LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. By Jennie J. Young. New York: Harper & Brothers.
"More crockery!" exclaims one aweary of the ceramic craze. "And the biggest book of all!—the winding-up shower, let us hope," quoth another non-sympathizer.
This portly octavo, with its four hundred and sixty-four wood-cuts, a seemingly exhaustive compend of the subject, may indeed be accepted as the peroratory rain destined to give the soil its last preparation for the rich growth to follow under a clear and sunny sky. What pen and print can do to perfect the requisite conditions for a Periclean age of pottery must by this time have been done. The case is summed up and stated. The issue rests with the jury of millions who use and admire burnt clay. Their wants, their sense of beauty and their purse will render the verdict. We might more safely and properly say that they will render a number of verdicts, all in their way and sphere just and true, since in no one of the arts so much as in this of all times and all nations is it so difficult to subject the infinitude of styles and fancies to one rigid canon. That the Greek vase is an absolute exemplar in grace and elegance of form every one hastens to concede. But who would hesitate to give up a part of what the Greeks have bequeathed us rather than lose the marvellous filigree in clay of "Henri Deux," the rich realism of Palissy or the wild and delightful riot of line and color and unequalled delicacy of manipulation presented to us by the Japanese? One and the same eye, as highly and soundly educated as you please, may be charmed almost equally by works of each of these schools and of others not here named; and that almost without wishing to see the peculiar merits of each combined and merged in one. A perfect eclectic vase is not to be expected, if desired, any more than a fruit or a wine which shall unite the best flavors of all orchards or all vintages. What can be done is to strive in that direction, as the French cook seeks, by "composing," to attain in one supreme plat the ne plus ultra of sapidity. We shall not be able, any more than he, to reach that climax or to dull the charm of variety. The fusing of the Greek brain and the Oriental eye and finger in the alembic of Western Europe and the New World will still continue to be attempted.
Trade, the great amalgamator, is promoting this end. Chinese porcelain has long been sent to Japan for decoration, the resemblance between the styles of the two countries, due primarily to race, being thus increased. American biscuit is sent to England for the like purpose; and we read with more surprise that the unfinished ware of Dresden seeks ornamentation in the same country, whence it is returned to be placed upon the market as true Meissen. A firm of New Yorkers, again, have migrated to France and built up the beautiful fabric of Limoges with the aid of French artists. The craftsmen of Japan and China are year by year borrowing Western forms and methods, as comparison of the ancient and modern work of those nations will show clearly enough.
While national idiosyncrasies the most opposite and the most widely separated in every sense ally themselves in behalf of progress, individual effort is encouraged by the reflection that no walk of art offers a more open field to original genius. Della Robbia, Bernart, Palissy and Wedgwood each found his own material and created his own school. Neither of them possessed the facilities, educational or mechanical, now at the command of hundreds. Neither had as wide or as eager a market for his productions as the coming artist in clay may command. Surely, such an artist is at this moment maturing his powers in some one of the scores of training institutions which have sprung up, under public or private auspices, within the past quarter of a century. Thorwaldsen was not a man of great originative genius, and nothing at all of a potter, troubling himself little about hard or soft paste or this or the other glaze; but he infused the love of classic form into the bleakest corners of Scandinavia, and made her youth modellers of terra-cotta into shapes unexcelled by any imitators of the antique. The prize awaits him who should, upon such knowledge and discipline, graft a study of Oriental designs, an eye for color, an independent fancy, and such minute precision of manual dexterity as seems the hardest thing of all for the Western to acquire. He will not have, like his great forerunners, to invent his material. Science does not repress, it invites and assists him. It offers him mineral colors and modes of graduating heat unknown to them. All the secrets of porcelain are open to him; and were they not, Europe did all her best things in ceramics before she was able to make a porcelain teacup. He may find room for improvement in material too. Pottery is the most durable of fabrics so long as it is not broken. But it is fragile, as bronze is not. Why may not that defect be remedied, as other defects have been by the Japanese and our bank-note printers in that particularly evanescent texture, paper? Some day, perhaps, burnt clay will be held together by threads of asbestos as greenbacks are by threads of silk and the sun-burned Egyptian bricks were by straw. Malleable glass we have already. Why not malleable faïence?
The book before us presents the art, its history, its processes and its results in a manner every way satisfactory. Its account is full without being prolix. The author's taste is catholic enough. The different styles are placed before the reader side by side, with an evident purpose to do justice to all of them. There is little of the jargon of the connoisseur. Marks are curtly dismissed with the sound dictum that "the art and not the mark should be studied." Much use is made of the engravings, which are more closely connected with the text than, unfortunately, is generally the case in illustrated works. They are strictly illustrations of it, and serve as good a purpose in that way as cuts without the aid of color could well do. Nothing is more difficult to reproduce than a first-class work in clay or porcelain. Color, drawing, form, surface and texture present a compound of difficulties not to be completely overcome by the resources of the graver, the camera and the printer in colors. Only on the shelves of the museum can it be studied understandingly. It must speak for itself. The chromo undertakes to duplicate, with more or less success, the painting in oil or fresco, but the vase is a picture and something more. It is the joint product of the painter and the sculptor, and the substance whereon they bestow their labor has a special and varying beauty of its own.
In the pages devoted to the history of American pottery we confess that we have been chiefly attracted by its antiquities. The specimens given of remains from all parts of the two continents show at a glance their common origin. They all come unmistakably from the hands of the same Indian, civilized or savage. The Moquis, the Mound-builders, the Aztecs and the Peruvians all wrought their mother, Earth, into the same fashion, and adorned her countenance, purified by fire, with scrolls and colors in the same taste. The pigments employed have proved as lasting as those in the Egyptian tombs, and the forms are often as graceful as in a majority of the Phoenician vessels found in Cyprus. In the representation of the human head the Peruvian artist, so far as we may judge from these relics, excelled his rival of Tyre and Sidon.
That this will become a handbook on the subject of which it treats cannot be doubted. If we might venture to suggest an amendment to the second edition, it would be the addition to the illustrations of two or three figures carefully executed in colors—Greek, Japanese and Sèvres.