WORMS AND SPIRES

Worms and Spires are the two towns on the Rhine which a wise man would pick out as the two typical historic towns upon that river, because they share the historical interest of the rest of the Roman chain—Cologne, Coblenz, Mayence, Bonn, Basle—but, unlike all the others, have remained exactly themselves; Worms very largely, Spires entirely, has remained the city of the past, or, rather, has preserved its spiritual continuity.

Moreover, Worms and Spires are the two towns most intimately connected with that great turning point in the modern history of the West, the Reformation. It was at Worms that the new position was taken up definitely in the Diet there held. It was at Spires that the name ‘Protestant’ took its rise, from the Protest of those in the meeting there held that they could not accept the decision of their ruler.

There is also about these two famous towns something which you will often discover in the intact relics of an earlier age; and that is, the overwhelming proportion borne by the great church in the scale of the little city.

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Elsewhere on the Rhine it is otherwise. Even the new mass of Cologne cathedral is lost in the modern industrial town which lives by the coal basin to the north of it. The ancient shrine of Mayence, with its doors of one thousand years, stands greatly in the midst of the modern industrial city, but is overwhelmed by that city.

In Worms and Spires it is very different. There the two majestic buildings, thundering (if one may use such a metaphor in architecture) with the last of the Dark Ages—two titanic structures in the round arch and the last expression of ancient strength before it was transformed by the vision of the French Gothic—occupy the eye from every side and challenge the sky.

What it is that gives this effect of mass in architecture no one can determine. It is, perhaps, a spirit in the builder, or, rather, in the mood of his time, surviving the centuries and still proceeding from that mind to ours. At any rate, so it is. You may show me modern buildings of which the actual measurements are superior in any degree to those of Worms and Spires, but not one of them produces the same effect of weight and enormity.

The two towns have this great advantage, as modern places go, that they are not on the main track of travel. Many expresses pass them; some few halt at Worms. Even Spires is reached easily enough. But they do not compel the traveller through the modern method of communication, and they are left fairly alone. It is a great advantage. For the traveller who would recapture the permanent spirit of the Rhineland it is an incalculable advantage—thus to be remote, spiritually at least, from the noise of modern Europe.

Of Worms the characteristic is rather the preservation of what was domestic and familiar among western Germans before the new industrial transformation. It is a town the old houses of which recall, as vividly as a well-acted play or a well-written historical novel, the German culture of the highest German time; lovable, familiar, a little confused, but at ease and confident of itself. It is strange how fully that confidence can be felt in the spirit of the place, when one considers the passing and repassing of armies through it for centuries and the destruction wrought by the wars in that frontier-belt.

Spires more than Worms, indeed, more than any other little city I know in all the West, preserves itself wholly to itself.

I have written of Cherchell, on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, and said, quite rightly, that it was a little paradise.

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In quite another way, Spires has become an oasis of repose and quiet delight in my recent memories of travel. There is the same isolation, the same silence, the same goodwill; but the one is wholly of the North; the other is of the burned and difficult Southern land held by arms. I could imagine a man with full liberty taking his ease for the proper months of the year alternately in Spires and in Cherchell.

At one end of the little town stands that high gateway, ‘The Old Gate,’ which is alive and august with the spirit of the German Middle Ages. At the other stands the great block of cathedral: spoiled, indeed, by a modern attempt at Gothic in its western end, but majestic in its multiple lines converging towards the sky throughout the rest of its structure, and provided with a measure of its vastness by the trees of the close or little park round about it.

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Between the two runs the one great street of the place, very broad, quite quiet, at peace. There is not an electric tramway in the place. I had almost written (though that would be an exaggeration) that a man sauntering by those old doors from that most ancient shrine which was sacred to the Emperors, down to the tower height of the old gate, could even forget petrol and the stench and noise thereof. I cannot quite write that; nothing in Europe to-day is free from the internal-combustion engine; but, at any rate, Spires is as free as it is given to any modern town to be free of the modern evils; and the people who inhabit it have for that reason retained a courtesy and a kindness which also the modern world has forgotten.

Spires is a place to return to, and I shall return to it, unless, as well may be, new troubles intervene. It is a city saved and content. Long may it so remain!