Various

The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. By Jennie J. Young. New York: Harper & Brothers.

"More crockery!" exclaims one aweary of the ceramic craze. "And the biggest book of all!—the winding-up shower, let us hope," quoth another non-sympathizer.

This portly octavo, with its four hundred and sixty-four wood-cuts, a seemingly exhaustive compend of the subject, may indeed be accepted as the peroratory rain destined to give the soil its last preparation for the rich growth to follow under a clear and sunny sky. What pen and print can do to perfect the requisite conditions for a Periclean age of pottery must by this time have been done. The case is summed up and stated. The issue rests with the jury of millions who use and admire burnt clay. Their wants, their sense of beauty and their purse will render the verdict. We might more safely and properly say that they will render a number of verdicts, all in their way and sphere just and true, since in no one of the arts so much as in this of all times and all nations is it so difficult to subject the infinitude of styles and fancies to one rigid canon. That the Greek vase is an absolute exemplar in grace and elegance of form every one hastens to concede. But who would hesitate to give up a part of what the Greeks have bequeathed us rather than lose the marvellous filigree in clay of "Henri Deux," the rich realism of Palissy or the wild and delightful riot of line and color and unequalled delicacy of manipulation presented to us by the Japanese? One and the same eye, as highly and soundly educated as you please, may be charmed almost equally by works of each of these schools and of others not here named; and that almost without wishing to see the peculiar merits of each combined and merged in one. A perfect eclectic vase is not to be expected, if desired, any more than a fruit or a wine which shall unite the best flavors of all orchards or all vintages. What can be done is to strive in that direction, as the French cook seeks, by "composing," to attain in one supreme plat the ne plus ultra of sapidity. We shall not be able, any more than he, to reach that climax or to dull the charm of variety. The fusing of the Greek brain and the Oriental eye and finger in the alembic of Western Europe and the New World will still continue to be attempted.

Trade, the great amalgamator, is promoting this end. Chinese porcelain has long been sent to Japan for decoration, the resemblance between the styles of the two countries, due primarily to race, being thus increased. American biscuit is sent to England for the like purpose; and we read with more surprise that the unfinished ware of Dresden seeks ornamentation in the same country, whence it is returned to be placed upon the market as true Meissen. A firm of New Yorkers, again, have migrated to France and built up the beautiful fabric of Limoges with the aid of French artists. The craftsmen of Japan and China are year by year borrowing Western forms and methods, as comparison of the ancient and modern work of those nations will show clearly enough.

While national idiosyncrasies the most opposite and the most widely separated in every sense ally themselves in behalf of progress, individual effort is encouraged by the reflection that no walk of art offers a more open field to original genius. Della Robbia, Bernart, Palissy and Wedgwood each found his own material and created his own school. Neither of them possessed the facilities, educational or mechanical, now at the command of hundreds. Neither had as wide or as eager a market for his productions as the coming artist in clay may command. Surely, such an artist is at this moment maturing his powers in some one of the scores of training institutions which have sprung up, under public or private auspices, within the past quarter of a century. Thorwaldsen was not a man of great originative genius, and nothing at all of a potter, troubling himself little about hard or soft paste or this or the other glaze; but he infused the love of classic form into the bleakest corners of Scandinavia, and made her youth modellers of terra-cotta into shapes unexcelled by any imitators of the antique. The prize awaits him who should, upon such knowledge and discipline, graft a study of Oriental designs, an eye for color, an independent fancy, and such minute precision of manual dexterity as seems the hardest thing of all for the Western to acquire. He will not have, like his great forerunners, to invent his material. Science does not repress, it invites and assists him. It offers him mineral colors and modes of graduating heat unknown to them. All the secrets of porcelain are open to him; and were they not, Europe did all her best things in ceramics before she was able to make a porcelain teacup. He may find room for improvement in material too. Pottery is the most durable of fabrics so long as it is not broken. But it is fragile, as bronze is not. Why may not that defect be remedied, as other defects have been by the Japanese and our bank-note printers in that particularly evanescent texture, paper? Some day, perhaps, burnt clay will be held together by threads of asbestos as greenbacks are by threads of silk and the sun-burned Egyptian bricks were by straw. Malleable glass we have already. Why not malleable faÏence?

The book before us presents the art, its history, its processes and its results in a manner every way satisfactory. Its account is full without being prolix. The author's taste is catholic enough. The different styles are placed before the reader side by side, with an evident purpose to do justice to all of them. There is little of the jargon of the connoisseur. Marks are curtly dismissed with the sound dictum that "the art and not the mark should be studied." Much use is made of the engravings, which are more closely connected with the text than, unfortunately, is generally the case in illustrated works. They are strictly illustrations of it, and serve as good a purpose in that way as cuts without the aid of color could well do. Nothing is more difficult to reproduce than a first-class work in clay or porcelain. Color, drawing, form, surface and texture present a compound of difficulties not to be completely overcome by the resources of the graver, the camera and the printer in colors. Only on the shelves of the museum can it be studied understandingly. It must speak for itself. The chromo undertakes to duplicate, with more or less success, the painting in oil or fresco, but the vase is a picture and something more. It is the joint product of the painter and the sculptor, and the substance whereon they bestow their labor has a special and varying beauty of its own.

In the pages devoted to the history of American pottery we confess that we have been chiefly attracted by its antiquities. The specimens given of remains from all parts of the two continents show at a glance their common origin. They all come unmistakably from the hands of the same Indian, civilized or savage. The Moquis, the Mound-builders, the Aztecs and the Peruvians all wrought their mother, Earth, into the same fashion, and adorned her countenance, purified by fire, with scrolls and colors in the same taste. The pigments employed have proved as lasting as those in the Egyptian tombs, and the forms are often as graceful as in a majority of the Phoenician vessels found in Cyprus. In the representation of the human head the Peruvian artist, so far as we may judge from these relics, excelled his rival of Tyre and Sidon.

That this will become a handbook on the subject of which it treats cannot be doubted. If we might venture to suggest an amendment to the second edition, it would be the addition to the illustrations of two or three figures carefully executed in colors—Greek, Japanese and SÈvres.

Sherwood Bonner has been singularly happy in her choice of a subject for this, her first novel. She has broken new ground on that Southern soil which seemed already for literary purposes wellnigh worn out, and she has touched upon a period in the struggle between North and South which, so far as we know, has been little treated by novelists. The antagonists are represented not in the smoke of battle, but at that critical and awkward moment when the first steps toward reconciliation are being made. A proud but sociable little Mississippi town is shown in the act of half-reluctantly opening its doors to the officers of a couple of Federal regiments stationed within its bounds. The situation is portrayed with much spirit and humor, as well as with the most perfect good-humor. Thoroughly Southern as the novel is, it is not narrowly so: its pictures of Southern society are drawn from within, and show its writer's sympathy with Southern feeling, yet its tone, even in touching on the most tender spots, is entirely dispassionate, and at the same time free from any apparent effort to be so.

The first chapter introduces us to a triad of charming girls, whose careless talk soon turns upon the soldiers' expected arrival in Yariba and the proper reception to be given them by the Yariba damsels. Betty Page, Mary Barton and Blythe Herndon are, in a sense, typical girls, and represent the three orders in which nearly all girlhood may be classified—namely, frivolous girls, good girls, and clever girls or girls with ideas. Ideas are represented by Blythe Herndon, whose outspoken verdict in favor of tolerance and forgetfulness of the past draws upon her the patriotic indignation of Miss Betty Page. How long the fair disputants preserve the jewel of consistency forms the motif of the book. Betty dances and flirts, neglects her loyal young Southern lover—who, we hope, is consoled by Mary—and finally surrenders to a handsome moustache and the Union with a happy unconsciousness of any abandonment of her principles. Blythe, with her ardent nature and youthful attitude of intolerance toward intolerance, is easily attracted by the intellectual freedom which appears to open before her in the conversation of an enthusiastic New England radical. Her mind is, however, not wholly thrown off its balance by this vision of culture: she awakens to the fact that the breach is wider than she had at first dreamed, and shrinks from the sacrifice not only of prejudice, but of first principles and affections, which is demanded of her. Lovers who are separated by hereditary or political strife have ever been a favorite theme with poet and romancer. In the majority of instances these unhappy beings have regarded the barrier between them as a useless obstacle erected by a perverse Fate in the way of their happiness. But Mr. Roger Ellis adheres with narrow obstinacy to the least article of his broad political creed, without a particle of consideration for the different one in which Blythe has been nurtured. He flourishes the American flag in his conversation in true stump-orator style, kisses black babies in the street—when, as Betty Page remarks, no man was ever known to kiss a white baby if he could help it—and refuses to eat without the company at table of a little black protÉgÉ.

Plot there is none in Like unto Like, and of incident very little. Light, often sparkling, conversations and charming bits of description follow each other in ready succession like beads upon a string. Lack of incident is atoned for by charm of writing, and in the vivacity of the scenes the reader disregards the slenderness of the connecting thread, or perhaps forgets to look for it. The style is easy and pleasant, while free from the slips to which "easy writers" are so prone. Of bright, witty sayings a number could easily be gathered as samples, but the readers would still have to be referred to the book for many more. Perhaps the main charm of Like unto Like lies in its description of the quaint life in Southern provincial towns, where the people "all talk to each other as if they were members of one family," where married ladies are still called by their friends "Miss Kate," "Miss Janey," or "Miss Ada," and where, "when a youth and maiden promise to marry each other, they become possessed immediately with a wild desire to conceal their engagement from all the world." There clings to the book a suggestion of that Southern accent which in the mouth of a pretty woman has such a piquant foreign sound.

We can complain of no lack of plot or paucity of incidents in His Heart's Desire. Were the material less ably handled we should suggest an unnecessary redundancy, but we hesitate to pronounce superfluous anything which is so exactly fitted, so neatly dove-tailed into the main structure, as is each incident and character in the present novel. About a dozen individual and more or less finished personages contribute their life-histories to the book, yet each of these lives has some bearing upon that of the heroine, Nora St. John, and notwithstanding these intricacies the plot never becomes confused. It has been too firmly grasped by the author's mind to be a puzzle to the reader's. Its various ramifications are never allowed to get into a "snarl:" the mystery all turns upon a single point which we will not spoil the reader's pleasure by mentioning, and, arrived at the last pages, the various threads of the story unwind themselves easily and naturally like a single coil. The same skill is displayed in the management of the characters. Though drawn with unequal power, many of them being seized with much vividness, whilst others must be accounted failures, they are well grouped. Numerous as the figures are, they never crowd or jostle each other, and elaborated as they are in many cases, all are subordinate to that of Nora, whose character and story stand out in a strong relief not easy to obtain upon so varied a background. This character is finely conceived and drawn with real power, being impressive by the very truth of the rendering, for she is not invested with any strikingly heroic qualities. A strong, passionate nature made cold by suffering and the constant struggle to keep the secret of her one season of passion from rising again to confront her—a woman of forty, who has no longer any illusions or pleasure, in whose character intense pride is the only motive-power left, and even pride is weary of its loneliness and the assaults made upon it—Nora excites interest, and even pity, by her position and by the aspect of a strong nature under subdued but real suffering. In the later pages of the book, and notably in the scene with Mr. Sistare, in which revelations are made by both, the changes gradual or sudden in her feelings and thought are portrayed with the delicacy of light and shade, the picturesqueness and self-forgetfulness, with which a fine actress renders a part. This dramatic quality is perhaps the most striking trait in His Heart's Desire. Many of its scenes are intensely dramatic, full of passion, striking in situation, and showing a rather rare accomplishment—that of conducting a dialogue which shall be equally brilliant on both sides without resembling a monologue.

In praising this novel so highly we do not forget its faults. But, though perhaps as numerous as its merits, they are by no means equal to them in importance. Something of naturalness and simplicity has been sacrificed to the exigences of the plot; and, while the higher truth is adhered to in the principal scenes and characters, some of the minor ones appear to us rather highly colored. By distributing the fatal gift of beauty with a less lavish hand the author might, we think, have subdued this color: a few commonplace figures would have added to the naturalness of the scene.

Sensational the book may be pronounced from a glance through its chain of incidents, yet neither by its tone nor its writing does it belong to the class which we call sensational. Its tone is earnest and sincere, grave social questions being handled with a purity and feeling which makes the book, in spite of its apparent unconsciousness of purpose, a distinctly moral one.