A stained glass window is itself the best possible illustration of the difference it makes whether we look at a thing from this side or from that. Goethe used this particular image in one of his little parables, comparing poems to painted windows, dark and dull from the market-place, bright with colour and alive with meaning only when we have crossed the threshold of the church.

I may claim to have entered the sanctuary, and not irreverently. My earliest training in design was in the workshops of artists in stained glass. For many years I worked exclusively at glass design, and for over a quarter of a century I have spent great part of my leisure in hunting glass all Europe over.

This book has grown out of my experience. It makes no claim to learnedness. It tells only what the windows have told me, or what I understood them to say. I have gone to glass to get pleasure out of it, to learn something from it, to find out the way it was done, and why it was done so, and what might yet perhaps be done. Anything apart from that did not so much interest me. Those, therefore, who desire minuter and more precise historic information must consult the works of Winston, Mr. Westlake, and the many continental authorities, with whose learned writings this more practical, and, in a sense, popular, volume does not enter into any sort of competition.

My point of view is that of art and workmanship, or, more precisely speaking, workmanship and art, workmanship being naturally the beginning and root of art. We are workmen first and artists afterwards—perhaps.

What I have tried to do is this: In the first place (Book I.), I set out to trace the course of workmanship, to follow the technique of the workman from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, from mosaic to painting, from archaism to pictorial accomplishment; and to indicate at what cost of perhaps more decorative qualities the later masterpieces of glass painting were bought.

In the second place (Book II.), I have endeavoured to show the course of design in glass, from the earliest MediÆval window to the latest glass picture of the Renaissance.

Finally (Book III.), I have set apart for separate discussion questions not in the direct line either of design or workmanship, or which, if taken by the way, would have hindered the narrative and confused the issue.

The rather lengthy chapter on “Style” is addressed to that large number of persons who, knowing as yet nothing about the subject, may want data by which to form some idea as to the period of a window when they see it: the postscript more nearly concerns the designer and the worker in glass.

In all this I have tried to put personality as much as possible aside, and to tell my story faithfully and without conscious bias. But I make no claim to impartiality, as the judge upon the bench understands it. We take up art or law according to our temperament. I can pretend to judge only as one interested, to be impartial only as an artist may.

LEWIS F. DAY.

13, Mecklenburgh Square, London.
January 29th, 1897.