BONN

The modern student of the Rhine, and all that the Rhine means for the future of Europe, will see in it, if he is wise, a great evil and a great interest. The evil is the evil of modern industrialism; the evil of the coalfields. The interest—an absorbing one—is the recovery of the Rhine as the chief highway of western Europe.

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Nothing can now prevent the Rhine from being an international highway (and thereby a force making for European union) except some new unification of the German culture under some new conqueror, such as Prussia was in the lifetime before the Great War. If some such conqueror should appear, and once more create an exclusive German state, politically jealous, self-dependent, arrogant and including all populations of German culture, then it is conceivable that the Rhine should once again become a local, particular, national river, a cause of dissension and a threat to peace. But if, as is more probable, no such further conquest and welding into a new exclusive state appears, then the Rhine will remain what it now is—and promises to be still more in the future—a common bond for the material activities of Europe.

To-day that stream is an arresting sight for the eyes of a spectator who desires, as I do, a new and communal European life. You see upon its crowded water every flag of the states which reach its banks between the Alps and the sea, and even of those, such as Belgium, whose traffic comes to it by canals. You may see a French tug, towing a long train of very large, deeply-laden barges, and that train flying Dutch, Belgian, German colours. You will see a German tug performing the same office for another train in which the Swiss red cross and the French tricolour appear, and the whole of those hundreds of miles of rapid broad water remains in the mind like the memory of a crowded street. The Rhine has recovered the place which it held those hundreds of years ago when Christendom was united.

But all this has been made possible only by the presence of the great coalfield lying on its lower reaches, and by the industrial civilisation based upon that coalfield; and it is here that you have the evil side of the thing. For no one will now deny that human happiness has severely suffered from the advent of these new powers. This disaster has not followed upon a mere material cause. It was not coal, or the mechanism which used it, that did us the harm: it was the rush of a sudden development with which we could not cope, and—much more—the false philosophy of avarice under which the development took place; a greedy and individual error in the political action of man.

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Take it all in all, the Germans have made a better job of the too-rapid expansion than we did. They had the advantage of coming much later. Our great towns sprawled out on coalfields, shapeless, hideous and morally anarchic. The modern German industrial system had greater opportunity to plan. None the less, here also the effect is evil. It is worst in the main towns of the Ruhr, it is bad in the great capital of the whole affair, Cologne, and all up-stream, wherever the great mass of transported coal is used for manufactory or has its effect upon other urban centres (such as Mayence), you have that deplorable degradation of life into a mechanical system, and of mankind into a disassociated dust of individuals, and of the works of man into the meaningless, or the disgusting or the absurd; notably in architecture, and worst of all, in the architecture of the last twenty-five years.

But in the midst of this there remain the older towns and the far higher and older civilisation of the Rhineland. The contrast is almost as sharp as the contrast here in England between our cathedral towns and our sprawling manufacturing camps of brick and iron.

Of these older towns, the first upon which you come as you leave the coalfield going southward up-stream is Bonn. Its university, its typically Rhenish collegiate church, its traditional market-place, its unchanged streets, the noble line of its seventeenth-century park and of its stately academic buildings, all these are the older and the better Germany—which still survives, and which it may be an effect of the Great War to call back again into life under another form. Bonn has its roots in Rome. It stands where it does as a Roman frontier garrison upon the great river just below the Gorge.

This Gorge of the Rhine, that part of the river’s course which has been so much more drawn and described, and known to our romantic fathers and grandmothers than all the rest of its course put together, is, geographically, a strange thing. It suggests the presence on the upper river of a great lake, the bed of which lay between the Swiss hills and the Taurus, and the flat bottom of which is now the Alsatian plain and the rich alluvial land to the north thereof. It is as though, in some cataclysm, a rift of sixty miles, sinuous and deep, had once cracked suddenly through the mass of high hills to the north of such a lake and drained it; so that after the breach was made, the lake ran dry, leaving the upper Rhine winding through the midst of its emptied bed, the middle Rhine confined within that Gorge, the lower Rhine spreading out again through its flats to the North Sea.

This deep and narrow valley forms a short section of the whole story of the Rhine, quite separate from the rest in physical character and, therefore, in history. The crossings of the stream eastward and westward, for war or for commerce, lay below and above that Gorge. Roman Bonn watched the crossing below, Roman Mayence the crossing above: two gates. In that deep valley the confusion, the noise, the waste, and the despair of the great cities disappear. Every village, every ruined stronghold, maintains its position; and to pass into it is like coming out from a factory into the countryside, or like reading a book of a better time, in which one may forget the surroundings of our own.

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It is odd that these famous reaches of the great river, which had become almost ridiculous in the eyes of moderns for their theatrical setting and for the reiterated, somewhat clumsy legends which the guide-books emphasise, should now, in their contrast with what lies above and below them, have recovered so much dignity.

Who could have prophesied forty years ago that the over-picturesque rocks and ruins and rapids (the Lorelei, which had become a jest, and the Bishop’s Tower, and the rest) would become classic under the pressure of new things and rouse our affections again? Yet that is what they do to-day. I can imagine a man who had made his acquaintance with Ludwigshafen and Cologne swearing that he would never see the Rhine again unless it were above Bonn and below Mayence.

There is in all that piece of journeying up the Gorge nothing monstrous, unless it be the statue of William the First at Coblenz, on the cape between the Rhine and the Moselle; and that big and vulgar blunder is rather absurd than monstrous. But the great engineering works, notably the modern bridges of concrete or iron, which disfigure the river, are absent from the Gorge. You leave behind you one of the worst at Bonn; you are spared the sight of another until you are close upon Mayence.

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In Bonn itself the note of antiquity is struck especially by the cloisters and their little, old squat palace, to which the Archbishops of Cologne were driven in the early Middle Ages when they fled from the rebellion of their capital city; and this typical monument of the German past is not a rare exception to be sought out in the midst of vilely different things (as are here and there such fragments in Cologne), but is native to the city and on a scale with it, as is the great church to which it is attached. The impression of antiquity here is strongly heightened by the massive simplicity of short pillar, rude capital (often unsculptured) and double rounded arch. It lacks the magnificence of that later work which so weighs upon the mind at Worms and at Spires, and which I shall next describe; but it the more suggests our passage from the Dark into the Middle Ages, which transition such small, very massive, domestic things recall. You may see something of the same sort in the forgotten churches of the hills of Auvergne and in the very oldest stones of the Jura. It is odd to find it surviving here, and so thoroughly a part of and a centre of a city right on the main river of the Western World. It seems to belong rather to the mountain regions from which travel is diverted, and which have not the wealth to rebuild. It is an introduction to all that tenacious chain of antiquity which runs through the Rhine Gorge above the City, and which, in ruin or in careful preservation, or in mere survival, carries on that soul of the Rhineland which an alien Prussian rule from the east had so nearly ruined.