Their arch-enemy is the restorer, at whose hands they have suffered cruel and irreparable wrong. He is the thief who has robbed so much old glass of its glory, and a most impenitent one: there are times when any one who cares for glass could find it in his heart to wish he were crucified. So greedy is he of work, if not of gain, that restoration cannot safely be left even to the most learned of men; to him, perhaps, can it least of all be entrusted.
The twelfth century windows at S. Denis should be among the most interesting extant. They are ruined by restoration. The beauty which they may have had, which they must have had, is wiped out; and, for purposes of study, they are of use only to those who have opportunity and leisure to ferret out what is genuine amidst the sham. The S. Chapelle is cited as a triumph of restoration, an object lesson, in which we may see a thirteenth century chapel with its glass as it appeared when first it was built. If that is so, then time has indeed been kinder even than one had thought. No less an authority than Mr. Ruskin (in a letter to Mr. E. S. Dallas, published in the Athenæum) praises the new work there, and says he cannot distinguish it from the old. There is at least a window and a half (part of the East window, and the one to the left of that) in which, at all events, the old is easily distinguishable from the new. But if the new is not more obvious throughout, that is not because the new is so good, but because the old has been so restored that it is unrecognisable—as good as new, in fact, and no better. The old glass is so smartened up, so watered down with modern, that it gives one rather a poor idea of unspoiled thirteenth century work. A more adequate impression of what it must have been, may be gained from the few panels of it, comparatively unhurt by restoration, now in South Kensington Museum.
The story of destruction repeats itself wherever the restorer has had his way. Sometimes he has actually inserted new material if only the old was cracked, obscured, corroded; and has effaced the very qualities which come of age and accident. Sometimes he has indulged in a brand-new background. There, at least, it seemed to his ignorance, he might safely substitute nice, new, even-tinted, well-made glass for streaky, speckled, rough, mechanically imperfect material. Invariably he has thinned the effect of colour by diluting the old glass with new. Many quite poor new-looking windows, spick and span from the restorer (those, for example, at the East end of Milan Cathedral), turn out to contain a certain amount of old work, good perhaps, lost in garish modern manufacture. At Notre Dame, at Paris, the considerable remains of Early and Early Decorated glass go for very little. One has to pick them out from among modern work designed to deceive. Certain windows at Mantes have suffered such thorough restoration that one begins to wonder if they are not altogether new; and you have precisely the same doubt at Limoges and at scores of other places. At Lyons an Early Rose has been made peculiarly hideous by restoration. Much of the harsh purple in Early French mosaic is surely due to the admixture of crude new glass. It is needless to multiply examples; they will occur to every one. All this old work swamped in modern imitation goes inevitably for nought. If the new is good it puzzles and perplexes one; if bad, one can see nothing else. What is crude kills what is subdued. It is as if one listened for a tender word at parting, and it was drowned in the screech of the steam-engine.
Early glass was so mechanically imperfect, and age has so roughened and pitted it, that its colour has, almost of necessity, a quality which new work has not; and one is disposed, perhaps too hastily, to ascribe all garish glass in old windows to the restorer. Many a time, however, the new work convicts itself. At Strassburg it is quite easily detected. You may check your judgment in this respect by surveying the windows from the rear. It is a very good plan to preface the study of old work by examining it from the churchyard, the street, the close, or in the case of a big church from its outer galleries. The surface exposed to the weather, with the light upon it, explains often at a glance what would else be unaccountable. A vile habit of the restorer is to smudge over his glass with dirty paint, perhaps burnt in, perhaps merely in varnish colour; this he terms “antiquating.”
The worse the new work added to the old, the more thoroughly it spoils it; the better the forgery, the more serious the doubt it throws upon what may be genuine. The modern ideal of restoration is thoroughly vicious. All that can be done is mending; and it should be an axiom with the repairer, that, where glass (however broken) can possibly be made safe by lead joints, no new piece of glass should ever be inserted in its place. Better any disfigurement by leads than the least adulteration of old work.
It is absurd to set good old work in the midst of inferior reproduction of it, as the common practice is, more especially in the case of Early work. Every bungler has thought himself equal to the task of restoring thirteenth century glass. It was rudely drawn and roughly painted. What could be easier than to repeat details of ornament, or even to make up bogus old subjects, and so complete the window? To paint figures anything like those in the picture windows of the sixteenth century was obviously not so easy, and the difficulty has acted as a deterrent. Where it has not, the discrepancy between old and new is usually unmistakable. Men like M. Capronnier, however, have sometimes put excellent workmanship into their restoration of Renaissance work, to be detected only by a certain air of modernity, which happily has crept into it, in spite of the restorer. But was it not he who flattened the grey-blue background to the transept windows at S. Gudule? The fine window at S. Gervais, Paris, with the Judgment of Solomon, has lost much of its charm in restoration. To compare it with the two lights in the window to the right of it, is to see how much of the quality of old glass has been restored away. That quality may be due in part to age and decay. What then? Beauty is beauty; and if it comes of decay (which we cannot hinder), let us at least enjoy the beauty of decay.
It has been proved at Strassburg that thirteenth or even twelfth century work may be quite harmoniously worked into fourteenth century windows. And even in the sixteenth century there were artists who managed to adapt quite Early mosaic glass to Renaissance windows, in which abundant stain, and even enamel, was used. The effect may be perplexing, but it does not deceive. Why will not a man frankly tell us what is new in his work? Then we could appreciate what he had done. But it is only once in a while that he takes you into his confidence. This happens, by way of exception, in a window at S. Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol, in the case of some figure work on quarry backgrounds, in which the new work is all of clear unpainted white or coloured glass, but so judiciously chosen that you do not at first perceive the patching. The effect is absolutely harmonious; and when you begin to study the glass, you do so without any fear that imposition is being practised upon you. Where the painting has in parts been made good, there is always that fear, as, for example, at S. Mary’s Hall, Coventry: the windows have been restored with great taste; but one cannot always be quite sure as to what is modern.
256. A Restoration at Angers.