THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS                129
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 monu-
mental 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 Abbé Suger's glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely made as early
as 1140-50, since the Abbé was a long time at work on it, before he
died in 1152. Their perfection proves, what his biographer asserted,
that the Abbé 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