For these thirty-eight years past, the _Albion_ hath been protesting
once a week, in the Latin tongue, that they who skip over the water
change only their sky, not their mental existence. Nor did I ever
doubt--indeed I ought to have faith therein--the truth of this motto,
until I found myself yesterday in one of the streets of this old city of
Nuremburg, with no promenaders at the moment save myself. There was not
a man in sight, tiled with a black beaver chimney-pot; nor a woman
redolent of the Rue de la Paix or Regent Street. Then it was that I
incontinently asked myself if I were truly a Briton by birth and an
Anglo-American by local ties; or whether I were not in fact a German
burgher of the middle ages. I should scarcely have been surprised at
sight of grave Albert Durer himself coming round the corner, or at
hearing Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, trolling one of his six thousand
ditties.
To say this, is simply to add the testimony of another witness to that
which has set down Nuremburg as the city of all Europe least changed
with changing times. The very little that has been done of late years in
the way of repairing and rebuilding, within the walls, has been done in
strict accordance with the prevalent mediaeval style. The result is
that--whereas elsewhere, when you stumble upon a private dwelling of
moderate proportions showing plainly that it was built some two or three
or four or five centuries ago, you congratulate yourself upon having
discovered a curiosity (as such a one really would be in Paris, for
instance)--here the difficult search would be for a house, modern and
spruce. Not that a rectangularly-ornamented gable-end is the
quintessence of architectural beauty, or that a basement front of low
iron-barred windows suggests an agreeable or hospitable interior. By no
means. If this were all, there would be considerable quaintness, and
nought beyond. But it is otherwise. Some of the decorative bits that
catch the eye right and left, are absolute gems in their way--whether
oriel windows, or fantastic turrets, or figures and devices embossed and
sculptured. Taste, generally for the Gothic, but diverging at a later
date into the Renaissance style, seems to have run riot here in wilful
playfulness.
Of the regular sights set down in the hand-books, and explored by
conscientious Englishmen with their Murrays under their arms, it would
not be appropriate to speak at length. I may however indulge in an
allusion to the different material, whereof are constructed two of the
most highly-laboured marvels, here exhibited. Now the city itself is
divided into two nearly equal parts by the small river Pegnitz, these
parts bearing the names respectively of the principal church that stands
in either. The one is dedicated to St. Sebald, the other to St.
Lawrence. The former, as its chief curiosity, contains the shrine of its
patron Saint, an elaborate and most exquisitely wrought fretwork canopy,
about fifteen feet in height, beneath which repose his remains. The
design is in a measure architectural, and Gothic of course; but the
ornamentation is its great glory, though one is staggered somewhat at
the irreverent juxtaposition of the twelve Apostles with Cupids and
Mermaids, and at sundry Fathers of the Church disporting themselves amid
clusters of fruit and bouquets of flowers. This monument of artistic
skill was the work of Peter Vischer, one of the worthies of Nuremburg,
and has been completed three hundred and forty years. The able worker,
having dispensed with consistency in the admixture of Christian and
Pagan accessories, as I have mentioned, was at least justified in
introducing a figure of himself as one of the human animals; and a very
fine statuette he makes, with chisel in hand and his working apron about
him. Now mark, if you please, O attentive reader, this shrine of St.
Sebald is entirely cast in bronze. To say that the effect is beautiful,
is too limited praise. It is harmonious; thoroughly satisfying to the
eye; perfect.
Cross with me now, if you be not weary, one of the dozen picturesque
bridges over the Pegnitz, and let us see what Adam Krafft, another great
Nuremburger of that same age, has done in the same line of Gothic
decoration for the Church of St. Lawrence. His work is a shrine, or I
should rather say a repository for the sacramental wafer of the Roman
Catholic rite. It is an open-work spire, tapering to the height of sixty
feet, with an infinity of graceful detail, and rare sculptures in high
and low relief. One fantasy is, I think, unique of its kind. The roof is
a little too low to admit the crowning summit fairly; and the top,
therefore, has been made to bend over. The effect--purposely designed, I
cannot doubt--is odd; nor can I agree with the fantastic remark of
Murray's Handbook, that it "has the air of a plant which is chocked in
its further growth." Spires and plants are not endowed with equal
pliability, and the idea of one of the former waving about, or nodding
gracefully, suggests an immediate "stand from under." And this all the
more in this instance, because--which brings me thus round-aboutedly to
my main point--the material hereon employed is stone, a clean and
white-toned stone, that looks as though its excellent carvings and
mouldings had been completed only for the last Crystal Palace
Exhibition. The apparent newness is downright provoking; and if Adam
Krafft could peep at it from his honoured grave, he would never dream
that he has lain therein three centuries and a half. Let me say
further--having thus stumbled upon personalities--that he too made
himself as durable as his work. And with more modesty than Master Peter
Vischer above named, who moulded for himself a niche in his monument
corresponding, in size and position, to the one assigned to the patron
Saint, though being at the opposite end of the shrine, the glorifier and
the glorified could not be taken into one glance and a comparison
forced. There was more modesty, I say, in Adam Krafft's mode of
travelling down the stream of Time as showman of his show, though he was
not methinks without a dash of _craft_, as befits the bearer of his
name. Down upon their marrow-bones (as the school boys have it) with
rounded backs grope Adam and his two apprentices, the three backs
forming a base of operations, or in plainer words upholding the
sixty-feet structure, and doing for it that which is done beneath his
rival's shrine by a snail at each of the four corners. Perhaps, after
all, the sculptor-architect was wiser than the bronze-caster, in his
mode of identifying himself with his work. Amid a multitude of figures
and emblems, Peter Vischer, as well as St. Sebald, may be overlooked,
for they are small in size; but you can scarcely avoid asking "who are
these three?" when you note how lofty is the edifice that the large
quasi-Atlases bear.
Enough, touching these minor differences. The essential one, whereof I
intended to speak, is the material in which the pair wrought
respectively. I have said that the bronze entirely satisfied my
critical eye, which is tantamount to saying that it charmed me. Not so
with the stone. It is obviously ill-adapted for detached ornamentation,
needing the solid adjunct of buttress, window, wall, or pillar, just as
ivy needs the oak, or (may I utter such a term?) lace the woman. Indeed,
with all my admiration for sundry mediaeval specimens of Gothic
architecture, wherein I scarcely yield to John Ruskin himself, I confess
that the famous Eleanor's Crosses in England never quite pleased me,
because therein the tracery and dainty delicacies of the design are not
backed by anything massive. The greater part of my readers will not
agree with me. I am sorry, but can't help it. Only, I don't want to see
any more open-work baskets in stone. Give me the most fantastical of
Gothic devices, as many as you please, so long as they have something to
cling to.
Finally, I have fallen quite in love with this quaint, irregular old
place. Nor do I know how long I might have loitered, had not the
inevitable disillusion come, as come it will over so many promising
things and fair. Otherwise I might have gone back--in imagination--to
those honest old times of Durer, Vischer, Krafft, and Company, and
imagined myself a free burgher of a free city. But the spell was doubly
broken. At the old castle--whereof some small apartments are
unpretendingly fitted up for the King and Queen of Bavaria--there comes
upon one, in another part thereof, a vision of certain instruments of
torture, used undoubtedly in those good old times to keep the burghers
submissive to their oligarchy of merchant princes. And again at the
Rath-haus, or Hotel de Ville; the maidenly show-woman lighted us by
lanthorn-light through a set of subterranean dungeons, too numerous to
have been destined for offenders only against the criminal laws, too
horrible to be sanctioned under our creed of comparative gentleness. And
so, on the whole, I returned back to actual existence, and to all the
boredom of Parliamentary conflicts and Presidential elections, with a
certain sense of relief.