Some slight touch of human perversity perhaps inspires him also. At Fairford, at all events, he has put some of his best work, and especially some of his finest colour, into the figures of the Persecutors of the Church. Unfortunately, they are high up in the clerestory, and so do not get their share of attention; certainly they do not get the praise they deserve. Why, one is inclined to ask, this honour to the enemies of the Church on the part of the churchman? Was he at heart a heathen giving secret vent in art to feelings he dared not openly express? Not a bit of it! He was just a trifle tired of Angels, and Saints, and subjects according to convention; he was delighted at the chance of doing something not quite tame and same, and revelled in the opportunity when it occurred. In the tracery openings above the persecutors, where in the ordinary way would be angels, are lodged much more appropriate little fiends. They haunt the memory long after you have seen them, not as anything very terrific, but as bits of beautiful colour. The Devil [overleaf], hovering in wait for the soul of the impenitent thief upon the cross, is not by any means a favourable specimen of the Fairford fiends.
Occasionally there is a grimness about the mediæval Devil which we feel to this day. In a window at S. Etienne, Beauvais, there is a quite unforgettable picture of a woman struggling in the clutches of the evil one. She is draped in green, the Devil is of greenish-white, the architecture is represented in a gloom of purple and dark blue; only a peep of pale sky is seen through the window. On the one hand, this is a delightful composition of decorative colour. On the other it is intensely dramatic. It sets one wondering who this may be, and what will be the outcome of it. The struggle is fearful, the fiend is quite frantic in action. One is so taken with the scene that one does not notice that his head is wanting, and has been replaced by one which does not even fit his shoulders. That the effect, for all that, is impressive, speaks volumes for the story-teller.
250. Fairford.
Alas, alas, the Devil is dead! His modern counterfeit is a fraud. You may see this at the church of S. Vincent, at Rouen, in one of the subjects representing the life of that saint, where he puts the devils to flight. The nearest of them is an evil-looking thing, ruby coloured, uncannily spotted, like some bright poisonous-looking fungus. The restorer has supplemented these retreating devils by a farther one painted on the grey-blue sky. The imp is grotesque enough, and very cleverly put in, but it plainly belongs no longer to the early sixteenth century. It suggests a theatrical “property,” not the hobgoblin of old belief. That is just what the devilry in old glass never does.
It must be owned that mediæval Angels charm us less. They are by comparison tame. Their colour is delicate and silvery, belike, but not seductive; their wings sit awkwardly upon them; they fulfil more or less trivial functions, bearing scrolls or emblems, shields of arms even. They are not in the least ethereal. They are too much on the model of man or woman. What possible business, for example, have they with legs and feet? Yet it is by the rarest chance that the body is, as it were, lost in a swirl of drapery, which, by disguising the lower limbs, makes the image by so much, if not the more angelic, at least the less obviously of the earth.
The glass hunter cannot but be amused every now and again by odd anachronisms in mediæval and even later illustrations in glass. But wonder at them ceases when we remember how simple-minded was the craftsman of those days before archæology. If he wished to picture scenes of the long past—and he did—there was nothing for it but to show them as they occurred to his imagination—as happening, that is to say, in his own day; and that is practically what he did. He had perhaps a vague notion that a Roman soldier should wear a kilt; but in the main he was content that the onlookers at the Crucifixion should be costumed according to the period of William the Conqueror, or Maximilian, in which he himself happened to live. The practice had, at least, one advantage over our modern displays of probably very inaccurate learnedness, in that it brought the scene close home to the unlearned observer, and, as it were, linked the event with his own life. In short, there is more vitality in that rude story-telling than in the more elaborate histories, much less inaccurate in detail doubtless, to which to-day and henceforth artists are pledged.
There is no occasion to dwell upon the oddities of glass painting; they are those of mediæval art all through. If we take a certain incongruity for granted, the guilelessness of it only charms us. That same guilelessness enables the artist to make absolutely ornamental use of themes which to-day we might think it profane to make subservient to decorative effect. We never question his sincerity, though in the scene of the Creation, as at Erfurth, he made a pattern of the birds, pair and pair, each on its own tree. He can safely show the staff of S. Christopher, as at Freiburg, blossoming so freely as conveniently to fill the head of the window and balance the Child upon his shoulder. According as it occurs to him, or as it suits his purpose, kings and bishops take part in the Crucifixion; S. Michael tramples upon a dragon big enough to swallow him at a mouthful; Abraham goes out, gorgeously arrayed in red and purple, to slaughter Isaac on a richly decorated altar, and a white ram, prancing among the green, calls his attention to itself as the more appropriate sacrifice; Adam and Eve are driven forth from Eden by a scarlet angel, draped in white, with wings as well as sword of flaming red. In this last case the peculiar colour has a significance. Elsewhere it implies the poverty of the glazier’s palette, or indicates the sacrifice of natural to artistic effect. So it was that, till quite the end of the thirteenth century, we meet with positively blue beards, ruby cows, and trees of all the colours of the rainbow; and even at a much later date than that, primary-coloured cattle look over the manger at the Nativity, and Christ is shown entering Jerusalem on a bright blue donkey.
To the last the glass painter indulged in very interesting compound subjects—the Nativity, for example, with in the distance the Magi on their way; the Last Supper, and in the foreground, relieved against the tablecloth, Christ washing Peter’s feet, the apostles grouped round so as to form part of each or either subject. Sometimes a series of events form a single picture, as where you have the Temptation, the Expulsion, Eve with her distaff, Adam with his spade, the childhood of Cain and Abel, and the first fratricide, all grouped in one comprehensive landscape.