts like a trump—that I suddenly realised I had at last become completely English in sentiment as well as in time without hesitation, Pistol's truculent question, "Under which King, Bezonian? Speak or die!"

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So it is fitting after all, I think, that I begin my story with some account of my own countrymen. Perhaps, too, it will conciliate my readers to find that, in this chapter at any rate, I have a good deal to say about other people and not very much about myself.

There was a time when Denmark played no insignificant part in the politics of Europe and occupied no inconsiderable space upon the map. To-day it contents itself with the modest ambition of supplying butter for the tables and princesses for the thrones of Europe; and both are of the highest quality.

The King who occupied the throne in my school-days was Christian IX. One of his sons, George, became King of Greece; a grandson, Haakon, was chosen King of Norway. Of his daughters, one became Queen of England, another Empress of Russia, a third the reigning Duchess of a German State. And so his consort, Queen Louise, came to be called affectionately "The Mother-in-law of Europe."

His butter, too, was of the best, for he was a farmer as well as a monarch. For more than a quarter of a century his name was seldom absent from the prize-lists of agricultural shows of importance. It was always in his lifetime regarded as a pleasing compliment if a host could tell his guest that it was "King's butter" that was served at table.

I actually met him once, and had him for ten whole minutes all to myself. The incident made an indelible impression on my memory, and may page 10serve, perhaps, to explain one of the reasons why the Danes so loved him, much as the English had already come to love his daughter Alexandra.

It must have been in the summer of 1874, when I was about eight years old, that I had occasion one day to make a detour on my way home from school which brought me past the gates of Amalienborg, the palace where the King and his family usually resided when in the capital. It was, I remember, a hot summer's day—and summer days can be scorching in Copenhagen. There were usually two sentries posted outside the palace gates, but on this occasion, for some reason, there was but one, and he, overcome with the heat, had sought the shade of his little sentry-box for a moment, no doubt, and fallen fast asleep. At any rate, there he sat in his box, his hands crossed on the butt of his carbine and his chin resting on them. And through the wide palace gates I spied the glorious beds of forget-me-nots—such forget-me-nots as grow no-where except in Copenhagen, unless it be at the North Cape. I could not resist the wish to have a closer look at those forget-me-nots, so I slipped past the sleeping sentry, in through the gates, and then crossed the lawns to the flower-beds. I don't know how long I had been there—I was always a dreamy, absent-minded youngster—when suddenly I felt a hand upon my shoulder and heard a voice say, "Naa, lille dreng, hvad bestiller du her?" (" Well, little boy, and what are you doing here? "). I looked up—it was the King! I knew him at once from pictures and photographs: a handsome old man, or so he seemed to me, with most kindly smiling eyes. I was startled, but not frightened; page 11it was quite impossible for anyone to be afraid of Christian IX. I hastily swept my cap off with my best bow—very small boys are taught to do such things in Denmark—and explained that the sentry was asleep and the forget-me-nots were very beautiful, so I slipt in past the sentry and there I was! With a droll smile, almost boyish in its enjoyment of the situation, the old King said to me, "It wasn't such a very dreadful thing to slip in past the sleeping sentry: I've just done it myself." And then he took me by the hand and led me through the grounds for quite ten minutes, talking away about the flowers, the school I went to, the story-books I liked, and very soon I was completely at my ease. There was not a soul visible in the grounds or on the porches—it was the hour of siesta. Then the King took me to the gates, and I remember how he said with a twinkle in his eyes, "I wonder if he is still asleep! "But no, the sentries (both were there now) were doing their" strut "—Danish as well as German soldiers affected the fantastic" goose-step "—with a vigour and alertness obviously intended to dispel the mere suspicion that either could ever have slept at his post. And with a whimsical smile for my sole benefit, at the expense of the wide-awake sentries, and a bright "Farvel, lille dreng" ("Good-bye, little boy "), he dismissed me.

When the Prince of Wales visited New Zealand in 1920, and the Duke of York followed him in 1927, this boyhood experience was again and again recalled to my memory. Their love of sheer fun, the easy grace of manner that marked their inter-course with all classes, above all, that way they both page 12had with children which won the hearts of the hordes of colonial youngsters who were assembled to meet them at every town and village they passed through, brought back with vivid intensity my own short meeting with their great-grandfather in the garden of Amalienborg half a century before. My digression on the laws of heredity is not, I hope, entirely fanciful or entirely due to my ineradicable bias in favour of all things Danish.

The average Englishman, I fear, knows very little of my country. "Brazil, where the nuts come from"; "Denmark, where the butter comes from": such phrases sum up his knowledge of these places.

And so far as he knows more than that about Denmark, his knowledge comes from an unreliable source. For to the educated Englishman Denmark is essentially the country where Hamlet saw ghosts and meditated upon the problems of existence.

Now, Hamlet—or Amleth, as he is more correctly called—was a barbarian chieftain of Jutland, the Danish mainland. He never walked upon the battlements of Elsinore, for the reason that there were then no battlements to walk upon; he never even visited Elsinore, for the reason that there was then no Elsinore to visit. Yet he was buried there. Danes were for a long time sceptical upon the point, but the numerous tourists who yearly visit "Hamlet's grave" in the grounds of Elsinore Castle have gone far to remove the national scepticism. There is at least one man in Denmark who has no doubt on the subject; that is the enterprising custodian who levies a toll of one krone per head page 13of those devout tourists who make pilgrimages to the tomb of Shakespeare's immortal Prince of Denmark. The simple slab and cross over Hamlet's grave is of a friable sandstone. Of this the pious tourist breaks off pieces and carries them away as mementoes of his visit. The stone has accordingly to be replaced every few years; but the tourist, especially if he be a member of a Shakespeare Society, still goes on believing.

There are unfortunately several passages in Shakespeare's play that have gone far to produce an erroneous impression of my country. There are, in the first place, persistent references to Hamlet's "melancholy"—so many that he is constantly described in hackneyed phrase as "the Melancholy Dane," much as Shakespeare himself is spoken of as "the Bard of Avon," and by the same sort of people.

Commentators and critics here unblushingly call statistics to their aid; as though Shakespeare ever cared a fig for statistics. Yet it is a fact which I cannot deny that Denmark holds, or held till recent years, a world's record for suicides. Two-thirds of these are men over sixty—bachelor men, let me add; but I have less fault to find with the number of my countrymen who commit suicide than with their method of doing it. I am sorry to say that they resort to the undignified, inelegant, and ungentlemanly process of hanging. How much more graceful to follow the suggestion of Hamlet himself and "their quietus make with a bare bodkin!"

Then again, in the first scene between Hamlet and Horatio, there is the famous reference to the "Drunken Danes." Shakespeare had heard some page 14travellers' tales, perhaps, in which the Danes were spoken of as hard drinkers, or he had acquired the information from some of the actors in his company who had recently played a "season" in Elsinore and Copenhagen. Here, at all events, was just that little dash of "local colour" he so dearly loved to work into his canvas on occasion.

So eager is Shakespeare to work it in and to display his information about the drinking customs of the Danes that he makes Horatio, a native of the country, inquire about them as though he were a foreigner paying a first visit to Denmark:

A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off, within.
Hor. What does this mean, my lord?
Ham. The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
Hor. Is it a custom?

Ham. Ay, marry, is't;
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduc'd and tax'd of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition.

But is Shakespeare quite justified in his inference? The fact that on each occasion when the King is minded to slake his thirst "ordnance" is "shot off" and "kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out," suggests much pomp about the Royal potations but not necessarily depth or frequency. Indeed, the page 15formidable business of re-loading the "ordnance," of standing to fire-stations with the fuses ready— to say nothing of the trumpeters tuning up their instruments for another blast—might conceivably prolong the "time between drinks" to an interval which the famous Governor of North Carolina would never in his time have tolerated.

But the Dane of to-day, at any rate, is certainly not a hard drinker, though his drinking is still done, if not with all the pomp and circumstance affected by Claudius, at least with much ceremony. Your Dane is no "silent drinker"; he does not sit and sip his own glass regardless of his companions and carefully look the other way when the waiter comes round to replenish it. He awaits the challenge from the host or toast-master—"Skal vi ta' den?" ("Shall we take it?"); and then the company, rising, clink their glasses together, and with a cheery chorus of "skaal," proceed to drink. There is always a toast to excuse the drink. If no other suggests itself, then it is:

Min skaal, din skaal, Alle vakkre pigers skaal.
(My health, thy health, All bonny lasses' health.)

There is one little drinking ceremony still used, I hope, among good Danes which has always appealed to me as naïvely characteristic of their pleasant friendliness one with another. When two men, or two women for that matter, feel that they have proceeded beyond the stage of mere acquaintanceship and are drawn towards something warmer, page 16then over a glass one will say to the other, "Shall we drink,'thou'?" and, each holding his glass in his right hand, they interlock their right arms and, so standing, drink. Ever after they say "thou" and "thee" to each other instead of using the formal plural, and they are friends and "sworn brothers" for life.

The Danes are a polite and well-mannered people. I venture to say that a Copenhagen artisan is the best-mannered man of his class in Europe. To a foreigner, perhaps—and especially to an Englishman— this politeness may seem a little overdone. A Dane takes off his cap when he meets his own brother in the street; an Englishman of the same class may meet his wife with a cheery "Hullo, Mary!" and forget to lift his hat. You never see a Copenhagener in a shop, especially if there be women behind the counter, with his hat on. I well remember that the last thrashing I had from my father he gave me because he had seen me in a shop in Napier with my hat on. "So you want to be an Englander, do you? Well, I'll give you a last lesson in Danish manners first." And he did—to such good purpose that, to this day, fifty years after, I seldom enter a shop where women are employed without removing my hat.

If Jorgensen has dined with Rasmussen, next time they meet, be it in the street or in a tram-car, his greeting must be "Tak for sidst" ("Thanks for last"), and Rasmussen's answer, "Selv tak" ("Be thanked yourself").

These little courtesies are not confined to any particular class of society, nor, from whatever class they proceed, is there ever the least taint of servility page 17or obsequiousness about them. A Copenhagen tram-guard—a very paragon of good manners:— hands you your change with "Vaer saa god" ("Be so good"); and when he has received your thanks, if there be not too many passengers and he has time for a gossip, he will inquire as like as not if you were at the revival last night of Ibsen's "Doll's House" or Sudermann's "Magda," as the case may be, and then engage you in critical discussion on the relative merits of the Norwegian and the German playwright. Nor would it ever occur to his passenger, if a Dane, to snub him.

If you wish to see Copenhagen at its best and brightest, visit the famous Tivoli Gardens on a summer evening; listen to one of the concerts— opera, chamber-music, or choral singing; if you so prefer, watch a ballet or a pantomime or—in these degenerate days—a cinema; order a plate of Tivoli's famous "sömorre-bröd" and a "Karls-berg "—a pint of the delectable Copenhagen lager. But don't try to pronounce "smörre-bröd" or even to translate it; above all, don't call it" sandwiches, "for that were rank blasphemy. Then sit and watch the crowd—the best-humoured, best-mannered, best-fed crowd in Europe. Each has paid the same price to come in—50 ore (about 6d.)— and each is, or feels, as good as the next, or better. On one memorable occasion—was it the silver or the golden wedding of Christian IX?—when half the world's Royalties were in Copenhagen, it is said that on one and the same evening there were three visiting European sovereigns strolling unaccompanied in the grounds of Tivoli, and each of them had paid his sixpence to come in, and each page 18of them no doubt was, or thought himself, as good as the next, or better.

But when I refer to a Copenhagen crowd as the "best-fed" in Europe, I must in honesty make a reservation. Danish cookery is, indeed, superlatively good; but it is not well to make a temple of the kitchen and a god of the chef. One grows tired of the everlasting chatter about food and drink, drink and food. Petersen meets his friend Rasmussen in a tram-car: "I was dining at Sörensen's last night "—so goes the well-known" dinner opening" to the conversational game. Rasmussen's "move" is almost mechanical: "What did you have? "and the game is fairly started. In set routine Petersen enumerates the courses, and Rasmussen inquires eagerly, "How was it cooked? how served?" Does Petersen think Sorensen could be persuaded to impart the secret of that sauce piquante?¹ I blame my countrymen page 19less for eating too much than for talking too much about what they eat.

When a fire breaks out in a Danish parsonage it is not the family silver, pictures, and heirlooms that are thought of first. The vicar himself rushes to his study to secure the manuscripts of his old sermons, his wife to the kitchen to retrieve her book of recipes.