Watching on the Rhine

In the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, where, after the manner of German collections, pictures and antiques, both good and bad, jostle each other with small regard to quality, a series of modern frescoes execrable in colour and design decorate the main staircase. The artist has been at pains to cover the walls with various incidents, allegorical and otherwise, in the long history of Cologne. The final fresco is the most entertaining of the series. It represents the scene in 1842 when Frederick William IV. visited Cologne on a memorable occasion. In this year work was resumed on the ruined and neglected shell of the cathedral, and the citizens of Cologne dedicated themselves anew to the task of making a success of the failure of centuries. The King attended in person to inaugurate the great effort. Frederick William had many of the showy and histrionic qualities for which his great-nephew was conspicuous, and like William II. was by way of having a great deal of taste in artistic matters—most of it bad. Blessed with the gift of fluent speech, he adored ceremonial occasions, especially those on which he could pose before Europe as a patron of the Muses.

In the Wallraf-Richartz Museum fresco the foundation stone of the new building has been well and truly laid. Brawny workmen in the foreground haul about imposing blocks of stone and deal purposefully with a huge floral decoration. Frederick William, on a platform raised above the assembled company, is looking heavenwards with rapt expression, as though following through the clouds the flight of some fiery chariot. Particularly impressive is a row of city fathers in full evening dress, wearing decorations, who with hands tightly clasped across their stomachs stand meek and simpering in the royal presence.

This ludicrous painting is an unworthy memorial of what was in fact a high and spirited adventure. The completion of the Dom after centuries of failure and decay was a great task, finely conceived and finely carried through. The wave of national feeling and national self-consciousness, which developed and spread through Germany, from the middle of the last century onwards, found a practical symbol to which it could rally in this work of reconstruction. As year by year columns and towers rose higher on the banks of the Rhine, and the great neglected fane began to assume the lines dreamt of centuries before by its long-dead architect, the German saw in this miracle an image of the resurrection of his own country. Germany had been a ruin, destroyed and at the feet of a conqueror. Germany too had triumphed over destruction and failure. Through her new-found unity she was rising, like the walls of the cathedral, to a position of power and authority undreamt of before. Little wonder that the rejoicings held in honour of the final completion of the work in 1880, a date following closely on the Franco-Prussian War, assumed a national character and were invested with considerable pomp and circumstance.

No cathedral in the world has had so strange and chequered a history as that of Cologne. The hearts of many master builders were broken over it. The mediaeval difficulties of construction were enormous. The building even of the beautiful thirteenth-century choir suffered severely from the fierce civic and ecclesiastical feuds which raged at that time between the town and the archbishops. Many legends are connected with the name of Meister Gerhard, the architect whose main ideas are embodied in the Dom as it stands to-day. Germany is under debt to France for the greatest of her Gothic churches. To Amiens, where Gerhard lived and studied, Cologne Cathedral owes its inspiration. The thirteenth-century choir, an architectural gem of the first order, follows closely the lines of Amiens Cathedral. Few examples of early Gothic are more pure or more perfect. Meister Gerhard, in despair at the delays which beset his work, entered, so the story runs, into a very unsuccessful wager with the devil as regards the completion of the cathedral. When the bet was lost he flung himself, to save his soul, from the scaffolding. There is no evidence to show that Meister Gerhard came to a violent end, but the story is significant as a testimony to the difficulties from which the building of the Dom suffered. These difficulties became accentuated in the time of Meister Gerhard’s successors. The choir fortunately struggled to completion, and in 1322 the bones of the Three Kings, the most precious of all Cologne relics, were deposited with great pomp in their new shrine. But the noble design of the nave fell on evil days, and after the varying vicissitudes of several generations work was finally abandoned, leaving a great torso instead of the church as originally planned. For centuries the half-completed aisles mocked the vision of the early master builders. Little by little the nave, which was shut off by a wall from the choir, fell into complete decay. In 1796 it was used by the occupying French Army as a magazine and stable. Some progress had been made with the south tower before work was finally abandoned. But in modern times trees were growing in the ruins of the tower, and a derelict crane, stranded high aloft on a pile of stones and rubbish, was an object of interest to casual visitors.

Withal a vague hope persisted through the centuries that some day, somehow, Cologne Cathedral would stand on the banks of the Rhine in the majesty of the completed design of which Meister Gerhard had dreamt. For centuries the hope seemed vain indeed. When some years after the War of Liberation the architect Zwirner championed the idea of a completed Dom, the response of popular enthusiasm was immediate and complete. The building as finished follows faithfully the ideas of the mediaeval architect, a fact for which we have to thank an extraordinary chapter of accidents.

The story of the original plans, which were recovered in the loft of an inn, reads like a fairy tale. Before the Napoleonic wars the plans of the cathedral were kept in the chapter-house. During the French occupation, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were removed for greater safety to a Benedictine monastery. The monastery was broken up and the forgotten and neglected designs came eventually into the possession of a private family, who used the great sheets of parchment for drying beans. Subsequently the son of the house went to Darmstadt for educational purposes. His anxious mother thought the young man’s clothes would be kept clean and dry if his box were lined with the stout parchment sheets which had rendered useful service in the case of the beans. The youth took up his residence in Darmstadt at the Gasthaus zur Traube. Internal evidence shows that, once away from the vigilant maternal eye, the care of his clothes must have suffered. The coverings intended to protect his garments from dust and damp were cast aside with youthful recklessness. The scrolls, still carrying their hidden treasure of the great design of the west end of the cathedral, were thrown away and consigned as litter to the loft of the inn. There they were discovered by a carpenter sufficiently intelligent to appreciate their importance. From his hands they passed into those of a painter, and eventually after a journey via Paris were returned to Cologne. They hang to-day in a chapel of the choir.

The stone from which the cathedral is built is quarried in the Drachenfels. Unfortunately it is soft and perishable, and constant repairs are necessary. Nearly a million sterling was spent on completing the building, a modest sum for so considerable a work judged by the spacious standards of our own spendthrift time. The funds were raised from pious founders, from state help, and from lotteries. Whether or not you admire the exterior of the cathedral—personally the answer is in the negative—there can be nothing but praise for the enterprise which made a success of the failure of the centuries and the fine solid work to which the completed Dom bears witness. In 1880, six hundred years after the original founding of the cathedral by Archbishop Conrad, the final stone of the giant blossom crowning the south tower was swung into place in the presence of the Emperor William I.

Not only in Cologne, but throughout the whole of Germany, the completion of the cathedral was a signal for an outburst of pride and joy. National enthusiasm knew no bounds. There were festivals and feastings and pageants. Looking back on the rejoicings from our own standpoint of a stricken world, we can recognise of what tragic events they were the starting point. To keep a cool head when steering on a full tide of success is a test of character more severe in its searching than the patient bearing of adversity. Under that test the new-made German Empire broke down rapidly. By 1880 Germany was launched on the career which, soon transcending all that is legitimate in national virility and self-consciousness, was to bring her ultimately, through pride and aggression, to defeat and downfall.

From the cannon captured in the French war a bell known as the Kaiser-Glocke was cast, which became in a special sense the tutelary genius of the cathedral. Only on rare and solemn occasions was the Kaiser-Glocke heard. Then as its deep note boomed across the waters of the Rhine, the citizens of Cologne thrilled with proud memories of conquest and restored national life. The cannon of a conquered foe are symbols of death, destruction, and defeat. To convert them as trophies of victory into bells which call men and women to the service of God and the worship of the Prince of Peace, is an act of paganism removed as by the poles from rudimentary Christian ethic. But though the mills of God grind slowly they grind exceeding small, as the fate of the great bell was to prove.

In the spring of 1918, owing to the acute shortage of metal, the Kaiser-Glocke shared the doom of many other of the fine Cologne church bells. To-day its great chamber stands bare and empty. The people of the town were in despair. The passing of the bell was to them a symbol of the passing of victory. But the grim needs of the hour in the matter of munitions had to be met at any cost. Born of the things of death, to the things of death the bell returned. Reconverted into a gun, and lost on the Western Front—was ever warning more sombre as to the vanity of human desires and the perils which wait on human arrogance?

As to the architectural merits of the cathedral, opinion is and is likely to remain divided. To me at least the exterior is thoroughly unsatisfactory. Especially when viewed from a distance the proportions though massive are ungainly. It dominates the plain by its size, an unwieldy colossus too high for its length. The openwork spires sit heavily on the towers, and lack the great élan and heavenward spring of buildings such as Chartres or Salisbury. But the interior is a different matter. I cannot explain why proportions which externally fail to satisfy are harmonious and beautiful within. The choir, the apse, the long forest of columns carrying the nave, the spring of the vast western arch between the towers—all this is Gothic in its strength and beauty. The splendid glass of the north aisle has vanished temporarily. It was taken down during the air-raids period, and the hour of its restoration is likely to tarry. Much of the remaining glass is poor and modern, and the general effect of the nave suffers severely from this fact.

In the course of months I have learnt to know Cologne Cathedral intimately and under many different aspects. It is what a cathedral should be, the central pulse of the religious life of the town. Unlike the barren preaching houses to which Protestantism has reduced the old Gothic churches, the great building has warmth and atmosphere. Before the shrines and altars, at all hours throughout the day, rich and poor alike may be found at prayer. Sometimes I have seen three or four little children come in shyly, hand in hand, and kneel down before the High Altar. Then, having fulfilled the duty with which they have been clearly charged by their elders, they may be found outside a moment later, chattering and playing, on the great flight of steps leading down to the square. Sometimes peasant women with their market baskets will come in for a moment and bend low before the Mother of God. Under the coloured scarves are humble patient faces, lined with care and want. The heavy baskets rest for a brief space on the broad pavement of the aisle as these poor children of the soil, kneeling among the fruits of their labours, raise inarticulate prayers to heaven.

At no point can the German character produce contradictions so supreme as over the question of religion. The extent to which the practice of religion, however exact and devout, can remain external to a man’s life is an unhappy fact with which all religious systems and creeds are too familiar. Germany perhaps supplies the supreme example. But to any one like myself who has seen a good deal of Catholic worship in Germany, the puzzle is necessarily acute. In no country of the world, certainly in no Catholic country, have I ever found myself among congregations so earnest and so devout. Catholicism in the Rhineland has a touch of almost Protestant austerity, thanks to which its services are wholly devoid of the tawdry fripperies which will often make the hearing of Mass, say in Italy or in parts of France, seem perfunctory and insincere. In Catholic Germany the services strike a note of great dignity and reverence. There is no talking, no moving about, no coming and going. Among the thousands of English people who have passed through Cologne since the Occupation, few have any knowledge of the extraordinary congregations which, Sunday after Sunday, fill the cathedral to overflowing; congregations three parts composed of men of all ages and conditions. A Franciscan monk, Father Dionysius, whose fame is widely spread throughout the Rhineland, holds these great congregations spellbound week by week.

Men of God, those sons of the Spirit who arise wherever the Spirit listeth, transcend all limits of race and creed and clime. To that rare company this German monk belongs. An orator of the first rank, it is not his oratory which compels, but the nobility of his personality and the purely spiritual appeal of his doctrine. The face is not typically ecclesiastical—it is too broad, too fine, too human. It has humour also, for the Father can use at will the lash of a fine irony.

It may not be popular to attribute such qualities to a German. “How can you go and listen to one of these brutes?” is a remark more than once addressed to me in Cologne. But in putting on record my impressions of Germany, it is not my object to minister to race hatreds, but to describe things good and bad alike as I saw them. The riddle of the German at prayer is difficult indeed. We write him off as a brute and a materialist. Yet will our own countrymen, artisans, professional men, shopkeepers, stand for hours and listen to doctrines dealing with the first principles of faith and of the things which concern a man’s soul? What would be the feelings of the average Church of England clergyman if, instead of a thin and depressing congregation mainly composed of elderly ladies, men in the prime of life crowded out his church? For great though the reputation of Father Dionysius, there is nothing peculiar in the Dom services. Other churches are equally well attended and equally full. The atmosphere is perfectly genuine and sincere. There is nothing hypocritical about it. The people mean what they are saying at the time they say it. And then before one’s eyes rises the memory of a whole series of evil and ugly deeds—cruelty to prisoners, callousness to suffering, arrogance, brutality, a cynical disregard of the first principles which in any decent society regulate the relations between man and man. Where has the application of religion gone wrong? I have often wondered what the services in the Dom must have been during the weeks when the full agony of defeat and surrender fell upon the Germans—black hours for preacher and for congregation alike.

The service at which Father Dionysius preaches on Sunday morning is a short sung mass following on High Mass. There is no choir, but the congregation themselves sing old German chorales while mass is going on. Every seat in the nave is filled nearly an hour before the service begins: to obtain standing room in the neighbourhood of the pulpit it is necessary to be there at least twenty minutes beforehand. By the time mass begins, the vast nave and side aisles of the cathedral are crowded from the doors to the altar. The effect of the thousands of voices singing the fine old German music in unison is without parallel in my experience. No act of congregational worship in which I have ever taken part can be compared with it. The music, soaring under the great vaulted roof, seems to be caught up in the forest of arches and to echo back again to earth.

The service begins with this ancient chorale, and as voice after voice joins in the effect is indescribable. During the solemn moments of the mass practically the whole congregation kneels. Often as I have watched some fat square-headed German singing the words of petition and penitence, or bending humbly before the Host, I have asked myself in utter bewilderment what it all means. How are we to reconcile the discrepancy between the sincerity and devotion of such worshippers, and the darker, more sinister sides of the German character? The Rhineland, a Catholic country civilised originally by ancient Rome, is not Prussia. But it is thoroughly German in sentiment and outlook. “Pious Cologne” had a bad reputation for the treatment of our prisoners. I have known personally two officers who were spat upon by well-dressed women in the railway station. Stories well attested were told me of wounded prisoners who were insulted when marched through the streets. Many cases of cruelty, often of gross cruelty, are proved. To shut our eyes to such facts, or to minimise them, is as foolish as to write off the whole German people as bred of Beelzebub. The passions roused by years of bitter warfare do not subside with any formal signing of peace. Yet to see things steadily, and to see them whole, is of all difficult principles the most essential in our relations with Germany.

The future of Europe and of Western civilisation largely turns on our power to place these discrepant facts side by side, to recognise that both are true and then to strike some balance between them. It is extraordinarily difficult to judge what the incidence of brutality was among the Germans during the war; how far it was natural, how far deliberately stimulated by those in authority. Our own gallant Hun hunters, who glowed with patriotic pride and satisfaction over the persecution of some wretched hairdresser or inoffensive nursery governess, are a sorry proof as to the ease with which vile instincts can be cultivated and spread. The overwhelming majority of the English in Cologne arrive with rigid ready-made ideas about the country and people, and they do not part from them willingly. They feel it below their dignity to study the Boche dispassionately, to watch him at work, at play, at prayer. But if we are concerned in this distracted world not to rest perpetually in the barren measures of strife, then it may be worth while to consider dispassionately what qualities the Germans possess which hold out some hope for the future. From this aspect it seems to me that Cologne Cathedral and its congregations are worthy of attention. The heart of every man is an altar, neglected, desecrated perhaps, but never forfeiting its right to serve the divine purpose. The sacred fire may burn low, but so long as one votary remains, holden though his eyes may be, the fire can never know extinction. A spark from heaven may fall again upon the ashes so that they blaze upwards into a pure light of truth and knowledge. Is it for us to say that no such spark can fall, that the shrine must remain forever unworthy?