In all France there exist barely a dozen good specimens of twelfth-century glass.  Besides these windows at Chartres and the fragments at Saint-Denis, there are windows at Le Mans and Angers and bits at Vendome, Chalons, Poitiers, Rheims, and Bourges; here and there one happens on other pieces, but the earliest is the best, because the glass-makers were new at the work and spent on it an infinite amount of trouble and money which they found to be unnecessary as they gained experience.  Even in 1200 the value of these windows was so well understood, relatively to new ones, that they were preserved with the greatest care.  The effort to make such windows was never repeated.  Their jewelled perfection did not suit the scale of the vast churches of the thirteenth century.  By turning your head toward the windows of the side aisles, you can see the criticism which the later artists passed on the old work.  They found it too refined, too brilliant, too jewel-like for the size of the new cathedral; the play of light and colour allowed the eye too little repose; indeed, the eye could not see their whole beauty, and half their value was thrown away in this huge stone setting.  At best they must have seemed astray on the bleak, cold, windy plain of Beauce,—­homesick for Palestine or Cairo,—­yearning for Monreale or Venice,—­but this is not our affair, and, under the protection of the Empress Virgin, Saint Bernard himself could have afforded to sin even to drunkenness of colour.  With trifling expense of imagination one can still catch a glimpse of the crusades in the glory of the glass.  The longer one looks into it, the more overpowering it becomes, until one begins almost to feel an echo of what our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors, drunk with the passion of youth and the splendour of the Virgin, have been calling to us from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.  No words and no wine could revive their emotions so vividly as they glow in the purity of the colours; the limpidity of the blues; the depth of the red; the intensity of the green; the complicated harmonies; the sparkle and splendour of the light; and the quiet and certain strength of the mass.

With too strong direct sun the windows are said to suffer, and become a cluster of jewels—­a delirium of coloured light.  The lines, too, have different degrees of merit.  These criticisms seldom strike a chance traveller, but he invariably makes the discovery that the designs within the medallions are childish.  He may easily correct them, if he likes, and see what would happen to the window; but although this is the alphabet of art, and we are past spelling words of one syllable, the criticism teaches at least one lesson.  Primitive man seems to have had a natural colour-sense, instinctive like the scent of a dog.  Society has no right to feel it as a moral reproach to be told that it has reached an age when it can no longer depend, as in childhood, on its taste, or smell, or sight, or hearing, or memory;