STAINED GLASS WINDOWS.
The subject is certainly one of present interest. The advertisements of firms who produce stained glass windows are numerous and conspicuous in our Church weeklies; glowing accounts of memorials just erected in this place and that make up a large part of our “Diocesan News.” To say nothing of the fact that we are in danger of forgetting what the real business of the Church is,—that it is not primarily to build and beautify edifices, but to save men and to establish righteousness in the earth; the uncomfortable question is forced upon us: For how much of this “embellishment” of our churches will posterity thank us?
A revival of religious art we welcome with profound gratitude. But when for the moment it threatens to take the form of an epidemic of stained glass, our joy may be turned to apprehension. Stained glass is simply becoming fashionable; everybody is beginning to want some of it because ‘all the other churches are getting some;’ commercial enterprise stimulates a well-meaning zeal, taking advantage, too, of a vulgar spirit of rivalry; and the end thereof must be painful to contemplate. Individuals are often given a freehand in God’s House on the ground that thus several hundred or several thousand dollars will be secured for “enrichment;” and so the work goes merrily on.
And such things can be because there is a lack of knowledge. Persons may have the best intention in the world; their experience in other, different fields may have been very wide; in a general way they may have good taste; moreover, they may possess a long purse and a liberal disposition; perhaps they may think to save themselves from going wrong by putting the whole matter into the hands of strongly advertised window-makers. But none of these things will supply the lack of a knowledge of stained glass. There is nothing for it but study and education. The clergy first of all, and after them the vestries, must inform themselves on the subject as thoroughly as possible. In the meantime, let them be slow to lend themselves to anything which they later, or those who come after them, might bitterly deplore and be helpless to remedy.
Nor is it to-day so forbidding a task to get this knowledge as it was but a few years ago. Then one had to go to the libraries in our largest cities, and laboriously gather from rare works the history and principles of this art. Now there is fortunately at least one single volume, easily obtainable, which may serve as atext-book to all who desire to study the subject. Mr. Lewis F. Day has given us in hisWindows: A Book about Stained and Painted Glass, published in London, 1897, by B. T. Batsford, imported by the Scribners, just that information which is needed. No vestry that has the matter of Stained Glass Memorials before it should permit its rector to be without this book; he should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it; but not he only; they also, at least the members of any committee responsible for such work; and intending donors likewise, who desire to have a controlling voice in regard to memorials to be erected. This is too important a thing to enter upon recklessly or at the dictation of mere fancy.
Meanwhile it may not be out of place to tell briefly and simply what stained glass windows in a church ought to be; and what stained glass itself is.
Stained glass windows are still, after all, windows: and windows are essential component parts of a building. If in a church, the axiom applies the more inevitably: a church is a building presumed to conform rigidly to a certain type; and therefore, the idea which the whole is to exhibit and impress must not for a moment be hidden or dissipated by any component part.
Our dwelling houses may be often built in a haphazard way, with a view simply to utility, regardless of style, laying no claim to architectural art. But to build a church so is an offense, an offense to art, and, we believe, an offense to religion also. A church building is presumed and expected to have a certain character, technically called “style,” dignifying and elevating God’s House above our common houses, even though it be small and plain and not costly; small and plain it may be, and not costly, but it must not be tawdry or incongruous or mean.
Now a window is, as we have said, a component part of the building. In a church well conceived, the window is inevitable just as it is: to make it larger or smaller, to close one up where now there is one or to make one where there is none, is just so far to do violence to the building. If such a change does not violate the integrity of the building as a whole, the fact simply goes to show that the building had no plan worthy of honor.
The window-space is therefore always to be preserved for window use—just such and just so much as the architect gave us. The use of a window (barring for the moment the unscientific one of ventilation) is to give light while still affording shelter. And this light-space is also to serve artistically as a kind of balance to the dark space of the solidwall; hence this light-space is to art sacred, and must be permitted to the end to assert itself as just what it is and such as it is, so much rightly apportioned and correctly proportioned translucent wall-space.
When this window-space has been first filled with a plain glass, which is then to give way to stained glass, the new treatment must say, just as obviously, only more beautifully, what the old said: it must still be a window—letting in light, though now the light is colored—and in its architectural value it must be just what it was before, asserting the shape and the design of the structural window, plainly and faithfully.
In other words, the true stained glass window—in a church building worthy of that name—is not now to give the beholder the impression that he is looking out through an opening and seeing, of something beyond, so much as the size of the opening will permit: in a word, the spectacular impression of looking into some beautiful out-door world through a hole in the wall. The beholder must be conscious still of looking at the wall itself, the translucent part of it, which confines him within the edifice as much as the stone or the brick. Nor yet is the true stained glass window merely a colored glass picture covering so much wall area: the outline form is to be soobvious, and the treatment so non-realistic, that the architectural idea may never for a moment be in danger of submersion under some other idea.
For, as is true in general of decorative art as contrasted with pictorial art, the true church window is to be designed without perspective, without shadow, without attempt at realistic effect. It is to be conventional, symbolical; with that intent it may utilize as it will forms, colors, attitudes, postures, accessories, fearless of the criticism that ‘this saint or that scene never in the world looked like that.’ No intelligent person standing before decorative painting would for a moment think of demanding a representation of the actual. That, frankly, was not its object.
And the stained glass church window will further fulfill its particular end if all round the figure or group, or whatever be the subject matter of the composition, there runs a clear line or border of differently colored glass, making a clear demarcation from the stone wall; drawing again, as it were, the architect’s line of his window construction.
All of which is but to say that windows were made for the sake of the building, and so must remain; not that a building was made for the sake of windows,—for the sake of furnishing so much space forso many square yards of somebody’s beautiful glass. Which ought to be self-evident, though to many persons it is not.
So regarding it now, the further question naturally occurs as to the treatment of the several windows of one particular church. For, each individual window might be in itself correct according to the above principles, and yet the total effect sadly lacking in unity and harmony.
There is first of all the consideration of style: a difficult matter to define, yet not, after all, so difficult to determine. What ought certainly not to determine it is the chance ability of some wealthy donor or donors to pay for the costliest work that could be produced; nor, on the other hand, the limited ability of others who could give only something inexpensive. The style of the building and its general character must determine the degree of splendor and ornateness which will be right for each and all the windows. If there be wealth to do still more, then exercise sober self-restraint. If there be available means only to do part of what the building demands, better do just so much as can be rightly and adequately done, though the scheme should wait many years for its entire completion. In building a new church, let this also be thought of in advance.
Then there is the question of a single scheme of subjects for all the windows, so that all when completed shall tell, chapter by chapter, one great story, or part by part, one great truth: say, the Christian Faith, or the Redemption of Man, or the Sacramental Economy of Grace, or the History of Religion, or the Mission of the Church in the World. Thus again, as in old time, will the church windows instruct the people, and the sum total of that instruction will be a unity, with harmony and interrelation of parts, of the utmost value to sound Christian thinking and feeling, and to symmetry of Christian character. For it is just this which our modern religion so much lacks: the sad result of sectarian thinking and teaching, where each hath a doctrine, a truth, and few the whole doctrine and the wholeness of truth.
Individualism, let us realize, is not what the Church should foster: though individuality, in its rightful place, be precious and sacred. The application here is not fanciful. Sadly absurd examples there are, where ecclesiastical art has been pressed into service by sectarian minds (not among the sects alone) to teach some one portion or fragment of truth through the eye every time the eye gazed upon the interior of the house of worship and fell upon the favorite symbol or picture.
But not this alone. Individualism is rampant in our day in the form of utterly arbitrary choice of subjects, as well as of their mode of treatment in point of material, color, scale of drawing, and—expensiveness. A Babel of confusion is the result, and that in some of our foremost churches, which have become thereby rather picture galleries or museums adapted to the study of all schools and all tastes, than restful, devotional, solemnizing and uplifting temples for the worship of Almighty God. A low motive ruled, and how can one help feeling it as one looks upon the performance?—here the wealthy donor, or the ambitious so-called artist, forgetting Whose this House was, demanded worship for himself. “Verily, they have their reward.”
Therefore let those who have such things in charge study first of all what a church should be, and then what their particular church, such as they have received it in trust, is. It will often be found that a building very little esteemed has something to say for itself, and is worthy of respect as originally conceived, in its own structural character as designed by its architect. And if not, and if it must be borne with, then all the more reason, in planning to do anything further in it or upon it, to “abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good.”
And after such careful study, determine (before the first enthusiast has an opportunity to put into some one window chosen at random a “most superb” production of the much advertised glass man) determine in advance what should be your total result when every window shall have been filled with stained glass: what story the whole shall tell, how best its parts may be distributed, what each part shall be, in what style, what design, what scale of drawing, scheme of color.
And when this has been determined, in the fear of God, in soberness of judgment, in conscientious fidelity to a sacred trust, with a willingness to be judged by a wiser posterity,—then let such a plan be adhered to as a law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not. To sacrifice one window to the seductions of some alien grandeur is to sacrifice the whole principle at stake. The plain glass patiently awaiting its time to give way to the right thing is more eloquent of a truly reverent and truly artistic intention than a medley of incongruous splendors.
And now, what is stained glass? This simple question it is of the utmost importance to answer, because a little familiarity with the materials and the methods of workmanship will itself serve as aguide to the choice of good windows and to the avoidance of bad.
Stained glass, then, is simply glass which has been colored in the pot, glass which has its color within itself: while painted glass—a term sometimes used as synonymous with stained glass—is properly glass which has had the color painted upon its surface, and has then been fired so that the colored or enameled surface has been vitrified. Some stained glass is of so deep a color,—red, for instance—that a thin coating of it blown over the surface of a white (that is, colorless) glass is sufficient to produce the desired color effect; if the entire thickness of the pane were of the colored glass, the effect would be much too dark: such glass is nevertheless true stained glass, and is called “flashed.”
In the early period of the art, beginning in the eleventh century and running parallel with the development of Pointed (commonly called Gothic) Architecture, only true stained glass was used. The use of enamel paints applied to the surface to produce a different color marks also the beginning of the decadence of the art; for the glory of true glass is in its jewel-like quality, its color being within itself and all absolutely translucent, while a painted glass will always be necessarily dull in comparison. The temptation to paint color upon the surfaceof glass is readily understood: it was an easier method, it promised wider scope, greater variety, in a word, the opportunity to make pictures somewhat as the painter may upon canvas. But glass is not canvas, and church windows are not to be pictures. Retribution has overtaken this work, and the latest and most ambitious more speedily than all; the enamel-painted glass has not stood the test of time, becoming muddy and perishing while the true ancient stained glass is still the joy and wonder of all who gaze upon it.
For, as we have said, the glory of true stained glass is in its rich, jewel-like color. Its reds, which the makers called “ruby,” its blues which they called “sapphire,” with its “emerald” greens, its “gold” and its “pearl,” never entered the field to compete with the achievements of the painter’s brush; to compare the delight they afford the beholder with that derived from a painting would be in a sense as impossible as a comparison between the fragrance of a flower and the cadence of a song.
The early makers of stained glass windows contended with great, to moderns they would be intolerable, limitations. They were almost absolutely restricted to the primary colors. They had not at first the art of blowing glass, but cast their pieces in small panes of at most fouror five inches in diameter. The use of the diamond in cutting was not known till the sixteenth century. Hence their work was simply mosaic. For variety they depended upon an arrangement of geometrical patterns, or patterns of familiar architectural form and of common ecclesiastical symbols. To construct these they leaded together their pieces and bits of glass, elaborating their treatment as time went on, but always in the main upon the same lines.
When they began to portray, in panels on their windows, the forms of Our Lord, of His apostles, of saints and angels, sometimes in crude settings of scenes or incidents from Holy Scripture or Church legend, their color principle was still the same; and it was still the same in the elaboration of the merely ornamental borders with forms of leaf or flower or fruit, or of sacred emblems and inscriptions. The brown pigment with which they produced faces and features, hands, feet, outlines and ornamentations, was not a color, nor intended for a color, but simply a means of definition or delineation when this was too minute to be carried out with leads. And the stained glass it was, still, which addressed the eye and compelled attention and admiration. No more than in heraldry did the forms and emblems pretend to be pictures of the actual, realistic representations ofmen, or of scenes or incidents. The makers of early stained glass were, in one word, simply makers of ornamental windows of rich color and religious symbolism.
We have said that their pieces of glass were small. This is but to say that their windows were a network of leads. For there is but one way to hold together such pieces of glass in a window, and that is by leads. These leads are not a misfortune. A square yard of simple red stained glass is artistically more beautiful if composed of a hundred pieces leaded together than if it were in a single sheet. The differences in texture themselves produce a better result, and the black leads, scarcely discernible individually, contribute an additional element of pleasure. And in arranging pieces of different color side by side, intelligent leading design was itself the artist’s drawing, and effected results altogether admirable. So far was this art of leading carried in France, for instance, that windows mainly of white glass were produced, of rare beauty by simple virtue of their structural design.
All this was changed by the men who in a later age ground up their enamel pigments, glazed windows in large panes, and daubed upon them their muddy colors, with a sublime contempt for the crude laborious mosaic work of their predecessors.Would they have a representation of the earth for their figure to stand upon? it must be carpeted with grass, with green grass, and they can paint green grass upon a colorless surface; red flowers also, upon the same, with red paint, if such were desired. The Renaissance was coming; Gothic was barbarous anyway; antiquated crudities must give place to refined work worthy of the new enlightenment! Paint a picture on canvas, then paint that picture on your glass. It can be done, certainly, if you will not allow yourself to be bothered with the nuisance of leads, but just get an ample pane of glass, unobstructed, and go at it with your brush and paints!
This miserable travesty did not long hold sway, it was scarcely permitted to go its own theoretical length. There came great political changes, great religious changes, and for a long time few churches more were built, nor even those standing kept in repair. The course of Ecclesiastical Architecture suffered an interruption for several centuries, of which Mr. Ralph Adams Cram has told us feelingly in his recent writings on that subject.
But within the memory of men now living there has also come the beginning of a true revival. The awakening of theCatholic spirit in the Anglican Communion has been accompanied by an eager desire to recover lost treasures and to restore sound traditions to their former honor.
And naturally all this has shown itself in the cultivation of Stained Glass also. As we have said, what is needed above all else is knowledge, to guide us to what is really good and worthy.
No sooner is any want of the public made evident than enterprising trade springs up to supply that want. If you want colored church windows, you can have them to-day at a trifle per square yard by purchasing a beautifully printed paper, of genuine ecclesiastical design, and pasting it upon your present windows. From this most abysmal horror of vulgarity you may pass through various successive gradations of so-called stained glass, all supplied by trade. If you pass on to the costliest, you are not thereby sure to obtain what is not horrible and vulgar, when regarded from the point of view of true Stained Glass, of Architectural Art, and of Religion.
There are at this moment three rather diverse schools of Stained Glass most in evidence before those who seek and are willing to pay for honest art work; the English, the German, and the American. Their comparative merits are nowhere, to our knowledge, presented in a fair mindedway; the makers of each claim superior excellence for their own, of course; if, indeed, they ever intimate to the public that there is any other kind at all. It should be said, however, that there is great merit in the best examples of each school; and that none of these schools can fairly be judged by the inferior stuff which is put out under its name, for each of them is defamed by such stuff.
The English school naturally had, and still has, great prestige among Churchmen. Taking it at its best, as for instance in the work of Mr. Henry Holiday, it is simple and vigorous in drawing, varied and harmonious in color, churchly in spirit, while free from mediævalism. The English artist believes in stained glass, glass which has its color within itself; and good glass, the best he can obtain. His glass is flat, that is, of even surface and equal thickness. He believes in painting upon this glass, and upon, one may say, every piece and bit of it; but he does not paint a color upon it, he simply shades it, draws folds of drapery, patterns of fabrics, details of ornamentations; always, however, aiming to leave it, however much so painted, with the color of the glass gleaming and glittering: that is, he does not daub over the surface, but puts on mere lines, and picks out lights, so that his painted piece of green glass, let us say, is still green glass,only with design upon it, or texture, or light and shade. He feels that only in this way has he done all which as an artist he is conscientiously bound to do; and he accounts a piece of mere stained glass which has not felt the brush at all, which has not had the touch of the conscious art of the maker, a poor thing, in a sort, crude and barbaric.
In the hands of a master—and there have been great masters in the English school—the results of this method have been very fine. But even so the fact remains that every line and every particle of even neutral pigment upon the surface of glass obscures so much light; which is to say, it detracts so much from its brilliancy and splendor. The fact is undeniable that the total effect of some great window of this school will be charming, but withal just a little dull; the richness which gleams and glitters from it is yet half hidden as by some fluttering veil before it. Such work at its best is exquisite; it is devotional; it is soothing; but hardly gives one a thrill of gladness. In the hands of a master, it is a fit medium for strong individuality of a good kind, as witness Burne-Jones’ windows executed at the works of William Morris. In the hands of the common multitude of English makers, it degenerates into a wearisome, conventional repetition of stiff figures, draped in the same damask stuffs,with the same wooden little flowers growing up around their feet, the whole surrounded by the same easily managed conventional border.
Of the German glass, commonly called Munich glass, it is sufficient for our purpose to say that it is in principle the same as the English. It relies much upon the brush. It is more in the mediæval spirit than the English; its feeling is that of a simply traditional, not a modern, devoutness. Its inspiration is Italian. Its colors are more predominatingly the old primary colors. Its decorative features are strictly conventional, and applied in a mechanical spirit. In warmth, in splendor of color, German windows at their best are superior to the English.
American glass is not simply glass made in America. The term denotes a new method, which yet is, in the main, a restoration of the very oldest method, reinforced on its own lines by modern resources. Mr. John La Farge is its distinguished pioneer.
American glass is true stained glass; but it is not glass of even surface and of equal thickness.[A]By its inequality of thickness the American artist effects what the English artist accomplishes by brushing dark lines upon his even glass; or he leads strips and pieces of glass onthe back of his window to intensify and deepen his color, as in folds of drapery and the like. He paints nothing except faces, hands and feet; all the rest he binds himself to obtain by the mosaic method. He cannot obtain by the mosaic method everything that the English artist obtains by the brush; but he feels that he obtains all which in a window is necessary, and by patient, thoroughly artistic work he obtains what upon study proves marvelous; and he has all his glass free to exhibit the full glory of glass. His very necessities compel him to compose in the true way, that is by lead lines; he is back upon first principles in this respect. The lead lines mark the structural lines of his drawing. But he has still to contend with the necessity of painting his flesh parts; and of overcoming the break between their flatness, between the dull hardness of painted faces, hands and feet, and the splendid jewel-like strength of all the rest of his window. The best he can do is to make this transition as little abrupt as possible.
[A]The earliest glass was not glass of even surface and equal thickness. Therein lies one of its charms.
[A]The earliest glass was not glass of even surface and equal thickness. Therein lies one of its charms.
Needless to say, the American school has its dangers. The ease with which an ignorant eye may be imposed upon by great pieces of folded glass instead of conscientiously selected and leaded strips and pieces, is a snare, into which it is not necessary for an honest artist to fall. When, however, a customer demandssomething cheap, he can obtain it in so-called American glass, and it will be cheap enough. There has been also a deplorable tendency among some prominent American glass makers toward startling theatrical effects. Of unchurchly windows, windows hopelessly and utterly unchurchly, the great majority doubtless are of the American school; nor are they the windows which have cost the least money. Novel and indescribable colors, as far removed as possible from all sober, reverent, devotional feeling, have been employed; effects have been sought which actually destroy all the value of the window as what it was designed by its architect, a window in a sacred edifice. And by the wide heralding of such performances, as if American glass meant simply this sort of thing, American glass has forfeited that just appreciation which in its essential principles it so richly merits. Let the American school remember that a window in a church is and forever must remain just a window, subservient that is, to the architecture of the church; let it design in the spirit of worshipful, reverent, dignified, sober devotion; let it compose with technical conscientiousness and love its leads and spare no labor; let it choose thoroughly good glass, and glass of predominantly the glorious colors so long honorable, eschewing startling and meretricious effects: and there will,to our mind, be no doubt of its being the Stained Glass of the future.
But, to our thinking, one thing cannot safely be done; and that is the placing of English and American, or Munich and American glass side by side in the same building. Let it be the one or the other; when you have chosen which it shall be, adhere to that. To mingle the schools in the same edifice will be sure to prove fatal to the best effects of each.
And before placing any permanent stained glass, again let us say, study the subject; see all the windows you can; and make haste slowly.
decoration 2
decoration 2