"Since what they chiefly ask for is criticism of religious art, I might write some short study of the early German painters.

I have ample notes, made on the spot in the galleries there; let us see!" He turned them over, lingering to read a note-book containing his impressions of travel.

A summing up of his remarks on the School of Cologne arrested his attention.
At every page he gave vent to his surprise in more and more vehement exclamations, at the false ideas and absurd theories put forward for so many years with regard to these pictures.
Every writer, without exception, had expatiated, each more enthusiastically than the last, on the pure and religious art of these early painters, speaking of them as seraphic artists who had depicted superhuman beauty, white and sylph-like Virgins all soul, standing out like celestial visions, against backgrounds of gold.
Durtal, prejudiced by the unanimity of this universal praise, expected to find almost impalpably fair angels, Flemish Madonnas, etherealized in some sort, having shed their husk of flesh, rapturous Memlings with eyes full of heaven, and bodies that had almost ceased to be--and he remembered his dismay on entering the galleries of the Cologne Museum.
In point of fact his disenchantment had begun as soon as he stepped out of the train.

Carried in the course of a night from Paris to that city, he had made his way through narrow streets where every basement window exhaled the fragrance of _sauerkraut_, and he had reached the cathedral square, beautified by Farina's shop-signs, where in front of the famous Dom he had been obliged to confess that this facade, this exterior, was a huge piece of patchwork--a delusion.

Every part of it was furbished up, and the church sheltered no sculpture under its portals; it was symmetrical, built by peg and line; its rigid forms, its hard outlines were an offence.
The interior was better, in spite of the vulgar blaze, the cheap fireworks, of ignoble modern glass.