Stained Glass Work Part 17

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[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 73. Seed of design as applied to Craft & Material.

Suppose you have three simple openings. (fig. 'a'.) garret windows, or pa.s.sage windows, we will suppose, each with a central horizontal bar: and suppose you have a number of pieces of gla.s.s to use up already cut to one gauge, and that six of these fill a window, can you get any little variety by arrangement on the following terms. 1. Treating both upper and lower ranges alike 2. Allowing yourself to halve them, vertically only. 3. Not wasting any gla.s.s. 4. Not halving more than two in each light. How is this, fig. b? you despise it? so absurdly simple?

It is the key to all simple ornament in leaded gla.s.s. Exhaust all the possible varieties, there are at least nine. Do them. That's all.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A]

[Ill.u.s.tration: B]

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[Ill.u.s.tration] ]

In these days and in our huge cities there are so many avenues open to celebrity, through Society, the Press, Exhibition, and so forth, that a man once led to spend time on them is in danger of finding half his working life run away with by them before he is aware, while even if they are successful the success won by them is a poor thing compared to that which might have been earned by the work which was sacrificed for them. It becomes almost a profession in itself to keep oneself notorious.

To spend large slices out of one's time in the mere putting forward of one's work, _showing_ it apart from _doing_ it, necessary as this sometimes is, is a thing to be done grudgingly; still more so should one grudge to be called from one's work here, there, and everywhere by the social claims which crowd round the position of a public man.

There are strenuous things enough for you in the work itself without wasting your strength on these. We will speak of them presently; but a word first upon originality.

Don't _strive_ to be original; no one ever got Heaven's gift of invention by saying, "I must have it, and since I don't feel it I must a.s.sume it and pretend it;" follow rather your master patiently and lovingly for a long time; give and take, echo his habits as Botticelli echoed Filippo Lippi's, but improve upon them; add something to them if you can, as he also did, and pa.s.s then on, as he also did, to the _little_ Filippo--Filippino--making him a truer and sweeter heart than his father, out of the well of truth and sweetness with which Botticelli's own heart was br.i.m.m.i.n.g. Do this, but at the same time expect with happy patience, as a boy longs for his manhood, yet does not try to hasten it and does not pretend to forestall it, the time when some fresh idea in imagination, some fresh method in design, some fresh process in craftsmans.h.i.+p, will come to you as a reward of patient working--and come by accident, as all such things do, lest you should think it your own and miss the joy of knowing that it is not yours but Heaven's.

And when this comes, guard it and mature it carefully. Do not throw it out too lavishly broadcast with the ostentation of a generous genius having gifts to spare. Share it with proved and worthy friends, when they notice it and ask you about it, but in the meanwhile develop and cultivate it as a gardener does a tree. And this leads me to the most important point of all--namely, the value, the all-sufficing value, of _one_ new step on the road of Beauty. If such is really granted you, consider it as enough for your lifetime. One such thing in the history of the arts has generally been enough for a century; how much more, then, for a generation.

For indeed there is only one rule for fine work in art, that you should put your whole strength, all the powers of mind and body into every touch. Nothing less will do than that. You must face it in drawing from the life. Try it in its acutest form, not from the posed, professional model, who will sit like a stone; try it with children, two years old or so; the despair of it, the exhaustion: and then, in a flash, when you thought you had really done somewhat, a still more captivating, fascinating gesture, which makes all you have done look like lead. Can you screw your exhaustion up _again,_ sacrifice all you have done, and face the labour of wrestling with the new idea? And if you do? You are sick with doubt between the new and the old. You ask your friends; you probably choose wrong; your judgment is clouded by the fatigue of your previous toil.

But you have gained strength. That is the real point of the thing. It is not what you have done in this instance, but what you have become in doing it. Next time, fresh and strong, you will dash the beautiful sudden thought upon the paper and leave it, happy to make others happy, but only through the pains you took before, which are a small price to pay for the joy of the strength you have gained.

This is the rule of great work. Puzzle and hesitation and compromise can only occur because you have left some factor of the problem out of count, and this should never be. Your business is to take all into account and to sacrifice everything, however fascinating and tempting it may be in itself, if it does not fit in as part of an harmonious _whole_. Remember in this case, when loth to make such sacrifice, the old saying that "there's as good fish in the sea as ever came out."

Brace yourself to try for something still better. Recast your composition. If it is defective, the defect all comes from some want of strenuousness as you went along. It is like getting a bit of your figure out of drawing because your eye only measured some portion of it with one or two portions of the rest and not with the whole figure and att.i.tude. Every student knows the feeling. So in your composition: you may get impossible levels, impossible relations between the subject and the surrounding canopy: perhaps one coming in front of the other at one point and the reverse at another point. You drew the thing dreamily: you were not alert enough. And now you must waste what you had got to love, because though it's so pretty it is not fitting.

But sometimes it will happen that some line of your composition is thus hacked off by no fault of yours, by some mismeasurement of a bar by your builder, or some change of mind or whim of your client, who "likes it all but"---- (some vital feature). As we have said, this is not quite a fair demand to be made upon the artist, but it will sometimes occur, whatever we do. Pull yourself together, and, before you stand out about it and refuse to change, consider. Try the modification, and try it in such an aroused and angry spirit as shall flame out against the difficulty with force and heat. Let the whole thing be as fuel of fire, and the reward will be given. The chief difficulty may become--it is more than an even chance that it does become--the chief glory, and that the composition will be like the new-born Phoenix, sprung from the ashes of the old and thrice as fair.

Then also strike while the iron is hot, and work while you're warm to it. When you have done the main figure-study and slain its difficulty you feel braced up, your mind clear, and you see your way to link it in with the surroundings. Will you let it all get cold because it is toward evening and you are physically tired, when another hour would set the whole problem right for next day's work; now, while you are warm, while the beauty of the model you have drawn from is still glowing in you with a thousand suggestions and possibilities? You will do in another hour now what would take you days to do when the fire has died down--if you ever do it at all.

It is after a day's work such as this that one feels the true delight of the balm of Nature. For conquered difficulty brings new insight through the feeling of new power; and new beauties are seen because they are felt to be attainable, and by virtue of the a.s.surance that one has got distinctly a step nearer to the veil that hides the inner heart of things which is our destined home.

It is after work like this, feeling the stirrings of some real strength within you, promising power to deal with nature's secrets by-and-by, that you see as never before the beauty of things.

The keen eyes that have been so busy turn gratefully to the silver of the sky with the grey, quiet trees against it and the watery gleam of sunset like pale gold, low down behind the boughs, where the robin, half seen, is flitting from place to place, choosing his rest and twittering his good-night; and you think with good hope of your life that is coming, and of all your aspirations and your dreams. And in the stillness and the coolness and the peace you can dwell with confidence upon the thought of all the Unknown that is moving onward towards you, as the glow which is fading renews itself day by day in the East, bringing the daily task with it.

You feel that you are able to meet it, and that all is well; that there are quiet and good things in store, and that this constant renewal of the glories of day and night, this constant procession of morning and evening as the world rolls round, has become almost a special possession to you, to which only those who pay the price have entrance, an inheritance of your own as a reward of your endeavour and acquired power, and leading to some purposed end that will be peace.

Stained-gla.s.s, stained-gla.s.s, stained-gla.s.s! At night in the lofty church windows the bits glow and gloom and talk to one another in their places; and the pictured angels and saints look down, peopling the empty aisles and companioning the lamp of the sanctuary.

The beads worth threading seem about all threaded now, and the book appears to be done. Thus we have gone on then, making it as it came to hand, blundering, as it seems to me, on the borders of half a dozen literary or illiterate styles, the pen not being the tool of our proper craft; but on the whole saying somehow what we meant to say: laughing when we felt amused, and being serious when the subject seemed so, our object being indeed to make workers in stained-gla.s.s and not a book about it. Is it worth while to try and put a little clasp to our string of beads and tie all together?

There was a little boy (was he six or seven or eight?), and his seat on Sunday was opposite the door in the fourteenth-century chancel of the little Norman country church. There the great, tall windows hung in the air around him, and he used to stare up at them with goggle-eyes in the way that used to earn him household names, wondering which he liked best. And for months one would be the favourite, and for months another would supplant it; his fancy would change, and now he liked this--now that. Only the stone tracery-bars, for there was no stained-gla.s.s to spoil them. The broad, plain flagstones of the floor spread round him in cool, white s.p.a.ces, in loved unevenness, honoured by the foot-tracks which had worn the stone into little valleys from the door and through the narrow, Norman chancel-arch up towards the altar rails, telling of generations of feet, long since at rest, that had carried simple lives to seek the place as the place of their help or peace.

Plain rush-plaited ha.s.socks and little bra.s.s sconces where, on lenten nights, in the unwarmed church, glimmered the few candles that lit the devotion of the strong, rough sons of the glebe, hedgers and ditchers, who came there after daily labour to spell out simple prayer and praise.

But it was best on the summer Sunday mornings, when the great s.p.a.ces of blue, and the towering white clouds looked down through the diamond panes; and the iron-studded door, with the wonderful big key, which his hands were not yet strong enough to turn, stood wide open; and outside, amongst the deep gra.s.s that grew upon the graves, he could see the tortoise-sh.e.l.l b.u.t.terflies sunning themselves upon the dandelions. Then it was that he used to think the outside the best, and fancy (with perfect truth, as I believe) that angels must be looking in, just as much as he was looking out, and gazing down, grave-eyed, upon the little people inside, as he himself used to watch the red ants busy in their tiny mounds upon the gra.s.s plot or the gravel path; and he wondered sometimes whether the outside or the inside was "G.o.d's House" most: the place where he was sitting, with rough, simple things about him that the village carpenter or mason or blacksmith had made, or the beautiful glowing world outside. And as he thought, with the grave mind of a child, about these things, he came to fancy that the eyes that looked out through the silver diamond-panes which kept out the wind and rain, mattered less than the eyes that looked in from the other side where basked the b.u.t.terflies and flowers and all the living things he so loved; awful eyes that were at home where hung the sun himself in his distances and the stars in the great star-s.p.a.ces; where Orion and the Pleiades glittered in the winter nights, where "Mazzaroth was brought forth in his season," and where through the purple skies of summer evening was laid out overhead the a.s.signed path along which moved Arcturus with his sons.

APPENDIX I

SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE STUDY OF OLD GLa.s.s

Every one who wants to study gla.s.s should go to York Minster. Go to the extreme west end, the first two windows are of plain quarries most prettily leaded, and showing how pleasant "plain-glazing" may be, with silvery gla.s.s and a child-like enjoyment of simple patterning, unconscious of "high art." But look at the second window on the north side. What do you see? You see a yellow s.h.i.+eld? Exactly. Every one who looks at that window as he pa.s.ses at a quick walk must come away remembering that he had seen a yellow s.h.i.+eld. But stop and look at it.

Don't you _like_ it--_I_ do! Why?--well, because it happens to be by good luck just _right_, and it is a very good lesson of the degree in which beauty in gla.s.s depends on juxtaposition. I had thought of it as a particularly beautiful bit of gla.s.s in quality and colour--but not at all! it is textureless and rather crude. I had thought of it as old--not at all: it is probably eighteenth-century. But look what it happens to be set in--the mixture of agate, silver, greenish and black quarries.

Imagine it by itself without the dull citron crocketting and pale yellow-stain "sun" and "shafting" of the panel below--without the black and yellow escutcheon in the light to its right hand--even without the cutting up and breaking with black lead lines of its own upper half. In short, you could have it so placed that you would like it no better, that it would _be_ no better, than the bit of "builder's glazing" in the top quatrefoil of the next window, which looks like, and I fancy is, of almost the very same gla.s.s, but clumsily mixed, and, fortunately, _dated_ for our instruction, 1779.

I do not know any place where you can get more study of certain properties of gla.s.s than in the city of York. The cathedral alone is a mine of wealth. The nave windows are near enough to see all necessary detail. There is something of every period. And with regard to the nave and clerestory windows, they have been so mauled and re-leaded that you need not be in the least afraid of admiring the wrong thing or pa.s.sing by the right. You can be quite frank and simple about it all. For instance, my own favourite window is the fifth from the west on the south side. The old restorer has coolly slipped down one whole panel below its proper level in a shower of rose-leaves (which were really, I believe, originally a pavement), and, frankly, I don't know (and don't care) whether they are part of his work in the late eighteenth century or the original gla.s.s of the late fourteenth. I rather incline to think that they came out of some other window and are bits of fifteenth-century gla.s.s. The same with the chequered s.h.i.+eld of Vernon in the other light. I daresay it is a bit of builder's glazing--but isn't it jolly? And what do you think of the colour of the little central circle half-way up the middle light? Isn't it a flower? And look at the petal that's dropped from it on to the bar below! or the _whole_ of the left-hand light; well, or the middle light, or the right-hand light? If that's not colour I don't know what is. I doubt if it was any more beautiful when it was new, perhaps not so beautiful. Compare it, for example, with the window in the same wall (I think next to it on the west, which has been "restored"). The window exactly opposite seems one of the least retouched, and the least interesting; if you think the yellow canopies disagreeable in colour don't be ashamed to say so: they are not unbeautiful exactly, I think, but, personally, I could do with less of them. Yet I should not be surprised to be a.s.sured that they are all genuine fourteenth-century. In the north transept is the celebrated "Five Sisters," the most beautiful bit of thirteenth-century "grisaille"

perhaps in existence. That is where we get our patterns for "kamptulicon" from; but we don't make kamptulicon quite like it. If you want a sample of "nineteenth-century thirteenth-century" work you have only to look over your left shoulder.

A similar glance to the right will show you "nineteenth-century fifteenth-century" work--and show it you in a curious and instructive transition stage--portions of the two right-hand windows of the five being old gla.s.s worked in with new, while the right-hand one of all is a little abbot who is nearly all old and has shrunk behind a tomb, wondering, as it seems to me, "how those fellows got in," and making up his mind whether he's going to stand being bullied by the new St. Peter.

In the south transept opposite, all the five eastern windows are fifteenth-century, and some of them very well preserved, while those in the southern wall are modern. The great east window has a history of its own quite easily ascertainable on the spot and worthy of research and study. Then go into the north ambulatory, look at the third of the big windows. Well, the right-hand light; look at the bishop at the top in a dark red chasuble, note the bits of dull rose colour in the lower dress, the bit of blackish grey touching the pastoral staff just below the edge of the chasuble, look at the bits of sharp strong blue in the background. Now I believe these are all accidents--bits put in in releading; but when the choir is singing and you can pick out every separate note of the harmony as it comes down to you from each curve of the fretted roof, if you don't think this window goes with it and is music also, you must be wrong, I think, in eye or ear. But indeed this part of the church and all round the choir aisles on both sides is a perfect treasure-house of gla.s.s.

If you want an instance of what I said (p. 212) as to "added notes turning discord into harmony," look at the _patched_ east window of the south choir aisle. Mere jumble--probably no selection--yet how beautiful! like beds of flowers. Did you ever see a bed of flowers that was _not_ beautiful?--often and often, when the gardener had carefully selected the plants of his ribbon-bordering; but I would have you think of an old-fas.h.i.+oned cottage garden, with its roses and lilies and larkspur and snapdragon and marigolds--those are what windows should be like.

In addition to the minster, almost every church in the city has some interesting gla.s.s; several of them a great quant.i.ty, and some finer than any in the cathedral itself. And here I would give a hint. _Never pa.s.s a church or chapel of any sort or kind_, _old or new, without looking in._ You cannot tell what you may find.

And a second hint. Do not make written pencil notes regarding colour, either from gla.s.s or nature, for you'll never trouble to puzzle them out afterwards. Take your colour-box with you. The merest dot of tint on the paper will bring everything back to mind.

s.p.a.ce prevents our making here anything like a complete itinerary setting forth where gla.s.s may be studied; it must suffice to name a few centres, noting a few places in the same district which may be visited from them easily. I name only those I know myself, and of course the list is very slight.

YORK. And all churches in the city.

GLOUCESTER. Tewkesbury, Cirencester.

BIRMINGHAM. (For Burne-Jones gla.s.s.) Shrewsbury, Warwick, Tamworth, Malvern.

WELLS.

OXFORD. Much gla.s.s in the city, old and new. Fairford.

CAMBRIDGE. Much gla.s.s in the city, old and new.

CANTERBURY.