Do not think it beneath your dignity or as if you were shirking some vital artistic obligation, to take hints from these natural objects, or from ancient or modern glass, in a perfectly frank and simple manner; nay, even to match your whole colour scheme, tint for tint, by them if it seems well to you. You may get help anywhere and from anything, and as much
as you like; it will only be so much more chance for you; so much richer a store to choose from, so much stronger resource to guide to good end; for after all, with all the helps you can get, much lies in the doing. Do what you like then—as a child: but be sure you do like it: and if the window wants a bit of any particular tint, put it there, meaning or no meaning. If there is no robe or other feature to excuse and account for it in the spot which seems to crave for it,—put the colour in, anywhere and anyhow—in the background if need be—a sudden orange or ruby "quarry" or bit of a quarry, as if the thing were done in purest waywardness. "You would like a bit there if there were an excuse for it?" Then there is an excuse—the best of all—that the eye demands it. Do it fearlessly.
But to work in this way (it hardly need be said) you must watch and work at your glass yourself; for these hints come late on in the work, when colour, light and shade, and design are all fusing together into a harmony. You can no more forecast these final accidents, which are the flower and crown and finish of
the whole, than you could forecast the lost "Chord";—
"Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine."
It "comes from the soul" of the window.
We all know the feeling—the climaxes, exceptions, surprises, suspensions, in which harmony delights; the change from the last bar of the overture to the first of the opening recitative in the "Messiah," the chord upon which the victor is crowned in "The Meistersingers," the 59th and 60th bars in Handel's "Every Valley." (I hope some of us are "old-fashioned" enough to be unashamed of still believing in Handel!)
Or if it may be said that these are hardly examples of the kind of accidental things I have spoken of, being rather, indeed, the deliberately arranged climax to which the whole construction has been leading, I would instance the 12th (complete) bar in the overture to "Tannhäuser," the 20th and 22nd bar in Chopin's Funeral March, the change from the minor to major in Schubert's Romance from "Rosamunde," and the 24th bar in his Serenade (Ständchen), the 13th
and following bars of the Crescendo in the Largo Appassionato of Beethoven's Op. 2. Or if you wish to have an example where all is exception, like one of the south nave windows in York Minster, the opening of the "Sonata Appassionata," Op. 57.
Now how can you forecast such things as these!