Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/625

 at his goodwill if she failed to do him pleasure, and who held her as sent into existence simply and solely for his pleasure. She was his wife, the care-taker of his house, and the mother of his children; yet she was nothing for or in herself, and her whole duty lay in administering to him, as all her honour came from him. Now, she is individual, and an independent worker almost the same as man himself. She makes her own living and she hews out her own fortune; she lives for fame, and builds up her artistic and literary reputation with as much toil and pains as man. But though the laws which once pressed so heavily on her are considerably lightened, and her disabilities much modified, yet she has griefs of which she complains to the public loudly, and which she is making desperate efforts to induce a masculine and perverse generation to redress. Whether she will succeed or no, rests, with other mysteries of the future, in the lap of time. The great danger in the woman question now, is, that the women and their partisans will go too far, and create a reaction towards injustice by the exaggeration of their demands.

lady of taste, as she arranges her freshly gathered flowers, little considers the pains which have been bestowed in fabricating the vessels she adorns. The vase, or cup, or tazza, be it of Dresden, Bow, Chelsea, or Derby porcelain, or of Wedgwood ware, has passed through many workmen's hands; and its form, if beautiful, and its decoration, if in keeping and good taste, have sprung necessarily from the conception of some true artist.

Much as Wedgwood did for art in this direction, and many beautiful vessels as he perfected for bulbous roots, plants, and flowers, he left open a wide and comparatively exhaustless field to future artists, and one to which, as yet, they have contributed little that is good. Were a few fine forms perfected by some potter of high ability, and then reproduced in a cheaper manner and material—so cheap as to become popularised, even to the extent of being hawked about, or set along the kerbstones in the cheap markets—a practical lesson in taste would be given to that wide class which so much needs an indirect culture of this character.

It is to the workers in terra-cotta that we must look for so much that is needed in the improvement of floral pottery. The beautiful unglazed wares they produce are just those which befit natural forms that derive their exquisite effects from gloss and colour. Black, a blue-black, several shades of buff, and a rich tawny red, are, without much chemical art, easily produced by the mere processes of the kiln, and were the colours used in endless variation and intermixture by the ancient potters. Some of their finest work was in a blue-black body; they favoured buff in its many shades, and that dark red, which is not only a primary colour, but one of the most exquisite in nature. It relieves every other colour, and is an effect in itself. The ancients loved and used it thus; often without a single relief or addition, and, with nothing but some fine geometrical outline in view, threw off productions which have never been excelled, or even approached, in modern times. Still more largely they used this colour as a pigment; and the greatest number of the finest antique vases which have descended to our time are black, painted with figures in this tawny red.

The observations of travellers, the analyses of chemists, and geological surveys, have elicited no facts which show that the ancients possessed other or better clays than those existing in this country in unrivalled abundance. Mr. Blackfield, a high authority on these points, says distinctly in a paper read before the Northamptonshire and Lincoln Architectural Societies, "There is no country in the world in which there are finer materials for pottery than exist in England;" our modellers have the same geometrical principles to refer to as had the Greeks, whose finest forms were but sections of the cone; and they have open to them the best examples of oriental colour and unconventional ornament. Every chemical, scientific, and mechanical process has made immense advance, and all that is wanted for this great and very much needed education of the popular taste is, that some few master potters, of superior judgment and skill, should supply the market with cheap, yet good, copies of a few fine examples in such sections of floral pottery as suspending vases for plants of the orchideæ species, pots for bulbs, and baskets and vases for ordinary plants and flowers. At first it might be that people so long accustomed to see nothing but the barbarisms begot by cupidity and ignorance combined, would prefer to purchase what was hideous for fourpence rather than what was beautiful for sixpence; but, happily, the human eye has a natural aptitude to seek out and select what is beautiful, and hence the process of initiation and culture would not be tedious. A real beginning would be thus made, and the taste for floriculture, which is spreading in London and the large cities, would be aided by culture of another kind.

The articles prepared by the modern potter, for the floral science of the wealthier classes, sin in the same direction of inappropriateness and inelegance. The shop windows of the dealers are filled with highly glazed, gaudy coloured, tub-like pots and square boxes; and, as choicer specimens for cut flowers, with ill-designed figures bearing cornucopias, or the semblance of a lady's ringed hand and wrist, holding a cup in the shape of a Scotchman's mull! This last is an excrescence which sins alike against good taste and feeling; for who would cut off a lady's hand even for the sake of holding the flowers of Proserpine? This is imitating nature