IN COLOGNE CATHEDRAL.
YOUNG ITALY, especially of late, has been breaking the hearts of all who are in love with the poetry of associations. Besides the inherent beauty in the old work which is being destroyed every year, there vanishes with such destructionA the added poetry which each year, and each season of each year, has stamped on the stone or marble surface, the harmony and tone that age, Nature working upon Art, alone can give. Young Italy ruthlessly carts away the houses from the Ponte-alle- Grazie in Florence, she destroys romantic fountains in Rome, and to say nothing of the wholesale sacrilege committed by restoration and destruction in Venice, Torcello, and Murano, she climbs with youthful, brutal energy tip into the quiet Cadore mountains, and ruins, for the poet or the artist, the aspect of the spot where Titian was born, rooting up, we are told, the old foun- tain standing on the little green plateau by the side of his birth- place, against the background of dolomite heights, the foun- tain round which Titian must have played as a little child, which he must have watched from the old kitchen-window, as the. cattle came in herds, morning and evening, to drink from its stone lip. Young Italy saw nothing worth preserving iu such an association, but unhappily was not inactive in her obtuseness. She wished to erect something accordant with her own taste, in a spot of world-wide interest (a spot whose chief interest lies in the thought of what it looked like four cen- turies ago), and the result of Young Italy's efforts is, iu place of the old fountain, a modern one in the taste of the age, spotting with its crude newness the mellowed. tone of the scene, and vul- garising with a suggestion of sightseeing a most beautiful and romantic landscape. England cannot boast of much more refine- ment in such matters. Each year brings about, notwithstanding the Anti-Restoration Society, some fresh destruction, which de- presses with a sense of cruelty, and disheartens all hopes for better things in the future. To say nothing of graver and more important destructions, why could not the inoffensive little fountain in the Temple Gardens be left to tell its little story of a past; or the funny old vestry in Kensington, guarded by quaint figures—two pretty bits of colour in the old street—be left us, to make a link with the old palace behind p The same answer is always given,—utility must not be sacrificed to unpractical fancies. As if there was no practical use in that feeling of love of early associations and reverence for the past, for the beauty that age, and ago alone, can add to any monu-
ment, to any human thought worked out in art ! letting alone the unsatisfactory answer which must be given to this question,—If we pull down, can we build up again as well F In these days of machinery, the art we have alive in us has all retired into picture-making and statue-making. No longer in every-day buildings or street ornamentation can we find an idea spon- taneous and original, framed by the artistic faculty which was second nature in former times, and put into shape by the hand of workers also imbued by such an instinctive faculty. There is no denying the fact that we are yearly thoughtlessly destroying what, in the nature of things, we cannot recover in any form. The world has moved away from the conditions which allowed of the construction of these things, and we ought to realise the impossibility of repeating them. But there is one spot in Europe which the most melancholy of the anti-restorers should flock to and take comfort in,—whero not only no destruction is going on, but at present construction in honour of the past. The Cologne Cathedral is to be finished next year. The sound of the hammers and tools that began its foundation six hundred years ago is to cease, they say, in August, 1880, leaving complete this greatest poem in stone the world possesses. Perhaps it is from a spirit of pride more than from religious devotion, that the Germans have for so many years been spending large sums of money on the finishing of this great work; certainly the feeling of the Cologne Cathedral is not repeated in any modern work in the town or country over which it soars high into the air, dwarfing all other buildings for many miles around it. Still, whatever may be the impulse, there is in the undertaking a spirit of reverence for an idea, and the acknowledgment of the greatness of the idea. The plan has not been changed. No modern German has dared to try and improve the conception which, six hundred years ago, a now nameless enthusiast—a giant architect—imagined and drew down. The greatest ideas attack so many sides of human sympathy, that it is seldom but one side is found, sooner or later, to respond to the greatest efforts of genius; and in whatever spirit it is completed, however different are the religious feelings of the workmen who began on the foundations in 1248 and those who are finish- ing the pinnacles in 1879, once finished, the plan worked out, it exists for all the world,—a standard of imaginative grasp, courageous enthusiasm, and yearning devotionto a higher being, the loftiest shrine of Gothic feeling in the world. Let us be grateful to the Germans that they have not only connected the two detached pieces of building, two colossal fragments inter- cepted by masses of old houses—the condition the Cathedral was in when the century began—but that they have completed the plan faithfully to the original conception.
As you mount the hilly street from your hotel, and confront the huge pile and feel the influence of its extraordinary beauty, this idea of an unknown poet whose work breathes up into spaces of blue sky and masses of white, luminous cloud, leaving the roofs of houses at its base, dwarfing the town around it, a romantic, almost mythical interest seems to attach one to it. How strange to hear the sound of the hammers as you pass the sheds clustered round the base, and listen to the ring of the tools echo- ing far away above in those labyrinths of scaffolding that still en- close the airy heights of the spires ; how strange to think those hand-workers are still constructing the idea of a master who had but one human life six hundred years agol What thousands of hands, used for how many years on the conception of one brain 1 Is that one brain conscious that its work is so nearly completed, that the plan it conceived has taken form and size, and that it has risen far up intcethe air, the greatest poem in stone the world has ever seen I' Is this an infant effort of a brain and heart which for six hundred years since has been developing fresh powers in another world P The whole building gives the feeling of rising and lifting itself up away from the town ; from its tourist life of comfortable, crowded hotels, from its commercial life of busy traffic and screeching trains and steamers, from the echo of the life of modern Paris, the ideal of the bourgeoisie of Europe, the materialist life of pleasure, show, and comfort,—this Gothic shrine would seem to spring up away from all this. The flying buttresses alone in the design, like arms outstretched around it, holding on to pinnacled staves, seem to fix it down. The rich- ness, the intricacy, the elaboration, these are all beautiful and admirable, but they are but details in the service of that feeling
of upward yearning and longing, the pure poetry of Gothic art. As the height of the Dom rises above the dwelling-houses around it, so the elevation of that feeling of devotion must have risen above material interests in the soul of the inventor of this great poem. Where, in our modern life, is the fervour, se secure in its aim, so settled in its faith, so enthusiastic in its• force P This is the genius of the old masters. We have art- genius enough, but art not elevated by some faith enthusiastically believed in has never and will never create works such as this,, unquestionably great, which impresses, consciously or uncon- sciously, every human soul coming under its influence.
Leaving the sunlight on the Platz outside, and passing: through the small swing-door, you find yourself in cool spaces of shadowed height. The Gothic feeling is even more impres- sively, because more simply, expressed here, than in the richer,. more elaborate building outside, the casement of the shrine. Inside, the sense of being drawn higher and higher is even greater. The eye unconsciously rises, as the pillars seem to be attenuated and stretch away above the sight. The roof is no- where, the eye seldom reaches it. There is a general sense of over- shadowing, but it is far above ; the sense of springing upwards has no limit. The completeness of Greek perfection, the self-contained power which produces perfect harmony, is not here, nor the ornamented art of the Renaissance; but a spirit, a soul, has built itself into pillars which soar with almost an exaggeration of height; the courage for such a successful exaggeration of proportion means a strength outside and beyond: human reason. To realise in stone such a yearning upwards of the spirit means more than genius for art, though this is present in its highest constructive power ; it means the genius of religious devotion, inspiration. It is the purity and directness of aim in this art which separates it, and elevates it above all more recent art of the kind; the spirit of it makes even that of Albert Dfirer's magnificent windows modern, fantastic, and worldly.. The saints in these are mixed up with heraldry, the Maria with rings and potentates, the materials of the robes of the devotional are patterned over with richest designs, the colours are gorgeous,.. they are triumphs of art; but sit down on one of the seats below them, and turn towards the vistas of pillars, and you feel how much more elevated and simpler is tho feeling of the earlier work, in those cross avenues of stony stems flecked with coloured sunlight, and pierced with the jewels of old glass, like the points of light that dazzle through thick foliage from the setting sun. This older glass, two hundred years more ancient than that of Albert Duras, has in it no design that can be dis- tinctly traced from below, but mysterious jets of solemn colour,. through which the sun has pierced for five hundred years, dazzle round the loftiest pillars like crowns of jewels.
Moving across the church, towards the old entrance, you come upon the huge stone image of St. Christopher, struggling through the floods, yearning, enthusiastic, happy, guided by the smiling child, seeing the further side, the goal where the- burden will be taken off and a truth unveiled. Here, again,. is the purest spirit of the Gothic; also in the group of 'the• Pieta, found under the houses which for centuries divided the tower from the chancel. The expression of the faces, roughly sculptured, in this group is gentle and dignified, the sorrow in them simple and grave, the devotion tender and pity-. ing. The whole group, however, is smothered with large, paper roses, a breath of the devotion of the nineteenth-cen- tury Catholics. Sitting in view of the St. Christopher, we see also a little doll, very old, and decked with queenly robes and numberless gold and jewelled trinkets. Seven candles are burning by her side, seven signs of faith in the Cologne. Catholics that the Virgin will cure their sick children. If it is a log that causes the illness, a little wax log is brought and hung
beneath her shrine, on which she stands in a glass case ; if an arm, a wax arm ; if it is a general illness, a wax image of a whole baby. If the children recover, the Virgin is rewarded by having a brooch, or a ring, or. a cross hung on. to her. This,.
surely, can hardly be the practice of the Germans we meet at our table d'hôte. These look so very unsuperstitious, so much too knowing, for any such faith as this. Probably such customs are chiefly kept up by the peasant class. But is this feeling less enlightened than the materialist view of life ? Both assuredly fall far short of the elevation and the enlightenment of the spirit who, living in what is called the dark ages, created this marvel of architecture, this poem of Gothic feeling, the Cologne- Cathedral. We leave it with a sense that humanity seems purer, higher, worthier for having counted among, its creatures such a brain and such a soul as the inventor of it..
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