part Scriptural, chosen apparently as
being apt for strongly satiric treatment, the suicide of Judas, the
fall of Goliath. The legend of Saint Benedict, naturally at home in a
Benedictine church, presented the sculptor with a series of forcible
grotesques ready-made. Some monkish story, [135] half moral, half
facetious, perhaps a little coarse, like that of Sainte Eugenie, from
time to time makes variety; or an example of the punishment of the
wicked by men or by devils, who play a large, and to themselves
thoroughly enjoyable and merry, part here. The sculptor would seem to
have witnessed the punishment of the blasphemer; how adroitly the
executioner planted knee on the culprit's bosom, as he lay on the
ground, and out came the sinful tongue, to meet the iron pincers. The
minds of those who worked thus seem to have been almost insanely
preoccupied just then with the human countenance, but by no means
exclusively in its pleasantness or dignity. Bold, crude, original,
their work indicates delight in the power of reproducing fact,
curiosity in it, but little or no sense of beauty. The humanity
therefore here presented, as in the Cluniac sculpture generally, is
wholly unconventional. M. Viollet-le-Duc thinks he can trace in it
individual types still actually existing in the peasantry of Le Morvan.
Man and morality, however, disappearing at intervals, the acanthine
capitals have a kind of later Venetian beauty about them, as the
Venetian birds also, the conventional peacocks, or birds wholly of
fantasy, amid the long fantastic foliage. There are still however no
true flowers of the field here. There is pity, it must be confessed, on
the other hand, and the delicacy, the beauty, which that always brings
[136] with it, where Jephtha peeps at the dead daughter's face, lifting
timidly the great leaves that cover it; in the hanging body of Absalom;
in the child carried away by the eagle, his long frock twisted in the
wind as he goes. The parents run out in dismay, and the devil grins,
not because it is the punishment of the child or of them; but because
he is the author of all mischief everywhere, as the monkish carver
conceived--so far wholesomely.

We must remember that any sculpture less emphatic would have been
ineffective, because practically invisible, in this sombre place. But
at the west end there is an escape for the eye, for the soul, towards
the unhindered, natural, afternoon sun; not however into the outer