I arrived at Copenhagen in August. I went there direct from Paris and crossed whatever intervening seas lie between Denmark and Germany via Hamburg and Kiel. I had been given an ointment made of tar by a French hair specialist to check my rapidly increasing baldness, and I applied it before I went to bed in my cabin, which contained three other berths. When the other passengers, who had intended to share my cabin, put their heads into it, they were appalled by the smell of tar, and thought that they had been given berths in the sail-room by the steward. They complained loudly, and refused to sleep there, so I had the cabin to myself.
I stayed at the H?tel d’Angleterre, and on the morning of my arrival presented myself to the Minister, Sir Edward Goschen. He was alone at the Legation. I took rooms in a street not far from the Legation, and settled down to the quiet routine of Legation life in a small capital.
Copenhagen in August seemed unusually quiet. The sentries outside the Amalienborg Palace looked like big wooden dolls in their blue uniforms, white trousers, white belts, and bearskins.
I immediately began to have Danish lessons from the British Vice-Consul, who was a Dane, and we soon began to read Hans Andersen in Danish. The diplomatic world in Copenhagen was a little world by itself. It consisted of the Russian Minister, Count Benckendorff, who, when I arrived, was there by himself; the Austrian Minister, Count Wildenbruch, who lived at the H?tel d’Angleterre, and never went out and rarely saw anybody; the French Minister, M. Jusserand, one of the most erudite of English scholars besides being one of the most charming of Frenchmen; and the German Minister, M. Sch?n,[209] who had a passion for dressing up in fancy dress; the Norwegian Minister, M. de Knagenhjelm; and the Italian Minister.
The diplomatic world mixed little with the Danes. I once heard a Dane say to another Dane: “Do you receive diplomats?” in the same tone of surprise as would have been appropriate had the question been: “Do you receive police-spies?”
I think the theatres were shut when I arrived, and the only amusements were to go out sailing which I used to do often with Sir Edward, who had a yacht, and in the evenings to have dinner at the Tivoli music-hall, which was an out-of-door park full of side-shows and was pleasantly illuminated.
The staff of the British Legation consisted of a First Secretary, Sir Alan Johnstone, and a Chancery servant: a Dane called Ole, who was a charming, simple person like a character in Hans Andersen, vaguely intoxicated sometimes, paternal, easily upset, and endlessly obliging.
Sir Alan Johnstone had a little house in the country, and there I often used to spend Sunday, and there I made the acquaintance of Count Benckendorff. The first time I met him we had a violent argument about the Dreyfus case. He was a firm believer in Dreyfus’ innocence and so was I, but that did not prevent us arguing as though we held diametrically opposite opinions.
In the middle of August, Edmund Gosse paid a visit to Denmark and I went to him meet at Munkebjerg, which entailed a long cross-country journey over many canals and in trains that were borne on steamers. Munkebjerg was a lovely place on the top of a high hill with little woods reaching down to the water. There, for the first time, I experienced the long, green, luminous twilights of the north. Edmund Gosse was inspired by the surroundings to write a book called Hypolympia, which he afterwards dedicated to me. He imagined that the gods of Greece arrived at Munkebjerg immediately after their exile, and on that theme he wove a fantasy.
One of the most important duties at Copenhagen was to go to the railway station to meet the various royalties who used to visit the King of Denmark, and another one was to receive English Royalties at the door of the English church when they attended divine service on Sundays. We used often to see the King of Denmark out riding, and although I think he was[210] then eighty years old, he looked on horseback, so extraordinarily young was his figure, like a man of thirty.
I learnt Danish fairly quickly and soon I could follow the plays at the Kongelige Theatre and at other theatres. The Kongelige Theatre was a State-supported institution with an ancient tradition and an excellent troupe of actors and dancers. They performed opera: Gluck, Mozart, and Wagner; ballets; the classic Danish comedies of Holberg; Molière; Shakespeare; modern comedies and the dramas of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Holger Drachman. The Shakespeare productions were particularly interesting and far more remarkable than any I ever saw in Berlin. They made use of the Apron Stage; on a small back-cloth at the back of the stage changed with the changing scene; the back-cloth was framed in a Gothic arch, which was supported by pillars raised on low steps. A curtain could be lowered across this arch, and the actors could proceed with the play in front of this curtain, without necessitating the lowering of the larger curtain. This small scene was extremely effective. It was just enough to give the eye the keynote of the play; and in the historical plays of Shakespeare, in Richard III. for instance, it was ideal. I saw Richard III., King Lear, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the latter was a beautiful and gay production; the actor who played Bottom had a rich vein of humour and a large exuberant personality, and the fairy dances were beautifully organised and executed. Of the modern drama I saw Tolstoy’s Powers of Darkness, which made a shattering effect, Ibsen’s Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, and Holger Drachman’s Gurre, and some comedies by Otto Benzon.
The performance of the Doll’s House with Fru Hennings’ Nora was unforgettable. I have seen many Noras; Eleonora Duse and Réjane and Agnes Sorma in Berlin; but Fru Hennings played the part as if it had been written for her; she was Nora; she made the whole play more than natural, she made it inevitable. “Quelle navrante ironie! quel désenchantement à fond!” said Jules Lema?tre, writing about Duse’s performance of Magda. In Fru Hennings’ interpretation of Nora, the irony was indeed harrowing, and the disenchantment complete; but irony, disillusion, weariness, disgust were all merged into a wonderful harmony, as the realities of life gradually dawned on the little singing-bird, and the doll changed into a woman. She made the transformation, which whenever I had[211] seen the play before seemed so difficult to believe in, of the Nora of the first act into the Nora of the last act seem the most natural thing in the world. Then Fru Hennings had the advantage of being a Dane and of speaking the words of the play in the language in which they had been written. She had a musical rippling voice and a plaintive grace of gesture. Holger Drachman’s drama Gurre was a terrible and intensely dramatic poetic drama, with a love duet of impassioned lyricism and melody, and an almost unbearable scene, in which the Queen has her rival scalded to death in a steam-bath. Hedda Gabler I confess to not being able to endure when I saw it; it was beautifully acted; too well acted; there seemed to be no difference between what was going on on the stage and in the audience. I had a sudden uprush of satiety with Norwegian drama: with Ibsen, with problem plays, with Denmark, with the North; and I remember going out of the theatre after the second act, in revolt and disgust, and not being able to stand any more of it. But that was an accidental impression arising from a surfeit of such things, and from an overdose of Scandinavian gloom and Norwegian complexity; a short course of musical comedies would have soon enabled one to appreciate the drama of Ibsen once more; as it was, I heard it after a year and a half’s stay at Copenhagen, and at that moment I had had just a drop too much of that kind of thing.
I also saw When we dead awaken when it was first produced, and this again had no effect on me, save one of vague and teasing perplexity.
The music at Copenhagen was as interesting as the drama. Mozart’s operas were admirably given at the Kongelige Theatre. I remember a fine performance of Don Giovanni, the Nozze di Figaro, and Gluck’s Orpheo, concerts where Beethoven’s Symphonies were played, and a recital of Paderewski where he played Liszt’s arrangement of the Erlk?nig. When he came to the end of it, the impression was that he himself had experienced that ride in the night; that he had battled with the Erl King for the life of the child, and that it was he and not the child who was dead.
As soon as I could speak Danish, I made several friends among the Danes. I sometimes spent the evening at Dr. George Brandes’ house, and more often at that of Otto Benzon, the playwright, who was extremely kind to me. The intelligentsia[212] of Copenhagen were highly cultivated; they were well-to-do and had fine collections of modern pictures. The meals were long and were often followed by a still longer supper. The days were short in winter at Copenhagen; the sun appeared to set at two; the wind blew in every direction at once down the Bred Gade. Copenhagen in winter had depressing elements.
I had, in the meantime, made great friends with the Benckendorffs at the Russian Legation.
Just as in the art of writing, and in fact in all arts, the best style is that where there is no style, or rather where we no longer notice the style, so appropriate and so inevitable, so easy the thing said, sung, or done is made to appear, so in diplomacy the most delightful diplomats were those about whom there was no diplomatic style, nothing which made you think of diplomacy. Michael Herbert was one of these, and so pre-eminently was Count Benckendorff. When he was Ambassador in London he took root easily in English life, and made friends instantly and without effort in many different worlds, so his personality and his services are well known to Englishmen. I doubt, however, whether they know how great the services were which he rendered at times both to our country as well as to his own.
All through the war, till a few days before his death, he was giving his whole heart and soul to his work, and every nerve of his being was strained to the utmost. The war killed him as certainly as if he had fought in the trenches. He was astonishingly far-sighted and clear-sighted. In 1903 he told me there would be a revolution in Russia directly there was a war. At the time of the Agadir crisis, he told me that the future of Europe entirely depended on the policy of the German Government: on whether the German Emperor and his Government decided or not to embark on a Louis XIV. policy of ambition and aggression, and try to make Germany the only European power.
When the Emperor of Russia issued the manifesto of 17th October, and the Russians were bedecking their cities with flags, because they thought they had received a constitution, he made it excruciatingly clear that it was nothing of the kind; and he predicted no less clearly what would be the results of so ambiguous an act, and so dangerously elastic a charter.
His public career belongs to history. I had the privilege[213] of knowing him as a private person and of finding in him the kindest and the wisest of friends.
I think his most striking quality was his keenness. The way he would throw himself into the discussion, the topic, or the occupation of the moment, whether it was a book, a play, a picture, a piece of music, a political question, a wolf-hunt, a speech, a problem, even an acrostic to be guessed, or the dredging of a pond.
Whenever I wrote anything new he always made me read it aloud to him, and he was in himself an extraordinarily exhilarating and encouraging public.
He was all for one’s doing more and more, for finding out what one could not do and then doing it.
He once tried to persuade me to go into Parliament. When I objected that I had no power of dealing with political questions, and no understanding of many affairs that a member of Parliament is supposed to understand, he said: “Rubbish! You could do all that part, just as you wrote a parody of Anatole France; people would think you knew.”
He hated pessimism. He hated the Oriental, passive view of life, especially if it was preached by Occidentals. The looking forward to a Nirvana and a closed door. He hated everything negative. Suicide to him was the one unpardonable sin. He hated affectation, especially cosmopolitan affectation, what he used to call “le faux esprit Parisien.” “Je préfère,” he used to say, “le bon sens anglais.” He was extremely argumentative and would put his whole soul into an argument on the most trivial point; and he was as unblushingly unscrupulous as Dr. Johnson in his use of the weapons of contradiction, although, unlike Dr. Johnson, however heated the argument, he was never rude, even for a second; he didn’t know how to be rude. He spoke the most beautiful natural French, the French of a more elegant epoch than ours, with a slightly classical tinge in it. He spoke it not only as well as a Frenchman, but better; that is to say, he spoke without any frills or unnecessary ornament, either of phrase or accent, with complete ease and naturalness.
He spoke English just as naturally. I remember on one occasion, shortly after he arrived in London, his being taken for an Englishman throughout a whole dinner-party by his host. But he used to say that this was sheer bluff and that[214] his command of the language was limited. His beautiful manners, and the perfection of his courtesy came from the same absence of style I have already alluded to. He was natural and unaffected with everyone, because he was chez soi partout; and his distinction, one felt, was based on a native integrity, a fundamental horror of anything common, or mean, or unkind, the incapacity of striking a wrong note in word or deed: the impossibility of hurting anyone’s feelings. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, writing in a provincial newspaper in Russia, about one of the many European crises that threatened Europe before the outbreak of the Great War, said: “We should have been dragged into a war, had we not had at the time, as our Ambassador in London, the first gentleman in Europe.” That is, I think, his best and most fitting epitaph.
I shall never have the benefit of his criticism any more, his keenness, his almost boyish interest, his decided, argumentative disagreement leaping into a blaze over a trifling point, and never again enjoy that glow of satisfaction—worth a whole world of praise—which I used to feel when he said about something, whether a poem, a newspaper article, a story, or a letter, or the most foolish of rhymes: “C’est très joli.”
I moved from my rooms in the town to the Legation and had most of my meals with the Goschens. Sir Edward’s inimitable humour, his minute observation of detail, and his keen eye for the ludicrous, the quaint and all the absurd incidents of daily life—and especially of diplomatic life—made all the official side of things, the dinner-parties, the interviews with ministers, the ceremonies at the station, the pompousness of the diplomats, extraordinarily amusing. Besides this, he was childishly fond of every kind of game, such as battledore and shuttlecock, and cup and ball.
Sir Edward went on leave in the autumn of 1900, and for a fortnight, from 10th October to 22nd October, I had the glory of being in charge, of being acting Chargé d’Affaires of the Legation, so that when the Foreign Office wrote to me they signed dispatches, “Yours with great truth.” The first thing which had to be done was to leave cards on all the Corps Diplomatique. This duty was always carried out by Ole, the Chancery servant. I gave him a sheaf of my cards to leave; he left some of them, but I think he considered that I was altogether too young to be taken seriously as a Chargé d’Affaires,[215] so he left no cards on the minor diplomats, who lived out of the immediate radius of the British Legation. About three days after I had been in charge, Count Benckendorff told me that the minor diplomats who had received no cards from me had held a meeting of indignation; I was to lose no time in smoothing down their ruffled sensibilities, so I left the cards myself. The only diplomatic interview I remember having was with the future King of Greece, who came to see me in my room and talked about something I didn’t understand. My brief era of sole responsibility was put an end to after a fortnight by the arrival of a new First Secretary in place of Alan Johnson. His name was Herbert. Shortly after his arrival Ethel Smyth paid a visit to Copenhagen on her way back to England from Berlin, where she had been negotiating for the performance of her opera, Der Wald. She wanted to make the acquaintance of the Benckendorffs, and she sang her opera to us, her Mass, and many songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, besides many English and Scotch ballads. Count Benckendorff, who was musical, was enchanted with her singing, with her interpretation of the songs she sang, “la richesse de son exécution,” her vitality, her good humour, her keenness, her passionate interest in everything. She played golf in the daytime and made music in the evening.
At Christmas, Sir Edward’s sons arrived and we had a Christmas-tree in the house, and a treat for the church choir, and endless games of battledore and shuttlecock in the Legation ballroom. Then, suddenly, came the unbelievable news that Queen Victoria was dead. A telegram arrived on the 22nd January, worded thus:
“I am profoundly grieved to inform you that the Queen expired this evening at six-thirty. Notify melancholy intelligence to Government.”
I was just going home for a little leave, but now it seemed impossible: there would be too much to do. But Sir Edward insisted on my going, all the same. Herbert was arriving back from leave, and he said he could get on without me; so I went. I saw the funeral procession from a house near the Marble Arch. The only splash of colour in the greyness and gloom of the long procession was the regalia and the bright pall on the gun-carriage that bore the coffin, and everyone agreed that the most imposing[216] figure in the procession was the German Emperor in a great grey cloak. But the most impressive feature of the whole ceremony was the attitude of the crowd: its size, its silence, the universal black. London was like a dead city, and as someone said at the time: “One went about feeling as if one had cheated at cards.” I felt that what “Onkel Adolph” used to say at Hildesheim was true: “Die Engl?nder lieben ihre alte K?nigin” (“The English love their old Queen”).
In February I went to Karlsruhe to hear Ethel Smyth’s first opera, Fantasio, performed at the Hofteater with Mottl conducting. Fantasio is an opera in two acts written on Musset’s play. Ethel Smyth wrote the libretto herself in German. The opera contains some lovely songs, especially one that begins: “Reite ohne Sattelpferd,” and some of the most delicate music Ethel Smyth ever composed, but the libretto is undramatic, and there are not enough bones in the framework to support the musical structure. Mottl conducted the orchestra beautifully; the opera was respectfully received, but without any great enthusiasm. When the performance was over, we had supper with the Grand Duchess of Baden, and there I met a cousin of mine, Charlie d’Otrante, whom I had not seen since I was a child. He was now, though a Swedish subject—his father was a Swede—an officer in the German Army.
I stayed at Copenhagen till the spring. The spring in Denmark comes with a rush. All is wintry, without any hint of the coming change, and then all of a sudden, and in one night, the beech trees are green, and of so startling, vivid, and fresh a green that it almost hurts the eye, and through them you see the sea, a milky haze, and the sky looks as if it had been washed clean.
In May, I went to London for my first spell of long leave since I had passed my examination. I stayed all June and July in London, and in the middle of July I went over to Brittany to stay a few days with Sarah Bernhardt at her house, the Fort des Poulains on the island of Belle-Isle, which is at the extreme north of the island. This visit entailed a terrific journey: first, a long train journey with many changes, then several hours on board a steamer, and then a two hours’ drive. The house was a little white, square, flat-roofed building among the rocks and a stone’s-throw from the sea—a great roaring[217] grey sea, with huge breakers, leaping cataracts of foam, and beaches of grey pebbles. Sarah Bernhardt’s son was staying there, Clairin, the artist, and one or two other people. The house was built entirely of pitch-pine inside. Sarah used to appear at déjeuner.
She spent all the morning working. In the afternoon she played lawn-tennis on a hard court; after dinner we played every kind of game. She was carrying on at the time a heated discussion by telegraph with the poet Catulle Mendès about the forthcoming production of a poetical play of his, called La Vierge d’Avilon. The dispute was about the casting: the poet wished one of the female parts to be played by a certain actress; Sarah wished otherwise. Telegram after telegram was sent and received, each of them several pages in length. The poet’s telegrams were lyrical and beautifully expressed. One of them began: “Vous êt............