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[Page 26]
answer to the importunate prayers which rose from the hearts of the first stained-glass artist craftsmen. Light! but light blessed and illuminated by reason, glowing on high like a picture held there by an invisible seraph and carpeting with impalpable, spirit-gems the crucifix-shaped floor, remindful of the play of the last wrathful rays of the wild sunset on the first Good Friday. To soar they must sacrifice – of the sacrifice they made a grace. To spread they must make concessions and their concessions became a virtue. The character of their material bounded their desires, but they triumphantly overcame it. They heightened their edifice by forced perspective, making their clustered pillars converge; and their roofs and floors from the entrance at the west to the apse at the east dipped and rose respectively, cunningly lengthening the nave, not only to the illuded eye, for the body felt, if ever so little, the slight strain that made for the same effect. These then, are the concrete signs of France's early announced resolve, her declaration of her ideals, her profession of faith, a faith which has had and still has the approval of her people for better or worse. To have and to hold. And she will hold to them and vindicate them, despite the howlings of the blood-maddened war-wolves, whose rabid fangs, a- slaver with venom threaten, but threaten in vain, to tear her down. - - - Bergson explains grace, defining it as a series of consecutive inter-related movements, the combination of which gives pleasure because it results in, or gives rise to, a feeling of confident anticipation, which is charmingly reassuring and gratifying to the senses. In the same way true beauty is a reaction from a realization of efficiency; a truth which, two thousand five hundred years ago, the Greeks seized on and embodied in their marbles, thereby establishing, for Europe, an everlasting canon of taste. But efficiency in ancient Greece is not the same thing as efficiency in modern France, for it, necessarily, is modified by conditions of place and time. These conditions the French have grasped and used to qualify the French variety of the prevailing Caucasian average type. This refers to human beings and particularly to French women, for the French have always