CATHEDRAL FROM NORTH-WEST
[Face page 122
Other royal monuments are many here, but it need not be assumed that the fairest of them mark the livers of the noblest and most useful lives. Many of them are in the numerous chapels which have been added beyond the aisles of this church from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth. They alter the character of the building very much.[55] Combined with the absence of any transept projection they make the plan of the church look very confused.
Those who departed centuries ago are laid away with decency in vaults. But in later days a far less seemly custom has grown up; the coffins are merely ranged in rows upon the chapel floors. They seem to be at rest when they are of marble or stone, and so, too, perhaps when of solid metal, but most are only of oak, covered with black velvet. It is almost impossible to dismiss the idea that the victims of some disaster await the last solemn rites. There is something weirdly gruesome in this vast Valhalla of the unburied dead. Abraham desired decorously to bury his dead out of his sight, but the rulers of Denmark must for ever merely lie in state. In ancient Egypt an empty coffin was sometimes placed upon the table that the feasters might remember death. They who say their prayers in this cathedral in the very presence of the dead must surely learn that lesson with much more force. To kneel on the same floor where coffins lie must be far more impressive than merely to learn from storied urn and animated bust of those who sleep below.
Trondhjem Cathedral, the noblest of Scandinavian churches, is without mediæval monuments, at Upsala there are few; this church is in very truth the most historical building of the North. Several of the monarchs that here rest bore rule over all the Norse. Saints of all three kingdoms have here some part. To St. Brita is hallowed a chapel on the north, to St. Siegfrid one under the northern tower. St. Olaf (Danish Oluf) and St. Knut are among those whose effigies are painted in the Chapel of Three Kings.
Few fences break up the wide fields that extend round the town to the sea. Cattle are invariably tethered, pasture is valuable, and none of it must be trampled down. Sprinkled about are white farmhouses covered with tiles or with thatch. Many small-holders have purchased their land with money borrowed from the State. Sir Rider Haggard[56] has recently described their condition, and pointed out what England may learn.
Denmark is, or rather has been, so progressively indifferent to the past that but few old buildings still adorn her open fields. When it was considered necessary for a self-respecting Scandinavian nation to establish an open-air museum,[57] the needful old farm buildings had to be brought from parts of old Denmark that are now either Swedish or German. Nothing had escaped rebuilding on strictly Danish soil.