The basilica of Rheims is the ideal type of a great Gothic cathedral. Everything has been gathered together here to enchant the eye and touch the mind.

From the outside, with its eight spires, and the lace-work of its bell-towers, and its galleries boldly mounting to the sky, with the breadth of its arrangement, the splendid development of its cruciform plan, with its two cloisters and its magnificent dependencies, it appears as the sublime expression of western genius and the culminating point of the Christian idea.

Within, it is dazzling. All the resources of decoration have been prodigally employed. Indeed, the eye does not know which of the marvels to select, and if this stupendous whole has been preserved to us by a miracle, nothing in the world can be compared to it. The brilliant series of windows, one of the most complete and beautiful in existence; the pavement, with its labyrinth and countless mortuary tombs; the rich altars and chapel paintings; the tomb of St. Nicaise; the pulpit of St. Remi; the rood-screen, a master work by Colard de Givry, made in 1417; the railings of the choir, with precious hangings and stalls; the high altar charged with relics, and presents from the Kings of France; its golden retable and its splendid ciborium of the Thirteenth Century, in silver gilt; the sacrarium, the fonts, and the sepulchres;—form a great mass of treasure.

And how greatly is the feeling increased by memories when you reconstruct the public life of Notre-Dame of Rheims, and the events of which she was the theatre during the long course of centuries; when you dream of all the coronations, councils, and meetings that have taken place beneath its vaults! No edifice, in truth, is, in this respect, more worthy of our honour and admiration.

Notre-Dame of Rheims measures in round numbers one hundred and thirty-nine metres long and thirty-eight metres high beneath the vault; it is not surpassed in length by the Cathedral of Mans, thanks to the unusual dimensions of its absidal chapel, nor in height by Beauvais, Cologne, Metz, Amiens, or Saint-Quentin. The great divisions of the whole, founded upon a triple scale, in height and breadth, are clearly accentuated. From the lower part of the nave the view is one of striking grandeur and harmony; the dazzled glance loses itself in these vast depths, under the luminous sheets of light which spread out from the lateral bays, while the large vault, clouded in the mysterious penumbra of the high windows, ornamented with their glass, invites you to meditation. No cathedral offers so powerful an opposition to light. The arrangement of the great piers cantoned by four half-columns bound together also increases the fleeting perspective.

Of the whole building, I have only to criticize the composition of the triforium, which is truly not of the first order; it demands more elegance and firmness; the arches of that gallery, the decorative function of which is so important in a Gothic church, seem heavy and as if crushed between the robust piers of the ground-floor and the large bays of the upper story.

In all that belongs to the Thirteenth Century, the execution bears witness to an extreme care and luxury. The Cathedral of Rheims, principally in its interior work, is a model that has never been surpassed from the point of view of technique, of show and of the judicious use of material. The carving is of the first order. The capitals of Rheims are celebrated, and very justly. The independence of the Style champenois has introduced some elements of life and fantasy which give them a character of their own. Some of the most beautiful, notably the capital of the Vendanges (The Vintages), have been made popular by the mouldings in the Musée of the Trocadéro; but all of them are remarkable on account of the variety of the motives that decorate them. Viollet-le-Duc has justly observed that the capitals of Rheims present a decisive progress in the union of the capital of the principal column with the capitals of the connected columns: a very great difficulty which Gothic architects did not solve until after numerous groupings. Here the monotony has been avoided by a division of the bound columns into two segments, separated by an astragal. The effect of this division is most happy and constitutes one of the most striking peculiarities of the Cathedral of Rheims.

The choir is unanimously admired. However, it has not the breadth nor the spring of the great choirs of Bourges, Amiens and Mans; but it derives its originality from its depth and its radiating chapels; and to the preservation of its most exquisite windows it owes a poetic charm that very few interiors can equal. The windows of Rheims are, in reality, the most perfect we have seen after those of Chartres, Bourges, Mans and Auxerre. In purity of expression they surpass the windows of Soissons, Troyes, and Châlons. The windows in the apsis are masterpieces; their sweet intensity, in the scale of blue, is truly enchanting. They were executed from 1227 to 1240 under the episcopate of Henri de Braisne, whose figure appears in the principal window, in the centre of nine large, high windows, between the twelve suffragans of Rheims, arranged in order, according to their rank in the province: Soissons, Laon, Beauvais, Noyon, Senlis, Tournai, Cambrai, Châlons, Thérouanne, Amiens, etc., each having at his side a Gothic cathedral.

These figures of bishops of gigantic proportions have a majesty that cannot be described. But in the midst of these splendours, it is the rose of the western window which is perhaps the most worthy of everything to hold your attention. Composition, brilliancy, harmony and elegance of position,—it possesses all these qualities. It would be difficult to find a more admirable witness of the decorative sense of the old glass-workers. When across the network of the immense surface, the light from the setting sun is thrown, the whole interior of the church is illuminated as if by a conflagration. The preservation of this masterpiece is unfortunately greatly compromised by the crack like a sabre cut which crosses the façade near the rose. The high windows in the nave represent the Kings, just as in the Cathedral of Sacres; they are still more beautiful, however, of deep rich colours, but of a less careful execution than the great rose and the windows in the choir.

All these marvels, however, pale before the carved decoration that surrounds on the inside the lower part of the three doors of the façade, a kind of drapery in relief, as unique by the character of its invention as by the perfection of its workmanship.

This extraordinary decoration envelops up to their summits the three ogival windows that open upon the porch. It goes up as high as the triforium, by a succession of seven rows of niches closed by trefoil arches, and separated from them by panels and corner-pieces of leaves borrowed from the flora of the country and divinely carved. You see in turn: the laurel, the vine, the pear, the apple, the holly, the oak, the ivy, the water-lily, the bulrush, the peony, the clover, the chestnut, the liverwort, and the olive. A hundred and twenty-two statues of incomparable beauty, rivalling the most beautiful productions of sculpture of former times, occupy the niches, and, deliciously set off by the floral decoration of the plain surfaces, stand out like living personages from the dark background of the niches.

Each one of these figures is a most precious work, studied from nature with a sovereign knowledge of drapery and movement. Here is a priest officiating in his chasuble and holding the Eucharist; there, is a warrior in coat-of-mail, who seems to have just returned from the Crusades; moreover, there are some prophets of heroic mien, noble virgins with trailing robes, and martyrs, illuminated with ecstasy. All this mural decoration was made in the spirit of the architecture, intended to complete the iconography of the great door and to amplify still further the cyclic character,—the general theme being the history of Christ and the glorification of the Virgin, with the accessory scenes that belong to it.

Let us cross the threshold: we are outside, before the façade. We must walk farther away in order to embrace all the lines and take in the masterly idea of the whole. It is most celebrated, that is well-known; for a long time, its richness has been a synonym of beauty in mediæval art. I have already said that the general conception is of the highest order, the upward movement is magnificent, the statues blossom with a bewildering luxuriance, and the infinite multiplication of the details, which—miraculous fact—do not obliterate the majestic section of the lower stages, so happily cut by the tall bays scattered in the bell-towers. Nevertheless, when you come nearer, you are surprised at finding so much uncertainty in the conduct of this terrible enterprise! How much weakness and lassitude in the highest parts! You perceive both haste and economy there. All that dates from the end of the Fourteenth and the beginning of the Fifteenth Century is mediocre; the sculpture, cut in bad materials that are injured by the frost, is coarse and flabby: the nobility of the contours is lost beneath the excessive ornamentation, and the absence of the spires deprives this aërial building of its necessary finish.

To be satisfied, the eye must rest below the row of Kings made during the reign of Charles V.

While the upper stories have been made of soft stone of a bad quality, the lower parts, built of hard stone, have acquired in the course of time the hues of Florentine bronze. It is here that the Champagne sculptor has lavishly exhibited the treasures of his spirit, his audacity and his genius. When the great statues of the portals of Rheims are mentioned, everybody is of one accord.

The Queen of the basilica, the Virgin, is the soul of this cosmos, the centre from which everything radiates.

She is crowned by Christ beneath the daïs of the great gable, and this composition, which is still brightened by the remains of the gold background from which it stands out, is one of the most exquisite creations of Christian Art; the Virgin is also on the pier; she is directly or indirectly in every scene of the life of Jesus. Her memory, her legend, her poetry are everywhere: she is at once the culminating point and the humble pretext of all this magnificence. At Paris, at Bourges and at Amiens, it is Christ; here, it is the Virgin; and around this admirable theme a powerful thought has quickened into being a race of statues, a people in whom life, movement and fantasy circulate, beneath the compassionate gaze of the Mother of God and under the influence of her adorable grace. Charm is really the special characteristic of the sculpture at Rheims,—a special charm that is always evident, a charm carried to the point of morbidezza which in certain figures has been compared, and not without reason, to the mysterious charm of Leonardo da Vinci.

All these personages of high stature, blackened and polished by time, possess an indescribable grace, smiling and familiar, an indescribable and eloquent gravity that puts them into communion with the spectator; they are indeed of our country and of our race; their idealism, always youthful despite the centuries, is not too far removed from earth to respond even now to the secret aspirations of our souls; they are the glory of the portals of Rheims, the glory of French sculpture.

Beautiful as these figures are, they must not let us forget the population of two thousand five hundred statues that make the Cathedral of Rheims a unique monument of decorative and monumental sculpture. All the images of this old basilica deserve attentive study. An entire volume would scarcely suffice to enumerate them. It is necessary to take a trip to the roof to measure fully this incredible wealth: giants of stone, angels with spread wings, apostles, saints and royal figures, fantastic animals, more than forty metres high, which occupy the pinnacles of the buttresses, are lined along the galleries of the transepts or fortify the balustrade of the roof; figures full of vitality that project from the corners, the springs of the arches, the junction of curves, as crowns, supports, caryatides, mascarons, and gargoyles; capricious, expressive and energetic figures, to execute which the Champagne chisel, the freest and most supple of Gothic chisels, has given itself full scope, with an exuberant joy.

Despite the devastations of the rococo period, to which was added that of the Revolutionary period, the Cathedral of Rheims has not been entirely stripped of her incomparable artistic treasures. She has preserved a great portion of her tapestry hangings, and her Treasury is still one of the richest in France.

The tapestries of Rheims have been very learnedly described by M. Ch. Loriquet. Before the Revolution the collection was unique. Hincmar, Hérivée, Regnault de Chartres, Juvénal des Ursins, Robert de Lenoncourt, the great Cardinal of Lorraine, the Cardinal of Guise, Henri de Lorraine, the Kings of France and the Chapter were the principal donators.

These tapestries were used to decorate the cathedral on days of special solemnity. Of the magnificent collection there only remain the fifteen pieces by Lenoncourt, two of the six tapestries of the Grand Roi Clovis, given by the Cardinal of Lorraine, fifteen tapestries executed by Pepersack, at the order of Henri de Lorraine, the four pieces ordered from Lombart d’ Aubusson by the Chapter, four tapestries called the Cantiques and two Gobelins after Raphael’s Cartoons.

The most remarkable are certainly those by Lenoncourt and those of the Clovis set. The first were offered to the cathedral by the Archbishop Robert de Lenoncourt; one of them bears the dedication of 1530. They represent the Life of the Virgin. They are of Flemish origin and of a very fine execution. The composition is rich, spirited and of an extremely graceful style. Some of them have not lost the freshness of their colours and can still be counted among the best specimens of the art of tapestry at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century. These precious hangings occupy the wall surfaces of the side-aisles of the nave, where they produce a sumptuous effect.