Arts and Crafts
The Creative Craftsman. By John Farleigh. (Bell. 2 S.) THIS book has many admirable qualities Mr. Farleigh has given us an illustrated chart of craftsmanship from the dawn of history up to 1800 (though with the strange omission of English mediaeval embroideries), a series of conversations between himself and various craftsmen, some notes on apprenticeship and training, and some very pleasant illustrations of which there could, with advantage, have been many more. He has also designed the jacket and supervised the production of the book in a manner worthy of his theme. The failures of the book lie not in Mr. Farleigh's approach to his subject but in the wider failure of the craftsman in England today.
All the people Mr. Farleigh has chosen to interview are indepen- dent and consciously creative craftsmen—Bernard Leach, Leslie Durbin, Sydney Cockerel! and so on. There is no reason' why such a description should not apply to the blicksmith, the barge-painter or even the dress-designer, but this is not how Mr. Farleigh has chosen to apply it. He has selected educated articulate men and women who with lucid force and sincerity explain their attitudes and aims. And when they have finished, the impression with which his selection has left us is of a devoted body of people working in almost total isolation from the main stream of society. It has been argued that even in a mechanised society the creative craftsman of this kind has his place, because from his original work will stem the design-inspiration for the machine. But when one looks at the work of Mr. Farleigh's craftsmen, it is clear that it in no way corresponds with the tastes of the people the machine is there to serve. Their taste is for the elaborate, the sophisticated, the obviously costly, the palpably contemporary ; the craftsmen's taste is for the simple, the traditional and, in general, it would not be unfair to say, the peasant. It is notable that the lists of works completed by these craftsmen show the bulk of it to be in the nature of ecclesias- tical or memorial work—work, that is to say, emotionally rooted in the past and deliberately removed from the tastes and standards of everyday life. Even Guido Morris, the job-printer, discloses it as his ambition to print in Hebrew so that comprehension may not impede appreciation of form.
Those of us who wish to see craftsmanship making an infinitely wider contribution to contemporary taste must find this book sadly discouraging. In so far, for instance, as taste is inspired by past fashion, we look today to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while these craftsmen, like their master William Morris, are still and almost exclusively inspired by the mediaeval. It may be that everyone's out of step but our Geordie, but few of them could produce anything elegant for our urban drawing-room though their products wotild settle admirably in our country cottage —if we could afford them. But we have no idea whether we can afford them or not, for, in introducing his craftsmen to the public, Mr. Farleigh never indicates whether we, even if infinitely wishful to bespeak, could possibly meet them over the matter of price. This book is, to sum up, a most interesting account of esoteric activity ; the pity is that it cannot tell of a creative impulse permeating society, in tune with, yet stimulating, our common taste.
MARGHANITA LASKI.
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