it is known to have been executed between 1508 and 1520. A very few years later were wrought the splendid sculptures in stone of the outer choir screen—the massive wall which encloses this graceful work in carved oak: but these must be referred to Chapter V. The great iron gates, beautiful of their kind, belong to the eighteenth century: they replace a noble jubé or rood screen which once separated the choir from the crossing, where nave and transepts meet.
Now it is clear enough what we have to admire and enjoy when we stand within such a church as this. The least attentive beholder is struck by the great height of the church; and the roof, one hundred and forty feet above the head, is not invisible nor lost in darkness, but shows its elaborate structure of elastic ribs carrying thin vaults which bear upon the ribs and thrust in every direction, so that the general character of the construction is readily grasped. The height is made manifest—it is in a manner explained—by its division into three stories, each of which again seems to be subdivided by the sculptured capitals which mark the springing of the arches. The cruciform plan leading the eye away into halls and passages, not perceived at first, adds to the ultimate effect of grandeur dependent upon space, however much it may delay the fullness of that impression. The abundant detail in mouldings and in floral sculpture as well as in constructional elements probably increases the effect of size by means of the constant repetition of its similar groups: and it is in itself capable of giving the greatest pleasure to the student who finds in it, as it were, a museum of decorative sculpture arranged not in meaningless succession as when fragments are arranged upon a shelf, but in highly significant order and in sequences both horizontal and vertical. There is still for the student of such matters the constantly growing respect for the logical acumen of the builders, who insert nothing for mere ornamentation but who make their constructional members tell as decorative features. Here are no slabs of precious marble nor any bas-reliefs delicately wrought in stucco, as in the buildings of imperial Rome, nor, at present, any chromatic effects whatever, except those of the great windows; for whatever traces of painting were left from the Middle Ages have been destroyed long ago. The building can never have affected surface decoration, in the Roman sense: a decoration covering all parts of its interior and concealing or ignoring the structure; the effective paintings that there were we know to have been local in their character, near the eye, and having a definite message of ecclesiastical import. The decorative instinct of the Gothic builders was not there but in the treatment of the actual building. Let us consider another great cathedral, that of Reims in the department of the Marne. [Plate XXVIII] gives two views in the interior, both near the east end. In the one, you look westward far down the north aisle, about four hundred and twenty feet from where we stand, to the open door seen in the west front. In the other, we look across the choir proper, that is the liturgical enclosure, from southwest to northeast, seeing the beginnings of the curve of the chevet or rounded apse. In these interior views are seen in a more intimate way the characteristics of a great Gothic church. The vastness, the height, the soaring grandeur of the interior are for the moment ignored, and we see the lower vaults and the clustered pillars which support them and the higher vaults of the nave, as well as the delicate sculpture of the capitals. The interior, however, though certainly the thing of primary importance, is not all that we have to study.
The outside of the Gothic Church is as closely related to the structure as is the inside and forms one with it. [Plate XXIX] gives the exterior of Amiens cathedral. The highest windows are those of the clearstory, which is the upper part of the central nave, in this case the nave of the choir. Below these is the roof of the inner aisle hidden here by the pyramidal roofs of the