ut-line--Setting the
Cartoon--Transferring the Cut-line to the Glass--Another Way--Some
Principles of Taste--Countercharging.

We have only as yet spoken of the processes of cutting and painting in
themselves, and as they can be practised on a single bit of glass; but
now we must consider them as applied to a subject in glass where many
pieces must be used. This is a different matter indeed, and brings in
all the questions of taste and judgment which make the difference
between a good window and an inferior one. Now, first, you must know
that every differently coloured piece must be cut out by itself, and
therefore must have a strip of lead round it to join it to the others.

Draw a cartoon of a figure, _bearing this well in mind_: you must draw
it in such a simple and severe way that you do not set impossible or
needlessly difficult tasks to the cutter. Look now, for example, at the
picture in Plate V. by Mr. Selwyn Image--how simple the cutting!

You think it, perhaps, too "severe"? You do not like to see the leads so
plainly. You would like better something more after the "Munich" school,
where the lead line is disguised or circumvented. If so, my lesson has
gone wrong; but we must try and get it right.

You would like it better because it is "more of a picture"; exactly, but
you ought to like the other better because it is "more of a window."
Yes, even if all else were equal, you ought to like it better, _because_
the lead lines cut it up. Keep your pictures for the walls and your
windows for the holes in them.

But all else is _not_ equal: and, supposing you now standing before a
window of the kind I speak of, I will tell you what has been sacrificed
to get this "picture-window" "like a picture." _Stained-glass_ has been
sacrificed; for this is _not_ stained-glass, it is painted glass--that
is to say, it is coloured glass ground up into powders and painted on to
white sheets of glass: a poor, miserable substitute for the glorious
colour of the deep amethyst and ruby-coloured glasses which it pretends
to ape. You will not be in much danger of using it when you have handled
your stained glass samples for a while and learned to love them. You will
love them so much that you will even get to like the severe lead line
which announces them for what they are.

But you must get to reasonably love it as a craft limitation, a
necessity, a thing which places bounds and limits to what you can do in
this art,