LONG before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known—that of Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, and the school of the ?le de France. The first is of the late eleventh century, the second of the twelfth, the third of the latter part of this century and the first half of the thirteenth. The earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman, part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as at Moissac, a level of extraordinary decorative value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for rhythmical line and space composition that are quite{239} astounding. In Burgundy, combined with great rudeness and an almost savage directness, there is far greater humanism, with much action and an unusual amount of character differentiation; much of the best work of this school is to be found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle years of the twelfth century the sculpture of the ?le de France seems suddenly to burst forth at St. Denis and Chartres like some miraculous happening. It was not this, but the result of many years of cumulative and progressive effort; but all that went before has perished, while fortunately some examples at St. Denis and a supreme collection at Chartres remain to give the impression of an unwonted and unheralded event. This sculpture of Chartres is more superbly architectural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic scheme than any other on record; all is formal, conventionalised; the figures are erect, rigid, immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple figure-modelling, the immobile, dispassionate faces, all show a most curious self-abnegation on the part of the sculptor and a profound conviction that both he and his art are only part of a greater whole, for they are purely architectural and in{240}deed nothing but the architectural spirit expressing itself through an allied artistic mode. They are startlingly akin to archaic Greek work and, as Professor Moore has said of the sculpture from Delos: “One of these ancient Greek statues might, if wrought in French limestone and slightly modified in outline, stand in the west portal of Chartres without apparent lack of keeping.” Yet there is manifestly no possible point of historical contact between the Hellenic and the French work, and the kinship simply shows the persistence of certain ways of looking at and feeling about things, and the inevitable if unconscious return of one generation to the ways of another, that form a commentary, both cruel and humorous, on the evolutionary philosophy current during the last century, and quite unjustifiably claiming descent from the innocent speculations of Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

Out of this sculpture of Chartres grew the very wonderful art of the thirteenth century, which gives a sorely diminished glory to the Cathedral of Paris and gave, a year ago, a still greater glory to that immortal group of churches now slowly crumbling under gun-fire. Very notable examples of the transition are at Senlis,{241} but they have been shockingly mutilated, and only one of the two wonderful carved lintels still gives much idea of its original beauty. The panel of the “Resurrection of the Virgin,” has all the architectural form and the decorative sense of Chartres, but it has as well an added human quality that makes it enduringly vital and appealing. The same can be said of the surrounding statues and reliefs that are of the same period, and altogether the almost unique work at Senlis strikes a singularly happy balance, as sculptured architecture, between the rigid formalism of Chartres and Vezelay and the exquisite humanism and the almost too-surpassing art of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. But for the Revolution Senlis would not have stood so alone for sculptural art of the transition. Laon once possessed far more, and of an even higher type, but all the column figures of the west doors, and indeed practically all the free-standing statues, were then ruthlessly destroyed and those that have taken their places are merely modern assumptions. The tympana of the doors are original, though mutilated: the Coronation of the Virgin, scenes from her life, the Last Judgment; while in the archivolts and around the windows are remains of singularly{242} beautiful effigies of the wise and foolish virgins, the seven liberal arts, episodes from the lives of the saints. More or less of the original polychromatic decoration remains, and the statues themselves, even in their battered state, are marvels of art. Every trace of archaism and of uncertainty is gone, the sculptor works with a definiteness and a certainty of touch that are amazing, while his sense of the eternally sculpturesque is infallible. Every face—where a face remains—is brilliantly characterised; the poses are graceful, unaffected, constantly varied; the gestures are convincing, the stone quality never lost, while there is nothing outside Hellas—except Amiens and Reims—so faultless in its composition of drapery. From the very first this was one of the strong points in French sculpture; each artist strove for, and attained, not only distinction, but naturalism expressed through and by an almost classic formalism; the line composition, from Vezelay to Reims, is a succession of ever-waxing marvels. At Laon are even now mutilated figures that are as perfect in their composition of lines and masses as anything in Athens, and the same was true of Reims. Personally I have always thought of the figure work at Amiens (apart from the bas reliefs) as less perfect in this respect, in spite of expert opinion, than that of Paris, Laon, and Reims; less brilliantly composed, more heavy and realistic, while the figures themselves are certainly not as slender and graceful, or so varied in pose. Moissac and Vezelay are hieratic abstractions, Chartres pure architecture, Soissons a breathing of divine life into ancient forms, but Laon and Paris and Reims are pure and perfect sculpture against which no criticism of any kind can be brought. Never has actual life been better expressed through the necessarily transforming modes of art than here; in these exquisite and rhythmical compositions the barbarous folly of the naturalistic and realistic schools of modern times is made cruelly apparent, and the base products of the average nineteenth-century practitioners (barring a few exceptions such as St. Gaudens at his best, as in the Rock Creek figure) become in comparison as absurd as do the shameless vulgarities of Bernini and his unhappy ilk.

There still remain at Laon many broken and headless fragments, and I do not know where anything can be found more complete in every sculptural quality. This is a great art at its{244} highest, and it shows, as Reims once showed, that in the early thirteenth century France possessed an art of sculpture that could take its place unashamed beside the best of the Parthenon. Usually one thinks of Gothic sculpture in the terms of that late fourteenth-century work so easily obtainable from venders of the remains of medi?val art, but this is of a time when a cold convention had killed the art itself; when the subtle curves of such matchless things as the statue of the Virgin from the north door of her church in Paris had been distorted into grotesque exaggeration; when the thin, close lines of drapery had coarsened into triangular spaces of meaningless upholstery, and the sensitive, spiritual faces of Reims had given place to fat attempts at a stolid pulchritude. This is not art but a trade, and it bears no earthly resemblance to the consummate work of a century earlier, when the art itself and the religion and the joy and the personal liberty behind it were very real things.

Chronologically, the next great sculpture of France is that of the Cathedral of Paris, but as I have arbitrarily excluded this city from the survey, since one must stop somewhere, while Paris requires a volume to itself, it is only necessary to{245} say that in spite of the devastations of man during six centuries, ending with the dull barbarity of the architect Sufflot, who hacked away the trumeau of the great central west door, together with a large section of the tympanum of the Last Judgment, in order to provide a more magnificent means of entrance for processions, enough still exists to show the singular mastery of the art. As for the statue of Our Lady on the north transept, it is one of the finest works of sculpture of any time or place, the perfection of the drapery finding rivals only in Greece. It is interesting to realise that this marvellous work antedates Niccolo Pisano by more than a century, so that if there still are those who search for the origins of sculpture after the great blank of the Dark Ages, they must forsake the Renaissance and Italy and find what they sought in France during the culmination of the Middle Ages.

At Amiens there is also, over the south portal, a figure of the Blessed Virgin, and while it is wholly different in spirit from that of Paris, it is almost as lovely and even more delicate and full of charm. Paris has the majesty and nobility of Michael Angelo, with nothing of his high but inopportune paganism, but this is like Mino da{246} Fiesole, with all his daintiness and sweetness of feeling, and added to this an almost playful humanism that is wonderfully appealing. “Le Beau Dieu” of Amiens, on the trumeau of the central west door is almost in the class of the Paris Virgin and the sculpture of Reims, and is perhaps more nearly a satisfactory showing forth of Christ in human form than any other work of art in the world. The whole vast church is a pageant of carven figures—prophets, saints, apostles, kings, virtues and vices, symbolical characters, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the lives of the saints, philosophy, romance—every tympanum is carved in bas relief, and the wall below the columns of the west portals is set with innumerable medallions of the signs of the zodiac and the labours of man. Never was there such an apotheosis of imagination, and only at Reims is there anything a degree finer as art. Even there the difference is mostly one of personal taste; if you like the lost marvels of Reims better than the miraculously preserved wonders of Amiens, well and good; it is for you to say, for both are matchless, each after its own kind. How the amazing array of carvings and statues at Amiens has survived passes the understanding; one would{247} have supposed that its spiritual emphasis, its priceless nature, and its singular beauty would have ............