FROM Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and then in the ?le de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long delayed, and never more than an echo at most. There were bad kings until the second Crusade and the coming of the Cistercians in 1174, and little culture; but from then on there was a distinct spiritual revival, a new impulse in religion and in life, and as a result the output of art of all kinds was greatly increased. The three elements entering into the new architecture were: the revived tradition of the old work of the Carolings, much of which still existed{279} in ruinous form, the new ideas brought home from Syria by the crusaders, and the infiltration of Lombard fashions from north Italy, with the Cistercian monks always exerting their austere and reforming influence toward simplicity.

Many of the earliest examples of this new work—at least the earliest now existing—are across the Rhine, in Thuringia and Saxony, and are outside our survey. Gernrode, Essen, Hildesheim, are all beyond our territory, but Cologne is this side the river and contains some of the most organic and best of the late tenth and early eleventh century work. Sta. Maria in Capitolio and St. Martin are both of that very peculiar type of plan that has an apse and apsidal transepts of equal size and semicircular in plan. The central tower is supported on four piers made up of groups of four, as at San Marco in Venice, and the apse and transepts are surrounded by ambulatories, the main walls being carried on columns, set rather close together and carrying round arches. It is an interesting and ingenious scheme, with great possibilities of development, though it has almost never been used elsewhere; probably it is of Syrian origin, the idea being brought home by early crusaders, though it may be Byzantine, in{280} which case also it was probably derived from Antioch, where the crusaders found so much of value to them in the development of the later art of Europe. St. Martin’s has also a very beautiful tower with a high broach spire and admirably designed corner turrets. The composition of the church from the east, with its curving apsidal lines, its delicate little colonnades of Lombard form under the eaves, and the graceful yet powerful towers, is noble and dignified, and the whole building is far more organic and logically articulated than the bigger work of a century later farther up the Rhine.

The Church of the Apostles is nearer this later type and has its unfortunate agglomeration of ill-placed towers, but St. Gereon is sui generis; it can hardly be said to have any plan at all, for it is made up of a simple little aisleless church of three bays with a round apse and two small transept-like towers, joined on to an irregular decagon of a nave, somewhat elliptical in plan, with large niches in each of the eight lateral sides and a square porch or narthex at the west end. This anomalous “nave” is early thirteenth century it is true, while the eastern church is one hundred and fifty years older, but the Gothic{281} work is on foundations undoubtedly Roman and takes the place of a structure of somewhat similar plan built by the Empress Helena. The sequence is curious; there was first a circular or elliptical Roman building, on the foundations of which the Empress Helena built her church, the crypt of which still remains, then the easterly choir was built by Archbishop Hanno late in the eleventh century, and finally the original main church was torn down and rebuilt on Gothic lines about 1225.

In nearly all the Romanesque churches of Cologne an attempt has been made to reproduce the original polychromatic decoration which once covered all portions of the masonry, but the results are not eminently satisfactory, for mechanical diaper and stencilling cannot take the place of the old work which was done freely and without exactness of line and spacing, while the colours and the medium used were quite different from what is employed to-day. There is no doubt that once every Gothic interior, now grey and sombre, or garish in its clean whitewash and mathematical jointing of painted lines, was entirely covered with the richest possible surface decoration in colours and gold, and the result must have been a gorgeousness and a gaiety of{282} which we know nothing and that would probably shock our sensitive taste to the point of hysteria. One would like to see some great church with full colour decoration, but as matters now stand, with oil paint, stencils, coal-tar colours, and all that, the experiment could hardly be made with any degree of safety.

In Cologne also are many early, middle, and late Gothic churches; that of the Minorites, St. Severins, St. Panteleon, St. Andreas, St. Cunibert; in fact, Cologne is especially rich in churches of many styles and most of them remarkably good, but they are apt to be overlooked by the tourist who can see, and cares to see, only the overgrown grandeur of the cathedral. Farther up the Rhine we find a long succession of great churches which are characteristically German and well show the best the Teutonic genius was capable of under the highest impulse; Bonn, Coblentz, Mayence, Worms, and Spires are all huge structures and quite in a class by themselves. They are not beautiful by any stretch of courtesy; big they are and massive, with curious combinations of multiplied apses and transepts and towers, but they are without organic quality of any kind, their composition is diffuse and casual, their detail crude and uninteresting. Nowhere is there a step forward in the 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 ?sthetically, 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{284} 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{285} 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{286} 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 interio............