Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

But before we proceed to tell in how florid a manner the Low Countries
interpreted the simpler forms of spires, we shall describe generically
in what manner not only they, but all the other European kingdoms, were
indebted to the old Rhineland towns for some of these forms. When the
bell-tower, in about the seventh or eighth century, began to be used in
Germany, it at once received certain very important modifications on the
earlier Italian campanile. The upper terminations of these latter
were horizontal, on account of their flat roofs. Now in more northern
climates, where the snow falls, these flat roofs would be unsafe and
inconvenient. So we find that the first church-towers that arose in such
Rhenish places as Oberwesel, Gelnhausen, Bacharach, Coblentz, Cologne,
Bingen, "sweet Bingen on the Rhine," no longer ended in these horizontal
lines, but arose in pointed shapes. Indeed, the Germans, who were great
rivals of the Italians in those days, not only in matters pertaining to
architecture, but to literature also, in the same independent spirit
which induced them alone, of all civilized peoples, to retain through
all time the cramped, angular letters of monkish transcribers, in
preference to the fair and square Roman forms, took particular pride in
avoiding horizontal lines entirely at the tops of their towers, as they
did at the tops of their letters. Wherever they so occur, they are
insignificant,--rather ornamental than constructive. Not so with the
English; they kept the square tops to their towers, and contented
themselves with the pointed superstructure. Let us see how Teutonic
stubbornness arranged the matter. Each separate face of their towers,
whether these towers were square or octangular, ended above in a gable;
and from these gables, in various ways, arose the octangular pointed
roof or spire. This circumstance, more than any other, tended to give
a peculiar character to German Gothic. The simplest type of the gabled
spire was magnificently used in the spire of St. Peter's at Hamburg.
This was the finest in North Germany; it was four hundred and sixteen
feet high, and, if still standing, would be the third in height in the
world. But it was destroyed by the great fire of 1842. Many a traveller
can bear witness to the sweet melody of the chimes that used to sound
beneath it every half-hour.

In later times, between the Germans and the French, was invented the
_lantern_,--a feature so often and so superbly used, not only on the
Continent, but more lately in England, that we must needs glance at it.
This consisted in a tall, perpendicular, octangular structure, placed
upon the tower, quite light and open, and pierced with long windows.
Here they used to swing the bells, and the place was called the lantern
or _louvre_; thence the octangular spire arose easily and naturally.
Now, notwithstanding this device, those troublesome triangular spaces
still remained unoccupied at the top of the square tower. The manner
in which this difficulty was remedied was exceedingly ingenious and
beautiful. It was by building on them very delicate pinnacles or
turrets, peopled, perhaps, as at Freiburg, with a silent and serene
concourse of saints in rich niches, or inclosing, as at Strasburg,
spiral open-work stairs. These structures accompanied the tall lantern
through its whole height; thus rendering the entire group a memory,
as it were, of the square tower below, while, at the same time, it
beautifully foreshadowed the octangular character of the sky-seeking
spire above,--a significant symbolism.

Now, when the Belgians and their neighbors received the spire thus from
the fatherland, they at once began to express in it the joy of their
worship by all the embroidery and tender imagery and grotesque conceits
it was capable of receiving. They varied as many changes on it as they
did on their bells. They concealed the first springing of their spires
behind clustering pinnacles, flying-buttresses, canopied niches with
gigantic statues, galleries with battlements and parapets pierced and
mantled in lacework of flamboyant tracery, pointed gables alive with
crockets and finials, and long, quaint dormers,--all with a bewildering
intricacy of enrichment. And they inherited from the Germans a love for
the gargoyle, which haunted the springing of the spire at the corners
with visions of very hideous _diablerie_. It may well be believed that
these florid builders did not suffer the spire to arise serious and
serene from the midst of this delicious tangle of architecture. They
tricked it out with all the frostwork of Gothic genius. Not only did
they use in its decoration spire-lights, crockets, ribs and cinctures,
bands of gablets, and masses of reticulated relief, but, with wonderful
skill, they pierced each face from base to apex in foliated patterns
of great richness, so that the whole spire became a web of delicate
open-work, through which the light was sprinkled in beautiful shapes,
varying with every movement of the beholder. Their plainer spires of
wood they were fond of covering with glazed tiles of various tints
arranged in quaint taste. And they would vary the outline by making it
curve inward, giving a fine sweep thus from the base to an apex of great
slenderness. Sometimes they would give it, with exaggerated refinement,
the _entasis_ of the Greek column. There are instances of this last
treatment both in France and England.

But it was not only in exuberance of enrichment and quaintness of form
that these enthusiastic workmen uttered their inspirations. They built
their spires to a most amazing height. Indeed, the loftiest steeples in
the world arose in level tracts of country, where they could be seen at
immense distances, as not only in Belgium and thereabout, but on the
flat margins of the upper and lower Rhine, as at Strasburg and Cologne.
In these countries, and about the North of France, there was a generous
rivalry as to which city should lift up highest the cross of God. But as
soon as the sacred passion for spire-building was corrupted by this new
element of human emulation, some strange things happened. The people of
Beauvais, for instance, desiring to beat the people of Amiens, set to
work, we are told, to build a tower on their cathedral as high as they
possibly could. The same thing had been done once before on the plains
of Shinar. One foresees the result, of course; "it fell, for it was
founded upon the sand, and great was the fall thereof." And so with the
good people of Louvain. They built three spires to their cathedral, of
which the central one reached the unparalleled height of five hundred
and thirty-three feet, according to Hope, and the side-towers four
hundred and thirty feet. This tremendous group, however, fell, or,
threatening destruction, was taken down, in 1604. We remember what the
Wanderer said so finely in the "Excursion":--

"We must needs confess
That 'tis a thing impossible to frame
Conceptions equal to the soul's desire;
And the most difficult of tasks _to keep_
Heights which the soul is competent to gain."

But we find that ecclesiastical edifices were not the only ones
which were adorned with this high building; for town-halls were not
infrequently distinguished by immensely lofty spires, as at Brussels. It
is curious to see, however, how easily the less exalted impulses which
erected them may be discovered. They do not _soar_, they _climb_ up
panting into the sky, like the famous passage up through Chaos, in
Milton, "with difficulty and labor hard." They have not the light, airy
gliding upward of the religious spire, whose feeling George Herbert had
in his mind, when he sang of prayer:--

"Of what an easy, quick accesse,
My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly
May our requests thine eare invade!"

Not so; but it is all human rivalry, a succession of diminishing towers,
steps piled one above another, where the mind every now and then may
stop to breathe, and then fight its way onward again;--not an Ascension,
like that from Bethany; rather the toil of a very human, though very
laudable ambition.

Unfinished spires were in Europe very common legacies from generation to
generation. Descendants were called upon to embody the great conceptions
of their forefathers. But the ancestral spirit too often failed in the
land, the wing of aspiration was broken, the crane rotted in its place,
the great conceptions were forgotten, or lived only as vague and dreamy
inheritances; and the half-completed spires stood like Sphinxes, and
none knew their riddles! They are very melancholy memorials. Like the
broken columns over the graves of the departed, fallen short of their
natural uses, they seem only the funeral monuments of a race that
is dead. The empty air is stilled over them in expectation, and the
imagination makes vain pictures, and fills out their crescent of
splendid purposes. They have been called "broken promises to God." Too
often, perhaps, they were rather monuments of the feebleness of those
who would scale heaven with anything but adoration upon their lips.
There were Ulm, indeed, and Cologne, and Mechlin, as artistic
intentions, eminently grand and beautiful; and in the early part of the
sixteenth century Belgium was famous for designs of open-work spires,
which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all
hitherto existing. But it is worthy of note that at this period the
purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the
plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its
violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the
simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men
to the stars. "Gay religions, full of pomp and gold," could neither feel
nor utter the grave tenderness of the early inspirations. And so, when
the German monk affixed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg
Church, the spire had ceased to be an utterance of prayerful aspiration.
It had lost its peculiar significance as an involuntary expression of
worship, and had become liable to all the accidents and contingencies
that attend the efforts of a merely human ambition. The whole story is
an architectural version of the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican
who went down to the temple to pray.

Of the finished spires, the loftiest in the world are, first, that of
Strasburg Minster, 474 feet; second, that of St. Stephens at Vienna,
469 feet; third, that of Notre Dame at Antwerp, 466 feet; then that of
Salisbury, 404 feet; Freiburg in the Breisgau, 380-1/2 feet; and then
follow the distinguished heights of Landshut, Utrecht, Rouen, Chartres,
Brugrels, Soissons, and others. The highest spire in our own country is
that of Trinity Church, New York, 284 feet. We do not "sweep the cobwebs
from the sky" so effectually as when men built according to the scale
of spiritual exaltation rather than that of practical feet and
inches,--after the stature of the soul, rather than that of the man.

The architects of the revival of classic architecture, with the learned
language of the five orders, with pediments and attics, consoles and
urns, labored to express the childlike sentiment of the spire. But even
the great Sir Christopher Wren, with his sixty steeple-towers, and
all his followers to this day, have not succeeded in a translation so
unnatural. Spirituality and the artless grace of inspiration are wanting
to the spires of the Renaissance, and so they struggle up painfully into
the sky. And it is very rare to find those who have gone back even to
Gothic models building a spire which touches our affections, or claims
affinity with any of our nobler emotions; so sensitive is this unique
structure to the approach of any element foreign to the early conditions
of its existence.

As for the great Strasburg example, that _Jungfrau_ of all spires,
German traditions have very properly babbled many strange stories about
the erection of it. These constitute an episode so characteristic in the
history of spire-building, that this essay would be incomplete, were
they not briefly told here.

In the legendary days of yore, nothing was more common than to meet that
personage known as the Devil walking up and down the earth, in innocent
guise, but ripe for all sorts of mischief, especially where the people
were building up mighty monuments to the glory of the good God. Very
naturally, the sacred spire was a special object of his aversion; and,
for some reason or other, that of Strasburg was honored with peculiar
marks of his hatred. Two ancient churches, which stood on the site
of the present minster, had been successively destroyed by fire; and
although, in the one case, this had been kindled by the torch of an
invading army, and in the other by a thunderbolt, yet the infernal
agency, in both cases, nobody ever thought of doubting. So it was
the effort of Bishop Werner to combat these evil influences; and he
accordingly inflamed the pride and indignation of the people to such
a degree, that throughout the land all concerted to defeat the wicked
designs of the Adversary. In two centuries and a half the whole
cathedral was completed, save the tower, the corner-stone of which was
forthwith laid with great pomp by Bishop Conrad of Lichtenberg, on the
25th of May, 1277. Doubtless the Arch-Fiend laid many cunning schemes to
entrap the illustrious architect, Erwin of Steinbach; but, unlike his
brother in the craft at Cologne, he came out unscathed; so we must
believe that throughout the whole work he was actuated by the most
unselfish spirit of devotion, infernal machinations to the contrary
notwithstanding. Now it must be confessed that the Enemy had a hard time
of it, since we read that the good Bishop Conrad fought against him with
all the powers of the Church, and granted absolution for all sins, past,
present, and future, for forty thousand years, to whatever person should
contribute to the building of the spire by money, material, or labor.
Owing to the scarcity of parchment, these grants of absolution were made
out on asses' skins; and it will be seen, that, in the great struggle,
these instruments retained in a very eminent degree that quality of
stubborn resistance which had cost them in their original state many a
beating from the driver's staff. The greatest enthusiasm was kindled
among rich and poor; year after year, thousands of pilgrims flocked
hither from all Germany to offer their aid, without reward or
recompense, to the building of the tower; and out of the
farthest boundaries, even from Austria, came wagons loaded with
building-materials, the gratuitous offerings of the pious. Rich legacies
were left to the work, and many a cloister devoted a fourth part of its
yearly revenues to the same object So much for asses' skins!

Meanwhile the Devil was not idle. In the night-winds he and his legions
would shriek and yell and rattle among the scaffolding and cranes
in vain. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, he shook the
structure with a frightful earthquake, which terrified all Alsatia,
and, although whole streets were thrown down in Strasburg, yet the
foundations of the _Wunderbau_, as the Germans love to call it, were not
loosened, and no stone was moved from its place. A few years afterward,
in 1289, he once more made use of his favorite element, and laid in
ashes the market-place of Strasburg all around the minster. More
fortunate than its great compeers, St. Paul's of London, and St. Peter's
of Hamburg, it miraculously experienced but trifling damage.

Well, the great Erwin died at last, when he had built the tower as high
as the roof-ridge of the nave. His son succeeded him, finished the tower
to the platform, when he, too, was gathered to his fathers in 1339. John
Hueltz followed as master; and finally his nephew, Hueltz II., in 1439,
finished the grand pyramid, fixed the colossal cross in its place, and
crowned the whole with a gigantic statue of the Virgin. Thus, from the
laying of the foundation-stone till all was completed, were one
hundred and sixty years; yet throughout this time the work was never
discontinued, and five successive generations labored upon its walls.

But the wrath of the Arch-Enemy, as may well be believed, waxed greater
as this prodigious structure gradually developed itself in all its
lordliness and strength, and was not at all appeased at its triumphant
completion. Ever since then he has visited its stately height with
especial marks of his malice. The most furious tempests have raged about
it, and more than sixty times has it been struck by lightning, and five
times have earthquakes shaken its foundations. But in vain. "The Golden
Legend" tells us how Lucifer and the Powers of the Air stormed about the
spire, and how he cried,--

"Hasten! hasten!
O ye spirits!
From its station drag the ponderous
Cross of iron that to mock us
Is uplifted high in air!"

and how the voices replied,--

"Oh, we cannot!
For around it
All the Saints and Guardian Angels
Throng in legions to protect it;
They defeat us everywhere!"

At one point, however, the evil spirits were successful; the colossal
statue of the Virgin, which crowned the dizzy summit, and was familiar
with the secrets of the upper air, and which, like its dread Enemy,

"above the rest,
In shape and gesture proudly eminent,
Stood like a tower,"--

after having for fifty years borne the insults of these airy powers,
till it had lost all its original brightness, and its face

"Deep scars of thunder had intrenched,"--

was taken down, and the present cross put in its place. And there it
stands to this day, high up in the silence of midair, where the voices
of the city below are rendered small and thin by the distance,--four
hundred and seventy-four feet above the heads of the populace, who, in
their littleness, crawl about and traffic at its base. This amazing
summit, "moulded in colossal calm," in its unapproachable grandeur,
seems to forget the city from which it rises, and to hold communion only
with that vast circle of "crowded farms and lessening towers" which
it surveys. It is a worthy companionship; on the one hand, the great
Vosgian chain, the closed gates of France,--on the other, afar off, the
hills of the Black Forest, and, more near, Father Rhine, winding his
silver thread among the villages and vineyards of Germany.

There is (or was) an enormous key suspended just beneath the cross of
Strasburg Cathedral, its use, and why it was placed there, having passed
away from the memory of man. If it were not to open the gates of heaven
for those who built this ladder of light and those who worship in
its shadow, it remains a riddle and a blank. Let us accept the
interpretation, and, made mild-eyed by the lens of tender memories, we
shall behold in every spire a means of grace and a hope of glory.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

PRELIMINARY CORRESPONDENCE.

THE PUBLISHERS TO THE AUTHOR.

_Queerangle Building, Nov. '59._

Dr. SR,--

Will you contract to do us a tale or a novel, at the rate of say 10 pp.
per month, with some popular subject, such as philanthropy, or the Broad
Church movement, or fashionable weddings, or the John Brown invasion,
brought in so as to make a taking thing of it? When finished, to come
to a 12mo of 350 pp. more or less. A good article of novel is always
salable about Christmas time, and we can do it up by Dec. 1, 1860.
Our Mr. Goader has been round among the hands that do the light
jobbing,--finds several ready to undertake the contract, at say 75c. @
3.00 per page;--but want the job done in first-rate style, and think
you could furnish us a good article. Our firm has great facilities for
working a novel, tale, or any kind of fancy stuff. What w'd be y'r terms
in cash payment, 1st of every month?

P.S. Would any additional compensation induce you to allow each number
to be illustrated by a colored engraving?

Yr obt serv'ts.

THE AUTHOR TO THE PUBLISHERS.

GENTLEMEN,--

In reply to your polite request, I have to say, that under no
circumstances can I entertain your proposition to write a _fictitious_
narrative. I could, however, relate some very interesting events which
have come to my knowledge, and which, if told in a connected form, might
undoubtedly be taken by the public for a work of fiction. I think my
narrative, with some collateral matter I should introduce, would take up
a reasonable space in about a dozen numbers of the Oceanic Miscellany.
I cannot listen to your proposal about the engraving. If you accept my
offer to write out, in the form of a story, the incidents of real
life to which I have referred, we will arrange the terms at a private
interview. I consider the first day of a month as unobjectionable as any
other in the same month, as a time for receiving payment of any sum that
may be due me under the proposed contract.

Yours truly.

CONFIDENTIAL EDITOR OF THE OCEANIC MISCELLANY TO THE AUTHOR.

MY DEAR PROF.,--

We have had lots of bob-tail stories,--docked short in from one to three
months. Can't you give us a switch-tail one, that will hang on so as
to touch next December? Something imaginary, based on your
recollections,--the incidents of the War of 1812, for instance;--but, at
any rate, a regular "to be continued" "_piece de resistance_"

Yours ever.

THE AUTHOR TO THE CONFIDENTIAL EDITOR.

MY DEAR ED.,--

I really wouldn't undertake to tell an "imaginary" story, or to write
a romance, or anything of the kind. I might be willing to relate some
curious matters that have come to my knowledge, arranging them in a
collective form, so that they would probably pass with most readers for
fictitious, and perhaps excite very much the same kind of interest they
would if genuine fictions. I don't remember much about the "last war";
but I suppose both of us may recollect the illumination when peace was
declared in 1815.

Ever yours.

THE PUBLISHERS TO THE AUTHOR.

(Inclosing a check, in advance, for the first number.)

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.

Finding myself in possession of certain facts which possess interest
sufficient to warrant their publication, I am led to ask myself whether
I shall put them in the form of a narrative. There are, evidently, two
sides to this question. In the first place, I have a number of friends
who write me letters, and tell me openly to my face, that they want me
to go on writing. It doesn't make much difference to them, they say,
what I write about,--only they want me to keep going. They have got used
to seeing me, in one shape or another,--and I am a kind of habit with
them, like a nap after dinner. They tell me not to be frightened about
it,--to begin as dull as I like, and that I shall warm up, by-and-by, as
old _Dutchman_ used to, who could hardly put one leg before the other
when he started, but, after a while, got so limbered and straightened
out by his work, that he dropped down into the forties, and, I think
they say, into the thirties. _L'appetit vient en mangeant_, one of them
said who talks French,--which, you know, means, that eating makes one
hungry. I remember, when I sat down to that last book of mine, which you
may perhaps have read, although I had the facts of the story, of course,
all in my head, it seemed to me that I should never have the patience
to tell them all; and yet, before I was through, I got so full of the
scenes and characters I was talking about, that I had to bolt my door
and lay in an extra bandanna, before I could trust myself to put my
recollections and thoughts on paper. You don't expect a locomotive is
going to start off with a train of thirty or forty thousand passengers,
without straining a little,--do you? That isn't the way; but this is.
_Puff!_ The wheels begin to turn, but very slowly. Papas hold up their
little Johnnys to the car-windows to be kissed. _Puff----Puff!_ People
shake hands from the platform to the cars, walking along by their side.
_Puff--puff--puff!_ Now, then, Ma'am! pass out that tumbler pretty
spry, out of which you have been swallowing that eternal "drink o'
wotter," to which the human female of a certain social grade is so
odiously addicted. _Puff, puff, puff, puff!_ Too late, old gentleman
I unless you can do a mile in a good deal less than three minutes,
carrying weight, in the shape of a valise in one hand and a carpet-bag
in the other. That's the way with anything that's got any freight to
carry. It's slow when it sets out;--but steam is steam,--and what's bred
in the boiler will show in the driving-wheel, sooner or later.

If I had to _make up_ a story, now, it would be a very different matter.
I could never conceive how some of those romancers go to work, in cold
blood, to draw, out of what they call their imagination, a parcel of
impossible events and absurd characters. That is not my trouble; for I
have come into relation with a series of persons and events which will
save me the pains of drawing on my invention, in case I shall see fit to
follow the counsel of my too partial friends. I am only afraid I should
not disguise the circumstances enough, if I were to arrange these facts
in the narrative form. Some of them are of such a nature, that they
cannot be supposed to have happened more than once in the experience
of a generation; and I feel that the greatest caution and delicacy are
necessary in the manner of their presentation, not to offend the living
or wrong the memory of the dead.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20