Stained Glass Work: A text-book for students and workers in glass

CHAPTER XX
A STRING OF BEADS

Is there anything more to say?

A whole world-full, of course; for every single thing is a part of all things. But I have said most of my say; and I could now wish that you were here that you might ask me aught else you want.

A few threads remain that might be gathered up—parting words, hints that cannot be classified. I must string them together like a row of beads; big and little mixed; we will try to get the big ones more or less in the middle if we can.

Grow everything from seed.

All seeds that are living (and therefore worth growing) have the power in them to grow.

But so many people miss the fact that, on the other hand, nothing else will grow; and that it is useless in art to transplant full-grown trees.

This is the key to great and little miseries, great and little mistakes.

Were you sorry to be on the lowest step of the ladder? Be glad; for all your hopes of climbing are in that.

And this applies in all things, from conditions of success and methods of "getting work" up to the highest questions of art and the "steps to Parnassus," by which are reached the very loftiest of ideals.

I must not linger over the former of these two things or do more than sum it up in the advice, to take anything you can get, and to be glad, not sorry, if it is small and comes to you but slowly. Simple things, and little things, and many things, are more needed in the arts today than complex things and great and isolated achievements. If you have nothing to do for others, do some little thing for yourself: it is a seed, presently it will send out a shoot of your first "commission," and that will probably lead to two others, or to a larger one; but pray to be led by small steps; and make sure of firm footing as you go, for there is such a thing as trying to take a leap on the ladder, and leaping off it.

So much for the seed of success.

The seed of craftsmanship I have tried to describe in this book.

The seed of ornament and design, it is impossible to treat of here; it would require as large a book as this to itself: but I will hazard the devotion of a page each to the A and the B of my own A B C of the subject as I try to teach it to my pupils, and put them before you without comment, hoping they may be of some slight use. (See figs. 72 and 73.)

But though I said that nothing will grow but seed, it does not, of course, follow that every seed will grow, or, if it does, that you yourself will reap the exact harvest you expect, or even recognise it in its fruitage as the growth of what you have sown. Expect to give much for little, to lose sight of the bread cast on the waters, not even sure that you will know it again even if you find it after many days. You never know, and therefore do not count your scalps too carefully or try to number your Israel and Judah. Neither, on the other hand, allow your seed to be forced by the hothouse of advertising or business pushing, or anything which will distract or distort that quiet gaze upon the work by which you love it for its own sake, and judge it on its merits; all such sidelights are misleading, since you do not know whether it is intended that this or that shall prosper or both be alike good.

How many a man one sees, earnest and sincere at starting, led aside off the track by the false lights of publicity and a first success. Art is peace. Do things because you love them. If purple is your favourite colour, put purple in your window; if green, green; if yellow, yellow. Flowers and leaves and buds because you love them. Glass because you love it. It is not that you are to despise either fame or wealth. Honestly acquired both are good. But you must bear in mind that the pursuit of these separately by any other means than perfecting your work is a thing requiring great outlay of TIME, and you cannot afford to withdraw any time from your work in order to acquire them.

FIG. 72: Design consists of arrangement. Let us practise arrangement separately, and on its simplest terms. Take the simplest possible arranged form, and make all ornament spring from this, without, for a considerable time changing its character, or making any additions of a different character to it. If we are not then to do this what resource have we? we may change its direction. Proceed then to do so, observing a few very simple rules. 1. Do the work in single "stitches" 2. & to each arm of the cross in turn. 3 keep a record of each step; that is, as soon as you have got any definite developement from your original form, put that down on paper and leave it, drawing it over again and developing from the second drawing. The fourth rule is the most important of all: 4. Keep "on the spot" as much as possible, i.e. take a number of single steps from the point you have arrived at, not a number of consecutive steps leading farther from it. For example: "b" here is a single step from "a", you do one thing. I do not want you to go on developing from it [fig. "b"] as "c", "d" & "e" until you have gone back to fig. "a" and made all the immediately possible steps to be taken from it, one of wh. is shown, fig "f."

FIG. 73: Seed of design as applied to Craft & Material. Suppose you have three simple openings. (fig. 'a'.) garret windows, or passage windows, we will suppose, each with a central horizontal bar: and suppose you have a number of pieces of glass 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 glass. 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 glass. Exhaust all the possible varieties, there are at least nine. Do them. That's all.

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 assume 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 pass 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 brimming. 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 craftsmanship, 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 attitude. 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 Ph[œ]nix, 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 assurance 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-glass, stained-glass, stained-glass! 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-glass 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-glass to spoil them. The broad, plain flagstones of the floor spread round him in cool, white spaces, 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 hassocks and little brass 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 spaces 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 grass that grew upon the graves, he could see the tortoise-shell butterflies 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 grass plot or the gravel path; and he wondered sometimes whether the outside or the inside was "God'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 butterflies 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-spaces; 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 assigned path along which moved Arcturus with his sons.

APPENDIX I

SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE STUDY OF OLD GLASS

Every one who wants to study glass 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 glass 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 shield? Exactly. Every one who looks at that window as he passes at a quick walk must come away remembering that he had seen a yellow shield. 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 glass depends on juxtaposition. I had thought of it as a particularly beautiful bit of glass 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 glass, 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 glass 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 passing 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 glass of the late fourteenth. I rather incline to think that they came out of some other window and are bits of fifteenth-century glass. The same with the chequered shield 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 assured 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 glass 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 glass.

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-fashioned 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 glass; several of them a great quantity, and some finer than any in the cathedral itself. And here I would give a hint. Never pass 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 glass 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.

Space prevents our making here anything like a complete itinerary setting forth where glass 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 glass.) Shrewsbury, Warwick, Tamworth, Malvern.

Wells.

Oxford. Much glass in the city, old and new. Fairford.

Cambridge. Much glass in the city, old and new.

Canterbury.

Chartres. (If there is still any left unrestored.) St. Pierre in the same town.

Sens.

Troyes. Auxerre.

Of the last two I have only seen some copies. For glass by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Madox-Brown, consult their lives.

There are many well-known books on the subject of ancient glass, Winston, Westlake, &c., which give fuller details on this matter.