.The pottery manager needs the collaboration of a man whose sense of fitness has not been crushed, a man who can design plates, cups, tea-pots, handles, spouts etc., in terms of clay and glaze with intimate knowledge of process. A knowledge that I can only describe as a sense of wholeness in which use and beauty find a new unity. He must enjoy each phase of the work himself and be able to convey that joy to his team. The work must become an end in itself and not a mere means to an end. He should know and really feel the rightness of the relationship between work, tool, and material which long ages had evolved before mechanization came, and not just have run perfunctorily through a course in historic ornament. We have no evidence of the existence of such a man in the trade today. But in other crafts, such as printing, the thing has been done. In any case it can only be a question of time.
There is a chasm which urgently needs spanning, but before a useful bridge can be built there must be sounder foundations and truer understanding between the business man, the scientist, and the artist-craftsman. Progressive firms have been working in this direction even in pottery, but it can be safely stated that nothing approaching the standard I have mentioned has been reached yet. Whichever side the initiative comes from first, matters little.
Efforts from both sides are wanted - the factory needs quality, and we hand-workers must produce in greater quantity if we are to bring the prices of our pots down to a level at which our friends can purchase them for use. That is my essential point viz., that we free craftsmen must supply an actual need to a much greater extent than we have hitherto done. This will involve an element of restraint on the part of the potter-artist which will bring him in closer contact with life, and thereby provide a discerning public with pots in which utility and beauty are one. This business of going back as confederated purists to the hand which preceded the machine has served its purpose. The next step awaits us.
In Japan a small pottery such as mine would have a sort of family of half a dozen expert craftsmen each trained to a particular job from childhood in a very definite tradition. Two kinds of pots would be made, the "bread and butter" pot, such as tea sets, sold at a moderate price, and pieces very carefully selected from each firing and correspondingly valued.
It is worth while noting in passing that the mental foot-binding which prevails in all these centres of traditional craft is a thing which has to be experienced to be believed. As long as that underlying spirit of race and place answers the slow change of circumstance the work done has national vitality, but when the barriers fall, and demand becomes suddenly international, and quite beyond the experience of the men in those work-shops, the springs dry up. Then a long time is bound to elapse before individual and conscious craftsmen emerge who can deal with the situation.
In Tokio I made shapes and patterns with the same enthusiasm as I spent on drawings and etchings, without thinking very much at first about utility and price. The pots were bought by people who looked, and were accustomed to looking, for the same essential qualities in Handicraft as in so called pure art. By degrees I paid more attention to use, but it was only when I returned to England that I found, as in so many ways, an opposite tendency, a valuation as matter of course of the utilities first and the spirit second. It was impossible to continue here in so "idealistic" a condition as to make just what I liked with only kiln and saggers as my limit.
The first daily-use pottery I was asked for was invariably a tea-set, but without the eastern teamwork, or our western machinery, the effort, especially at high temperature, is both back and heart-breaking. Making nothing else, I have calculated that by hard work I and a couple of apprentices could produce some 200 fifteen piece sets in a year, and we would have to sell them all at about £5 per set to keep going. I have often been asked why, given a good sample hand-made tea-pot, it cannot be reproduced indefinitely by machinery. In the first place your hand-made pot has to be translated into factory terms of devitalised clay, of plaster moulds, of unvarying thin fritted glazes, of coal-fed muffle kilns, and most of all, of men and girls who care so little for their dull jobs: the process is not faithful enough, not humanly comprehensive enough to reproduce living beauty. Secondly there is not the will on the part of the Industry. Thirdly, there is a chain of middlemen, with orders in their pockets, who have a fatal capacity for under-estimating latent public taste.
During my absence in the East I had become aware through books of our old English slipware, and one of my chief objects in returning was to permeate my work with its spirit. Since 1920, Hamada, Michael Cardew and I have revived the technique of the 17th Century slip-ware potter. Cardew and I have tried moreover to provide sound hand-made pots sufficiently inexpensive for people of moderate means to take into daily use. But my own experience which culminated last year in an exhibition at the Three Shield's Gallery in Kensington, has taught me that however much this ware expressed the English national temperament of one or two hundred years ago, it does not fit in with modern life. Its earthy and homely nature belongs to the kitchen, the cottage, and the country. Many refuse it because it only harmonizes with the whitewash, oak, iron, leather, and pewter of "Old England" - moods which have been creatively "worked out", however much I as an individual, or a few others, may have needed this experience as part of our personal growth. We cannot forego those other qualifications, of thinness, hardness, non-porosity, and light toned colour.
I then determined to see how far I could succeed in making semi-porcelaineous stoneware. I have reason for the belief that under favourable conditions it is possible to make household pottery with some of the qualities of the "Sung" or "Tang" wares of China. Such pots would satisfy the finer taste and the practical needs of today. The æsthetic perception of the modern French stoneware potter-artists since as far back as the "eighties" proves it. They, as usual, are in much more advanced position with regard to their manufacturers, middlemen, and public than we are here. But there was a significant interest shown in their work during the recent Paris Exhibition by our trade potters : a leven is at work. The gradual acceptance of eastern classic standards is an accomplished fact, and the museums of Europe and America have during the past twenty years set the periods of greatest achievement in Far Eastern art back by many centuries.
These among other factors are producing an international public, not very large, but growing, which has a new classic