AIX-LA-CHAPELLE

The Rhine March, the broad belt of country lying to the left or west of the middle and lower navigable Rhine, has been for centuries the very heart of European political debate.

It is an accident of our generation that the debate should ever seem settled. The sudden and complete victory won by Prussia and her allies over France in 1870, and the consequent amalgamation of more than two-thirds of the Germans under the leadership of Prussia, the creation thereby of a state which has come to be called ‘Germany’ (though it does not include anything like the totality of the German culture)—these things between them seemed to have settled the debate for good.

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The gradually weakening demands of the French for the restoration of Metz and Strasbourg, with their provinces, were the only exception to this apparently fixed settlement. It was always thought to be a particular French grievance, little understood or sympathised with elsewhere, and, as I have said, it was rapidly dying down.

But the Great War brought back vividly before Europe, as a whole, the critical character of this belt of country. A modern man would speak of that critical character as a quarrel between France and Germany—France desiring a hold upon the Rhine to secure itself from invasion, and Germany desiring complete control over it for the simple reason that, with the exception of a very small district round Metz, the whole is German-speaking; while even this district round Metz had been welded by the impression and increasing wealth of nearly fifty years into the new Prussianised Reich.

But this common, modern way of talking of the present debate is very superficial and very provincial, confined to conditions of no long standing, and not likely to have long endurance. It is something very much deeper than the rivalry between a modern German state and a modern French state, which is at work in all this countryside. Briefly, the fate of the Rhineland has turned upon these two divergent conditions: it is German; but it is of Roman foundation. An Englishman might note with interest an almost exactly parallel case on the border and in the southern lowlands of Scotland. They also were Romanised, and had their foundation in the Roman Empire; but they were attached to a nation all the farther part of which had never been administered by the civilisation of antiquity. Hence the perpetual attempts of the English Government to hold, or at least influence, this nearer part of Scotland, and hence its ‘Anglification’ during and after the eleventh century.

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It is in the same way that the Rhine March, though essentially German in language, culture, and, upon the whole, in race, has another spiritual strain in it and another historical memory, and goes back to a very different foundation from the Germany which stands round the Elbe.

All the innumerable results of this double-origin would take volumes to discuss. I propose to do no more than what a chance traveller may do in the description of certain of its typical cities, and especially of their chief buildings; for in them one has presented to the eye the whole past of the country, and its inward nature coming out in stone. I have chosen six such towns—Aix, Metz and Treves, Bonn, Worms and Spires. I begin with Aix and Metz because these two, lying right on the border of the Rhine March, the one German-speaking from the beginning, the other Latin and French-speaking for two thousand years, are typical of the March, the border, towns.

I may add that I propose to follow the old custom of giving foreign towns their English names, and not the modern (and, I hope, passing) habit of spelling them as they are spelt by their inhabitants. I would as soon talk of _Aachen_ as I would talk of _Paree_ or _Lyong_.

Aix is the town of Charlemagne. His presence overshadows the place; he is buried in the heart of it; he is the influence, or the ghost, or the god of the city. He was brought up, indeed, at his family’s place in Aix and at another which they had at Metz, so that presumably the servants about his childhood were German-speaking in the one case, and spoke a low Latin dialect in the other. I verily believe that it is this influence of the man in whom was summed up all that was left of antiquity and all the beginnings of the Middle Ages, which gives Aix its singular dignity. Nowhere else have I seen modern work so admirably fitted in with the old except in certain architectural experiments of the two English universities.

The shrine itself, the cathedral under which the great emperor lies, is an exact and harmonious mixture of the oldest and the latest things. There is not a jarring note; and all the accessories of that triumph in stone and mosaic are the same. Nowhere have I heard music more solemnly fulfilling its part in a Christian church, and nowhere has modern restoration seemed, in my eyes, at least, more successful. The candle ring of gilt bronze, a sort of crown dependent from the roof, goes back to Barbarossa. The mosaics of the dome are of the other day—not forty years old, from the hands, I believe, of Italian workmen. Of the pillars supporting the roof and arches of the gallery most are original, some few brought in in our time to complete the work. Yet they produce an effect of complete unity. And in the midst of that gallery, facing the high altar and the choir, on its arcade above the people, stands the throne of Charlemagne; the plain, white marble chair, which brings the mind back at once to the Chair of St. Peter in Rome. Authority seated.

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In the externals of the place I find the same unity between what was old and what is new. The eye can follow in the last courses of the original octagonal church material which is Roman. It discovers in the round windows of those walls the ancient unchanging spirit which ran through the Dark Ages until the Gothic Renaissance. It is surprising that a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century choir in the pure French-Gothic attached to this Romanesque and much more modern thing in no way swears with it, and seems a natural completion, and (what is, perhaps, more remarkable) the odd seventeenth-century roof, with its eight separate ridges like the sections of an open orange, makes no jarring effect. And all the modern reconstruction of the open bridge from the western towers to the dome, and the modern replacement of sculpture and other detail, leaves the thing not only unspoiled, but the better. It is as though the unchanging character of European unity underlying all our shifting divisions, and summed up in the name of Charlemagne, had come forth and expressed itself visibly upon the shrine where he is buried.

This singular dignity, and what I have called ‘success’ in the spirit of Aix, you find not only in the way it has treated its great central shrine, but in the restoration of its few remaining ancient buildings, and in the completely modern mass of its Town Hall. The old March Gate has been restored from a half-ruined state, completely in our own time, yet fails in nothing. It simply reproduces what the building was when it left the hands of its first builders.

The Town Hall is still more modern. When one considers what our time has done with its attempts to revive or copy a spirit which it thinks long dead, when one remembers the false Gothic of Châteauroux, for instance, and a hundred things in England, which are too familiar to us all, I marvel that this work at Aix should have been done as well as it has been.

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In this same town of Aix there is a railway station which will show you what an attempt to be original and to break with tradition can achieve in the way of abomination. That was because the railway station was built for, by, and under the spirit of monstrous new doctrines from the Prussian East—if doctrine it can be called, for it is rather chaos. But here in the Town Hall, where Aix has its own spirit at work, you have the real German soul in architecture, the delight in great roofs and somewhat fantastic towers, in romantic outlines, and in a pleasing extravagance making mystery of the whole. To use the same word again, this architecture ‘succeeds.’ Of the various towns of the Rhine March it is to Aix that I would always return for the sense of unfathomed antiquity, continuity, government. Round the old city there has grown up a vast new population, unhappily industrial, and created by the new mechanical expansion of the last fifty years. That has happened to many another old city, the whole point and meaning of which lay in its antiquity. It has happened to Oxford. It has happened to Rouen. But here in Aix it seemed to me, as I travelled through, not to have destroyed the meaning of the old, and not to be at enmity with it or to threaten it for the future. I may be wrong; the spirit of modern competitive commerce is capable of anything in its lack of intelligence. So far it has spared Aix; and may Aix be spared for ever.