cornice or
capital, have given way here, in the first Pointed style, to a
pleasanter, because more natural, mode of fancy; to veritable forms of
vegetable life, flower or leaf, from meadow and woodside, though still
indeed with a certain survival of the grotesque in a confusion of the
leaf with the flower, which the subsequent Decorated period will wholly
purge away in its perfect garden-borders. It was not with monastic
artists and artisans that the sheds and workshops around Amiens
Cathedral were filled, [119] as it rose from its foundations through
fifty years; and those lay schools of art, with their communistic
sentiment, to which in the thirteenth century the great episcopal
builders must needs resort, would in the natural course of things tend
towards naturalism. The subordinate arts also were no longer at the
monastic stage, borrowing inspiration exclusively from the experiences
of the cloister, but belonged to guilds of laymen--smiths, painters,
sculptors. The great confederation of the "city," the commune,
subdivided itself into confederations of citizens. In the natural
objects of the first Pointed style there is the freshness as of nature
itself, seen and felt for the first time; as if, in contrast, those
older cloistral workmen had but fed their imagination in an
embarrassed, imprisoned, and really decadent manner, or mere
reminiscence of, or prescriptions about, things visible.

Congruous again with the popularity of the builders of Amiens, of their
motives, is the wealth, the freedom and abundance, of popular, almost
secular, teaching, here afforded, in the carving especially, within and
without; an open Bible, in place of later legend, as at monastic
Vezelay,--the Bible treated as a book about men and women, and other
persons equally real, but blent with lessons, with the liveliest
observations, on the lives of men as they were then and now, what they
do, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the doings of nature
[120] which so greatly influence what man does; together with certain
impressive metaphysical and moral ideas, a sort of popular scholastic
philosophy, or as if it were the virtues and vices Aristotle defines,
or the characters of Theophrastus, translated into stone. Above all,
it is to be observed that as a result of this spirit, this "free"
spirit, in it, art has at last become personal. The artist, as such,
appears at Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth century; and, by
making