BOOKS

Of Meissen men

Bevis Hillier

THE ARCANUM: THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF THE INVENTION OF EUROPEAN PORCELAIN by Janet Gleeson Bantam, £12.99, pp. 268 In the mid-1960s, George (now Lord) Weidenfeld asked the art historian Hugh Honour to edit a series of books with the running title `The social history of the decorative arts'. I don't know whether the original idea was Weidenfeld's or Honour's but it was a bright one. Instead of writing about who made particular objects, the contributors would concentrate on who bought and used them — in the case of pottery and porcelain, who ate off and drank from their wares and who had which ornaments on their mantelpiece.

I was invited to write the ceramics volume covering 1700-1914, and it was pub- lished 30 years ago. The first chapter was on the social status of the potter and began:

The Victorians spoke of the 'humble potter' as they spoke of the 'gentle reader' — to sug- gest social status rather than temperament. `Common as dirt' was a less cryptically snob- bish phrase; a craftsman who worked with clay could not expect much prestige.

Of course there were exceptions to that rule. The Dutchman John Philip Elers, who came to England in the wake of William of Orange and made a fine red stoneware, had as his godparents Queen Christina of Sweden and the Elector of Mainz. (One of Elers's descendants was the novelist Maria Edgeworth. Breaking the news to a cousin that they were both great-grandchildren of a potter, she wrote: 'Maybe, my dear Coz, your aristocratic blood may shudder at this discovery of which I am nevertheless proud.' But she couldn't resist also men- tioning a picture of the christening with the royal sponsors.) Johann Friedrich Bottger, a German born about 20 years after Elers, was anoth- er potter who bucked the social system. He was made a baron by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who owned the Meissen (Dresden) porcelain factory. I had quite a lot to say about BOttger in 1969; and now he is the central figure of Janet Gleeson's book. He was first employed by Augustus as an alchemist, and more than once was in danger of being executed for not keeping his promise to discover the (of course undiscoverable) secret of transmuting lead into gold. Though he failed in transmuting, he suc- ceeded in commuting his sentence into a lifetime of research into ceramic tech- niques. He began by making red stonewares very similar in material and design to those of Elers. But what Augus- tus — in common with all the princelings of Europe — really wanted was the secret of making a fine, white, translucent porce- lain like that imported from China — `white gold', as Gleeson calls it. Science had accepted that the earth revolved round the sun; now the potter would cause the sun to shine through the earth. Biittger expressed indignation at being transferred from alchemy to potting. He wrote a caus- tic verse above his laboratory door:

Gott, unser SchOpfer, Hat gemacht aus einem Goldmacher einen Topfer

Gleeson misses a trick by giving only the English translation of this (`God, our cre- ator, has turned a goldmaker into a potter') without treating us to the snappish rhyme of the original. Maybe Bottger's indigna- tion was genuine but his move was a bless- ing. Instead of chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of alchemical gold, he was now on the track of the porcelain arcanum. That precious secret he did deliver. The story of how he discovered it, and of what happened after- wards, is the grist of Gleeson's narrative.

Her book belongs to the genre of popu- lar history — as distinct from academic his- tory which trails its footnotes behind it like a leper's bell or a string of tin cans behind a newlyweds' car.

This genre is 'hot' at the moment. In the 1970s, following great biographies by George Painter and Michael Holroyd, biography took over from the novel as the most favoured literary form. An Age of Biography supervened. (With a rare tetchi- ness, Iris Murdoch demanded, 'What is it with all these biographers — are they just would-be novelists who can't think up a plot?' — and speaking just for myself, I think there is a rankling grain of truth in that.) Today, with such books as Stella Till- yard's Aristocrats, Dava Sobel's Longitude and John Keay's The Honourable Company, popular history has overtaken biography as the genre on which publishers rely to make them big bucks. On 1 February the Inde- pendent on Sunday carried the headline `Porcelain is the next "Longitude".' Under that heading Diana Gregory wrote:

The story of a self-styled alchemist's acciden- tal discovery of the formula for porcelain is tipped as a potential successor to the non- fiction literary sensation of the Nineties: Dava Sobel's Longitude.

Since the astounding success of that work, publishers have been scanning the horizon for a similar book to capture the reading public's imagination.

Faced with that, and recalling my earlier work on porcelain, I feel rather like a 1960s footballer enviously noting the transfer fees for Premier League stars today. Bantam have probably made a good bet in putting their chips on The Arcanum. If it is a run- away commercial success, it will be for two reasons. First, Gleeson has hit on a marvel- lous true story, which had previously been told — and only partially told at that mainly in German kunsthistorische books. And second, she is a born storyteller, in the same way as Jeffrey Archer (I say this with unironic admiration) is a born storyteller.

On art and antiques she knows her stuff. Formerly at Sotheby's and Bonham's, she was art and antiques editor on House and Garden for seven years, has written for Apollo and The Antique Collector, and in 1991 joined Reed Books, where she wrote Miller's Antiques and Collectables. But, again like Jeffrey Archer, she is not a dis- tinguished writer; and that is what you need to be to write good popular history.

Popular history is actually harder to get right than academic history. The university scholar needs only to marshal his facts, put them in a neat order and underpin them with those pesky footnotes. The pop histo- rian still has a duty to be accurate, but also has to make the mixture palatable to the layman, 'Atmosphere' must be conveyed without descending into Georgette Hey- erism. Macaulay qualifies. So does Lytton Strachey, though G. M. Young compared him to the sage quem discipuli trucidaverunt stylis suis (whom his disciples have mur- dered with their pens). Probably Young had particularly in mind Strachey's simian imitator, the relentless, facetious Philip Guedalla. A. J. P. Taylor is another candi- date, though he has to answer at the bar of history Lord David Cecil's accusation that `he was always prepared to sacrifice the truth for a paradox'. For me, the finest popular historians of modern times have been G. M. Young himself (his books on Victorian England) and Cecil Woodham- Smith (her books The Reason Why and The Great Hunger on, respectively, the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Irish potato famine). To these should be added Eliza- beth Longford, who uses such a wide-angle lens that her books on Wellington and Queen Victoria transcend biography.

In view of the glittering rewards that the Independent on Sunday dangles before Janet Gleeson and her publishers, I have no compunction in judging her by the Olympian standards set by these examplars. And judged by those standards she falls down. The Arcanum: she has chosen a decorous enough title for her book. (More dashing would have been The Crossed Swords — the famous mark used by the Meissen factory.) However, you need go no further than the book's subtitle to pick up a note of hyperbole — 'The Extraordinary True Story of the Invention of European Porcelain'. To warn us that the story is going to be extraordinary is like tipping us off that a joke is going to be funny: that is for us to decide. As for 'True' — well, Sir James Barrie tells us in The Admirable Crichton that anybody who begins a sen- tence, 'To be quite honest with you . . . ', is about to tell a big fib. I'm not suggesting that Janet Gleeson is, only that there is no call for her to protest so much. Given that Meissen porcelain is the quintessence of the baroque, an overreaching style, Glee- son's taste for melodrama and overdoing things is not always out of place. You have to hand it to her that she knows how to write a gripping opening. Chapter One begins:

Escape was the only alternative. He had failed to fulfil his promise to the king and his life now hung in the balance. On 21 June 1703, a dark-haired 21-year-old prisoner gave the slip to his unsuspecting guards, stole from the confines of his castle prison and found his way to the meeting place, where his accomplice waited with a horse ready har- nessed for a journey to freedom.

With a hastily murmured farewell and scarcely a backward glance, the fugitive mounted his horse and fled speedily through Dresden's narrow mediaeval streets.

A bit hammy, perhaps, but it makes you want to read on. Too often, however, in the pages that follow, you feel that Gleeson is straining after a 'beautiful style'. For exam- ple:

Like silvered Saxon swords raised against dark-liveried Prussian troops, the fireworks that carved open the night sky proclaimed a royal marriage to the citizens of Dresden.

That is Janet Gleeson at her worst; but in general her prose is adequate; and though some of her scene-setting is Heyeresque, it also, at times, suggests a writer of much greater accomplishment:

The gentlemen of the court were dressed in velvet and brocade trimmed with gold and silver embroidery and gem-studded buttons. The ladies' costumes echoed French fash- ions, with tight-fitting jewelled bodices and plunging décolletage edged in gold and silver lace and strewn with silken flowers and rib- bons. Copious brocaded skirts overflowed the chairs on which they sat, falling in billowing swags to the floor, and long trains, decorous-

Do you remember when people led lives of quiet desperation?'

ly arranged by their footmen, formed ele- gant cascades over the backs of their seats. The effect was completed by gravity-defying coiffures .. .

°Ingres said, 'If the drawing is good, the painting cannot be bad', and the story, which Gleeson must be given full credit for uncovering, is so strong a framework that it doesn't matter much what words she covers it with. The story has two heroes, Bottger and J. J. Kaendler, the brilliant Meissen modeller. And like all good stories it has a villain, a financially corrrupt manager called Johann Gregor Herold, who tried to dominate the Meissen factory and to do down Kaendler. To collectors, Herold is known for perhaps the most exquisite of all European china-decoration. He puts me in mind of Samuel Richardson. 'There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones,' said Dr Johnson; but in real life Fielding, with all his faults, was good-hearted, and Richardson was an odious man.

Gleeson's book has most of the ingredi- ents of a James Bond story: womanising, starting with Augustus the Strong's many mistresses; torture:

One of the gloomy cavernous tunnels con- tained a bizarre machine in the form of a steel woman with rotating arms of razor- sharp swords. Those who fell from favour in the court were forced to walk blindfold towards the machine until they were sliced to shreds and a trapdoor in the floor opened, allowing the still-twitching body to sink with- out trace into the river Elbe.

and bloodshed, when Frederick the Great and his Prussians invade Dresden and seize crates of porcelain. Gleeson points up beautifully the irony of the situation. In 1717 Augustus had done a deal with Fred- erick's father, Frederick-William I, swap- ping 600 very tall soldiers for a magnificent collection of Chinese porcelain. (Bruce Chatwin refers to the soldiers as 'the 600 giants' in his novella Utz.) In 1745, when Frederick invaded Dresden, the Saxon army's final annihilation took place at the battle of Kesseldorf:

Among those opposing the Saxon soldiers on the battlefield were the porcelain soldiers the regiment of dragoons that Augustus the Strong had so rashly traded with Frederick's father ...

The vases for which the men had been bartered were of Ming porcelain — drag- ons in exchange for dragoons.

If I were a Hollywood producer, I would be negotiating for the film rights now. One thing that strikes you is the extreme youth of the three principal Meissen characters. Bottger was 21 when he tried to escape Augustus in 1703, Herold was 23 when he joined the team, Kaendler 25. So there is a chance to cast some young Turks. I'd let Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-. Smith semi-reprise their roles in the 1984 movie Weird Science — after all, 'weird sci- ence' is a pretty good synonym for alchemy. As for the slimy Herold, how about Daniel Day-Lewis? It's time he played a baddie, and the Yanks like a villain to have a Brit accent, suggestive of atrophied emotion and chill calculation. For Augustus the Strong, an aging stud, the field is limitless. Dudley Moore as Kapellmeister. Jonathan Cecil as court silly ass.

And, in spite of all that 'Bomber' Harris did to Dresden, some of the film could be shot on location. Gleeson, who has consci- entiously visited all the visitable sites, and has even been helped by 'Inge Heckmann- Walther, one of J. F. BOttger's direct descendants', records that the Albrechts- burg castle, where Wager was imprisoned for a time, 'still towers with imposing authority above the muddled clusters of mediaeval Meissen rooftops'. The covered bridge connecting Augustus's Dresden cas- tle to the Taschenberg Palace 'where once he cavorted with the beautiful Countess of Cozelle' is intact, 'and her grand residence has metamorphosed into one of Dresden's most luxurious hotels'.