Old China

       If the city parlor, in its best estate, of course, had nothing else but its old china on which to rely, it would have sufficient excuse for its being.

       The fabric itself is so exquisite, in the translucent material, in the enamel, in the tints, in the shapes, that one would search in vain outside the kingdom of jewels and flowers for anything so alluring to the eye as that bit of china in which, when held before the light, the spirit of lambent flame seems to float as it does in an opal, and whose designs, even when not intrinsically charming, are always interesting through history and through suggestion, and the love of which among our own people dates back more than two hundred years.

       There is more quaint and curious tradition clustering round the story of pottery and porcelain than of any other of the arts, from the tale of the man who, in despair, after ceaseless efforts to produce the quality at which he aimed, leaped into his furnace, and produced the desired flux in the consuming of his own body, and has been worshiped ever since among the less enlightened practicers of the ceramic art, to the touching story of Palissy the Potter, and the noble work of Wedgwood.

       As far back in Roman record as the time when Numa Pompilius reigned a king, we find a school or college of pottery founded, from which we can judge that the subject was held in high esteem even at that day. The Greeks already had potteries at Samos and at Corinth and elsewhere and we all know the absolute charm which the Etrurians had reached in such productions while the most exquisite enamel has been found in the tombs of the Egyptians. At perhaps still remoter periods, in the gloom of what we call the early twilight of civilization, the Orient had reached perfection in pottery, and rivaled the best the world has done in porcelain, the tower of Nankin, whose tiles are of the rarest faience, being the one concerning which the above legend of the sacrifice of a life is related.

       It is not merely for their beauty, though, that these things acquire their interest. The historian has made them subserve many a matter of profound research. When he finds the remnants of a race some bones scattered in a cave or under a bank of earth, weapons round about, and even traces of food he knows instantly at what point of civilization that race perished, not by its stone or copper knives and axes, but by its jars and pipkins or the absence of them; for their presence signifies that a race has reached, as we may say, the boiling-point; shows that man then was no longer in the condition of the mere animal, devouring raw meat with teeth and .talons. And the antiquarian, meanwhile, in his search among the ruins of the buried Asian cities, is enabled by the style of the pottery he finds to say what power ruled, and what people obeyed the rule.

       Of course the manufacture of china is something far beyond that of pottery in importance, but the one is the crude alphabet of which the other is the poem; and pottery itself has now and then risen to a height where even china falters, as in those instances of majolica that it has not been disdained to adorn with the work of Raphael and Julio Romano and Titian. If one could but own such marvelous specimens to delectate the eyes, one's cars could endure all the sarcasms of those in ignorance of such beauty with exceeding equanimity. Addison, to be sure, was among the ignorant in this respect, or pretended that he was. "There is no inclination in women that more surprises me than this passion for china," he somewhere takes occasion to say. 'When a woman is visited with it, it generally takes possession of her for life. China vessels are playthings for women of all ages. An old lady of forescore shall be as busy in cleaning an Indian mandarin as her great-grand-daughter is in dressing her baby." But when we remember that Horace Walpole was of precisely the opposite persuasion, that Kingsley was an amateur and Gladstone a collector, we can afford merely to pity one who did not know how to enjoy the bits of delicate color and light with which we are fond of adorning our cabinets.

       What is there, in sooth, that can be lovelier than a cup of that delicious sea-green called the Celadon, a concretion of sea-foam out of which the nereids themselves might sup, and one of which Robert Cecil gave Queen Elizabeth, as being a fit gift for royalty, unless it is that egg-shell cup through which the light falls rosy as through a baby's upheld fingers, while the odd designs upon them both tell strange tales cf life and worship and floral fancies among the curious people who make them. And yet one would pause a moment before giving them the palm over this claret-colored Chelsea cup, with its gold anchor mark ; over that delicious Dresden candelabrum where the hand of Summer seems to have scattered the flowers; or this vase in Capo di Monte china, where the high relief of the figures dancing round about it throws a shadow on the tints beyond; or these miracles of Sevres, exhibited every Christmas in the Louvre along with the latest work of the Gobelin looms, the cups and vases painted after Watteau, now in bleu du rci, now in rcse du Barry, now in vert pr'c, looking as if the wings of birds and the petals of blossoms had simply been cast under a spell beneath the gloss of enamel, and now made more precious yet with jewels.

       Where all are so lovely it is hard to choose; and a collector is tolerably sure that if she selects a vase of Henri Deux, with its yellow glory, she will long for a basket of Palissy's ware in violet relief; if she has Dresden, she will want Berlin, that she will never think her china closet complete without a bit of old Bow with its bee beneath the handle; and that, in fact, having once begun, she will never be happy again so long as the snow-white shapes encircle the blue of the Portland vase itself and are not hers.

       And meanwhile the lover of the quaint and the suggestive has united town and country in another article cf ornamentation only the good country housewife would never have it in her parlor, as the city wife is eager to do'. Perhaps its adoption yields a little too much to the rococo, but, it is interesting inasmuch as it makes the necessary article of earlier centuries the plaything of the later. It can, indeed, hardly be anything but a plaything, for what machinery already does so perfectly is unlikely to be rivaled by the amateur fine lady's fingers; and the thing is now only saved from absurdity by its history, which is something inquisitorial in the bondage it imposed, by its associations, which are sacred, and by its outlines, which are those of clear beauty.

 Rosemary Dorling discusses her Victorian pottery collection.