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 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
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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 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.