Architecture
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Stockholm has sinned particularly in this field. Less violence is done to the eye in modern Copenhagen, but even there one can complain of what is being done.
In the countrysides of either country I saw no invasion of the abominable, but in the towns the disease has broken out badly. In all my experience of this return after a lifetime to places which impressed me so vividly in my youth, this is the worst and most portentous change.
I have compared the modern disease in archite&ure to the chaotic fantasies which followed in the second lifetime after the break-up of society under the effect of the Reformation—such a monstrosity as the seventeenth-century Sapientia tower in Rome, or as the ludicrous combination of a Greek capital and flutings with a tapering spire in Bermondsey.
But these things were isolated, the modern things are collective, covering whole areas of architectural action. It reminds one of what a late Papal Encyclical said of atheism to-day, compared with the atheism of yesterday. ‘The denial of God,’ it remarked, ‘was once the privilege of a few. It has now become the commonplace of the many.’ So with the denial of beauty. For the two things go together, deliberate contempt for beauty is atheist in architecture and in design.
As for the two excuses men now make for the ugly, they depend upon two suppositions which we can soon find, by mere experience, to be false. The first is the supposition that suitability to a particular function will of itself breed beauty; the other is that new material compels you to adopt a new form, though that form be meaningless or disgusting. Against the first proposition there is the plain fact that men have always and everywhere added ornament to Structure; that man cannot live without ornament; that any unspoilt man left to himself, and making what-not with his hands, will adorn it. For when men say that function compels you to the abandonment of beauty in art, they forget that the enjoyment of beauty is the first of functions in art.
As for your material condemning you to hideosity, it is an error so obvious that it is difficult to understand how it could have arisen.
When men could use cut Stone instead of wood, they did not on that account abandon the perpendicular line of the pillar, the horizontal line of the beam, the triangle of the roof-end. When men had for material tiles and rafters they did not on that account abandon the curves of the tent whence they derived their memories; curves which still Stamp the Mongolian buildings. There is no reason why a concrete bridge should ravage the mind with emptiness and despair save of course its cheapness, and I am not so sure that cheapness is not at the root of the ‘Stark’ rubbish under which we are sinking to-day as under a mortal load.
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You tell me that instead of writing on the Baltic, which I sat down to do, I am wasting your time on empty denunciations. You are right, as King Dagobent said to St. Eligius (of Noyon, I think, of Limoges, I know) in the matter of the Breeches. Let me continue my journey and get to the Baltic coaSt and thence by the Canal to the Great Lakes, which I remember so well after so many years and which are the special feature of this land.
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On the Baltic side of Sweden the coaSt is a mass of small islands, a perfeft swarm of them.
Forest
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If you look at them on the map you will see that they look like hundreds of insects fastening on a fruit: they are monotonous enough and very lonely, but they have a landscape of their own as one threads between them in the water always calm, no matter how hard it may be blowing from the east.
As with the mainland all these islands are densely covered with little conifers, the forest which is spread like a carpet all over the Swedish world, and here and there in an inlet one comes upon some little discreet harbour-town.
I remember one such in my journeying where they were loading that main modern export of Sweden, iron ore. They were sending it, I remember, to the other side of the Baltic, to a German port, presumably for the making of guns, and yet more guns: a pleasing thought for those who have put Prussia upon her feet again—the international bankers, and especially those of London. Sweden is a mass of iron, and her export of this is inexhaustible, as also her export of wood, but actually the regulation of this the country manages extremely well. Not so long ago one might have said of Sweden that it would never export anything except soldiers, and those it exported with special success, because of all the countries around it was the only one with something approaching conscription. That Statement may be challenged, but I think it is true. When Gustavus called for a levy of men he got them, and most of them were not even technically volunteers. It was an advantage which disappeared with the outbreak of the French Revolution, though long before that even the great States were beginning to conscript in a veiled fashion. Louvois, under Louis XIV, the man who was gathering the armies together, admitted rather cynically that the voluntary system he was using was only voluntary in name and that by the time the men he had recruited had got to their regiments they could only be kept very sorely against their will.
I hope, talking of the exports of Sweden, that there will never be a rush upon Swedish wood beyond the present arrangement. That disturbance could only happen, of course, if the excellent Swedish regulations were to break down or be superseded, but it is true that the modern world is hungry for wood, and for wood put to a very base use. For I am told that by the massacre of forests we get wood pulp, and of wood pulp is made what the trade calls newsprint. I read in an American paper (and that is my only authority for the Statement) that one of those huge New York Sunday editions cost 40 acres of woodland. I seem to remember the figure 40. It is an appalling thought, when you consider both the rubbish that is printed and the vast mass of that rubbish and its lease of life. It appears and is forgotten almost in the same day. And during its little passage through the daylight it does nothing but harm.
Our fathers (or perhaps I should say our grandfathers) believed that a thing called the ‘freedom of the Press’ would solve half the ills of mankind. We now know what that means. So far from solving the ills of mankind, it has increased them out of all knowledge. It means freedom for a few millionaires to print any falsehood, to suppress any truth, and to increase their vast possessions by debauching the masses with appeals to their base appetites: stuff written for slaves by slaves.
It is fortunate indeed that the exploitation of all that timber has fallen under careful and conscientious governments, now at their best since the enfranchisement of Finland. For those governments restrict what under mere capitalist greed would be a massacre of the northern woodlands. The exploitation of the deal is regulated and the capital value of that vast woodland remains intact, though Streams of cargo Steamers laden with sawn planks high on the decks pour down it during all the open season. There is something violent, with a mixture of the tragic and the comic, in the sacrifice of those silent shades to the basest of modern needs, the popular Press. It is a relief when the traveller comes on the loneliness of these forests to know that they will not here be ruined as they have been ruined on the eastern seaboard of Canada, notably in Newfoundland, which has been ruined not only in patches of cutting, but financially through the usury which has sucked the blood of the place and left it in the talons of our banking system.
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From the Baltic coast a canal reaching right across Sweden takes you to the first of the Great Lakes. The canal follows a depression which forms a natural way from sea to lake, though not without a ‘saddle’ which has to be crossed by locks. That depression was followed by commerce for centuries, and a great tower built by the Vasas dominates over the narrows, taking toll of merchandise on its way to the Great Lakes.
These immense inland waters, almost seas, would be of prodigious effect in any of the more populated parts of Europe. Imagine a sheet of navigable water 100 miles by 40 in the midst of England or France. What history would have gathered round it, what shrines, what great cities: how it would have divided or joined whole provinces: how it would have produced it
s special local population, and the mass of their traditions!
Here in the North, in the midst of those interminable forests, this interminable empty land of granite and iron, trees, of innumerable Streams and lesser meres also beyond number, they are not of the same effect. Yet the effect they produce is very great. This is especially true of the Wetter if one approaches it, as it is commonly first approached by travellers, from the high land to the southern end, where one overlooks a vast expanse—a view not indeed to the further end, for that could only be possible if there were high mountains there—but at any rate so far northward that the sky-line begins before the further shore is reached.
Jonkopping
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At this southern end of Lake Wetter Stands the ancient town of Jonkopping, which was a local centre of government and continually appears in Swedish history. It Still has its importance to-day, and it was its administrative function which dignified it with fine official seventeenth-century architecture which is Still the mark of the place. But its chief modern use, or one of its chief modern uses, is for the recreation of distant Stockholm. The moderately high land just behind Jonkopping and to the east of it overlooking the great plain of water, is full of those small country houses which the Swedes love to build and adorn with gardens. Also there is here water power which has been used harmlessly for the manufacture especially of metal-work, and as I was told, of arms; and, of course, for the local production of electricity, though it has nothing of the importance of the huge Trohatten cascades, the nature, capture and use of which is one of the most interesting things in Europe.
Water Power
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From the larger of the two lakes runs the River Gota, which takes the overflow down by its valley to the open sea, with Gothenburg at its mouth.
On that river course fell, ever since the ice melted, a series of big cascades, an immediate fall in level scores of feet down, and a magnificent sight it must have been when the spate was at its full, but to-day all that is gone. The waters have been captured to-day into pipes and made to drive turbines which provide electricity for most of Sweden (except Stockholm, I am told) and even for part of Denmark overseas. The bed of the old waterfalls lies rocky and bare.
But the industrial use of water power has not done nearly as much harm here in the North as it has in France, where it seems more is made of water power, oddly enough, than in any other country. The squalor of industrial capitalism has been allowed to desecrate the valley of Maurienne lamentably. I have myself seen in my lifetime this evil arise and grow.
The Maurienne ought to be one of the sacred valleys of Europe. It was here that the Angel of the legend and of the great epic appeared to Charlemagne, giving him the sword Durandal for the greatest of his captains, and with it he girt Roland. I never knew it in its ancient silence, for the railway had been brought along it before I was born; but I knew it all my youth before industrial capitalism came to murder it. The railway along the Maurienne Valley led to the Mont Cenis Pass, and served in due time the earliest of the Alpine tunnels, yet the railway did no great harm. It was a transit only, up to Modane and on to Italy. What did harm was the capture of the torrent without provision for beauty.
The power thus harnessed has not befouled the sky as coal would have done, but it has brought into the Maurienne the dispossessed and their unhappiness, it has brought greed and insecurity and poverty and unrest, and the masses of scattered rubbish which industrialism accumulates unless or until it be tamed. The Maurienne has become a heart-breaking sight. You may Still climb up the narrow Streets of St. Jean and find yourself in the traditions of a thousand years, yet all about you is this vile degradation of man’s talents by greed.
In the Pyrenees things are not quite as bad, but they are bad enough. I know more than one valley of the Jura also on which the abomination has set its mark. It is to the honour of Sweden that her water power has been taken without involving such adjuncts. It has there given rise to no such towns as originated from the same source of water power in South Lancashire and the West Riding. That decent cleanliness which Scandinavia boasts has harnessed and garnished all. May it long so continue! As a proof that it is not the machines of man that befoul mankind but the wrong use of those machines, and especially the oppression of the poor.
The Great Lakes
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These great inland waters when they are so widely extended have always seemed to me in some way natural. It may be fantasy or it may be recognition, but I never could get used to something which was like the sea and yet was not the sea. I had that feeling of incongruity profoundly impressed upon me early in life when first I saw the Great Lakes of Northern America. Where was the salt? No matter how enormous the reservoir it lacked in some way that sense of infinity which the ocean has and lends to its narrow seas as well. Why this should be so, I know not. Perhaps it is an illusion born of the map: if so, it is a Strong illusion.
Moreover, the wave movement of the fresh water, and therefore the nature of the beaches on its shores, is something very different from that of the sea. The fresh water is lighter, the waves are steeper, of course, and therefore they have in a heavy gale a sort of spiteful fury of their own which lacks the majesty of the ocean; ‘the Strength of the ocean ’ which runs all round the world and as was shown on the shield of Achilles. Storms also rise too rapidly and fall too rapidly, and there is a sort of deserted feeling about freshwater inland lakes of great size which one does not feel about the salt. They have not the same gods and goddesses, and the powers of their deities are lesser powers: or perhaps no gods visit them.
Here it was the ice of course which scooped out the great hollows wherein such miles of inland water lie, as it also scooped out the lesser hollows which produced the myriad lakes of Sweden and of Finland. Indeed, whatever you see all about the Baltic lands leaves you with a memory of the ice.
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Time will bring back the old glories of Trollhatten and therefore of the cascades and the peopling of empty gorges with foam and sound. Time, though it will at last destroy also, wear down and smooth the Steps of the waterfall, will get rid of man’s use thereof long before nature has felt the levelling. There will be ruins soon turned to dust and scraps of rusty iron which the grasses and the trees will hide and the water roaring down again, as it did when it was free before the brief episode of our mechanical day.
It is as well that time should now and then repair the ills of mortality, for Heaven knows it adds to them perpetually and grievously. Hence the motto which a poet engraved upon the inside of his expensive watch and then transferred to a sundial:
‘Ephemeral mortal, mark my emblem well:
I tell the Time, and Time in Time will tell.’
No Castles
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Sweden, though so military a state, has not been largely fortified: neither the great stone castle period of the Middle Ages nor the transformed earthwork fortification imposed by artillery in the seventeenth century left on Sweden, as it has left in most European countries, a permanent mark everywhere. There are examples of the mediæval stonework, whereof Vadstena is the finest example and the most memorable one. There is the Tower of Gustavus Vasa, a simple affair on the roadway crossing the peninsula from east to west. There are ruins here and there, but there is no foison of castles and only the rarest examples of earthwork against artillery.
It seems that in even the earlier history of Sweden men troubled less about defence than elsewhere. You have not there those great monuments of earthwork before record began such as our prehistoric camps in England and our great dykes, and the rarer corresponding French examples; you have nothing corresponding to the Danework. I think the reason can be discovered. The Swedes warred out of their own country, they were menaced upon no land frontier. Now and then they were taxed and administered from Denmark, emancipated again, and so on, but there was no isthmus to be held against foreign pressure and no centre of resistance against foreign armies—at least, I suppose that is
the explanation of this absence of fortification in Sweden. You have something of the same sort in modern England, which is another parallel between the two countries. England was crammed with fortification until the Civil Wars. There were walls round her towns, there were Stone castles everywhere, and even in the later period when artillery had begun there were earthworks against siege guns, some, I believe, at Portsmouth, and one famous, very lengthy but ephemeral example in the ‘Lines of Communications ’ which were drawn round London after the City had decided against the constitutional government of Charles I and had joined the Rebellion of the taxpayers against the Crown. The only relic I know now surviving of earthwork against artillery is (or was) at Berwick, I suppose because Berwick was a frontier town, but if I remember right the old gate of Berwick facing northward against the Border was almost like a bit of Vauban’s later work, scarp and counter-scarp and all the rest of it. I have not seen it for thirty years, but I hope it is still there. All relics of the past ought to be preserved as far as possible. They are like mortar, binding the generations, and they teach history, and apart from that they are in themselves venerable.
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