The only other place where later glass is of sufficient worth to make it worth seeing, the only place where Seventeenth century work arouses much interest, is Troyes. There is a quantity of it in the churches of S. Nizier, S. Pantaleon, and in the cathedral, attributed, for the most part, to Linard Gontier, who is certainly responsible for some of the best of it. But it is in the church of S. Martin-ès-Vignes, in the outskirts of the town, that it is to be appreciated en masse. There you may see some hundred and ten lights in all, executed during the first forty years of the seventeenth century. This is the place to study the decline and fall of glass painting—a melancholy sort of satisfaction. Here more thoroughly than ever must be realised how hopeless it is to evade in glass the glazier’s part of the business; how powerless enamel is to produce effect; how weak, poor, lacking in limpidity and lustre, its colour is—and this even in the hands of an artist born, one may say, after his time. Gonthier was an incomparable glass painter. He could produce with a wash of pigment effects which lesser men could only get by laborious stippling and scratching; he could float enamel on to glass with a dexterity which enabled him to get something like colour in it; but he was not a colourist, nor yet, probably, a designer. The difference in the work attributed to him, and the style of his design (which is sometimes that of an earlier and better day) lead one rather to suppose that he adapted or adopted the designs of his predecessors as suited his convenience.
To see what glass painting came to in the eighteenth century you cannot do better than go to Oxford. You have there the design of no less a man than Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted by one of the best china painters of his day. None but a china painter, by the way, could be found to do it. It is not unfair, therefore, to compare this masterpiece of its poor period with the rude work of the fourteenth century, done by no one knows whom. And what do we find? Conspicuous before us is the great West window, which might as well have been painted on linen, so little of the translucency of glass is there left in it. It in no way lessens the credit of the great portrait painter that he knew nothing of the capacities of glass; that was not his métier. And there was no one to advise him wisely in the matter. But the result is disastrous. The beauty of his drawing—and there is charm at least in the figures of the Virtues—counts for little, as compared with the dulness of it all. It has neither the colour of mosaic glass nor the sparkle of grisaille. The white is obscured by masses of heavy paint, which, when the sun shines very brightly behind it, kindles at best into a foxy-brown; and even this is in danger of peeling off, and showing the poverty of the glass it was meant to enrich. Any pictorial effect it might have had is ruined by the leads and bars, which assert themselves in the most uncompromising manner. In short, the qualities of oil painting aimed at are altogether missed, and the facilities which glass offered are not so much as sought.
It is no hardship to turn your back upon such poor stuff. And there, high up on the other side, are seven great Gothic windows. These are by no means of the best period. The design consists largely of canopy work, never profoundly interesting; the figures are, at the best, rudely drawn; some of them are even grotesquely awkward. Their heads are too large by half, their hands and feet flattened out in the familiar, childish, mediæval way. In all the sixty-four figures there is not one that can be called beautiful. Yet for all that, there is a dignity in them which the graceful Virtues lack. They are designed, moreover, with a large sense of decoration. The balance of white and colour is just perfect, and the way the patches of deep colour are embedded, as it were, in grisaille, is skilful in the extreme. To compare them with the futile effort of the eighteenth century, opposite, is to apprehend what can be done in glass, and what cannot. The whole secret of the success of the mere craftsman where the great painter failed, is that he knew what to seek in glass,—colour, brilliancy, decorative breadth. He not only knew what to do, but how to do it; and he did it in the manliest and most straightforward way. Rude though the work, it fits its place, fulfils its function, adorns the architecture, gives grandeur to it. What more can you ask?
Domestic glass, such as that in which the Swiss excelled (window panes, many of them, rather than windows), is best studied in museums, whither most of it has drifted. There is no national collection without good examples. Better or more accessible it would be difficult to find than those in the quiet little museum at Lucerne—so quiet that, if you spend a morning there, studying them, you become yourself, by reason of your long stay, an object of interest. So little attention do these masterpieces in miniature glass painting attract, that the guardians do not expect any one to give them more than a passing glance; but they leave you, happily, quite free to pursue your harmless, if inexplicable, bent.
The list of windows worth seeing is by no means exhausted. In many a town, as at York, Tours, Troyes, Evreux, Bourges, Rouen, Nuremberg, Cologne, and in many a single church, you may find the whole course of glass painting, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, more or less completely illustrated; and, where that is so, of course one period throws light upon another. But the impression is always stronger when the century has left its mark upon the church.
Not until you have a clear idea of the characteristics of style, can you sort out for yourself the various specimens, which occur in anything but historic sequence in the churches where they are to be found. Having arrived at understanding enough to do that, you will need no further guidance, and may go a-hunting for yourself. To the glass hunter there are almost everywhere windows worth seeing.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
A WORD ON RESTORATION.
If old windows have suffered at the hands of time, they have also gained, apart from sentiment, a tone and quality which the glass had not when it was new.