160 STBAY-AWAYS 



Antiquities (which we would fain eulogise after its 

 deserving), and the Danske Folke Museum (from which 

 we could, still more gladly, have abstracted wedding 

 presents, in old furniture and silver, to have lasted 

 for a lifetime), and Thorwaldsen was already obscured 

 behind kitchen middens, and the evolution of the 

 toothbrush. But his tranquillity remains in the 

 memory as the tranquillity of superior strength; he 

 is a Milton in sculpture removed from all heats and 

 transitions in art. 



His country's art is now in transition, not without 

 heat; there are heretics fresh from Paris schools; 

 there are heretics of older standing, half ready to 

 leave Denmark because of the narrowness that they 

 find in it, there are those to whom the Parisian greens 

 and mauves and magentas are the sin of witchcraft ; 

 but the school of the plein airistes is strong in the 

 North, and in its reliance on Nature has a special 

 fascination for these Northerns, whose passion for 

 Nature is a wonderful exemplification of the principle 

 of loving one's enemies. Every summer a troop of 

 the elect settles down upon Skagen, up at the northern 

 point of Denmark, a village of farmhouses, on a coast 

 half blind with drifting sand, facing the cold anger 

 of the Skagen Rack. Its creamy sand, its great 

 horizons, its bitter blue sea, have found fame at the 

 hands of many good artists ; the canvases of Kroyer 

 and Johannsen and Froken Krebs carry the prickle 

 of the sandy wind, the smell of the harsh grass, the 

 creaking of the battered arms of the windmills, but 

 they give no hint of the kindnesses of life, nor do they 

 conceal the fact that wind and sand have it all their 

 owji way there, and that Skagen is a place where 

 the inhabitants must exhume themselves and their 

 houses every few days if they do not wish to emerge 

 in coming centuries as a pale Danish Pompeii. 



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