Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
American millionaires model the gates of their parks and the grille
doors of their palaces under the wise direction of modern architects
who fortunately know enough to follow the designs created by these
village workmen of the olden time. Modern palatial residences are glad
to have samples of the wood-carving of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries as models for their decoration, and as attractive pieces
around which present-day work may be done. We have to import our
workmen, even our large cities cannot supply all that we want of them,
and yet little towns of a few thousand inhabitants had them in
sufficient abundance in the olden time to enable them to make every
portion of their great monumental buildings, cathedrals, abbeys,
universities, castles and town halls beautiful in every way. This
represents the triumph of a technical training afforded by the gilds
of workmen of the olden time. We have to insist on this because our
present generation has been so sure that ours was the first generation
that gave any serious attention to the education of the masses, that
it is important to show by {163} contrast how much of a mistake we
have made and how well an older generation accomplished its purpose.
The chapter of the "Lost Arts" might well be told with regard to this
old time. They had secrets in glass-making which were the tradition of
the teaching of particular gilds that we have been unable to find
again in the modern time. There is a jewel-like lustre to their colors
that is sometimes simply marvellous in its depth and purity. At
Lincoln the contrast between old and new glass can be seen very well.
The old windows of the thirteenth century time were stoned out by the
Parliamentarians when they captured the town, because forsooth they
could have no such idolatry as that in their presence. The old sexton,
who as man and boy for over sixty years had lived his life under the
beautiful tints of the old glass, now saw it scattered upon the floor
in fragments. He could not part with it thus and so he gathered it up
into bags, broken to pieces though it was, and hid it away in the
crypt. In the nineteenth century when they were restoring the
cathedral they found these fragments of the old windows. They pieced
them together and they proved to be so beautiful that, though they
could not fit them as they were in the olden time, at least they
succeeded in making a beautiful patchwork of colored glass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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