alth of
the world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong.
They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical
exaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure,
profound, internal, intellectual incompetence; that intellectual
incompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride.
I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All the columns
in the Kaiser's Chapel are in one way very suitable to their place;
every one of them has a swelled head. The column itself is slender
but the capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the air
of bulging _downwards_, as if pressing heavily on something too
slender to support it. This is false, not to any of the particular
schools of architecture about which professors can read in libraries,
but to the inmost instinctive idea of architecture itself.
A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick,
and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose.
And a Gothic column can be slender, because its strength is energy;
and is expressed in its line, which shoots upwards like the life of
a tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like the rush of a rocket.
But a slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a bloated
thing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakes
that are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right.
And to all this is added the intolerable intuition; that the Russians
and the Franciscans, even if we credit them with fantastic ignorance,
are at least looking up at the sky; and we know how the learned
Germans would look down upon them, from their monstrous tower
upon the hill.

And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elements
in the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not unjustly partisan,
I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that common
subject of complaint; the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceiling
of the chapel. It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknown
practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations.
The real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked
the barbaric imperialism can be found in another figure of which,
curiously enough, considerably less notice seems to have been taken.
It is the more remarkable because it is but an artistic shadow of
the actual fact; and merely records in outline and relief the temporary
masquerade in which the man walked