THE POTTERY OF THE ANCIENTS.*
ALTHOUGH English archaeologists were amongst the first to draw attention to the subject, and the Trustees of the British Museum have made it their business for more than a hundred years to gather together the most completely representative collection of Greek pottery which it was possible to form, the general appreciation of this branch of art has perhaps never been very widespread in this country. Even nowadays people who would be ashamed if they could not recognise at a glance the principal, or indeed the minor, masterpieces of ancient sculpture, and who have at least a bowing acquaintance with the principal results of the excavations at Olympia, Delphi, and Knossos, speak of the familiar black and red vases as Etruscan urns, and pass them by with calm incuriousness. It must be confessed that the school of criticism which maintains, with the author of the present volumes, that "the artistic and mythological interest of the vases is soon exhausted" has done something to drive all but strictly archaeological students from the vase rooms of our museums. As a fact, this interest is the only one for which the ancient and the modern owners of the vases are united in admiring them, or by which we can feel quite sure that they will compel the atten- tion of posterity. Yet there was a time when, whatever the archaeological errors they entertained, English cognoscenti and collectors were fully alive to the intrinsic beauty and decorative value of such vases, mostly late in date and somewhat rococo in style, as had then been disinterred. The dilettanti of the eighteenth century may, as Mr. Walters says, have looked upon the vase paintings merely as "pretty pictures," but they certainly perceived their beauty as a living and imitable quality, as the pottery and silver work with which they surrounded themselves survive to witness. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm only amounted to a temporary fashion. Attempts have, however, been made in recent years, as by Miss Harrison and Mr. MacColl's hand- some volume of plates, to spread the knowledge of vase- paintings amongst those incapable of appreciating more than their artistic merit, and in France an enterprising publisher has even ventured to include a monograph on Buns and other great Greek vase painters in a series of popular hand- books. In England such a popular book is wanted, and it would perhaps have been better if the present work, with its many admirable illustrations, had aimed no higher. It is, instead, strictly archaeological in intention, to a greater extent, indeed, than the volume by Samuel Birch upon which, as the title-page somewhat misleadingly asserts, it is supposed to be based.
Birch's book, it will be remembered, dealt with the whole of the subject as understood in his day ; but the author's ideas of the possible extension of the materials have proved strangely ill-founded. "In Archaeology," he wrote in the preface to the last edition of his book (1873), "the accumu- lating number of facts brought to light by excavations do not, on the whole, seriously alter the views already entertained, for there are many repetitions and not great varieties in the general character of the monuments of ancient art. This law particularly applies to pottery." Birch's book shows, however, that if he explored, or was able to explore, inadequately certain provinces of his subject, he at least saw that subject as a whole according to the light of his time. Mr. Walters admits that the sixteen years following the publication of these remarks of Dr. Birch "doubled, or even trebled, the material available for a study of this subject," and have even "revolutionized that study " ; and that during the succeeding sixteen years "the advance in the study of pottery, especially that of the primitive periods, has been astounding."
Possibly the most astounding advance has been due to discoveries bridging over, in Egypt at least, the gulf between prehistoric and historic times, and, by revealing the distri- bution over widely separated distances in the basin of the Mediterranean of certain identical types of pottery, indicating an intercourse amongst the nations of remote antiquity far more extensive than could ever have been expected. It might, therefore, be supposed that the framework of an account of ancient pottery based upon the lines of Birch's * History of Ancient Pottery, Greek, Etruscan, and-Boman. By H. B. Walters, F.S.A. Based on the Work of Samuel Birch. S vole. London; John Murray. [We. net.] history would need at once extending and knitting together. In the present work, however, the subject has simply been curtailed by the removal of the sections relating to Egypt and Babylonia, and to what was called by Birch Celtic, Teutonic, and Scandinavian pottery. The convenient hypo- thesis is adopted that resemblance amounting practically to identity between certain types of pottery made by peoples "separated by enormous distances of time and space" are negligible, because there is, in some places we may already say was, believed to have been no possibility of contact between the makers. In these circumstances, the remains of Neolithic pottery found in Crete and the Cyclades are briefly dismissed; and, if the early vases of Cyprus receive slightly more consideration, it is with the express caution that it cannot be said that there is any connection between them and similar pottery amongst the remains of the predynastic and protodynastic periods in Egypt, here referred to under the long-discarded name of New Race Tombs, and attributed to the time of the Seventh to Tenth Dynasties.
The book is not, in fact, a history of ancient pottery at all, but an account, complete enough within somewhat arbitrary limits, of Aegean, Hellenic, Etruscan, and Roman pottery. Mr. Walters has, unluckily, often to lament the growth of his material as the book proceeded; but he has tried to keep his earlier chapters abreast of the latest discoveries in Crete and elsewhere, and his later ones of the excavations at St. Remy and Graufesenque. If the result is somewhat dgcousu, and occasional inconsistencies are apparent, that is no more than must be expected. The account of the central period of Hellenic pottery includes notices of the principal painters, their works, the inscriptions which they placed upon them, and the myths and other subjects which they treated, com- piled with method and minuteness. The section dealing with Greek vases manufactured in Italy is the most neatly con- structed and agreeably written part of the book ; it was evidently done con amore, and revives an interest in a long- neglected field of ancient art.
The defects in these volumes arise principally from the narrow outlook with which they are written. Perhaps it is as well that the illustrations should be drawn for the most part, as they have been with generous profusion, from the British National Collection, but an analogous restriction in the text is a mistake. It need scarcely be said that the book evinces an extensive and thorough acquaintance with all the principal published sources of the subject; but a broader interest in foreign collections would surely have dispelled some unfortunate heresies about the early fabrics already alluded to, as well as that of dating Mycenaean remains in Cyprus in the eighth century B.C., and have prevented the uncritical adoption of many hypotheses, such as "double moulding," the use of the feather brush, and others, as proven facts. Upon the whole, it is perhaps surprising that the attempt to condense so vast an accumula- tion of material into the form of a handbook has been so nearly crowned with success ; especially as it has been made at a moment when the questions of the early history of the art are yet in solution and cannot be summarised without danger.
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