SEVENTH LETTER
Contains a glimpse of the history of Sweden as suggested by the monuments of Stockholm; Birger Jarl; Bridget, the saint without a monument; Gustavus Adolphus, the champion of Protestantism; Charles XII, who conquered half of Europe; Linnæus, the lover of flowers; John Ericsson, the inventor of the “Monitor.”
Stockholm, January 17.
My dear Judicia,
My last letter left us in a Lapp camp on the northern edge of the Gulf of Bothnia, surrounded by dirty Lapps, yelping dogs, and ruminating reindeer; and here I am, after three days, in Stockholm again, while Aylmer has gone back to his beloved Norway, striking across Sweden and over the mountain by rail to Trondhjem, since he was unwilling, as he said, to “waste any time in Sweden.”
Imagine, Judicia, the superciliousness of youth! To waste time in Sweden, the land of heroes and patriots, the land of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII, the land that saved northern Europe for liberty and freedom of conscience. Wasting time in Sweden, indeed!
What should you say to the idea of studying a little Swedish history with me, with the help of the monuments of Stockholm? Some people, I know, consider monuments a great bore and hasten by them with scarcely a glance, but that is because they do not know the delightful stories that they can tell with their bronze or marble lips.
Let us first call upon Birger Jarl. We find him on Riddarholmen, standing erect on a lofty marble pillar, with his shield and his sword, his steel armor and his helmet, looking down from his lofty pedestal as though he would say to us: “What have I to do with you, upstart Americans, you children of a day, whose nearest western shore even was not discovered by Columbus for more than two hundred years after I sailed the seas in my viking ships.”
The great Jarl seems to have been the first one to have discovered the impregnable position which Stockholm’s islands offered for defense. To be sure there was quite a population on these islands before Birger’s time, but he was a man of far-seeing vision, as his position on his lofty monument indicates, so he made of Stockholm one great fort. On every side it was surrounded by water, the great Lake Mälar, and the two rushing rivers that carried its waters to the Baltic.
Birger was never anything but a Jarl, but he was the greatest of all the earls, and so powerful that he was able to place his son Magnus above all his brother earls, and made him the first king of Sweden. Magnus was not unworthy of his name, for he too was a great ruler for those rude times, though if the son was Magnus I think the father should be called Major, if not Maximus, for he really founded the kingdom of Sweden, as well as the city of Stockholm.
Sweden of course had a history before the days of Birger and Magnus, but it is so mixed up with that of Norway and Denmark, who were really the predominant partners in those early days, that I shall have to resign St. Olaf and some of the other exceedingly interesting worthies of that time to the pen of Aylmer, thus giving him, my dear Judicia, a vast advantage in his efforts to claim for Norway your favorable verdict.
I must remark in passing, however, that St. Olaf, or King Olaf Haraldson of Norway, to give him his full title, once found himself and all his fleet shut up in Lake Mälar by chains stretched across its western outlet. This was in the year 1007; so in order to get out of his cul-de-sac, he dug a shallow channel across a neck of land that prevented him from making his way into the Baltic, that he might thus evade the clutches of Olaf Skötkonung of Sweden. Nature favored his project, and the strong current that sets from the great lake to the Baltic Sea soon wore a wide thoroughfare, through which the king and all his ships escaped into the Baltic and thence home to Norway. This channel made of a former peninsula the island of Staden, so that the Swedes may thank St. Olaf for making one of the three great islands of their capital which Birger Jarl found it so easy to fortify and defend.
A monument that I have been looking for but have not yet found, though there may be one somewhere in Stockholm, is a memorial to St. Bridget. If any Swedish woman deserves a monument, surely it is this same saint “Birgitta,” as she is called in Swedish. In my youth I naturally supposed that St. Bridget was an Irish lady; but she was a pure Swede, and a Swede of the mystical type, in some respects not unlike a fellow countryman of more modern days—the great Swedenborg. She devoutly believed that she received many revelations from Christ and the Virgin Mary, which are preserved to this day in large tomes.
She lived before the Reformation, but was none the less a reformer of the first order. The rule of her abbey, which she believed was enjoined by Christ himself, made chastity, humility, and voluntary poverty the first requisites. “No member of the convent could possess the smallest piece of money; nor even touch silver or gold except when necessary for embroidery, and then only after permission obtained from the abbess. The nuns ate the simplest food and fasted three days in the week. To remind them of their mortality, a bier always stood at the church door, and near the cloister yawned an open grave. Thither these devout women repaired every day, and the abbess threw a handful of earth into the pit, while the sisters repeated psalms and prayers.”[1]
In these days, when the social pendulum has swung so far to the other extreme, there is something worthily heroic in this story of good Birgitta. There is a tonic in it, like a strong east wind, that blows away the miasma of modern social life.
Whatever we may think of her, she made a tremendous impression upon Sweden, an impression which is fresh and vivid to this day, as anyone who studies the history of Sweden speedily discovers. St. Bridget was a woman of tremendous courage. She knew how to reprove the Pope as well as the King. Moreover, her influence was not confined to Sweden, for she spent much time in Rome and is acknowledged throughout the whole Catholic world as one of their greatest saints.
Again come with me to one of the chief squares of Stockholm, and there we will see the figure of the noblest Swede of them all, Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of Protestantism, the victor of a score of hard-fought battles. I will not take you to the monument of Gustavus Vasa, the grandfather of Gustavus Adolphus, for we have already traced his glorious career from the days when he was a hunted fugitive in Dalecarlia to the day when he mounted in triumph the Swedish throne at Stockholm.
But great as was the grandfather, his grandson Adolphus was greater still, as a general, as a reformer, as a man. Between the days of the grandfather and the grandson Sweden had thrown off the power of the Roman church, whose possessions had been seized by the crown; and two of the immediate disciples and pupils of Luther, the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri, had firmly established the reformed religion throughout the kingdom.
An unhappy interregnum between grandfather Vasa and grandson Adolphus, who ascended the throne in 1611, had left Sweden in a parlous state, with foes without and fightings within. The great king and general succeeded in shutting out Russia from the Baltic and capturing one of the important provinces of Poland, Livland, which also bordered on the Baltic. But it was not until 1630 that Gustavus Adolphus became a mighty figure in European history. For twelve years the German Protestants had been putting up a courageous but losing fight with the overwhelmingly superior Catholic forces of Europe. Little by little they had been beaten, and their power was being gradually circumscribed.
“In 1630 it seemed as though the continent of Europe was hopelessly doomed to fall beneath the united supremacy of the Papacy and the Empire. From the southern shore of the Baltic Wallenstein, the great leader of the imperial forces, stretched his hand threateningly to grasp the Baltic Sea and its approach, the sound, which chief means of communication with the ocean had become for Sweden a matter of vital importance to keep open. As much to defend the independence as the Protestantism of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus was forced to go to Germany and there assail the enemy on his own ground. Within the short period of two years he succeeded by his brilliancy both as a warrior and a statesman in changing the fate of the world.”[2]
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Lion-Guarded Statue of Charles XIII in King’s Garden, Stockholm.
His brilliant exploits in Germany were confined to two short years. His great victory at Breitenfeld in 1631 was followed by the battle of Lützen in 1632, which cost Sweden and the world the victor’s life. But though the war raged for sixteen years longer, the Protestant cause was never again hopeless. The victory of Adolphus turned the tide, and his noble personal friend and chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, maintained the prestige of Sweden as one of the great powers of the world, fully recognized in the Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 closed the bloody Thirty Years’ War.
As I stand before the fine equestrian statue of Gustavus, I take off my hat to that noble warrior and reformer, even though it is frosty winter weather, and, as I look at his majestic figure, I can hear the Swedish army on the battlefield of Lützen singing the king’s own hymn of triumph:
“Fear not, O little flock, the foe
That madly seeks your overthrow.”
It has been truly said the “sword of Gustavus Adolphus was mighty as the pen of Luther.”
Every year on the sixth of November a great procession of Swedes with bands and banners, led by the famous choral societies of Stockholm, proceeds through the streets on a triumphal march to the Church of the Knights, where the great king lies buried, a spot forever sacred to the lovers of freedom.
In the king’s park in Stockholm we find another interesting statue, that of Charles XII. He stands with his sword in one hand pointing with powerful finger to the Baltic, on whose shores he gained his greatest victories.
As I gazed at the noble statue, I thought how this great-grandson of Gustavus Vasa came to the throne as a boy of fifteen years of age. How three years after, Russia, with Peter the Great for her emperor; Poland, then the great power of central Europe; Saxony and Denmark all united their forces to crush this eighteen-year-old king and the country for which he fought so bravely. But he was equal to them all. One after another he conquered Denmark, Prussia, and Poland in the field, and for nine years with Sweden, a little nation of only two and a half millions of people at his back, he held them all at bay.
“With an army of eight hundred half-starved, half-frozen Swedes on a chill November morning he charged upon forty thousand Russians behind intrenchments at Narva and put them to utter rout, taking in prisoners alone more than double his little army.”
Many were his vicissitudes; defeated after nine years of victory by the Russians at Pultava, he had to flee to Turkey, hoping to enlist the sympathies of the Sultan against the Russians. For five years he remained there in exile, and then, almost alone, in an incredibly short space of time, made his way across Europe, and for years more fought the battles of Sweden against mighty odds, but with indomitable courage and often with success, until a bullet at the battle of Fredrikshald in Norway put an end to this heroic life and at the same time closed the era of Sweden’s greatness.
I cannot take you to all the statues of Stockholm to-day, Judicia, but there are two others which I think we must visit. As a lover of flowers you would never forgive me if we did not together make our obeisance before the monument of Linnæus. It is true that he is associated more particularly with Upsala and its university, where I hope later to see his grave, but he has a worthy statue in Stockholm in the Humlegård. There he stands in a benignant attitude that befits a great naturalist. I am glad that he is surrounded by the trees and plants and flowers that he loved so well and did so much to make us familiar with.
When a man is preëminently distinguished in one line, his services to the world in other directions are apt to be overlooked. Linnæus was not only a great botanist, but a distinguished physician and a brilliant writer on geographical subjects. He traveled much throughout Sweden, and our knowledge of Swedish life in the eighteenth century is largely due to his interesting and accurate accounts of his travels. He is said also to have created a new style of Swedish prose, and to have been as eminent as a teacher as he was as an investigator.
You would hardly recognize him under his Swedish name, Carolus a Ljnné, or Carl von Linné, as he is more commonly called. Linné was the most prominent lecturer of his time, we are told. “When he took a ramble, discoursing as he went and ‘demonstrating Flora’s charming children’ then Botany became the scientia amabilis, a knowledge of which was an honor for all, from royalty down to the poorest peasant.”
As I gazed at his statue, however, I could not help thinking, with a sense of mild pity, of the millions of school children with no great gifts for botanical research who have struggled over the two hard names which he set the fashion of assigning to every plant, one for the genus and one for the species; and who have studied, with many a groan, his system of identifying plants which seem to them as dry as the herbariums which they have been compelled to collect and arrange.
One other statue, among the latest erected in Stockholm, is of peculiar interest to Americans, for it commemorates the man who, more than any other inventor, saved the Union in the terribly black days of ’63. This man was Captain John Ericsson, the son of a Swedish miner, “born and brought up in a miner’s hut in the backwoods of Sweden.” On Sunday, September 14, 1890, the body of Ericsson was given over by America to the perpetual care of Sweden, his native land. It had been brought from New York in the warship Baltimore by Captain Schley, who afterwards won his laurels on the coast of Cuba.
The body was placed on a beautiful pavilion, directly in front of the statue of Charles XII and very near one of Stockholm’s principal quays. With solemn ceremonies and appropriate words the body was conveyed by Captain Schley to the American Minister, and by him given over to the Swedish government, a Swedish admiral accepting it in behalf of his country.
All around the catafalque were magnificent floral emblems contributed by Americans and Swedes alike, and on the coffin itself was a Monitor made of immortelles, in the American and Swedish colors, a white dove perched on the turret. This was the offering of the Swedish-American ladies who had crossed the Atlantic with the body. After these ceremonies the coffin was borne in state through the streets of Stockholm and carried to the little town of Filipstad, near which he was born. On the spot where the great funeral pavilion stood, by Stockholm’s quay, is now the monument to the inventor of the Monitor, the savior of the American Union, strong and massive as the man whom it commemorates. It will always be to every American the most admired of Stockholm’s many statues.
Faithfully yours,
Phillips.