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

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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.

But in these changeful days it would be rash indeed to forecast where lies the sphere of duty for any individual life. It may lie in the reconstruction by solitary, personal experiment, of some forgotten art or system, the quiet laying of foundation for the future rather than building the monument of today. Or perhaps the self-devoted life of the seer may be the Age's chief need, and it is not a Giotto that is wanted for the twentieth century but a Dante or a Blake, with the accompanying destiny of having to prove as they did--

"si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e com'h duro calle Lo scendere e'l salir per l'altrui scale."

But, however these things be, whether working happily in harmony with the scheme of things around us, and only concerned to give it full expression, or not; whether we are the fortunate apprentices of a well-taught trade, gaining secure and advancing knowledge day by day, or whether we are lonely experimentalists, wringing the secret from reluctant Nature and Art upon some untrodden path; there is one last great principle that covers all conditions, solves all questions, and is an abiding rock which remains, unfailing foundation on which all may build; and that is the constant measuring of our smallness against the greatness of things, a thing which, done in the right spirit, does not daunt, but inspires. For the greatness of all things is ours for the winning, almost for the asking.

The great imaginative poets and thinkers and artists of the mid-nineteenth century have drawn aside for us the curtain of the world behind the veil, and he would be an ambitious man who would expect to set the mark higher, in type of beauty or depth of feeling, than they have placed it for us; but all must hope to do so, even if they do not expect it; for the great themes are not exhausted or ever to be exhausted; and the storehouse of the great thought and action of the past is ever open to us to clothe our nakedness and enrich our poverty; we need only ask to have.

"Ah!" said Coningsby, "I should like to be a great man."

The stranger threw at him a scrutinising glance. His countenance was serious. He said in a voice of almost solemn melody--

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes."

All the great thoughts of the world are stored up in books, and all the great books of the world, or nearly all, have been translated into English. You should make it a systematic part of your life to search these things out and, if only by a page or two, try how far they fit your need. We do not enough realise how wide a field this is, how great an undertaking, how completely unattainable except by carefully husbanding our time from the start, how impossible it is in the span of a human life to read the great books unless we strictly save the time which so many spend on the little books. Ruskin's words on this subject, almost harsh in their blunt common sense, bring the matter home so well that I cannot refrain from quoting them.

"Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that--that what you lose today you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your own claims to respect that you jostle with the common crowd for entrie here, and audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the Dead."

This is the great world of BOOKS that is open to you; and how shall you find your way in it, in these days, amongst the plethora of the second and third and fourth rate, shouting out at you and besieging your attention on every stall? It is no more possible to give you entire guidance towards this than to give complete advice on any other problem of life; your own nature must be your guide, choosing the good and refusing the evil in the degree in which itself is good or evil. But one may name some landmarks, set up some guide-posts, and the best of all guidance surely is not that of a guide-post, but that of a guide, a kindly hand of one who knows the way, to take your hand.

Do you ask for such a guide? A man of our own day, in full view of all its questions from the loftiest to the least, and heart and soul engaged in them, with deep and sympathetic wisdom born of his own companionship with all the great thoughts of the ages? One surely need not hesitate a moment in naming as the one for our special needs the writer we have just quoted.

Scattered up and down the whole of his works is constant reference to and commentary upon the great themes of all ages, the great creeds of all peoples.

"Queen of the Air," "Aratra Pentelici," "Ariadne Florentina," "The Mornings in Florence," "St. Mark's Rest," "The Oxford Inaugural Lectures," "The Bible of Amiens," "Fors Clavigera."

With these as portals you can enter by easy steps into the whole universe of great things: the divine myth and symbolism of the old pagan world and of more recent Christendom; all the makers of ancient Greece and Italy and of our own England; worship and kingship and leadership, and the high thought and noble deed of all times. And clustering in groups round these centres is the world of books. All Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, Sacred History; Homer, Plato, Virgil, the Bible, and the Breviary. The great doctors and saints, kings and heroes, poets and painters, Gerome and Dominic and Francis; St. Louis and Coeur-de-Lion; Dante, St. Jerome, Chaucer, and Froissart; Botticelli, Giotto, Angelico; the "Golden Legend"; and many another ancient or modern legend and story or passage from the history of some great and splendid life, or illuminating hint upon the beauties of liturgy and symbolism. They, and a hundred other things, are all gathered up and introduced to us in Ruskin's books; and we are shown them from the exact standpoint from which they are most likely to appeal to us, and be of use. There never was a great world made so easy and pleasant of entrance for the adventuring traveller; you have only to enter and take possession.

Do you incline towards myth and symbolism and allegory--the expression of abstract thought by beautiful figures? Read the myths of Greece expounded to you in their exquisite spirituality in the "Queen of the Air." Or is your bent devotion and the devout life, expressed in thrilling story and gorgeous colour? Read, say, the life of St. Catherine or of St. George in the "Golden Legend." Or are you in love, and would express its spring-time beauty? Translate into your own native language of form and colour "The Romaunt of the Rose."

For, remember always that, even if you conceive that you have a mission laid upon you to declare Truth, it is most sternly conditioned by an obligation, as binding as itself and of as high authority, to set forth Beauty: the holiness of beauty equally with the beauty of holiness. No amount of good intent can make up for lack of skill; it is your business to know your business. Youth always would begin with allegory, but the ambition of the good intention is generally in exactly the reverse proportion to the ability to carry it out in expression. But the true allegory that appeals to all is the presentment of noble natures and of noble deeds. Where, for most people at any rate, is the "allegory" in the Theseus or the Venus of Milo? Yet is not the whole race of man the better for them?

"how tastes of salt The bread of others, and how is hard the passage To go down and to go up by other's stairs."

Coningsby, Book iii. ch. i.

"Sesame and Lilies," Lecture 1.

Having now described, as well as I can, the whole of your equipment--of hand, and head, and heart--your mental and technical weapons for the practice of stained-glass, there now follow a few simple hints to guide you in the use of them; how best to dispose your forces, and on what to employ them. This must be a very broken and fragmentary chapter, full of little everyday matters, very different to the high themes we have just been trying to discuss--and relating chiefly to your conduct of the thing as a business, and your relationships with the interests that surround you; modes of procedure, business hints, practical matters. I am sorry, just as you were beginning to be warmed to the subject, and fired with the high ambitions that it suggests, to take and toss you into the cold world of matter-of-fact things; but that is life, and we have to face it. Open the door into the cold air and let us bang at it straight away!

Now there is one great and plain question that contains all the rest; you do not see it now, but you will find it facing you before you have gone very far. The great question, "Must I do it all myself, or may I train pupils and assistants?"

Let us first amplify the question and get it fairly and fully stated. Then we shall have a better chance of being able to answer it wisely.

I have described or implied elsewhere the usual practice in the matter amongst those who produce stained-glass on a large scale. In great establishments the work is divided up into branches: designers, cartoonists, painters, cutters, lead workers, kiln-men: none of whom, as a rule, know any branch of the work except their own.

Obviously one of the principal contentions of this book is against the idea that such division, as practised, is an ideal method.

On the other hand, you will gather that the writer himself uses the service of assistants.

While in the plates at the end are examples of glass where everything has been done by the artists themselves .

Speaking generally, I care not whether a man calls himself Brown, or Brown and Co., or, co-operating with others, works under the style of Brown, Jones and Robinson, so long as he observe four things.

Not to direct what he cannot practise;

To make masters of apprentices, or aim at making them;

To keep his hand of mastery over the whole work personally at all stages; and

To be prepared sometimes to make sacrifices of profit for the sake of the Art, should the interests of the two clash.

Such an one we must call an artist, a master, and a worthy craftsman. It is almost impossible to describe the deadening influence which a routine embodying the reverse of these four things has upon the mind of those who should be artists. Under this influence not only is the subdivision of labour which places each successive operation in separate hands accepted as a matter of course, but into each operation itself this separation imports a spirit of lassitude and dulness and compliance with false conditions and limited aims which would seem almost incredible in those practising what should be an inspiring art. To men so trained, so employed, all counsels of perfection are foolishness; all idea of tentative work, experiment, modification while in progress, is looked upon as mere delusion. To them work consists of a series of never-varied formulas, all fitting into each other and combined to aim at producing a definite result, the like of which they have produced a thousand times before and will produce a thousand times again.

"With us," once said, to a friend of the writer, a man so trained, "it's a matter of judgment and experience. It's all nonsense this talk about seeing work at a distance and against the sky, and so forth, while as to the ever taking it down again for retouching after once erecting it, that could only be done by an amateur. We paint a good deal of the work on the bench, and never see it as a whole until it's leaded up; but then we know what we want and get it."

"We know what we want!" To what a pass have we come that such a thing could be spoken by any one engaged in the arts! Were it wholly and universally true, nothing more would be needed in condemnation of wide fields of modern practice in the architectural and applied arts, for, most assuredly it is a sentence that could never be spoken of any one worthy of the name of artist that ever lived. Whence would you like instances quoted? Literature? Painting? Sculpture? Music? Their name is legion in the history of all these arts, and in the lives of the great men who wrought in them.

For a taste--

Did Michael Angelo "know what he wanted" when, half-way through his figure, he found the block not large enough, and had to make the limb too short?

Did Beethoven know, when he evolved a movement in one of his concerted pieces out of a quarrel with his landlady? and another, "from singing or rather roaring up and down the scale," until at last he said, "I think I have found a motive"--as one of his biographers relates? Tennyson, when he corrected and re-corrected his poems from youth to his death? D?rer, the precise, the perfect, able to say, "It cannot be better done," yet re-engraving a portion of his best-known plate, and frankly leaving the rejected portion half erased? Titian, whose custom it was to lay aside his pictures for long periods and then criticise them, imagining that he was looking at them "with the eyes of his worst enemy"?

There is not, I suppose, in the English language a more "perfect" poem than "Lycidas." It purports to have been written in a single day, and its wholeness and unity and crystalline completeness give good colour to the thought that it probably was so.

"Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with sandals gray; He touched the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropt into the western bay: At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue; To-morrow, to fresh woods and pastures new."

Yet, regarding it, the delightful Charles Lamb writes:--

So also is all art, and you must hold all things in suspense. Aye! the last touch more or less of light or shade or colour upon the smallest piece, keeping all open and solvent to the last, until the whole thing rushes together and fuses into a harmony. It is not to be done by "judgment and experience," for all things are new, and there are no two tasks the same; and it is impossible for you from the outset to "know what you want," or to know it at any stage until you can say that the whole work is finished.

"But if we work on these methods we shall only get such a small quantity of work done, and it will be so costly done on a system like that you speak of! Make my assistants masters, and so rivals! put a window in, and take it out again, forsooth!" What remedy or answer for this?

And you must expect to pay for that privilege at some corresponding personal cost; all the more so in these days when your lot is so exceptional a fortune, and when to enjoy daily work falls to so few. Nevertheless, when I say "enjoy" I do not mean that art is easy or pleasant in the way that ease is pleasant; there is nothing harder; and the better the artist, probably the harder it is. But you enjoy it because of its privileges; because beauty is delightful; because you know that good art does high and unquestioned service to man, and is even one of the ways for the advancing of the kingdom of God.

That should be pleasure enough for any one, and compensation for any pains. You must learn the secret of human suffering--and you can only learn it by tasting it--because it is yours to point its meaning to others and to give the message of hope.

In this spirit, then, and within these limitations, must you guide your own work and claim the co-operation of others, and arrange your relationships with them, and the limits of their assistance and your whole personal conduct and course of procedure:--

To be yourself a master.

To train others up to mastery.

To keep your hand over the whole.

To work in a spirit of sacrifice.

These things once firmly established, questions of procedure become simple. But a few detached hints may be given. I shall string them together just as they come.

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