The potter sat in his little pit, working the wheel with his foot—as Carlyle says, "one of the venerablest objects, old as the Prophet Ezekiel and far older. Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes."
The potter thumped his wet clay; then, as the wheel turned, pressed and moulded it with clever clay-encrusted hands: the sleeves were turned back from his bony chocolate-coloured arms. He had a grey goatee and a quiet smile, a dirty turban round his head, a white tunic mostly clay, and underneath a claret-coloured garment showed at the neck.
He was a spare, wizened old man: perhaps his work, like Dante's, had made him "lean for many years." The faster his wheel revolved, the truer apparently was the shape of the vessel he turned out. His country might accept the lesson—that labour, like the wheel, conduces towards a good end. I fancy that a decadent people, who will neither work nor spin, but choose to rest and lie at ease, give the potter Destiny no chance. He has no wheel, this potter—for Morocco will not labour, nor be broken, nor disciplined; and so he is reduced to a mere kneading and baking, without the means he fain would employ; and he turns out a mere makeshift—his production at best is "not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch—a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour."
Selling Earthenware Pots.
The great pot which the potter slowly evolved out of the soft brown clay under our eyes was not perfect: he made it entirely by eye, and it matched the rest of the group to the ordinary observer; yet it had a distinct "lean." Did it grumble to itself, that
vessel of the more ungainly make?
as human vessels complain sometimes:—
They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?