BY ROGER E. E owe to France what is perhaps the most important and the most original movement in figurative art that Europe has witnessed since the efflorescence of Greek sculpture; the movement which from 1200 to 1300 created for the first time a distinctively christian style, and created it, too, in the Greek spirit. Unfortunately that period when France was most originative and showed the way for modern Europe falls outside the range of the present exhibition, which takes up the story of French art at the middle of the fourteenth century. But the committee have wisely admitted one or two examples of earlier art; and of one, the silver-gilt figure of a king, recently discovered in a house at Bourges, I will speak shortly, since it gives the essential characteristics of that great period. We are struck at once by the presence of this figure in the debonnair saintliness of the man. He stands with an easy self-assurance which yet has nothing of self-assertion or indifference. And this expression of a new moral type which was the great discovery of early gothic art gains its effect more by the rendering of pose and movement than by the treatment of the face. It is due to the intense synthetic imagination of the artist, who seized at once the essential relations of the shoulders to the hips and of both to the supporting feet.

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It is the way in which this figure stands that determines our feelings. This is indicated to us mainly by the dependence of the draperies, in which by a supreme effort of artistic tact the forms are at once generalized and expressive.

It is scarcely too fanciful, perhaps, to compare this intense perception of the lines of stress in figure and drapery with the engineering imagination of the cathedral builders of the day, who built vaulted

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structures in which the stress of gravity was so perfectly met that the lines they built up to meet it are the inverse of those which a pendant structure would take if flexible threads replaced the stone ribs.

It is this scientific imagination of the fundamental conditions of our bodily existence which distinguishes the greatest art of Europe; and on this, if anything, it may make its claim to superiority over the art of the East, the art which eliminates or ignores those conditions. In any case for its power of stimulating such imaginative perceptions this silver figure must assuredly rank high among the products of western

art.

The history of the development of an art may be looked at from two points of view. It may be looked on as a gradual conquest of the forms of nature, a gradual discovery of how things appear to the eye; or, on the other hand, as the logical and internally necessitated evolution of a rhythm; a process in which the rhythm of one generation of artists is bound, by its very nature, to generate the rhythm of the next. There come certain moments in this process when the rhythm which the artist inherits is more, others when it is less, propitious to the expression of the highest truths about the external universe: but always the rhythm tends to move along the lines of its own separate and predestined course. In French gothic art this seems to be particularly marked. We can trace how the lines of the Romanesque sculptors became more and more flexible without apparently approaching any nearer to natural form until suddenly the rhythm arrives at a point where it becomes perfectly adapted to the expression of life. At such a moment of the relaxation of a too rigid formula we get the generalized heroic naturalism of the early thirteenth century. To such a moment the silver king belongs. But the rhythm of rhythms moves on inevitably; it is but a moment, and the