by clear, glittering light. Strips of brown paper, pinned down
the sides of the light you are painting, will get the thing quite near
to its future conditions.

As you have been told, the work is fixed in its place by bars of iron,
and these ought by no means to be despised or ignored or disguised, as
if they were a troublesome necessity: you must accept fully and
willingly the conditions of your craft; you must pride yourself upon so
accepting them, knowing that they are the wholesome checks upon your
liberty and the proper boundaries of the field in which you have your
appointed work. There should, in any light more than a foot wide, be
bars at every foot throughout the length of the light; and these bars
should be 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch, or 1 inch in section, according to the
weight of the work. The question then arises: Should the bars be set out
in their places on the paper, before you begin to draw the cartoon, or
should you be perfectly free and unfettered in the drawing and then
_make_ the bars fit in afterwards, by moving them up and down as may be
needed to avoid cutting across the faces, hands, &c.

I find more difficulty in answering this than any other _technical_
question in this book. I do not think it can be answered with a hard and
fast "Yes" or "No." It depends on the circumstances of the case. But I
incline towards the side of making it the rule to put the bars in first,
and adapt the composition to them. You may think this a surprising view
for an artist to take. "Surely," you will say, "that is putting the cart
before the horse, and making the more important thing give way to the
less!" But my feeling is that reasonable limitations of any kind ought
never to be considered as hindrances in a work of art. They are part of
the problem, and it is only a spirit of dangerous license which will
consider them as bonds, or will find them irksome, or wish to break them
through. Stained-glass is not an independent art. It is an accessory to
architecture, and any limitations imposed by structure and architectural
propriety or necessity are most gravely to be considered and not lightly
laid on one side. And in this connection it must be remembered that the
bars cannot be made to go _anywhere_ to fit a freely designed
composition: they must be approximately at certain distances on account
of use; and they must be arranged with regard to each other in the whole
of the window on account of appearance.

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