PART IV
MODERN SCULPTURE
CHAPTER XII
THE ART OF MONARCHICAL FRANCE
(FROM FRANCIS I., 1515 a.d., TO
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1789)
Among the commonplaces uppermost in latter-day thought is that which usually finds expression in the phrase, “For East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Whether this dogma be ultimately true or not it certainly enshrines a far-reaching truth. The difference between the typical Eastern and the typical Western mind goes down to the deepest philosophical beliefs of both. The circumstances under which the two types have been moulded differ so widely that they hardly appear to move on the same mental plane.
But the Eastern and the Western are not the only types which offer the strongest contrast the one to the other. Between the North and the South, too, there is a great gulf fixed—a vital historical fact which Heine has expressed with unforgettable vividness in two short stanzas. In the first, he pictures the black fir-tree on the bald hill-brow of the North. He speaks of its icy garb, and shows it sleeping and dreaming amid the eternal snows:
“It sleeps and dreams of a palm-tree, Far off in the morning land, Lonely and silent, pining On a cliff o’er the shimmering sand.”
For thousands of years the great mountain chains of mid-Europe cut off the man in the North from the man in the South, as completely as the barren steppes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia divided East from West. To this very day the long winters and cool summers, the sombre skies and deep forests, have operated to produce a body of thought and emotion in the North of Europe that differs entirely from that nourished under the clear skies and in the warm winds of Italy and Greece. The mysticism of the Northman, his yearning to be at one with the Ultimate Reality, is foreign to the typical Southern intellect—as foreign as the dim forests, in which the mystical gloom of the Northern imagination arose, are to the fruitful plains in which the sunnier creed of the Southerner had its birth.