The window-space is therefore always to be preserved for window use—just such and just so much as the architect gave us. The use of a window (barring for the moment the unscientific one of ventilation) is to give light while still affording shelter. And this light-space is also to serve artistically as a kind of balance to the dark space of the solid wall; hence this light-space is to art sacred, and must be permitted to the end to assert itself as just what it is and such as it is, so much rightly apportioned and correctly proportioned translucent wall-space.
When this window-space has been first filled with a plain glass, which is then to give way to stained glass, the new treatment must say, just as obviously, only more beautifully, what the old said: it must still be a window—letting in light, though now the light is colored—and in its architectural value it must be just what it was before, asserting the shape and the design of the structural window, plainly and faithfully.
In other words, the true stained glass window—in a church building worthy of that name—is not now to give the beholder the impression that he is looking out through an opening and seeing, of something beyond, so much as the size of the opening will permit: in a word, the spectacular impression of looking into some beautiful out-door world through a hole in the wall. The beholder must be conscious still of looking at the wall itself, the translucent part of it, which confines him within the edifice as much as the stone or the brick. Nor yet is the true stained glass window merely a colored glass picture covering so much wall area: the outline form is to be so obvious, and the treatment so non-realistic, that the architectural idea may never for a moment be in danger of submersion under some other idea.
For, as is true in general of decorative art as contrasted with pictorial art, the true church window is to be designed without perspective, without shadow, without attempt at realistic effect. It is to be conventional, symbolical; with that intent it may utilize as it will forms, colors, attitudes, postures, accessories, fearless of the criticism that ‘this saint or that scene never in the world looked like that.’ No intelligent person standing before decorative painting would for a moment think of demanding a representation of the actual. That, frankly, was not its object.
And the stained glass church window will further fulfill its particular end if all round the figure or group, or whatever be the subject matter of the composition, there runs a clear line or border of differently colored glass, making a clear demarcation from the stone wall; drawing again, as it were, the architect’s line of his window construction.
All of which is but to say that windows were made for the sake of the building, and so must remain; not that a building was made for the sake of windows,—for the sake of furnishing so much space for so many square yards of somebody’s beautiful glass. Which ought to be self-evident, though to many persons it is not.
So regarding it now, the further question naturally occurs as to the treatment of the several windows of one particular church. For, each individual window might be in itself correct according to the above principles, and yet the total effect sadly lacking in unity and harmony.
There is first of all the consideration of style: a difficult matter to define, yet not, after all, so difficult to determine. What ought certainly not to determine it is the chance ability of some wealthy donor or donors to pay for the costliest work that could be produced; nor, on the other hand, the limited ability of others who could give only something inexpensive. The style of the building and its general character must determine the degree of splendor and ornateness which will be right for each and all the windows. If there be wealth to do still more, then exercise sober self-restraint. If there be available means only to do part of what the building demands, better do just so much as can be rightly and adequately done, though the scheme should wait many years for its entire completion. In building a new church, let this also be thought of in advance.