IT seems impossible, in face of the facts, to believe in
a past age in which a large body of men worked as
religious artists (in the full modern sense of both terms,
art and religion) upon a series of monuments which
succeeding ages have been able only to destroy or to
caricature. The vast majority of masons either did not
possess, or had no opportunity of developing, more
artistic sense than that of the modern skilled mechanic.
A small minority were not only stone-dressers but also
stone-carvers; yet these were probably no more numerous,
in proportion to population, than the exhibitors at our
art galleries of to-day. Moreover, even of this minority
only a small fraction showed real originality. "The
artists of the fifteenth century imitated with almost the
same docility as those of the twelfth. Imitation is still
the great law of [medieval] art. . . . There were a few
artists, at the end of the fourteenth century and during
the fifteenth, who were able to invent. . . . But the
illumination of service-books was as much an industry
as an art. The head of the workshop alone was a real
artist; he alone took the liberty of making discreet
innovations." ¹ Those words might as truly have been
written about stone-carving as about illumination.
Again, the extent to which glass-painters copied each
other and repeated themselves has long been recognized.
"Moreover, it is a popular fallacy that the medieval
glass-painter was a sentimentalist, a man of high ideals,
who worked chiefly for the love of God's Church and
its adornment, and to that end was content to labour

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