We arrived here this evening. I left the cars with my head full of the
cathedral. The first thing I saw, on lifting my eyes, was a brown
spire. Said I,--
"C., do you think that can be the cathedral spire?"
"Yes, that must be it."
"I am afraid it is," said I, doubtfully, as I felt, within, that
dissolving of airy visions which I have generally found the first
sensation on visiting any celebrated object.
The thing looked entirely too low and too broad for what I had heard
of its marvellous grace and lightness; nay, some mischievous elf even
whispered the word "dumpy" hi my ear. But being informed, in time,
that this was the spire, I resisted the temptation, and determined to
make the best of it. I have since been comforted by reading in
Goethe's autobiography a criticism on its proportions quite similar to
my own. We climbed the spire; we gained the roof. What a magnificent
terrace! A world itself; a panoramic view sweeping the horizon. Here I
saw the names of Goethe and Herder. Here they have walked many a time,
I suppose. But the inside!--a forest-like firmament, glorious in
holiness; windows many hued as the Hebrew psalms; a gloom solemn and
pathetic as man's mysterious existence; a richness gorgeous and
manifold as his wonderful nature. In this Gothic architecture we see
earnest northern races, whose nature was a composite of influences
from pine forest, mountain, and storm, expressing, in vast proportions
and gigantic masonry, those ideas of infinite duration and existence
which Christianity opened before them. A barbaric wildness mingles
itself with fanciful, ornate abundance; it is the blossoming of
northern forests.
The ethereal eloquence of the Greeks could not express the rugged
earnestness of souls wrestling with those fearful mysteries of fate,
of suffering, of eternal existence, declared equally by nature and
revelation. This architecture is Hebraistic in spirit, not Greek; it
well accords with the deep ground-swell of Hebrew prophets.
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.
"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed
the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou
art God.
"A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past.
"And as a watch in the night."
The objection to Gothic architecture, as compared with Greek, is, that
it is less finished and elegant. So it is. It symbolizes that state of
mind too earnest for mere polish, too deeply excited for laws of exact
proportions and architectural refinement. It is Alpine architecture--vast,
wild, and sublime in its foundations, yet bursting into flowers at every
interval.
The human soul seems to me an imprisoned essence, striving after
somewhat divine. There is a struggle in it, as of suffocated flame;
finding vent now through poetry, now in painting, now in music,
sculpture, or architecture; various are the crevices and fissures, but
the flame is one.
Moreover, as society grows from barbarism upward, it tends to
inflorescence, at certain periods, as do plants and trees; and some
races flower later than others. This architecture was the first
flowering of the Gothic race; they had no Homers; the flame found vent
not by imaged words and vitalized alphabets; they vitalized stone, and
their poets were minster builders; their epics, cathedrals.
This is why one cathedral--like Strasbourg, or Notre Dame--has a
thousand fold the power of any number of Madeleines. The Madeleine is
simply a building; these are poems.
I never look at one of them without feeling that gravitation of soul
towards its artist which poetry always excites. Often the artist is
unknown; here we know him; Erwin von Steinbach, poet, prophet, priest,
in architecture.
We visited his house--a house old and quaint, and to me _full_ of
suggestions and emotions. Ah, if there be, as the apostle vividly
suggests, houses not made with hands, strange splendors, of which
these are but shadows, that vast religious spirit may have been
finding scope for itself where all the forces of nature shall have
been made tributary to the great conceptions of the soul.
Save this cathedral, Strasbourg has nothing except peaked-roofed
houses, dotted with six or seven rows of gable windows.