But I feel that time will not allow me to go into the features of the style with more minuteness, or to do more than direct your attention to the strange eccentricity which characterizes the last phase of German Gothic, of which the design for the spire of Ulm (never carried out) is one of the most curious examples. In the short time that still remains to me, I would rather prefer to call your attention to the local peculiarities which you will meet with in different districts of this great country—a part of my subject which would, if I had time for it, be of more value perhaps to those who are going to explore German churches for themselves than any other.

I have said so much about the churches of Cologne and the Rhine, that I need say no more than that they are very much a class by themselves. You have there the best specimens of early churches; whilst in Cologne cathedral, in Altenberg abbey, in the church of the Minorites at Cologne—an admirable example—in the very interesting church at Oberwesel, and in S. Werner at Bacharach, a church at Andernach, and Frankfort cathedral, you have a series of examples within a short distance of each other of the best complete German Gothic.

Then leaving this district and going in a north-easterly direction, you will find a series of towns full of local peculiarities, quite unlike those of the Rhine:—Münster, for instance, with its churches of great height and without distinction between nave and aisles; or Soest, where the beautiful Wiesen-Kirche affords one of the finest evidences of what Germans could do in their palmiest days: whilst in the other churches in the same little known city you would see examples of Romanesque of the most grand kind in the remarkable steeple of the cathedral, and of a very curious kind in the low groined entrances which support a continuation of the triforia round the west end of the naves. In towns like these, and Paderborn, Lemgo, Herford, Minden, and Hildesheim, you will find a rich store of architectural matter; and then if you will venture so far, you will find at Lüneburg, and Lübeck, and Ratzeburg, abundant examples (as I have once before explained in this room) of the German mode of building in brick developed in a group of churches quite unlike any others in Germany, and most interesting in every point of view. Then again there are those curious churches at Brunswick and Halberstadt, Magdeburg and Burg, whose west fronts, contrived apparently solely for the sake of obtaining space for the display of immense window traceries, are so completely local and so thoroughly, I suppose I may say, an invention! Here too you will see the churches almost invariably with gabled aisles,—sometimes, as in the cathedral at Lemgo, so gabled at the sides that one doubts which is the side and which the end, and sometimes, as in a church at Brunswick, filled with tracery and panelling of extreme beauty. Then again at Halberstadt, Erfurt, Naumburg, and Marburg, you may see some of the most excellent work in all Germany of the best period. And if you go further south, to where Nuremberg takes you back in almost all externals to the sixteenth century, or where Ratisbon to the thirteenth, you will find yourselves again in the neighbourhood of brick churches, at Landshut and Munich: and lastly at Freiburg you may see one of the very best of German churches, eclipsed though it undoubtedly is by the unequalled (in Germany) nave of the thoroughly German cathedral of Strasburg.

I can but give you a hurried list of names, but not without a warm recommendation to you to go and see for yourselves how very much is to be learnt in all these churches, not only in architectural matters, but even much more in ecclesiological. Germany is the one part of Europe in which the furniture of the Middle Ages still remains. There where in Protestant Nuremberg every altar still stands with its white cloth, and candles, and crucifix; where the great rood still hangs aloft in the churches; where in one church, as at Brandenburg, one may see some thirty or forty mediaeval vestments still hanging untouched in their old presses; where you may see screens of every date, from early Romanesque to the latest pointed; where coronae, and all kinds of metal furniture and ancient work of a date far earlier than any other country in Europe can show are still preserved; where, as in the choirs of Halberstadt and Hildesheim, the old illuminated office books still rest upon the old choir desk; where hangings of quaint and gorgeous patterns still hang round the choirs, and where triptychs and carved retables are so common that one forgets to take note of them;—there it is, I say, that you must go if you would wish to study and to understand fully the ecclesiology of the Middle Ages. It is indeed a country full of the most wonderful interest to the ecclesiologist in all ways, and I am anxious to say that though I have been asked by your committee to give a second paper on Italian architecture, I feel very strongly that I should be doing their work much better by telling you somewhat of all those things to which I have just referred. In the first place, I have said my say on Italy, and have nothing new to tell you; and secondly, I have been obliged to avoid saying one word either on the furniture or glass of German churches, or on the domestic architecture in which the country is so rich,—and on all these points I should be only too glad at some future day to give you some notes of what I have seen.

INDEX

FOOTNOTES

[1] Since these words were written that country has seen another harvest time; the fields have been ploughed with the trenches of armies and harrowed by the bomb and bullet: Street’s record of what men saw fifty years ago has grown precious for us who shall never see it more.

[2] Your man of genius has run ahead of fashion by forty years. This description reads like the account of a house finished last week somewhere up the River or on the Main Line.