Part 2

Another tendency in the work of contemporary designers which I regret is the absence of bordering. They are so inclined to treat figures and quarries right up to the mullion or wall without any border. It is severe and simple, but you lose the advantage in colour very often. This is a point for those of you who are attempting to treat modern subjects in stained glass, because modern subjects are very difficult. We have not the advantage our luckier ancestors had of seeing people all round us wearing rich and strong colours, colours akin to those of glass, and also fine textures; black broadcloth is not like the black velvet worn by gentlemen in the old days. You must find your colours somewhere else if you want to use modern figures, and you must manage somehow by means of borders or the decorative crosspieces which divide the window. So I would suggest that you should pay as much attention to the use of borders as you possibly can. You can have a very good, rather silvery picture without much colouring, such as modern subjects would probably demand, and yet get your colour by having a rather rich and wide border. Modern figures look best in quite small areas usually.

Another tendency, not very important, but very helpful to colour, is that in the last thirty years the light glass has been used much whiter and clearer. When I began to do stained glass the correct thing was a kind of dull green, rather a sage green, a “greenery, yallery” kind of thing. I think it was because the dullish green stuff was thought to give a less new or modern effect. As you probably know, very little glass is white, it nearly all has some tint, but contrasting strong colour knocks it out, and makes you think it is clear. There are a few sorts of glass of a really clear, limpid quality, but you cannot use them too much; they are far too dazzling.

Another tendency is, I think, to use more primary colours; strong colours are used more and not so many secondary shades: that is because the strong colours, the real colours, red and blue and green, the sober and the sombre, the deep and rich colours, are the most effective contrast with this very silvery white. When you get into half tones of browns and greys, you get rather a dull effect. The work done by good men thirty or forty years ago is often of that character. If you go to Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford, there are several windows by Burne-Jones and Morris, quite good ones, but they look rather washed out, except the earliest one which, on the contrary, is very vivid. It is partly because the glass itself is not as deep and strong as it might be, and partly because there is not enough lead, the pieces are rather too big, and partly, perhaps, because there is some very good old glass to be seen near by.

Another tendency which is a good one is the increased reliance upon painting in line, the increasing avoidance of that flat, mat affair, which has been the workshop tradition up till recently. Like many modern workshop traditions it is simply one of incompetence and mental idleness, it means they did not know how to do it better, and you could also employ cheaper labour, because you do not want the same type of educated man to do it.

There is now a school of young artists who are doing very good work, and I hope we shall soon have more--both men and women. Like pottery painting, it must not be timid, you have got to do it with a decided, firm, steady stroke, it does not do to be feeble, any more than it does on pottery; it is the vigorous, quick line you want: vigour is even more important than academic accuracy. But of course a good man can do it correctly.

There is also considerably more restraint in the amount of pattern on costume, borders, etc., and therefore more reliance on the quality of the glass itself. Those elaborate and ingenious patterns so general in, at any rate, the greater number of late nineteenth-century windows are found to be tedious and worrying; their object was, as a rule, to enrich a rather poor quality of glass. Nevertheless well-designed pattern work is very useful when judiciously used.

Now a few words to students who propose to take up the study of stained glass. First of all get thoroughly used to the material and practise painting it, leaving the design of less important detail until the glass is being handled. The constant danger to the designer is the cartoon. I find that new students are far too apt to make elaborate cartoons before they are sufficiently familiar with the glass itself, and to cover them with details of ornament of a character which will not really help the result.

Stained glass is severe and at the same time rich. As with every technique the subject must be inseparable from the treatment. The _artist’s_ subject that is. This is not the same as that which the spectator regards as the “subject,” and it is not the “art for art’s sake” subject. It is not beauty divorced from meaning, except in the simpler forms of lead lighting or patterns in colour. These are often useful, often wanted, but they do not demand the highest imaginative qualities which our art can express. I have little sympathy with the desire to reduce our arts to the abstract. It is too austere and too puritanical an ideal. They are the better, I think, where the work is conceived in a moment of fervent exaltation. It may be religious, it may come from poetry, from music, from the external beauty of Nature; it may come as the wind comes, one knows not whence, but it sets a flame, as it were, to the imaginative mind, and in that flame the _artistic_ subject is born.

Now without a real grasp of the craft this moment is wasted. Nothing is welded. The beautiful possibility cannot come to the birth, it is without form, it has no bodily shape, and is but one of those pitiful unrealised and unrealisable glimpses through the veil which form the tragedy of the incomplete artist.

Only when you are so familiar and so easy with your means of expression that their limitations, their so-called restraints, are to you a help and a happy freedom and as natural to you as the organs of your body, can you hope to realise the gift which is offered to you and transform it into your own artistic expression.

This does not imply that “to carry out the carrying out” will necessarily be easy, any more than it is always easy to make your body obey your wishes; but it will be natural, and the transformation will be unconscious, just as a school-boy is transformed into a cricketer quite unconsciously, but yet cricket is not easy.

To get down to facts, what all this means is that you must work at your technique until you never dream of wanting stained glass to do the things which stained glass won’t do.

Now stained glass is at its best, as I have said, a severe and yet rich form of decoration. It can, in its lighter uses, express a sort of quaintness or whimsicality, it can tell the gothic fairy tale--goblins, elves, gnomes, it can express a somewhat grimmish form of fantasy. I remember seeing a capital piece of work--quite small--giving the characters of that strange old Cornish song “Widdicombe Fair,” a rather macabre story--with the Ghost of the Old Grey Mare, Peter Hawke and the rest of the rout. But it cannot easily be gay and it can never be frivolous. How depressing is restaurant stained glass! I am speaking of stained glass, _i.e._, coloured glass. White glass, painted, can convey a certain sedate cheerfulness, as one may see in 16th and 17th century domestic work; and when enamelled, as in the Swiss work, it even has a sort of sprightliness, of a Teutonic rather than of a Latin type. Excursions along these paths might give very interesting results to those whose temperaments lead them to such adventures. They have been by no means explored--and some of our students are gifted that way.

We modern people stand at a disadvantage compared to our ancestors in that the surroundings of our lives are not so immediately suggestive of treatment in glass as those which they enjoyed. Think of the luck of that man in Richard II’s time who had to put “le Dispencers” round the choir at Tewkesbury. Not, of course, a great imaginative subject, but a very pleasant, interesting, and easy job--gorgeous knights in surcoats with their arms emblazoned. And then think of being asked to do a modern Cabinet Council! Nevertheless there are suggestions to be got from modern life, and I am glad to see that our students are aware of it--children, women--men are more difficult. Texture as well as colour is a difficulty, it cannot quite be ignored.

But the great, the profound difficulty is the absence of symbolic figures, of characters which have been “canonised” in our times by popular acclaim, and symbolism must be widely and readily recognised to be of value. Think of all the great moral qualities--and these are naturally the motives of much stained glass. Is it leadership in war? It is not General Haig, nor even Foch, your mind flies to--but Joshua or David, or Godfrey de Bouillon. Is it statesmanship? It is not Lloyd George or Gladstone, or even William Pitt--but rather Moses or Gregory, Hildebrand or Anselm. Is it patriotism and self sacrifice? Well, there are many graves “which are for ever England,” and yet--it is Joan of Arc we think of. Probably, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon are the only characters which have been “canonised” in recent times. And even in the case of Gordon does the present generation feel about him as we older ones did, who watched his tragedy and cherish his memory? If it comes to other than moral virtues, to figures typifying factors in the structure of Society--Law, Kingship, Commerce, Labour? Law would scarcely be a Lord Chancellor (or Justinian), but again Moses, with the Tablets given him from The Mount. Kingship would hardly be a modern sovereign--but Barbarossa as in the Spanish Chapel, or Charlemagne, or our own King Arthur.

Commerce is, I confess, a difficulty. I think possibly the gracious figure of Venice would be best. Certainly not the Port of London Authority or Sir Alfred Mond or Lord Leverhulme! For Labour, not that gorilla-like figure, with a huge jaw and no back to its head, brandishing a pick or a hammer, so favoured by the advanced politicians, and some sculptors, of to-day. But rather--the shepherds following the angel to the lowly manger.

It follows then, that those who wish to excel in stained glass designing should have a wide culture and real imagination, a sound knowledge of the necessary technique, and a thorough delight in the craft. I feel sure, too, that they would be all the better for study and design in other methods of artistic expression in order to avoid that staleness and repetition which too often comes to those who practice one form of art alone.

ROBERT ANNING BELL.

Transcriber’s Note

Text in _italics_ is indicated by underscores.

No changes were made to the text as printed.

While original copyright information has been retained, this book is in the public domain in the country of publication.