rs in one general problem. Here
also Ruskin has a pregnant word of advice--as indeed where has he
not?--"A great painter's business is to do what the public ask of him,
in the way that shall be helpful and instructive to them."[8] You cannot
always do what people ask, but you can do it more often than a
headstrong man would at first think.

I was once doing a series of small square panels, set at intervals in
the height of some large, tall windows, and containing Scripture
subjects, the intermediate spaces being filled with "grisaille" work.
The subjects, of course, had to be approximately on one scale, and
several of them became very tough problems on account of this
restriction. However, all managed to slip through somehow till we came
to "Jacob's Ladder," and there I stood firm, or perhaps I ought rather
to say _stuck fast_. "How is it possible," I said to my client, "that
you can have a picture of the 'Fall' in one panel with Eve's figure
taking up almost the whole height of it, and have a similar panel with
'Angels Ascending and Descending' up and down a ladder? There are only
two ways of doing it--to put the ladder far off in a landscape, which
would reduce it to insignificance, and besides be unsuitable in glass;
or to make the angels the size of dolls. Don't you see that it's
impossible?" No, he didn't see that it was impossible. What he wanted
was "Jacob's Ladder"; the possibility or otherwise was nothing to him.
He said (what you'll often hear said, reader, if you do stained-glass),
"I don't, of course, know anything about art, and I can't say how this
could be done; that is the artist's province."

It was in my younger days, and I'm afraid I must have replied to the
effect that it was not a question of art but of common reason, and that
the artist's province did not extend to making bricks without straw or
making two and two into five; and the work fell through. But had I the
same thing to deal with now I should waste no words on it, but run the
"ladder" right up out of the panel into the grisaille above; an
opportunity for one of those delightful naive _exceptions_ of which old
art is so full--like, for instance, the west door of St. Maclou at
Rouen, where the crowd of falling angels burst out of the tympanum, bang
through the lintel, defying architecture as they defied the first great
Architect, and continue their fall amongst the columns below. "Angels
Descending," by-the-bye, with a vengeance! And if the