Northern Light

MARQUIS W. CHILDS

Stockholm, where the northern lights have seen strange sights — including Garbo, Kreuger, and smörgåsbord

• In its relative isolation from the continent of Europe, the Scandinavian peninsula has occupied, for a century or more, a most fortunate position. The Baltic, a cold, land-locked sea, has separated Norway and Sweden, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the islands of Denmark, from the violent paroxysms that have wracked continental Europe.

Thus protected, the Scandinavian countries have nevertheless been close enough to draw from Europe ideas, forms, manners, arts, and to adapt them to their own special requirements. These three countries have served, in a sense, as a laboratory for western civilization. Here, apart from the passionate national and political hatreds that have again and again distorted the face of Europe, there has gone forward an orderly evolution of social, political, and economic forms. These forms, most of them, had their origin on the continent; but in the north—as though under the shelter of some vast bell-jar—they have had an organic, natural growth.

Today this is more apparent than ever. One passes, in crossing the narrow sea to the north, from a crazy camp, in which jealousy and terror and the bitter poison of distrust prevail, to a world poised and calm and in a measure reasonable. And this is not an illusion, created by an accident of temperament, the traditional phlegm of the Scandinavian people. It is based upon a rationalization of many of the forms of western civilization. Capitalism has been restrained and effectively controlled, the profit motive in many fields drastically curbed or abolished. The domestic economy has been to a considerable degree planned for the greatest good of the greatest number. This has come with the partial socialization of retail and wholesale trade and certain forms of manufacture by the co-operatives; with the large-scale development of water power by the state; with the development of efficient state monopolies. What has resulted constitutes virtually a new way of economic life, one that occupies a middle ground between the uncontrolled capitalism of the United States before the crash, and the doctrinaire, Marxian Communism of Russia before the Stalin modifications; a middle course that avoids the excesses of both extremes.

Of late years the stream of European travel has turned to the north, away from the nervous tensions of the continent. The traveler has discovered in Stockholm one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a city that embodies the massive calm, the rational order, the deep pride of the Scandinavian. The other capitals of Europe are hag-ridden: Paris is staccato, shrill; Berlin is haunted by desperate ghosts; London is old and weary. It is in the capital of the north that one feels the strong, vigorous current of life flowing as of old, since the beginning of the time of man, as the water of the Baltic flows about the islands that the old town is built upon.

In the spring the city wakens from the long, cruel death of winter. It is then that one should first see Stockholm, when the green puts out and the days begin to lengthen until at ten o'clock in the evening there is still a soft dusk in the sky. It is then that one realizes how close the northern people are to the ancient roots of life. They celebrate in the spring Walpurgis Eve and the ancient nature days. To mark the return of the sun, after the endless night, bonfires are lit on every hill and the young students go singing through the streets.

There is everywhere the sense of a world stirring and quickened. In the light itself, in the afterglow that lingers in the sky like a phrase of music long sustained, there is this vibrant quality. Down every street one sees the sky aglow with the burnished color of the sun that is there, just below the horizon. And on the water, crossing on the ferry to the station where one takes the electric train for Saltsjobaden, the city, as one looks back at it, is like a curtain hung against the glow, all the outlines intensely clear, intensely black. The low roof of the Foreign Office, the looming mass of the Opera, and the building with the curious dome, all cut out of stiff, black cloth and hung up against the sky. No one sleeps. Through the night the streets are filled, young boys and young girls walking along Strandvagen with their arms entwined.

In the colors, clean and light, in the outlines of things, cool and distinct, it is a northern city. On every hand one sees the old symbols of man's relation to earth and water and sky. The old quarter is built upon one of the islands of the archipelago through which ships must thread their way to reach the open sea. (Someone has been fatuous enough to call Stockholm the "Venice of the North." It is as much like Venice as a cream puff is like a whiskeyand-soda.) Wherever you look you see blue water, small white boats, the sudden flight of sea birds.

From the summer terrace of the Grand Hotel or from the terrace of the Opera cafe you look toward the Baltic and see men fishing with big, round nets which they let down into the water from the stern of small dories. And on the stone quais are idle spectators, watching in a timeless world. Sometimes there are fish in the nets, the stromming, a fish that is important to the Stockholm table. More often there are no fish and it seems to matter very little to the patient fishermen.

On the quai behind the fishermen, as one looks out from the Opera terrace, is the royal palace. Designed by Tessin in the eighteenth century, the palace in its simplicity, in its great dignity, in the sheer beauty of its line, is a fit home for the king of such a clean, light, northern country. Knowing the value of symbols, the Swedes, who are above all else realists, value their king. He and his family are inexpensive, decent and picturesque. His public show is always a good one, tempered by a geniality that is more than the professional smirk of democracy.

And his palace, too, is a good symbol. It is made of the granite that one sees in the rocks that go down to the water's edge on the islands of the archipelago. It would be slander to call it pink and yet there is no other name for the color it is. There are colors in the north—the Swedes have a magnificent color sense—that can hardly be named; curious yellows and blue shot full of light, and a shade that is between earth-red and bisque but is neither. You feel, as you do about the palace, that they are inevitably right. Always the light does odd things to form and to color. Through the prolonged sunsets of late May and early June the windows of the palace are painted with fire. In winter when the sun at noon stands barely above the palace roof there are long, dramatic shadows on the snow.

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One sees in bronze and stone the naked figures of men and women. Milles and Eldh and even the lesser sculptors have used these oldest symbols with consummate wisdom in the public monuments they have created. There are Milles figures almost everywhere that one turns in Stockholm, monuments of such originality and force that only an enlightened city would give them public place. One can imagine the screams of outraged modesty that would arise in an American or an English city if it were proposed to put Milles' Sea God on a conspicuous site. This figure, in rough red granite, stands on a quai on the island on which are the palace and the old quarter. The figure of the Sea God is monstrous and terrible, the image of consuming lust, and held to him with one great arm, cleaving about his body with her forked tail, is a mermaid, on her face the blank, drowsy look of sensual surrender. Foreign visitors are never taken to see the Sea God or the Fountain of Industry in front of the Technical High School. The people of Stockholm seem to feel that while they themselves may understand and appreciate the meaning of these works, the foreigner may not.

And they are sensitive, so proud of their capital. They sometimes say, "Oh, here in our little city you will not find the same kind of life that you find in London and Paris. We are a little provincial, don't you think?" You will be very stupid if you agree, since Stockholm is not a provincial city. And the remark was only intended to draw out a tribute of denial.

While there have been preserved in the course of its recent growth the essential notes of the human scale, it is a modern city, perhaps the most modern city in Europe in respect to the number of motor cars and telephones and electrical appliances in proportion to population. It is modern as well in the sense that it draws from Europe and America the latest in the arts. Most of Eugene O'Neill's plays have had their first European performance in Stockholm. Last winter the state-subsidized Dramatic Theater was playing alternately Mourning Becomes Electro and The Green Pastures.

There are telephones and motor cars and radios (one to every ten persons) without the nervous strain that one had assumed was an inevitable concomitant of the present civilization. People move with an even serenity about their ordered tasks. For the surface gestures that one must make in living there is a convenient formalism.

Their formalism is not the elaborate politesse of a southern people. It is simple and straight forward. At the beginning of dinner, and often luncheon, you drink with the smorgasbord (the hors d'aeuvre), a small liqueur glass of briinnvin, which is a very potent kind of brandy distilled from potatoes. You drink it in a definitely prescribed fashion. At a signal from the host you raise your glass, you say "Skal!" you drink and then you raise your empty glass in salute. Certain pretentious people substitute cocktails, but cocktails, however strong, never do what the briinnvin does. It is liquid fire. The first time you take it in the Swedish fashion, at one drink, you are speechless for half an hour. The most beautiful before-and-aftertaking magic occurs. The reserve of the Swedes melts with all the lushness of a spring freshet. . . .

At dusk one is aware of the strangeness of the land. It is then that Stockholm turns a hostile face to the intruder. For all its external graciousness, its serene charm, there is this northern quality, stubborn and harsh, with something even of the cruelty, the wanton, barbarous cruelty, of the men of the high-prowed ships. You feel it as you look out over the city from one of the twin skyscrapers of Kungsgatan in the shadow of the endless dusk of late summer. Then it is foreign, strange, all dark, all hostile, a remote city lost among the dark spruce forests. It is as though one remembered, faintly, a fear long lost.

One remembers, too, the viking things in the National Museum, those barbaric armlets and rings and crowns of beaten gold. It is not all vanished, that barbaric past. It remains in the evidences of a masculine domination, a masculine tempo, and the corresponding reticence and modesty of the women. (One can imagine that if D. H. Lawrence had come to the north, he might have found what he sought with such a wretched unrest, a balance between the masculine and feminine.) It is not neurotic, not over-civilized.

For the stranger there is that same nameless fear when the summer ends —it has seemed so brief, so soon over —and the darkness begins to lengthen. There is the menace of the long, lonely night. The people who have always lived in the north understand this. They close their doors, they draw their curtains. They have always the warmth of briinnvin.

While that impudent and frivolous novel, The Latitude of Love, may have been, as the Swedes themselves hasten to say, a gross, Gallic caricature, it contains, as does even the grossest caricature, a seed of truth. Stockholm is the latitude of a kind of love, a sane and very agreeable and un-Gallic kind of love, it would seem. People smile a little when you ask them if they mind the long winters. No, they don't mind the long winters, they tell you. They are, you feel, a very wise people who have acquired—and how miraculous and beautiful it seems to an American—the difficult art of living.