Therefore, let us plod on, laboriously proving God, although, even to Saint Bernard and Pascal, God was incapable of proof; and using such material as the books furnish for help.  It is not much.  The French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic glory.  One knows not even where to seek.  One must go to the National Library and beg as a special favour permission to look at the monumental work of M. Lasteyrie, if one wishes to make even a beginning of the study of French glass.  Fortunately there exists a fragment of a great work which the Government began, but never completed, upon Chartres; and another, quite indispensable, but not official, upon Bourges; while Viollet-le-Duc’s article “Vitrail” serves as guide to the whole.  Ottin’s book “Le Vitrail” is convenient.  Male’s volume “L’Art Religieux” is essential.  In English, Westlake’s “History of Design” is helpful.  Perhaps, after reading all that is readable, the best hope will be to provide the best glasses with the largest possible field; and, choosing an hour when the church is empty, take seat about halfway up the nave, facing toward the western entrance with a morning light, so that the glass of the western windows shall not stand in direct sun.

The glass of the three lancets is the oldest in the cathedral.  If the portal beneath it, with the sculpture, was built in the twenty or thirty years before 1150, the glass could not be much later.  It goes with the Abbe Suger’s glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely made as early as 1140-50, since the Abbe was a long time at work on it, before he died in 1152.  Their perfection proves, what his biographer asserted, that the Abbe Suger spent many years as well as much money on his windows at Saint-Denis, and the specialists affirm that the three lancets at Chartres are quite as good as what remains of Suger’s work.  Viollet-le-Duc and M. Paul Durand, the Government expert, are positive that this glass is the finest ever made, as far as record exists; and that the northern lancet representing the Tree of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever.  The windows claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are darkness beside them.

The claim may not be modest, but it is none of ours.  Viollet-le-Duc must answer for his own sins, and he chose the lancet window of the Tree of Jesse for the subject of his lecture on glass in general, as the most complete and perfect example of this greatest decorative art.  Once more, in following him, one is dragged, in spite of one’s self, into technique, and, what is worse, into a colour world whose technique was forgotten five hundred years ago.  Viollet-le-Duc tried to recover it.  “After studying our best French windows,” he cautiously suggests that “one might maintain,” as