190 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



when in church or abbey or cathedral, to look 

 carefully at all the sculptured flowers and foliage 

 that are to be seen. The Gothic sculptors took 

 the familiar leaves of the woodland, and flowers 

 of the field, and with a delicate sense of their 

 beauty, cut their forms in stone, with exquisite 

 grace and with constant variation, on the 

 capitals, the bosses, the pendants, cusps and 

 finials, and, in beautiful diaper patterns, on the 

 walls themselves. There was constant variation, 

 I repeat, no mere mechanical repetition of the 

 same forms. They worked their designs mind- 

 ful always — until the last days of the Gothic 

 style — of the changefulness of the living plant ; 

 and, yet, they did not for the most part confuse 

 nature with art, so that it is indeed design that 

 we see ; the treatment is decorative, and, be- 

 cause decorative, conventional. The pleasure 

 we get from their work is different from that 

 which we get from nature. The trees are not 

 decorative. We should like them less if they 

 were. They are living, and the conditions of 

 their life do not make for formal symmetry and 

 proportion. But the sculptor's work is not 

 living; and it is used to decorate forms that 

 are not living. If he were literally to imitate 



