Read Ebook: Stained Glass Work: A text-book for students and workers in glass by Whall Christopher

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Ebook has 606 lines and 28899 words, and 13 pages

is a very small price to pay for the delight of living in this glorious fairyland of colour.

But to work in this way you must watch and work at your glass yourself; for these hints come late on in the work, when colour, light and shade, and design are all fusing together into a harmony. You can no more forecast these final accidents, which are the flower and crown and finish of the whole, than you could forecast the lost "Chord";--

"Which came from the soul of the organ, And entered into mine."

It "comes from the soul" of the window.

We all know the feeling--the climaxes, exceptions, surprises, suspensions, in which harmony delights; the change from the last bar of the overture to the first of the opening recitative in the "Messiah," the chord upon which the victor is crowned in "The Meistersingers," the 59th and 60th bars in Handel's "Every Valley."

Now how can you forecast such things as these!

"I thought you'd like to look at it before we stained it," said he.

"STAIN IT!" I said. "I wouldn't touch it; not for sixpence three-farthings!"

There was a sigh of relief all round the shop, and the reply was, "Well, so we all thought!"

Just so; therefore the figure remained, and so was erected in its place. Now suppose I had had men who did what they were told, instead of being encouraged to think and feel and suggest?

There is another question of ideals in the treatment of colour in stained-glass about which a word must be said.

And here I must now leave it to you. But one last little hint, and do not smile at its simplicity.

Each in his place. How good a thing it is! how much to be desired! how well if we ourselves could be so, and know of the pattern that we make! For our lives are like the broken bits of glass, sadly or brightly coloured, jostled about and shaken hither and thither, in a seeming confusion, which yet we hope is somewhere held up to a light in which each one meets with his own, and holds his place; and, to the Eye that watches, plays his part in a universal harmony by us, as yet, unseen.

West of the road between Welwyn and Hitchin.

OF ARCHITECTURAL FITNESS

Come, in thought, reader, and stand in quiet village churches, nestling amongst trees where rooks are building; or in gaps of the chalk downs, where the village shelters from the wind; or in stately cathedrals, where the aisles echo to the footstep and the sound of the chimes comes down, with the memory of the centuries which have lived and died. Here the old artists set their handmark to live now they are gone, and we who see it today see, if our eye be single, with what sincerity they built, carved, or painted their heart and life into these stones. In such a spirit and for such a memorial you too must do your work, to be weighed by the judgment of the coming ages, when you in turn are gone, in the same balance as theirs--perhaps even side by side with it.

And will you dare to venture? Have no fear if you also bring your best. But if we enter on work like this as to a mere market for our wares, and with no other thought than to make a brisk business with those that buy and sell; we well may pray that some merciful scourge of small cords drive us also hence to dig or beg , lest worse befall us!

And I do not say these things because this or that place is "God's house." All places are so, and the first that was called so was the bare hillside; but because you are a man and have indeed here arrived, as there the lonely traveller did, at the arena of your wrestling. But, granted that you mean to hold your own and put your strength into it, I have brought you to these grave walls to consult with them as to the limits they impose upon your working.

In short, you must think of the building first, and make your windows help it. You must observe its scale and the spacing and proportions of its style, and place your own work, with whatever new feeling and new detail may be natural to you, well within those circumscribing bounds.

But here we find ourselves suddenly brought sharp up, face to face with a most difficult and thorny subject, upon which we have rushed without knowing it. "Must we observe then" "the style of the building into which we put our work, and not have a style of our own that is native to us?"

"This is contrary to all you have been preaching! The old men did not so. Did they not add the fancies of their own time to the old work, and fill with their dainty, branching tracery the severe, round-headed, Norman openings of Peterborough and Gloucester? Did fifteenth-century men do thirteenth-century glass when they had to refill a window of that date?" No. Nor must you. Never imitate, but graft your own work on to the old, reverently, and only changing from it so far forth as you, like itself, have also a living tradition, springing from mastery of craft--naturally, spontaneously, and inevitably.

Whether we shall ever again have such a tradition running throughout all the arts is a thing that cannot possibly be foretold. But three things we may be quite sure of.

First, that if it comes it will not be by way of any imitative revival of a past style;

Second, that it will be in harmony with the principles of Nature; and

Third, that it will be founded upon the crafts, and brought about by craftsmen working in it with their own hands, on the materials of architecture, designing only what they themselves can execute, and giving employment to others only in what they themselves can do.

A word about each of these three conditions.

So in the very midst of the pampered and enervated over-refinement of Roman decay, Constantine did something more than merely turn the conquering eagle back, against the course of the heavens, for which Dante seems to blame him, when he established his capital at Byzantium; for there at once upon the new soil, and in less than a single century, sprang to life again all the natural modes of building and decoration that, despised as barbaric, had been ignored and forgotten amid the Roman luxury and sham.

It is a curious feature of these latest days of ours that this searching after sincerity should seem to be leading us towards a similar revival; taking even very much the same forms. We went back, at the time of the Gothic revival, to the forgotten Gothic art of stained-glass; now tired, as it would seem, of the insincerity and mere spirit of imitation with which it and similar arts have been practised, a number of us appear to be ready to throw it aside, along with scholarly mouldings and traceries, and build our arts afresh out of the ground, as was done by the Byzantines, with plain brickwork, mosaic, and matched slabs of marble. Definite examples in recent architecture will occur to the reader. But I am thinking less of these--which for the most part are deliberate and scholastic revivals of a particular style, founded on the study of previous examples and executed on rigid academic methods--than of what appears to be a widespread awakening to principles of simplicity, sincerity, and common sense in the arts of building generally. Signs are not wanting of a revived interest in building--a revived interest in materials for their own sake, and a revived practice of personally working in them and experimenting with them. One calls to mind examples of these things, growing in number daily--plain and strong furniture made with the designer's own hands and without machinery, and enjoyed in the making--made for actual places and personal needs and tastes; houses built in the same spirit by architects who condescend to be masons also; an effort here and an effort there to revive the common ways of building that used to prevail--and not so long ago--for the ordinary housing and uses of country-folk and country-life, and which gave us cottages, barns, and sheds throughout the length and breadth of the land; simple things for simple needs, built by simple men, without self-consciousness, for actual use and pleasant dwelling; traditional construction and the habits of making belonging to the country-side. These still linger in the time-honoured ways of making the waggon and the cart and the plough; but they have vanished from architecture and building except in so far as they are being now, as I have said, consciously and deliberately revived by men who are going back from academic methods, to found their arts once more upon the actual making of things with their own hand and as their hand and materials will guide them.

This was what happened in the time to which I have referred: in the dawn of the Christian era and of a new civilisation; and it has special interest for us of today, because it was not a case of an infant or savage race, beginning all things from seed; but the revival, as in Sparta, centuries before it, of simplicity and sincerity of life, in the midst of enervation, luxury, and decay.

This seems our hope for the future.

I have thought fit, dear student, to touch on these great questions in passing, that you may know where you stand; but our real business is with ourselves: to make ourselves so secure upon firm standing ground, in our own particular province, that when the hour arrives, it may find in us the man. Let us therefore return again from these bright hopes to consider those particular details of architectural fitness which are our proper business as workers in glass.

Let each decide the question for himself; but, supposing you admit that it is permissible, what are the proper restrictions and conditions?

You must not tell a lie, or "match" old work, joining your own on to it as if itself were old.

Heaven in mercy defend us and forbid it!

Canopies are venerable; thirteenth-century panels and borders are venerable, the great traditional vestments are so, and liturgy, and symbolism, and ceremony. These are not things of one age alone, but belong to all time. Get, wherever possible, authority on all these points.

Must we work in a "style," then--a "Gothic" style?

No.

What rule, then?

It is hard to formulate so as to cover all questions, but something thus:--

Take forms, and proportions, and scale from the style of the church you are to work in.

Add your own feeling to it from--

The feeling of the day, but the best and most reverent feeling.

From Nature.

From materials and the knowledge of craft.

Paradise, canto vi. 1.

OF THOUGHT, IMAGINATION, AND ALLEGORY

Thus once said to me an artist of respectable attainment.

Thus once said to me a member of a window-committee, himself also an artist.

To both I answered, and would answer with all the emphasis possible--No!

On the other hand, the artist who has trained himself to speak with the tongues of angels and after all has nothing to say, is also, to me, an imperfect being. What follows is written, as the whole book is written, for the young student, just beginning his career and feeling the pressure and conflict of these questions. For such I must venture to discuss points which the wise and the experienced may pass by.

A great point of happiness in this dangerous and critical time is to have a definite trade; learnt in its completeness and practised day by day, step by step, upwards from its elements, in constant subservience to wise and kind mastership. This indeed is a golden lot, and one rare in these days; and perhaps we must not look to be so shielded. This was the sober and happy craftsmanship of the Middle Ages, and produced for us all that imagery and ornature, instinct with gaiety and simplicity of heart, which decorates, where the hand of the ruthless restorer has spared it, the churches and cathedrals of Europe.

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