very broken and fragmentary chapter, full of
little everyday matters, very different to the high themes we have just
been trying to discuss--and relating chiefly to your conduct of the
thing as a business, and your relationships with the interests that
surround you; modes of procedure, business hints, practical matters. I
am sorry, just as you were beginning (I hope) to be warmed to the
subject, and fired with the high ambitions that it suggests, to take and
toss you into the cold world of matter-of-fact things; but that is life,
and we have to face it. Open the door into the cold air and let us bang
at it straight away!

Now there is one great and plain question that contains all the rest;
you do not see it now, but you will find it facing you before you have
gone very far. The great question, "Must I do it all myself, or may I
train pupils and assistants?"

Let us first amplify the question and get it fairly and fully stated.
Then we shall have a better chance of being able to answer it wisely.

I have described or implied elsewhere the usual practice in the matter
amongst those who produce stained-glass on a large scale. In great
establishments the work is divided up into branches: designers,
cartoonists, painters, cutters, lead workers, kiln-men: none of whom, as
a rule, know any branch of the work except their own.

Obviously one of the principal contentions of this book is against the
idea that such division, as practised, is an ideal method.

On the other hand, you will gather that the writer himself uses the
service of assistants.

While in the plates at the end are examples of glass where everything
has been done by the artists themselves (Plates I., II., III., IV.,
VII.).

I must freely confess that when I first saw in the work of these men the
beauty resulting from the personal touch of the artist on the whole of
the cutting and leading, a qualm of doubt arose whether the practice of
admitting _any_ other hand to my assistance was not a compromise to some
extent with absolute ideal; whether it were not the only right plan,
after all, to do the whole oneself; to sit down to the bench with one's
drawing, and pick out the glass, piece by piece, on its merits,
carefully considering each bit as it passed through hand; cutting it and
trimming it affectionately to preserve its beauties, and, later, leading
it into its place with thicker or thinner lead, in the same careful
spirit. But I do not think so. I f