development of organism, and as they increase in size they show only a
multiplication of rather infelicitous parts. Underneath is an idea that
was susceptible of development into something fine and national, but it
never had either the time or the spirit to work itself out and so
remains a heavy and rather illiterate labouring after something too
dimly seen to be really stimulating in the sense in which the ideal in
Normandy and France was stimulating. Actually there was more of promise
in the work of the eleventh century, as we see it at Hildesheim and
Cologne, but this also was left undeveloped and never worked out its
inherent possibilities.
The architectural development of Germany began too late; it was always a
full century behind France and Italy, and when the Rhenish people were
hammering away at their clumsy and uninspired giants of masonry that
never seemed to become anything else and never produced any elements of
novelty or progress, either structurally or æsthetically, Normandy
already had struck out those masterpieces of crescent vitality, Jumièges
and the abbeys of Caen, while France was well along the highroad of her
consummate Gothic, through St. Denis, Noyon, Laon, and Paris.
This backwardness in the acceptance of civilisation has always worked
against the attainment of the highest levels of culture by that portion
of the Germanic nation north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, while
it has given it a certain advantage in the achievement of material ends,
since the ethical and religious considerations, that in a measure held
elsewhere, were naturally lacking. No part of this wild land of savage
and heathen tribes ever felt the touch of Roman civilisation, such as it
was, and it was the last part of central Europe to be Christianised. The
Bavarians, Burgundians, and Franks all accepted Christianity at the end
of the fifth century, but the tribes between the Rhine and the Weser
were heathens for another three hundred years. The Wendish lands (where
Berlin now is) did not come into Christian Europe until the early
eleventh century, at about the time, let us say, of Duke Richard of
Normandy and the founding of the great abbeys and schools of Bec,
Fécamp, and Jumièges; Pomerania (where the grenadiers come from) was
converted after a fashion a hundred years later still, in the days of
the highest civilisation in Europe, but Prussia was the last of all,
and when Christianity was preached in its arid plains and amongst its
stubbornly heathen peoples Reims cathedral was rising into its sublime
majesty, marking the high attainments of almost eight centuries of
cumulative Christian culture.
Even in the Rhineland, however, there was something lacking to that
culture that always has issue in great architectural art; many things
were started but none was ever finished. The school of Cologne gave
place to the Rhenish fashion and this was suddenly abandoned for Gothic
after it had been raised to its highest point in France and was at the
very moment of decline. Neither Cologne nor Strasbourg is of the same
quality of perfection as Bourges or Amiens or Reims; indeed, they both
fall immeasurably short, and though later, across the Rhine, in
Freibourg, Erfurt, even as far afield as Vienna, Teutonic blood was to
begin a new coursing through veins already hardening, again there was to
be no culmination and the Renaissance was accepted, ready-made, as it
came from France and Italy.
Cologne is a magnificent essay in premeditated art, and it has certain
qualities of almost over-powering grandeur that are wholly its own; the
west front with its vast towers is a masterpiece of consistent design,
but it is so knowing and academic that it misses the inspiration
accorded to more modest and God-fearing master builders, while the
interior is wire-drawn and metallic and quite without the infinite grace
and subtlety of the best French or even English work. Of the sense of
scale it has little or nothing, its detail is of a cast-iron quality,
and altogether it seems like a very successful nineteenth-century essay
in academic design.
Of course, much of what we see is modern; the choir is fairly early for
Gothic in Germany, having been begun in 1248 and finished just
seventy-five years later; the transepts followed at once, and the lower
portion of the nave, but interest died out and some time during the
fifteenth century work completely stopped. During the Renaissance
nothing was done except to mess up the forlorn interior with
pseudo-classic ineptitudes, and finally the Revolutionists came over to
turn the whole thing into a storage place for hay. In 1823 royalty
conceived the scheme of restoring the ruin and completing the entire
design in accordance with certain original plans which had been
preserved. It is said, possibly with truth,
[Illustration: COLOGNE]
that the first architect, Master Gerard, sold his soul to the devil as
the price for these same plans, and if so he would perhaps have done
better had he followed the practice of the master masons of a century
earlier in France, who preferred to deal with other spiritual powers and
not on the basis of trade. However this may be, the work went on at the
expense of all Germany, and was finally completed in 1880, at a cost of
some five millions of dollars.
As it stands, then, it is largely the work of restoration and of
nineteenth-century talent; hence, if in the fortunes of war it should be
subjected to the hail of shell and shrapnel from French and British
batteries, so working out the hard old Israelitish law of an eye for an
eye, a tooth for a tooth, and suffering even as Reims has suffered, the
world would look on with far different sentiments since, apart from its
windows (some of them) and pictures and tombs, nothing would be lost
that could not be replaced and after a better fashion; for after all
when you say the most you can for the nineteenth century it will
generally be admitted that, even in Germany, it was not a stimulating
era so far as creative or even archæological Gothic art is concerned.
Strasbourg is much more interesting and poetic, with great refinement
and originality in design, though its taste is far from impeccable, its
structural sense gravely deficient. The tendency is wholly toward
lace-like and fantastic design, but it has little resemblance to the
late French flamboyant with its curving and interlacing lines; instead,
it is more suggestive of the English perpendicular, with its scaffolding
of vertical lines applied to, but not a part of, the basic fabric. It
has no consistency of plan, for the eastern end, with its semicircular
apse and portions of its transepts, is of a singularly noble type of
twelfth-century Romanesque, while the nave is mid-thirteenth century and
the tower and upper portion of the west front are a hundred years later.
Confused as it is, there is an extraordinary charm about it all, for
every part is personal and distinguished, full of novel and poetic ideas
and all kinds of unaffected touches of genius. The wonderful colour of
the exterior and the singularly fine glass of the interior have much to
do with its general effect of a delicate mediæval loveliness that makes
amends for its architectural shortcomings.
Of the castle architecture of the Rhine there is
[Illustration: STRASBOURG]
little left from the mediæval period from which one can gain an adequate
idea of its excellence, which was probably great. As in Luxembourg,
everything has been shattered into wildly picturesque ruins which are
outside the category of architecture, and such Renaissance work as
Heidelberg is quite as far without the same category, though for another
reason; here even picturesqueness of site and dilapidation cannot make
amends for ignorance, assurance, and excruciating taste. As a matter of
fact, the best architecture of the Rhine is the domestic building of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the half timber, many-gabled
structures that give the little Rhine towns a charm that is unexcelled
and testify to the native sense of beauty in the common people, when
they were left alone and not confused by the self-satisfied and ill-bred
interference of the connoisseur.
If Christian culture began too late along the Rhine to find a great
expression in architecture, the same is not true of painting, which
followed after and achieved much that the older art could not
accomplish. The Teutonic tribes of the Rhine had always excelled in
certain virtues of frugality, temperance, domestic morality, and a
righteous revolt showed itself here against the corruption of the
Church and society in the fourteenth century that followed the first
downward trend of mediævalism. Early in the century men and women began
to draw away from a world with which they had little sympathy, striving
for personal righteousness, the sense of an inner relation to God, the
attainment through mystical means of escape from the devastating wars,
the pestilence and famine, the favouritism and cupidity and
licentiousness of the Church. The centre of these mystical brotherhoods
was Cologne, particularly at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning
of the fifteenth century, and it is not a mere coincidence that here at
Cologne also, and at the same time, a new school of painting should come
into existence, exactly as had happened a few years earlier in Siena and
Florence. There had been great wall painting for several centuries, but
it had always been an essential part of architecture, hieratic, formal,
monumental, impersonal; now the new spiritual impulse was to work out an
original and very personal form of expression on the basis of these
earlier works, but at smaller scale and with a minute craftsmanship
borrowed partly from the goldsmiths’ work and the enamels for which
Cologne already was famous; partly from the exquisite illumination of
the vellum volumes of the time. It was somewhere about 1350 that Master
Wilhelm, who holds the same place in the north that was attained by
Cimabue in the south, was born. His pictures are rare but there is one
of great value in Cologne cathedral, the “St. Clara Triptych,” and it
shows all the elements now at work toward the development of the new
art, the fine and masterly line and composition, with a strong rhythmic
sense taken over from the fully developed wall painting of the preceding
century, the delicate craftsmanship of the goldsmith, the illuminator,
or the worker in enamels, and the extraordinary personal quality, the
direct human appeal, that was furnished by the mystical seekers after
union with God through a direct relationship outside the formalised
institutions and practices of the Church. You get the quality best of
all perhaps from the “Madonna of the Bean-flower” in the Cologne Museum,
another picture by Master Wilhelm, and as lovely and personal as one
could ask. There are also the “Paradise pictures,” equally human and
even more mystical; visions of delicate and gracious gardens, where
youths and ladies and children and angels all mingle in the midst of
flowers and singing around the Queen of Heaven herself; efforts, one
might think, to create a paradise for the imagination, where one could
escape from the too numerous horrors of a none too accommodating world.
The more specifically devotional pictures are very numerous and
generally anonymous; painters then were craftsmen, members of guilds
devoted to the upbuilding of the highest standards of workmanship, and
caring little for their own personal fame. Picture exhibitions and
competitions for prizes and medals were also unknown, which made a
difference. In all these works is the same sweet humanism, the
invariable personal appeal, and it is easy to understand that a new art
such as this must have been a wonderful boon to a weary and disappointed
generation.
The Teuton had at last found a field for the expression of that æsthetic
sense that was one of the inalienable possessions of man down to the
nineteenth century, and he made the very best of it, as he was to make
the best of the still newer art of music a few centuries later. The
world wanted this new art, and from Cologne it spread rapidly to the
west into Flanders and Brabant, and south to Franconia and Suabia. To
the
[Illustration: BACHARACH ON THE RHINE]
school of Cologne Hubert van Eyck owed much, he could hardly have been
what he was but for Master Wilhelm and his contemporaries, but he added
something of his own Flanders, and more of himself, and the art he
initiated rose immeasurably above its source.
In sculpture also the Teuton found a facile and congenial form of
expression, but this art developed rather to the north and east of the
Rhine. Hildesheim was, of course, the centre, for it was here that
Bishop Bernward gathered or educated his amazing craftsmen in bronze.
Where such an artist came from, as he who made the cathedral doors and
the bronze column, heaven alone knows, for it was early in the eleventh
century that these came into existence. They began a school, however,
that continued in Saxony for many centuries and had its influence over
all Germany. The early thirteenth-century bronze font, also in the
cathedral, is one of those masterpieces that defy comparison. The great
school of sculpture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that
which grew up between the Elbe and the Hartz Mountains, not only in
Hildesheim but Halberstadt, Bamberg, Freiberg, Magdebourg, Naumbourg,
the masters of Magdebourg ranking with those of Amiens and Reims.
Undoubtedly there is French influence here, perhaps through the
training, under the masters of France, of the craftsmen who later went
back to their native lands to practise their art. In Strasbourg the
French influence is even more clearly seen but here it is rather in the
line of the more southerly schools. It is at Strasbourg that we find
that singular and ingenious masterpiece, the “Pillar of the Angels,”
slender grouped shafts with intermediate niches, one above the other,
each containing an exquisite statue of an apostle, an angel, or, at the
top, our Lord at the Day of Judgment. This is one of those sudden and
unprecedented happenings in mediæval art that mark the vast vitality,
imagination, and personal initiative of the time. It has no progenitors,
no successors, it is a sport of personal genius, and the masterpiece of
one Ervin de Steinbach, who appears to have been the architect for the
later portions of the cathedral.
Apart from Strasbourg, however, sculpture seems never to have been a
favoured art in the Rhineland, and the painting of Cologne remains its
chief claim to honourable record, though stained glass reached
considerable heights, as is seen both at Cologne and Strasbourg, and on
definitely local lines. By the fifteenth century the Flemish schools of
art of all kinds had succeeded by their sheer achievement in
establishing their dominant influence along the Rhine, and with the
Renaissance the lingering elements of an instinctive practice of beauty
quite died away.
XV
THE FOREST OF ARDEN
Where the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle
that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can
give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an
implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a
place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last
year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some
centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties;
Roman Belgica, part of the kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia,
Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, the
Netherlands (Spanish and Austrian), France again, both of the republican
and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous Germany, and now, crushed
into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign Grand
Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of
oppression wherefrom no word issues forth, but destined under God to a
triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to
earlier and wider frontiers.
Luxembourg means that portion of the Heart of Europe lying between the
Meuse and the Moselle, and one line drawn from Limbourg to Trèves,
another from Verdun to Metz. It is now a tithe of this, but who can say
what may be in the future? All its great northern portion has for long
been incorporated in the eternally honourable kingdom of Belgium, and
there it will remain, but there is always the old Archbishopric of
Trèves with its Moselle valley, and there are the lands along the Saar
and the new (and old) frontiers of France. At present, as a result of
three treaties in which it played the passive part of victim, it is a
fourth the size it once had under its first Duke Wenceslas; the first
section was lost in 1659, the second at the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
the third and largest at London in 1859, but, as a Japanese guide
remarked at the monastery of Horiuji, “The quality is not dependent on
the numerality of quantity,” and as nothing was lost but land the
indomitable spirit of the people remained intact and merely
concentrated itself still more intensely within its shrunken borders.
Luxembourg lies along that line where first the Teuton blended with the
primitive Gaul, or Celt, and where a second mingling later took place
between the result of the first--the Salian Frank--and the same old
Teutonic stock. It is the mating-place of races and therefore the
fighting-place as well, and always will remain so, as they and we now
realise only too clearly. They were far enough apart, these Celts and
Germans, to guarantee good progeny. The Gaul was huge of stature,
blonde, long-haired, fond of fine clothes and golden chains. He was
pastoral and agricultural, aristocratic in his social and political
systems, incontinent, good-natured, quick-tempered, superstitious,
Druidical. The Teuton was red-haired, shaven except for a fierce
top-knot, grim in his clothing, contemptuous of agriculture and of
everything else except fighting; as a youth he wore an iron collar which
could not be removed until he had killed his man. Politically he was
ultra-democratic; socially, monogamous and chaste; theologically,
monotheistic. From the fusion of these two elements came the many tribes
of Gallia Belgica, and in good time most of the peoples of the Heart of
Europe, of Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Lorraine, the hither
Rhineland, Champagne, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois. Trèves, head city of
the Treveri, was the natural capital and so it became under the Cæsars
when they had made their wilderness and called it peace.
It did not remain a wilderness long; presently came the pacific Cæsars
of a later day and the whole land became first the “kitchen-garden of
Rome” and then the Newport of the Empire. Fine roads cut the forests in
every direction, land was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that
shortly the whole region was a garden dotted with private parks and
estates. Trèves was made a great city, with palaces, temples, baths,
amphitheatres, the summer capital of Europe and second in Gaul only to
Lyons. A city of manifold pleasures and as many beauties; rich,
sumptuous, sensuous, where from the shores of Tiber and Bosporus
enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of living came to cool
themselves and restore their vitality in the fresh air and the green
river valleys of this curiously picturesque retreat. All along the
Moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms of sheeted marble and
mosaic and gilded cedar and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens
and cool groves and wide-spreading parks. A golden day-dream focussed
along the windings of a little river and destined, the sleepers dreamed,
to endure for ever.
And then the greater dream of empire began to turn into nightmare. The
Gallic legions revolted against a weakening hand in Rome, and Cæsars of
a day and a thousand votes fought back and forth over the land, and
burned and murdered and died until peace came again, and restoration,
with real emperors refreshing themselves in their imperial city of
Trèves and their dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding Moselle.
War again, and ruin, this time of a nature to last for generations and
to leave the marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of trees and
vines and moss. Out of the terrible east the Huns came like a flood with
the deadly Attila at their head, blind terror before them, death and
silence behind. Just to the west, at Châlons, they were beaten back and
fled eastward again (men thought for ever), and what was left became
part of the new Frankish kingdom. Of the makers of this nation and the
stock from which sprang Merovings, Carolings, and most of
[Illustration: SCHLOSS ELTZ]
the other royal houses of Europe, the Reverend T. H. Passmore writes
engagingly thus:
The record of this people, until the close of the fifth century, is
dim and discursive. Up to that time they were more like a firework
display than a people. They appear and disappear on the historic
horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general
and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition
of the universe. The first head upon which history steadily
focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of the
small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered all around
him to such an extent that the other Frankish tribes who lived
along the Belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to
the standard of so virtuous a prince.... The pious Clovis was a
born diplomatist. He was a sanguinary Teuton, a cultured Roman, and
a Christian saint according to circumstances. He was great.
After clearing Gaul of the Burgundians and other Germans who still
barred his progress, and wiping out the Alemanni--those chronic
foes whom Rome had found invincible--Clovis listened to the prayers
of his Christian wife, Clotilde, and was baptised in Rheims
Cathedral by St. Remigius with three thousand of his devoted
Franks, who would probably have heard of it again had they made any
trouble about the matter. He does not seem, however, to have grown
any nicer or kinder on this account. St. Gregory of Tours, his
biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly endowed with
the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on one occasion, after
dismissing with prayer a synod of the Gallican Church, he quietly
proceeded to butcher all the Merovingian princes. Having pushed his
arms into France, he fixed on Paris as his royal seat; conquered
the Goths under Alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was
invested with purple tunic in St. Martin’s church at Tours.
Twenty-five years after his death the Emperor Justinian generously
bestowed on his sons the provinces of Gaul, which they already
possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabitants from their
allegiance to himself, which had only existed in his own august
imagination. Thus the French kingdom of the Merovingians, to the
generation succeeding Clovis, already included all Gaul from
western France to the Rhine and their suzerainty reached to the
Alps and beyond them.
Luxembourg had long been Christian after a fashion; the first Bishop of
Trèves had been appointed by St. Peter himself, while the Emperor
Constantine, who had lived much in the city, fostered the new religion
in every way. Later, at the time of the era-making Pepin of Heristal,
St. Willibrord came from England on his great mission to the heathen of
Friesland, and while converting them, and much of Norway and Denmark to
boot, established here at Echternach a great monastery that was his
spiritual power-house, from which he drew the energy that sent him on
his endless journeys and cruises, by land and sea, for the winning of
souls to Christ. He did his work well, none better, and wherever he went
Christianity went with him, and a new civilisation, a new culture, that
remained for many centuries after he had been called to his high
reward, buried in his dear abbey at Echternach and enrolled in the
Kalendar of Saints.