APPENDIX, 12 457

opposite qualities, each naturally and easily attainable, of transparency in shadow and opacity in light, it complies with the conditions of nature; and by its perfect governableness it permits the utmost possible fulness and subtlety in the harmonies of colour, as well as the utmost perfection in the drawing. Glass, considered as a material for a picture, is exactly as bad as oil paint is good. It sets out by reversing the conditions of nature, by making the lights transparent and the shadows opaque; and the ungovernableness of its colour (changing in the furnace), and its violence (being always on a high key, because produced by actual light), render it so disadvantageous in every way, that the result of working in it for pictorial effect would infallibly be the destruction of all the appreciation of the noble qualities of pictorial colour.

In the second place, this modern barbarism destroys the true appreciation of the qualities of glass. It denies, and endeavours as far as possible to conceal, the transparency, which is not only its great virtue in a merely utilitarian point of view, but its great spiritual character; the character by which in church architecture it becomes most touchingly impressive, as typical of the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the heart of man; a typical expression rendered specific and intense by the purity and brilliancy of its sevenfold hues;* and therefore, in endeavouring to turn the window into a picture, we at once lose the sanctity and power of the noble material, and employ it to an end which it is utterly impossible it should every worthily attain. The true perfection of a painted window is to be serene, intense, brilliant, like flaming jewellery; full of easily legible and quaint subjects, and exquisitely subtle, yet simple, in its harmonies. In a word, this perfection has been consummated in the designs, never to be surpassed, if ever again to be approached by human art, of the French windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹

* I do not think that there is anything more necessary to the progress of European art in the present day than the complete understanding of this sanctity of Colour.² I had much pleasure in finding it, the other day, fully understood and thus sweetly expressed in a little volume of poems by a Miss Maynard:

“For still in every land, though to Thy name

Arose no temple,-still in every age,

Though heedless man had quite forgot Thy praise,

We praised thee; and at rise and set of sun

Did we assemble duly, and intone

A choral hymn that all the lands might hear.

In heaven, on earth, and on the deep we praised Thee,

Singly, or mingled in sweet sisterhood.

But now, acknowledged ministrants, we come,

Co-worshippers with man in this Thy house,

We, the Seven Daughters of the Light, to praise

Thee, Light of Light! Thee, God of very God!”

-A Dream of Fair Colours.³

These poems seem to be otherwise remarkable for a very unobtrusive and pure religious feeling in subjects connected with art.

¹ [See on the subject of painted glass, in Vol. XII., Ruskin’s letters to his friend, Edmund Oldfield, and note on p. 111 above.]

² [See note on p. 172 above.]

³ [One of the pieces (p. 68) in a volume of Poems by Mary Maynard, issued by Ruskin’s publishers, Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., in 1851.]

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