Baltic on the east is an archipelago forty miles in length, dotted with islands and headlands, smiling and peaceful in summer, ice-bound and storm-lashed in the winter, but equally beautiful in January or June.
The first building that strikes the eye is naturally the royal palace, which, I must say, to republican eyes, looks square and somber and lacking in ornamentation, but which connoisseurs in palaces say is one of the most beautiful in Europe.
Do you remember my writing you some years ago about my interview with good King Oscar in this old palace? After waiting in the public reception room for a little while I was announced by the lord chamberlain and stepped into a little room leading off the large reception hall, and there, all alone, stood a very tall and very handsome man in a light blue military uniform, with two or three jeweled decorations on his breast. This was Oscar II, by the grace of God, King of Sweden and Norway, of the Goths and Vandals. He bowed and smiled with a most winning and gracious expression, and, coming forward, took me by the hand and led me to a seat on one side of a small table, on the other side of which he seated himself. I do not think it was the glamour of royalty that dazzled my eyes when I wrote of his winning smile. Many others have spoken of his charm of manner, and he was noted as being the most courtly, affable, and gracious monarch that sat upon any throne of Europe.
But alas, the good king has died since my last visit to Stockholm, his later years being embittered by the partition of his kingdom, when Norway decided to set up a king of her own. But though kings may come and kings may go, the grim old palace which has harbored all the rulers of Sweden for eight hundred years still stands on the banks of the tumultuous Mälar.
When the palace was rebuilt, or restored, some two hundred and twenty years ago, it was the scene of a most tragic event. In 1692 Charles XI decided that it was time to remodel the old home of the Swedish kings, which had already stood upon that spot for six centuries. He commanded Tessin, a great architect, who has left his impress upon Stockholm and all Sweden, to rebuild the palace. Accordingly the architect traveled in Italy and France and England to make a study of the best palaces he could find. When his plans were completed, he showed them to Louis XIV of France, who was so much pleased with them that he commanded his ambassador to Sweden to congratulate Charles XI “on this beautiful edifice he was proposing to erect.”
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
The Royal Palace, Stockholm.
But Charles XI never lived to see the plans carried out. He died after the work had been well begun, and when the scaffoldings surrounded the palace on every side. The work of reconstruction was of course interrupted while the king’s body was lying in state, but just before the funeral procession moved out of the palace a fire broke out, and the whole edifice was destroyed, save the great walls, which are standing to this day. With extreme difficulty the king’s body was saved and carried into the royal stables, where his grandson, a lad fifteen years of age, who was destined to become Charles XII, one of the most famous kings of Sweden, had taken refuge.
A picture in the National Museum makes the scene live over again: the old queen, frightened by the double catastrophe; the boy king, helping his frightened grandmother down the steps, while the tongues of fire leap out at them from behind; the courtiers in hot haste carrying the coffin of the old king, while the little princesses look on with childish interest, scarcely realizing the gravity of the situation.
Again the great architect had to go to work on his task, so sadly interrupted. For thirty years it was pursued, during the days of Sweden’s greatest poverty, and only in 1754, nearly sixty years after Tessin began his work of rebuilding, was it completed, and nearly thirty years after the death of the master builder.
The palace has at least the merit of commodiousness, for we are told that “when King Oscar celebrated his Jubilee in 1897, all his guests, including more than twenty princes and half as many princesses, belonging to all the thrones of Europe, were lodged there with their numerous suites.”
But your republican soul, Judicia, will be more interested in some of the other buildings of Stockholm, perhaps even in the hideous excrescence which towers up above the roofs of the houses, and which shows us where the telephone exchange is situated, to which ten thousand wires, more or less (I did not count them), converge. I should think, however, that it would require at least ten thousand wires to satisfy the rapacious demands of the Stockholmers for telephone service. Every hotel room, even in the modest hostelries, has one, and most of them have two telephones, a city telephone and a long-distance one.
In every little park and open space are two telephone booths, for long and short distances. Stockholm, with a population about the twentieth part of greater London, has nearly twice as many telephones as the British metropolis, and the service is always prompt, cheap, and obliging.
Then there is the great Lift, a conspicuous feature of Old Stockholm, which hoists passengers in a jiffy from the level of the Baltic to the heights of the old town. That, too, would interest you, Judicia, for I remember your strenuous objections to hill-climbing.
To turn from structures, useful but hideous, to one more beautiful, and, shall I say, less useful? there is the Riksdag, a modern building of very handsome and generous proportions, where the law-makers of Sweden assemble, and where, I suppose, rival parties fire hot shot at one another as freely as they do in Washington or London. Every year the Swedish parliament meets in the middle of January and closes its sessions on the fifteenth of May, and this is the one place which the king may not enter, as one of the guardians of the Riksdag proudly informed me. Both houses of Parliament go to him, but he may not return to them. At the opening of Parliament, the legislators assemble in the palace, where the king addresses them, and the medieval ceremony connected with this function is worth telling you about.
After prayers and a special sermon in the cathedral relating to the duties of legislation (a religious custom that reminds us of the old Election Day Sermon of the good State of Massachusetts, a custom now unhappily abolished), the members of the upper and lower houses march into a great hall in the palace, the speakers of the two houses leading the way, and take their seats on either side of the throne. This throne is of solid silver, on a raised platform, and on either side of it are seats for the princes and members of the royal family. The queen and princesses sit in the gallery, surrounded by members of the court. “All sorts and conditions of men are represented—bishops and country clergymen, provincial governors and landed noblemen, freehold peasants, rural schoolmasters, university dons, and industrial kings.”
We are reminded of the past history of Sweden by the uniforms of the military guards, some of whom are in the costume of Charles XII, and others in that of Gustavus III. The courtiers are arrayed in gorgeous uniforms, and their breasts blaze with their many decorations. After the guard and the gentlemen-in-waiting come the princes, in the march to the throne room, and last of all the king himself. He seats himself upon the throne and commences his address, which always begins with the words, “Good Sirs and Swedish Men” and ends with his assurance of good will to all.
The presidents of the two houses respond to the speech of the king. The heads of the departments read their reports and present their budgets. Then, the stately ceremony being over, the gorgeous procession files out in the same order in which it came in, and the two houses proceed to the Parliament Building to begin the work of the new session.
If the fad that prevailed among our novelists a few years ago in finding titles for their stories should ever reach Sweden, I am sure that there would be a novel called “The Man from Dalecarlia,” for he is certainly the most picturesque figure in the Riksdag. In the midst of the sober, black coats and white shirt fronts and patent-leather shoes and top hats, he stands out like a very bird of paradise in his navy blue coat, trimmed with red piping, bright red waistcoat, knee breeches tied with heavy tassels, and bright shoe-buckles. He might have stepped into the Riksdag out of the century before last. But I am glad he has not discarded his national costume, and, whenever I see a Dalecarlian girl on the street in her bright striped apron and piquant cap (and these girls often seek service in Stockholm), I am again grateful for the bit of color which they bring into the gray, wintry