A Lecture on Stained Glass

by Robert Anning Bell

Now without a real grasp of the craft this moment is wasted. Nothing is welded. The beautiful possibility cannot come to the birth, it is without form, it has no bodily shape, and is but one of those pitiful unrealised and unrealisable glimpses through the veil which form the tragedy of the incomplete artist.

Only when you are so familiar and so easy with your means of expression that their limitations, their so-called restraints, are to you a help and a happy freedom and as natural to you as the organs of your body, can you hope to realise the gift which is offered to you and transform it into your own artistic expression.

This does not imply that “to carry out the carrying out” will necessarily be easy, any more than it is always easy to make your body obey your wishes; but it will be natural, and the transformation will be unconscious, just as a school-boy is transformed into a cricketer quite unconsciously, but yet cricket is not easy.

To get down to facts, what all this means is that you must work at your technique until you never dream of wanting stained glass to do the things which stained glass won’t do.

Now stained glass is at its best, as I have said, a severe and yet rich form of decoration. It can, in its lighter uses, express a sort of quaintness or whimsicality, it can tell the gothic fairy tale—goblins, elves, gnomes, it can express a somewhat grimmish form of fantasy. I remember seeing a capital piece of work—quite small—giving the characters of that strange old Cornish song “Widdicombe Fair,” a rather macabre story—with the Ghost of the Old Grey Mare, Peter Hawke and the rest of the rout. But it cannot easily be gay and it can never be frivolous. How depressing is restaurant stained glass! I am speaking of stained glass, i.e., coloured glass. White glass, painted, can convey a certain sedate cheerfulness, as one may see in 16th and 17th century domestic work; and when enamelled, as in the Swiss work, it even has a sort of sprightliness, of a Teutonic rather than of a Latin type. Excursions along these paths might give very interesting results to those whose temperaments lead them to such adventures. They have been by no means explored—and some of our students are gifted that way.

We modern people stand at a disadvantage compared to our ancestors in that the surroundings of our lives are not so immediately suggestive of treatment in glass as those which they enjoyed. Think of the luck of that man in Richard II’s time who had to put “le Dispencers” round the choir at Tewkesbury. Not, of course, a great imaginative subject, but a very pleasant, interesting, and easy job—gorgeous knights in surcoats with their arms emblazoned. And then think of being asked to do a modern Cabinet Council! Nevertheless there are suggestions to be got from modern life, and I am glad to see that our students are aware of it—children, women—men are more difficult. Texture as well as colour is a difficulty, it cannot quite be ignored.

But the great, the profound difficulty is the absence of symbolic figures, of characters which have been “canonised” in our times by popular acclaim, and symbolism must be widely and readily recognised to be of value. Think of all the great moral qualities—and these are naturally the motives of much stained glass. Is it leadership in war? It is not General Haig, nor even Foch, your mind flies to—but Joshua or David, or Godfrey de Bouillon. Is it statesmanship? It is not Lloyd George or Gladstone, or even William Pitt—but rather Moses or Gregory, Hildebrand or Anselm. Is it patriotism and self sacrifice? Well, there are many graves “which are for ever England,” and yet—it is Joan of Arc we think of. Probably, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon are the only characters which have been “canonised” in recent times. And even in the case of Gordon does the present generation feel about him as we older ones did, who watched his tragedy and cherish his memory? If it comes to other than moral virtues, to figures typifying factors in the structure of Society—Law, Kingship, Commerce, Labour? Law would scarcely be a Lord Chancellor (or Justinian), but again Moses, with the Tablets given him from The Mount. Kingship would hardly be a modern sovereign—but Barbarossa as in the Spanish Chapel, or Charlemagne, or our own King Arthur.

Commerce is, I confess, a difficulty. I think possibly the gracious figure of Venice would be best. Certainly not the Port of London Authority or Sir Alfred Mond or Lord Leverhulme! For Labour, not that gorilla-like figure, with a huge jaw and no back to its head, brandishing a pick or a hammer, so favoured by the advanced politicians, and some sculptors, of to-day. But rather—the shepherds following the angel to the lowly manger.

It follows then, that those who wish to excel in stained glass designing should have a wide culture and real imagination, a sound knowledge of the necessary technique, and a thorough delight in the craft. I feel sure, too, that they would be all the better for study and design in other methods of artistic expression in order to avoid that staleness and repetition which too often comes to those who practice one form of art alone.

ROBERT ANNING BELL.