from garishness on the other; but it is only a means—the fact of salvation lies always in one's own hands—for we must, I fear, admit that "garishness" and "irresolution" are not unknown in stained-glass itself, in spite of the resources and safeguardings we have attributed to the material. Speaking, therefore, now to stained-glass painters themselves, we might say that these faults in their own art, as too often practised in our days, arise, strange as it may seem, from ignorance of their own material, that very material the knowledge of which we have just been recommending as a safeguard against these very faults to the students of another art.
And this brings us back to our subject.
For the foregoing discussion of painters' methods has all been written to draw a comparison and emphasise a contrast.
A contrast from which you, student of stained-glass, I hope may learn much.
For as we have tried to describe the methods of the painter in oil or water colours, and so point out his advantages and disadvantages, so we would now draw a picture of the glass-painter at work; if he works as he should do.
For the painter of pictures (we said) has his colour-box of a few pigments, from which all his harmonies must come by mixing them and diluting them in various proportions, dealing with infinity out of a very limited range of materials, and required to supply all the rest by his own skill and memory.
Coming each day to his work with his palette clean and his colours in their tubes;
Beginning, as it were, all over again each time; and perhaps with his heart cold and his memory dull.
But the glass-painter has his specimens of glass round him; some hundreds, perhaps, of all possible tints.
He has, with these, to compose a subject in colour;