LETTERS ON PAINTED GLASS 445

result. I don’t think that between us we shall do anything very bad, though I might have fallen into sad mistakes alone. By all means select from the Bourges windows for the Paradise subject; mine has no expression in it at all. Only I should still like a little red if you can get it in; not but that I have precisely the same feeling which you have respecting it, as a [word indecipherable] and fiery colour, expressive of anger and power; but that without it I think the Purgatory on the other side will look entirely detached and isolated, inharmonious, drawing all eyes to it, and throwing the whole window off its balance; while the subjects must in both cases be so very small that I hardly calculate on either the Purgatory or Paradise being intelligible as such, and therefore I think it more important that the window should be symmetrical and complete in general effect than that the Paradise should be expressive on close examination. In fact, not one of the Chartres subjects in the upper parts of the windows is intelligible without a ladder; they are one mass of confusion, and it was from observing this that I ventured to send the new Paradise, thinking that if the play of colour were good, it did not matter whether it were calculated to please the few people who would take telescopes or ladder to it. But I should be exceedingly obliged to you if you would get some more expressive figures from Bourges, retaining only a little red somewhere, which appears to me farther valuable because it will give, by opposition to the Resurrection subject, a pallid and fearful tone to this latter, which will be effective, especially as it is the nearest the eye.

All the other designs I am sure you will arrange a great deal better than I can here, as I have no books to assist me or give tone to the eye. In fact, I do not care how much you alter, now that I have seen your design for the chief light; this latter I return in case you should want it. If you should be inclined to favour me with another letter, my address for a fortnight is Poste Restante, Geneva.

ST. MARTINS, 5th July.-You see I pay you back, for being so long in sending me any news, in your own coin. I have been very busy, and wanted to think over the subject a little more than I could when I wrote the above, half asleep. However, I still hold to the opinion that we ought to have a little red in Paradise somehow, though how to introduce anything so inappropriate I don’t know. The worst of it is that red is the colour of sin-“red like crimson.”¹

Ward is preposterously slow in execution. I wish we had happened to fall into other hands; but perhaps if we had had a better man to deal with, we might have been more modest and less determined to have our own way, in which case let us hope that the window would have been worse off in the end. It don’t matter to us now how long he takes, it is neither our fault nor our affair.

I like all your alterations in the Albert Dürer; especially the reversing of the sword; but you need not have altered the clouds unless their form was per se disagreeable, as the white throne is given to Christ in Judgment, Rev. xx. 11, and I intended the clouds to assume the form of it. The round

¹ [Isaiah i. 18.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]