.Having become a potter in Japan - a land still new to the affair of industrialism - I did not realise the chasm which a century of factories had torn between ordinary life and hand crafts such as mine. I thought that, as in Japan, the work would speak for itself. But I have been forced to the conclusion that, except to the very few, this is not the case, and that unless the potter, weaver, wheelwright, or other craftsman, tells his own tale, no one else will or can do it for him. At this peculiar junction of two centuries nobody apparently is able to perceive the elementary conditions of our work, unless he has himself seriously tried to make some organically useful and beautiful article.
On my return to England after many years absence, the first thing that surprised me was the lack of any acknowledged classic standard of pottery. Out in the East this is the thread of life which runs through tradition. It once made a Japanese farmer say to me apologetically pointing to an ugly glass vase "Please excuse that, I know it is not according to a Tea - Master's taste, but it pleases me". It is only during the last few years that our archæologists have discovered that we had a mediæval pottery tradition with a
form-sense equivalent to the contemporary architecture. An indigenous 17th and 18th century slip-ware is quite screened from our view by a hundred years of industry, although even here in the distant fields of Cornwall I have picked up many shards of the combed oven-dishes which were in use until 30 or 40 years ago: the name Wedgewood is still invoked as if he were a great artist instead of only the first and greatest of commercial potters. Even painters and sculptors are wildly ignorant of the elements of potting, and when confronted by pots are inclined to look only for such qualities as are aimed at in their own work, missing the beauty which is pressed, and thrown, and cut, and burned, and subtly devised to meet a daily need.
This confusion is depressing , for by it the thought is again and again forced upon us that nothing we could do, not even the production of veritable masterpieces, would receive the recognition which we all naturally crave, and without which, we can still less carry on than those in freer fields of art.
From this arises the questions: Who are we? What kind of person is the craftsman of our time? He is called individual, or artist - but how vague is the general understanding of the distinction even amongst educated people - and what is his relationship to the peasant, or to the industrial worker?
A moment's thought must make it clear that he is different from these, if only because he comes later in evolution. Factories have driven folk - art practically out of England, and it only survives in out of the way corners of Europe; and the artist - craftsman, since the day of William Morris, has been the chief means of reaction against the materialism of Industry. But, as a reaction, he has been almost as extreme as the thing against which he has reacted. Antagonism has resulted. The strife has been over the body of the public. After 100 years, the trade offers us crockery which is cheap, standardised, thin, white, hard, and waterproof - good qualities all - but the shapes are wretched, the colours sharp and harsh, the decoration banal, and quality absent. There can be no two minds about it, if judgement is made from the level of the World's classics of pottery.
Let me mention a few such periods and sources:- Chinese T'ang, and Sung, and some Ming. Corean Caledonia, Japanese Tea-Master's wares, early Persian, Peruvian, Hispano-Moresque, German Bellarmines, some Delft, and English Toft Dishes. Such pottery was a completely human expression, it had not been mechanised. But who has ever seen a factory - made pot with a nature of it's own - a soul? How should it have one, except it were breathed into it by the love of its maker?
Very well! What have the artist - potters been doing all this while? Working by hand to please ourselves as artists first, and therefore producing only limited and expensive pieces, we have been supported by collectors, purists, cranks, or "arty" people, rather than by the normal man or woman. In so far we have tended ourselves to become abnormal, and consequently most of our pots have been still-born: they have not had the breath of reality in them: it has been a game.
I feel that we must be prepared to relinquish half our "artist", "art for art's sake", "misunderstood", "solitary", "handmade", "hand-spun", "hand-thrown", "hand-any-thing" attitude, and come right down to solid earth and actual conditions, and leave our phantasy. I say "half", for it is not a question of giving up that which is true in the "artist" or the "hand - made" attitude, but that which is false.
The next step is to get rid of the idea of the machine as an enemy. The machine is an extension of the tool; the tool of the hand; the hand of the brain; and it is only the unfaithful use of machinery which we can attack. It is here that Industry is to blame - just where it is unfaithful to Life in putting money values first. Science which has invented machinery in the XIX century, is no enemy of life, but "business first" has turned it into a bully, a slave-driver, and a cheat. Art which is the outcome of and proof of life, must come into the firm again in the XX century as an equal partner, or there will be disaster.
Art has been a horrid "veneer" in trade so far, but that is wrong, for beauty is an inherent demand of human nature, and work done without it is a starvation diet bound in the long run to produce disorder. The enjoyment of work for its own sake is what we individual craftsmen and women have to offer to an age which has mistaken the means for the end. It is this rather than shorter hours and longer pay which is at the root of our industrial unrest.
The widened demands of the increased population of the world make inevitable the mass-production of many utensils. It is good that machinery should stamp the iron of a railway track, or the glazed bricks of London Tubes - better than that it should be done by hand - plain, and clean, and strong and no nonsense about it! But that does not mean that labour should be employed eight hours a day, year in year out, upon mechanical work which gives no play to its creative faculties, for that is ROBOT work. With the increase of mass-production shorter hours are bound to come, and with them the time and energy for individual and home production with power supplied by electricity.
Granting then the need of industry and the function of the machine to reproduce with fidelity, the first
necessity in pottery is obviously to reproduce good pots. This simply is not done. There are no commercial pots being made which can hold a candle to the classics I have mentioned for beauty. The merits which fall within the industrial scale are utilitarian and comparative, the larger historic, human, æsthetic values are unperceived. There are no hills on this horizon.