MR. GLADSTONE ON ENGLISH CHINA.
rE present which the Liberal working-men of Derby have made to Mr. Gladstone is in every way appropriate. The particular form which the gift took was calculated to give Mr. Gladstone special pleasure. " I have," he told the deputation, " for very many years had a great love for porcelain." Some of the scanty leisure of a public man with an extraordinary capacity for work, and with a corresponding amount of work thrown upon him, has often been given to the great King Street auction rooms. Amidst all the excitement and all the labour of politics, he has found a moment's relaxation in the texture of Wedgwood pottery or the colour of Oriental china. The choice of porcelain thus showed that acquaintance with and appreciation of his tastes which make a gift additionally attractive. And, even amongst the various kinds of china and the various types of decoration which might have been chosen, this particular service stands out distinctly. It has strong local interests of its own. It has been made in the town by whose workmen it is presented, and at works which represent and continue one of the most famous English factories. Every one who knows anything of the history of English porcelain has heard of " Crown Derby," and knows the combination of gold and dark blue which has always been its characteristic mark; and it is at the " Derby Crown Porcelain Works " that this service has been made. The link with the past is not merely one of name and style. The flowers which make part of the ornamentation are painted by. a man who worked in the old Derby factory, and who now at eighty-two still lives, to unite the reviving industry with the earlier triumphs of the same art Further, the landscapes which form the centre of each piece are described as forming in themselves a gallery of Derbyshire scenes. Thus the association of the service, alike with those who give and with him to whom it is given, is complete.
Mr. Gladstone gives the manufacture of porcelain its true place, when he says that it is more than a branch of industry,—more even than a branch of skilled industry. There must be some cause to account for the estimation in which it is held in every nation. Its uses are so obvious and so many, that it is no wonder that it has always been valued for the service it renders. But in every instance, it has been valued for something more than its service. It has been valued not merely for its use, but for its beauty ; not merely for what it does, but for what it is. Now, this just marks the dividing-line between industry and Art. The making of china is a branch of industry, but it is also a branch of Art. Everything about it combines to give it this distinction. There is the beauty of the material ; there is the plastic quality which enables it to be thrown into so many different forms; there is the eminent suitableness of its surface for decoration. Consequently, porcelain has some of the merits of a precious stone, together with some which belong to sculpture and some which belong to painting; and all these in a material which lends itself in a thousand different ways to the supply of human wants. Do what we will, we must eat off china and drink out of china, and see china of one kind or another around us where- ever we turn. And in each one of these capacities it may do its work so as to please the eye or to offend it, and it is its power of doing one or the other that makes it a work of art,—of good art, if the workman uses his opportunities well; of bad art, if he uses them ill. There are other pursuits in which art is applied to industry, and in their degree the results are always works of art. But in porcelain it is applied more directly, and with a certain predominance of the artistic element which makes it unlike all other industries which hold a similar place in the debateable land which separates the neighbours from each other.
Yet something is still wanting to invest the making of por- celain with the dignity which properly belongs to it. Mere
utility is constantly treading on the heels of beauty, and what is intended to be beautiful constantly falls short of what it was meant to be, by reason of some fault in the taste of the producer. Much as English porcelain has improved during the last ten years, there is still a lamentable vagueness in the mind of the buyer as to what it is that he ought to look for in the thing he buys. In too many instances he has not risen above the bondage of "new patterns." Though he is going to buy what, if he is fairly fortunate, will last his lifetime and that of his children, he is careful to ask whether a pattern is this year's or last year's. He assumes that what was made yesterday must be essentially better than what was made a twelvemonth ago. Nor is he any more free from that other slavery of liking to see porcelain made to do the very things which it is least fitted to do. In his eyes, the highest triumph of the potter's art is to imitate some material with which it has nothing in common, or to exhibit an incongruous decoration. It does not do to trust wholly to the producer to find a cure for this state of things. Competition is so fierce in modern trade, that what one man does all his rivals must do the next moment. The very shop-windows which a little time back rejected every staff that was not dyed with the faintest and most subdued colours now exhibit, aide by side with the hues to which they owe their success, the coarse blues and reds which a wayward taste has decreed shall this year displace all that has been thought beautiful, because fashionable for some years past. If the taste of the buyer goes wrong, the taste of the manufacturer will go wrong too. The public need educating as well as the work- man. Yet though it is the public that needs educating, it is the workman that must play the teacher. The trained judgment of experts has an important part to play in raising the taste of those who are not experts. Though the function of academies may easily be overrated, they still have their func- tion. In painting, for example, it can hardly be doubted that individual buyers would go more wrong than they do, if there were no conclave sitting at Burlington House to decide what pictures are worthy of exhibition and what are not. The exhibitions always going on in London at least weed out a great deal of rubbish. More than this, they show to one artist what other artists are capable of ; and though this very often generates nothing but imitation, it sometimes puts a man on his mettle, and makes him try to do the best that he himself can conceive, not merely to copy the best that another has conceived. The general level of painting is raised, and from time to time individuals are stimulated to show that they, too, can rise above the general level. We should like to see an exhibition of pottery every year in London, not merely a collec- tion of anything that a potter chooses to send, but one in which the things shown have been carefully picked out by a com- mittee of really qualified judges, partly professionals and partly amateurs,—Mr. Gladstone himself, for example, being one of them, if he could possibly find the time. To have been admitted to the annual exhibition would then mark out a piece of china as being, at all events, up to a certain mark ; and as pottery is, more than most others, an imitative art, the improve- ment thus effected would slowly, but surely, filter down to many an article which the maker had never dreamed of exhibiting.
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