In itself his sculpture is hardly
decorative, as we apply the epithet to modern work. It is just off the
line of rigidity, of insistence in every detail of its right and title
to individuality apart from every other sculptured detail. The prophets
in the niches of the beautiful Dijon Well, the monks under the arcades
of the beautiful Burgundian tombs, have little relation with each other
as elements of a decorative sculptural composition. They are in the same
style, that is all. Each of them is in interest quite independent of the
other. Compared with one of the Pisans' pulpits they form a congeries
rather than a composition. Compared with Goujon's "Fountain of the
Innocents" their motive is not decorative at all. Isaiah, Ezekiel,
Jeremiah asserts his individuality in a way the more sociable prophets
of the Sistine Chapel would hesitate to do. They have a little the air
of hermits--of artistic anchorites, one may say.

They are Gothic, too, not only in being thus sculpturally undecorative
and uncomposed, but in being beautifully subordinate to the architecture
which it is their unmistakable ancillary function to decorate in the
most delightful way imaginable--in being in a word architecturally
decorative. The marriage of the two arts is, Gothically, not on equal
terms. It never occurred, of course, to the Gothic architect that it
should be. His _ensemble_ was always one of which the chief, the
overwhelming, one may almost say the sole, interest is structural. He
even imposed the condition that the sculpture which decorated his
structure should be itself architecturally structural. One figure of the
portals of Chartres is almost as like another as one pillar of the
interior is like its fellows; for the reason--eminently satisfactory to
the architect--that it discharges an identical function.

Emancipation from this thraldom of the architect is Sluters's great
distinction, however. He is modern in this sense, without going so
far--without going anything like so far--as the modern sculptor who
divorces his work from that of the architect with whom he is called upon
to combine to the end of an _ensemble_ that shall be equally agreeable
to the sense satisfied by form and that satisfied by structure. His
figures, subordinate as they are to the general architectural purpose
and function of what they decorate, are not only not purely structural
in their expression, stiff as they still are from the point of view of
absolutely f