veals only what is external, dies from
him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning. It is only in
his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly.
Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a
series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest. The
classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to
make up the meaning. Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that
surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred
upon the outside of Chartres,--nine thousand in all, carved or painted,
inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred _epos_
in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the
beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and
subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community,
whatever occupied and interested men,--their virtues and vices, trades
and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp
hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and
the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,--in short, all that touched the mind
of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all
exists alike to the glory of God.

It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the
statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French
Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of
the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the
statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their
fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was
the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,--the sovereign
importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of
any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of
the infinite possibilities he infolds.

The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of
Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are
moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,--on one side
qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that
the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with
the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror
embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the
terrific is accumula