These curious figures, these seven kings and seven prophets and five queens, these nineteen survivors of the twenty-four once here, with their thin, elongated bodies, their small heads, their Eastern drapery, their anatomical faults, and their haunting faces, may strike you at first as unattractive, bizarre. But nothing is more certain than that, if you study them, you will find in them an unutterable beauty and an ineffable charm. For this is the most spiritual and fascinating sculpture in the world, wrought with an infinite delicacy and an inimitable cleverness of detail, by the hands of artists who were consummate in their craft, and had learned, if not the perfection of form of the old Greeks, yet the secret, as it has been said, of spiritualising matter.
The figures stand upright, with an air of inviolable repose, beneath canopies like that of the Angel-sundial, heavenly Jerusalems, miniature Zions. Their hands are glued to their sides, their drapery falls, in most cases, in straight parallel folds; a halo is, or has been, behind the head of each. They are clad in the long, rich robes of the East. Over some of these a kind of dalmatic reaches to the knees. The girdles and the broidered robes, the arrangement of the sleeves and veils, and the jewellery of the crowns they wear, all demand the closest study. The hard stone has been handled with such precision and such feeling that you might almost fancy it, here, a delicate brocade, and there, a necklace of veritable jewels. You could almost untie the knots of those girdles, unplait almost the long braided tresses of those mystic queens. And the heads of these silent watchers, who have waited here and watched, with ever the same living smile about their thin, ironical Gallic lips, are portraits startling in their lifelike reality.
The bare feet rest upon pedestals which are not the least exquisite portions of these sculptured monoliths. For they are richly ornamented with carved chequerwork, so delicately chiselled as to seem the work of a goldsmith rather than a mason; mosaic patterns, which, like the borders of the stained-glass windows, betray the influence of the East through the medium of the Crusades. An exception, however, must be made in the case of the three first statues of the left bay, next to the Clocher Neuf. These have no halo, and the pedestals on which they rest their feet are groups of enigmatic beings. The first, a king who has been given by some modern restorer a thirteenth-century Virgin’s head, treads underfoot a man, now scarce recognisable, enfolded by two serpents; the second, a king also, rests upon a woman, who holds with one hand the tail of a dragon, on which she is trampling, and with the other she fingers a tress of her long, plaited hair; the third, a queen of grosser type, but very richly clad, has beneath her feet a curious group, composed of a large ape, two dragons, a toad, a dog and a basilisk with a monkey’s face.
It has been supposed that this group represents the benefactors of the Cathedral, William the Conqueror, Henry the First and Queen Matilda. But this explanation, like that of the last-named group as representing the Deadly Sins, is mere conjecture. Nor can we do more than name as kings, prophets and queens the remaining sixteen statues which line the porch. The fourth and fifth, counting from the Clocher Neuf, are prophets, Isaiah and Daniel perhaps, according to the suggestions of M. l’Abbé Bulteau: the eighth, ninth and tenth, Ezekiel, James-the-Less and Thaddæus; the eleventh, thirteenth and fourteenth, kings with missals and sceptres in their hands, may be Edward the Confessor, Charlemagne and Cnut; the fifteenth, S. Paul; the sixteenth, a haloed, virgin king, beardless, and full of the holy charm and freshness of youth, S. Henry (1024); the seventeenth, S. Peter; the eighteenth, S. Constantine; the last, a queen, much defaced, like several of the others, Pulcheria, beloved of the Byzantines.