OUR first two articles dealt chiefly with the difficulty which was experienced in getting good and artistically useful glass, and the wonderful success which has been arrived at. But, given good glass, it by no means follows that you will have a good window. Artistic acquirements and faculties of a very high order are as requisite as the material itself. Few people, even of those who are continually handling color, have the color sense; and yet this is more necessary in dealing with stained glass than with anything else. The entering light carries every color up to such a pitch that discords, which would be scarcely noticeable in work seen by reflected light, are unbearable in stained glass. " The ancients," says M. Bontemps, " with the palette that we call incomplete, produced effects of harmony to which we have not yet attained. People have imagined that this was owing to the quality of their colors, while it was really the result of the well-balanced powers of the different colors, and of their artistically combined oppositions." According to M. Labarte, the success of the mediaeval glass-stainer was due to " the skillful arrangement and harmonious distribution of his colors." "A knowledge of the relative values of tones " is reckoned by Viollet-le-Duc as the first requisite of success in stained glass. As the blending of tones cannot be carried to any great degree of accuracy or refinement, it is all the more essential that each piece of glass should be chosen with reference to its effect on every other. What is known as the orchestration of color, i. e. the massing of color harmonies, – attempted by very few painters on canvas, – is almost necessary in glass. In color, again, as in music, there are harmonies which cross and blend; others, of which the component notes are scattered apparently at random throughout the composition. In work like stained glass the absence of these implied harmonies is at once felt, for only by them can the colorist reach the expression of infinity. But it goes without saying that genius only is capable of supplying all this. Bontemps is right, therefore, when he says that the one thing needed for modern glass painting is a great artist. And yet it could great seem likely when the difficulties peculiar to the art are taken account of, that an artist, great or small, could be found to take it up. It is, as has already been shown, an art in which but painter's skill is as nearly as possible useless; in which nothing is to be gained with facility
but brilliancy, and that is more likely to be attributed to the material than to the artist.
It is Impossible to overrate the difficulties involved. The distant appearance of a work may be wholly different from what one would expect from a near view. Everybody has noticed the effect of a bright light coming from behind a dark object, in apparently eating it away or
