Stained Glass Work Part 13

For our lives are like the broken bits of gla.s.s, 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.

[1] West of the road between Welwyn and Hitchin.

CHAPTER XVII

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 (which is more honourable), lest worse befall us!

And I do not say these things because this or that place is "G.o.d'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.

And perhaps the most important of all is already observed by your _being_ here, for it is important that you should visit, whenever possible, the place where you are to do work; if you are not able to do this, get all the particulars you can as to aspect and surroundings. And yet a reservation must be made, even upon all this; for everything depends upon the way we use it, and if you only have an eye to the showing off of your work to advantage, treating the church as a mere frame for your picture, it would be better that your window should misfit and have to be cut down and altered, or anything else happen to it that would help to put it back and make it take second place. It is so hard to explain these things so that they cannot be misconstrued; but you remember I quoted the windows at St. Philip's, Birmingham, as an example of n.o.ble thought and work carried to the pitch of perfection and design. But that was in a cla.s.sic building, with large, plain, single openings without tracery. Do you think the artist would have let himself go, in that full and ample way, in a beautiful Gothic building full of lovely architectural detail? Not so: rather would he have made his pictures hang lightly and daintily in the air amongst the slender shafts, as in St. Martin's Church in the same town, at Jesus College and at All Saints' Church, Cambridge, at Tamworth; and in Lyndhurst, and many another church where the architecture, to say truth, had but slender claims to such respect.

In short, you must think of the building first, and make your windows help it. You must observe its scale and the s.p.a.cing 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 circ.u.mscribing bounds.

But here we find ourselves suddenly brought sharp up, face to face with a most difficult and th.o.r.n.y subject, upon which we have rushed without knowing it. "Must we observe then" (you say) "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 gla.s.s 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.

In the course of the various attempted revivals in architecture that have taken place during the past sixty years, it has been frequently urged both by writers and architects that we should agree to revive some _one_ style of ancient art that might again become a national style of architecture. It would, indeed, no doubt be better, if we must speak in a dead language, to agree to use only one, instead of our present confusion of tongues: but what, after all, is the adopting of this principle at all but to engage once again in the replanting of a full-grown tree--the mistake of the Renaissance and the Gothic revival repeated? Such things never take firm root or establish healthy growth which lives and goes on of its own vitality. They never succeed in obtaining a natural, national sympathy and acceptance. The movement is a scholarly and academic one, and the art so remains. The reaction against it is always a return to materials, and almost always the first result of this is a revival of simplicity. People get tired of being surrounded with elaborate mouldings and traceries and other architectural features, which are not the natural growth of their own day but of another day long since dead, which had other thoughts and moods, feelings and aspirations. "Let us have straightforward masonry and simple openings, and ornament them with something from Nature."

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,[2] 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-gla.s.s; 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.

There has already gathered together in the great field of the arts of today a little Byzantium of the crafts setting itself to learn from the beginning how things are actually made, how built, hammered, painted, cut, st.i.tched; casting aside theories and academical thought, and founding itself upon simplicity, and sincerity, and materials. And the architect who condescends, or, as we should rather say, aspires, to be a builder and a master-mason, true director of his craft, will, if things go on as they seem now going, find in the near future a band around him of other workers so minded, and will have these bright tools of the accessory crafts ready to his hand. This it is, if anything, that will solve all the vexed questions of "style," and lead, if anything will, to the art of the times to be. For the reason why the nineteenth century complained so constantly that it had "no style of architecture" was surely because it had _every_ style of architecture, and a race of architects who could design in every style because they could build in no style; knew by practical handling and tooling nothing of the real natures and capacities of stone or brick or wood or gla.s.s; received no criticism from their materials; whereas these should have daily and hourly moulded their work and formed the very breath of its life, warning and forbidding on the one hand, suggesting on the other, and so directing over all.

I have thought fit, dear student, to touch on these great questions in pa.s.sing, 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 gla.s.s.

What, then, in detail, are the rules that must guide us in placing windows in ancient buildings? But first--_may_ we place windows in ancient buildings at all? "No," say some; "because we have no right to touch the past; it is 'restoration,' a word that has covered, in the past," they say (and we must agree with them), "a ma.s.s of artistic crime never to be expiated, and of loss never to be repaired." "Yes,"

say others, "because new churches will be older in half-an-hour-- half-an-hour older; for the world has moved, and where will you draw the line? Also, gla.s.s has _to be renewed_, you must put in something, or some one must."

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.

Shall we work in the style of the "New art," then--"_l'art Nouveau_"?

the style of the last new poster? the art-tree, the art-bird, the art-squirm, and the ace of spades form of ornament?

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--

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

(2) From Nature.

(3) From (and the whole conditioned by) materials and the knowledge of craft.

Finally, let us say that you must consider each case on its merits, and be ready even sometimes perhaps to admit that the old white gla.s.s may be better for a certain position than your new gla.s.s could be, while old _stained-gla.s.s_, of course, should always be sacred to you, a thing to be left untouched. Even where new work seems justifiable and to be demanded, proceed as if treading on holy ground. Do not try crude experiments on venerable and beautiful buildings, but be modest and reticent; know the styles of the past thoroughly and add your own fresh feeling to them reverently. And in thought do not think it necessary to be novel in order to be original. There is quite enough originality in making a n.o.ble figure of a saint, or treating with reverent and dignified art some actual theme of Scripture or tradition, and working into its detail the sweetness of nature and the skill of your hands, without going into eccentricity for the sake of novelty, and into weak allegory to show your originality and independence, tired with the world-old truths and laws of holy life and n.o.ble character. And this leads us to the point where we must speak of these deep things in the great province of thought.

[2] Paradise, canto vi. 1.

CHAPTER XVIII

OF THOUGHT, IMAGINATION, AND ALLEGORY

"_The first thing one should demand of a man who calls himself an artist is that he has something to say, some truth to teach, some lesson to enforce. Don't you think so?_"