Stained Glass Windows: An Essay: With a Report to the Vestry on Stained Glass Windows for Grace Church Lockport New York

by William Frederic Faber

This is the building which is committed to our care. Not only that we keep it clean and in repair, warmed and lighted, not only that we preserve the fabric as a valuable piece of property; but that continuing to labor in the spirit of those who have preceded us, we secure such further additions to it as will tend to make it complete in its kind.

We say, complete in its kind. And it is our sacred duty, therefore, to understand what it is that we already have, as well as to ask what further gifts and further embellishments might add thereto. For to add, with the best intention and with lavish generosity, but without an understanding of the conditions and limitations imposed by the existing edifice, might easily result in such disastrous incongruity as a future generation, if not ours, would deplore. The land is full of warning examples, and one is at times appalled to think of the vast sums embodied in worse than waste, from which our better educated descendants after us will suffer in the years to come. Knowledge is bound to grow; travel and study cannot fail to make an understanding of these things the common property of intelligent Church people as time goes on. And it is a grave responsibility to be at the head of a parish in which permanent work is undertaken and executed, work on which the future is to pronounce judgment. This responsibility, let me add, your rector for one feels very seriously and deeply.

A very common form of architectural enrichment in this day of growing wealth and of increasing commemoration of the departed is that of stained glass windows. No memorial can be more beautiful than this when wisely planned and well executed. None can be much more painful or incessantly offensive when inartistic, incongruous, or lacking in the true devotional spirit.

And as touching our own case, it is reasonably certain that offers will be made to place such windows in Grace Church. It would be ungenerous to decline them. Moreover, we cannot escape the moral obligation of directing what such memorials shall be, so far as the building itself, its style of architecture, its uses, and its history, shall impose the conditions. It is not a question of dictating to intending donors: for the vestry to decline to exercise such control would be for us to fail of a sacred trust.

Our church, we may be most thankful to bear in mind, is built in a style pure and self-consistent, plain as it is. It is Early English, of the first and simplest of the periods of Gothic. To treat it as if it were of some other style, in any changes or additions we might see fit to make hereafter, would be to do violence to the edifice, to wrong its intelligent and loving builders in the days of good Bishop De Lancey, and those who shall inherit it after we are gone. There is meaning and purpose in it, as it is: in every line of it, in every arch, every dimension, every grouping and distribution of parts.

We are not at liberty, therefore, to change the window openings, in size or form, unless indeed we wish to rebuild the church. We may at our taste reconstruct the windows in the houses in which we live, but we cannot alter the style of these windows without destroying the style of the architecture. The series of long narrow lancets, no matter how long or how narrow, are right; and with all their severe simplicity, their beauty of outline and their grace and dignity grow upon one the more they are studied. Mediæval builders had a meaning even in putting such windows in pairs; it may seem to us a little fantastic, but as they made everything symbolical, so in this grouping they symbolized our Lord’s sending out His Apostles two and two. Apart from such a consideration, there is a quiet grace in this long succession of lancet pairs which may safely be left to speak for itself.

The development of window forms is itself very interesting, and should be understood before an attempt is made to treat any church windows in particular. Mrs. Van Rensselaer, who has done so much to make the English cathedrals known in this country, thus traces the successive steps from style to style: “Fancy first a plain tall window with a round-arched head; then the round exchanged for a pointed head; then two, or three, or five perhaps, of these pointed windows set close together; and then a projecting moulding in the shape of an arch drawn around them, including them all and thus including, of necessity, a plain piece of wall above their heads. Then fancy this piece of wall pierced with a few small openings, and we have a group of connected lights in which, as a plant in its embryo, lies the promise of all after-development....

“The small lights in the upper field enlarge and multiply until they form a connected pattern which fills its whole area, and the jambs of the main lights diminish into narrow strips or very slender columns. The great arch, which in the first place did but encircle the windows, thus becomes itself the window—the ‘plate-traceried’ window which was richly developed in early French Gothic, but less richly in English, owing to the persistent local love for mere groups of lancets. Then all the stone-work shrinks still farther—the columnar character of the uprights is lost, and the flat surfaces between the upper openings change into mouldings of complex section. Thus the original tall lights and upper piercings surrender their last claim to independence; the uprights are no longer jambs or bits of wall but mullions, the arch-head is filled with genuine traceries, and all the elements of the design are vitally fused together within the sweep of the great window to form its multiple yet organic beauty.”

The art of making stained glass windows went hand in hand with this development of architectural forms through the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and succeeding centuries. It has indeed been called the “principal branch of Mediæval Art;” but was always treated as absolutely subservient to the particular architecture itself. A most eminent authority denies that the art of glass-staining has ever been lost. Glass itself was used by Christians in their churches from the earliest church-building times; the distinct art of painting on glass emerges, one might say, with the springing up of pointed architecture, though the beginnings show themselves in Norman architecture in the eleventh century. Four centuries the two arts flourished side by side; with the decadence of the greater came also the decline of the subsidiary; a poorer taste in building was naturally accompanied by a poorer taste in glass. With the revival of interest in those long-neglected periods of noble achievement, the Oxford movement of Church Restoration giving men the religious guiding principles for an intelligent appreciation of the forms of Mediæval art, church building and glass staining were brought back again, the one with the other. And whether such restoration can leave us satisfied with the mere recovery of the riches of by-gone ages, or must mean also, as I believe, the development of what the present can contribute in a reverent but not slavish spirit—certain it is that the first step is to understand the past, to find out what was done in the great formative and classic periods, why it was done as it was and not otherwise, in a word, to master the models before we proceed on our own course; and, as I said before, to remember to which period and style our own edifice belongs.