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,
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