alist, or sensualist, was
naturalist. This character follows necessarily on its extreme love of
truth, prevailing over the sense of beauty, and causing it to take
delight in portraiture of every kind, and to express the various
characters of the human countenance and form, as it did the varieties of
leaves and the ruggedness of branches. And this tendency is both
increased and ennobled by the same Christian humility which we saw
expressed in the first character of Gothic work, its rudeness. For as
that resulted from a humility which confessed the imperfection of the
_workman_, so this naturalist portraiture is rendered more faithful by
the humility which confesses the imperfection of the _subject_. The
Greek sculptor could neither bear to confess his own feebleness, nor to
tell the faults of the forms that he portrayed. But the Christian
workman, believing that all is finally to work together for good, freely
confesses both, and neither seeks to disguise his own roughness of work,
nor his subject's roughness of make. Yet this frankness being joined,
for the most part, with depth of religious feeling in other directions,
and especially with charity, there is sometimes a tendency to Purism in
the best Gothic sculpture; so that it frequently reaches great dignity
of form and tenderness of expression, yet never so as to lose the
veracity of portraiture, wherever portraiture is possible: not exalting
its kings into demi-gods, nor its saints into archangels, but giving
what kingliness and sanctity was in them, to the full, mixed with due
record of their faults; and this in the most part with a great
indifference like that of Scripture history, which sets down, with
unmoved and unexcusing resoluteness, the virtues and errors of all men
of whom it speaks, often leaving the reader to form his own estimate of
them, without an indication of the judgment of the historian. And this
veracity is carried out by the Gothic sculptors in the minuteness and
generality, as well as the equity, of their delineation: for they do not
limit their art to the portraiture of saints and kings, but introduce
the most familiar scenes and most simple subjects; filling up the
backgrounds of Scripture histories with vivid and curious
representations of the commonest incidents of daily life, and availing
themselves of every occasion in which, either as a symbol, or an
explanation of a scene or time, the things familiar to the eye of the
workman could be in