The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 27, January, 1860

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 confessThat 'tis a thing impossible to frameConceptions equal to the soul's desire;And the most difficult of tasks to keepHeights 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 suddenlyMay 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 Hültz followed as master; and finally his nephew, Hültz 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 ponderousCross of iron that to mock usIs uplifted high in air!"

and how the voices replied,—

"Oh, we cannot!For around itAll the Saints and Guardian AngelsThrong 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" "pièce de résistance"

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'appétit 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.

It is very easy for you, the Reader, to sit down and run over the pages of a monthly narrative as a boy "skips" a stone,—and the flatter and thinner your capacity, the more skips, perhaps, you will make. But I tell you, for a man who has live people to deal with, and hearts that are beating even while he handles them,—a man who can go into families and pull up by the roots all the mysteries of their dead generations and their living sons' and daughters' secret history,—responsible for what he says, here and elsewhere,—open to a libel suit, if he isn't pretty careful in his personalities, or to a visit from a brother or other relative, wishing to know, Sir, and so forth,—or to a paragraph in the leading journal of that whispering-gallery of a nation's gossip, Little Millionville, to the effect that—We understand the personages alluded to in the tale now publishing in the Oceanic Miscellany are the Reverend Dr. S–h and his accomplished lady, the distinguished financier, Mr. B–n,—and so through the whole list of characters;—I say, for a man who writes the pages you skim over, it is a mighty different piece of business. Why, if I do tell all I know about some things that have come to my cognizance, I shall make you open your eyes and spread your pupils, as if you had been to the Eye Infirmary, and the doctors there had anointed your lids with the extract of belladonna. Mark what I tell you! I have happened to become intimately acquainted with circumstances of a very extraordinary nature,—not, perhaps, without precedent, but such as very few have been called upon to witness. Suppose that I should see fit to tell these in connection with the story of which they form a part? I may render myself obnoxious to persons whom it is not safe to offend,—persons that won't come out in the public prints, perhaps, but will poke incendiary letters under your doors,—that won't step up to you in broad daylight, and lug a Colt out of their pocket, or draw a bowie-knife from their back, where they had carried it under their coat, but who will dog you about to do you a mischief unseen,—who will carry air-guns in the shape of canes, and hang round the place where you get your provisions, and practise with long-range rifles out in the lonely fields,—rifles that crack no louder than a parlor-pistol, but spit a bit of lead out of their mouths half a mile and more, so that you wait as you do for the sound of the man's axe who is chopping on the other side of the river, to see the fellow you have "saved" clap his hand to his breast and stagger over. It makes me nervous to think of such things. I don't want to be suspicious of every queer taste in my coffee, and to shiver if I see a little powdered white sugar on the upper crust of my pastry. I don't want, every time I hear a door bang, to think it is a ragged slug from an unseen gun-barrel.