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 free sculpture; they are, moreover, not merely unrelated to each other in any essential sense, such as that in which the figures of the Pisans and of Goujon are related; they are on the contrary each and all wonderfully accentuated and individualized.  Every ecclesiastic on the Dijon tombs is a character study.  Every figure on the Well has a psychologic as well as a sculptural interest.  Poised between Gothic tradition and modern feeling, between a reverend and august aesthetic conventionality and the dawn of free activity, Sluters is one of the most interesting and stimulating figures in the whole history of sculpture.  And the force of his characterizations, the vividness of his conceptions, and the combined power and delicacy of his modelling give him the added importance of one of the heroes of his art in any time or country.  There is something extremely Flemish in his sense of personality.  A similar interest in humanity as such, in the individual apart from the type, is noticeable in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of Memling, of Quentin Matsys, and Roger Van der Weyden, wherein all idea of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal is subordinated as it is in no other art—­in that of Holland no more than in that of Italy—­to the representation in the most definite, precise, and powerful way of some intensely human personality.  There is the same extraordinary concreteness in one of Matsys’s apostles and one of Sluters’s prophets.