I find more difficulty in answering this than any other technical question in this book. I do not think it can be answered
with a hard and fast "Yes" or "No." It depends on the circumstances of the case. But I incline towards the side of making it the rule to put the bars in first, and adapt the composition to them. You may think this a surprising view for an artist to take. "Surely," you will say, "that is putting the cart before the horse, and making the more important thing give way to the less!" But my feeling is that reasonable limitations of any kind ought never to be considered as hindrances in a work of art. They are part of the problem, and it is only a spirit of dangerous license which will consider them as bonds, or will find them irksome, or wish to break them through. Stained-glass is not an independent art. It is an accessory to architecture, and any limitations imposed by structure and architectural propriety or necessity are most gravely to be considered and not lightly laid on one side. And in this connection it must be remembered that the bars cannot be made to go anywhere to fit a freely designed composition: they must be approximately at certain distances on account of use; and they must be arranged with regard to each other in
the whole of the window on account of appearance.
You might indeed find that, in any single light, it is quite easy to arrange them at proper and serviceable distances, without cutting across the heads or hands of the figures; but it is ten chances to one that you can get them to do so, and still be level with each other, throughout a number of lights side by side.
The best plan, I think, is to set them out on the side of the cartoon-paper before you begin, but not so as to notice them; then first roughly strike out the position your most important groups or figures are to occupy, and, before you go on with the serious work of drawing, see if the bars cut awkwardly, and, if they do, whether a slight shifting of them will clear all the important parts; it often will, and then all is well; but I do not shrink from slightly altering even the position of a head or hand, rather than give a laboured look to what ought to be simple and straightforward by "coaxing" the bars up and down all over the window to fit in with the numerous heads and hands.
If, by the way, I see fit in any case to
adopt the other plan, and make my composition first, placing the bars afterwards to suit it, I never allow myself to shift them from the level that is convenient and reasonable for anything except a head; I prefer even that they should cut across a hand, for instance, rather than that they should be placed at inconvenient intervals to avoid it.
The principle of observing your limitations is, I do not hesitate to say, the most important, and far the most important, of all principles guiding the worker in the right practising of any craft.
The next in importance to it is the right exercise of all legitimate freedom within those limitations. I place them in this order, because it is better to stop short, by nine-tenths, of right liberty, than to take one-tenth of wrong license. But by rights the two things should go together, and, with the requisite skill and training to use them, constitute indeed the whole of the practice of a craft.
Modern division of labour is much against both of these things, the observance of which charms us so in the ancient Gothic Art of the Middle Ages.