We feel that they accumulated on that spot all the learning and organisation and information and wealth 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.