Admitting my inexperience, I must say that I think the instinct for
beauty and all the desire to produce beautiful things, which you and
Goethe refer to as the "Art Impulse," is a kind of sex quality, not
unlike the song of birds or their beautiful plumage.
--_Josiah Wedgwood to Doctor Erasmus Darwin_
[Illustration: JOSIAH WEDGWOOD]
Once upon a day a financial panic was on in Boston. Real estate was
rapidly changing hands, most all owners making desperate efforts to
realize. Banks which were thought to be solvent and solid went soaring
skyward, and even collapsed occasionally, with a loud, ominous, R. G.
Dun report. And so it happened that about this time Henry Thoreau
strolled out of his cabin and looking up at the placid moon, murmured,
"Moonshine, after all, is the only really permanent thing we possess."
This is the first in the series of twelve love-stories--or "tales of
moonshine," to use the phrase of Thomas Carlyle.
In passing, let us note the fact that the doughty Thomas was not a
lover, and he more than once growled out his gratitude in that he had
never lost either his head or his heart, for men congratulate themselves
on everything they have, even their limitations. Thomas Carlyle was not
a lover.
A great passion is a trinitarian affair. And I sometimes have thought it
a matter of regret, as well as of wonder, that a strong man did not
appear on the scene and fall in love with the winsome Jeannie Welsh.
Conditions were ripe there for a great drama. I know it would have
blown the roof off that little house in Cheyne Row, but it might have
crushed the heart of Thomas Carlyle and made him a lover, indeed. After
death had claimed Jeannie as a bride, the fastnesses of the old Sartor
Resartus soul were broken up, and Carlyle paced the darkness, crying
aloud, "Oh, why was I cruel to her?" He manifested a tenderness toward
the memory of the woman dead which the woman alive had never been able
to bring forth.
Love demands opposition and obstacle. It is the intermittent or
obstructed current that gives power.
The finest flowers are those transplanted; for transplanting means
difficulty, a readjusting to new conditions, and through the effort put
forth to find adjustment does the plant progress. Transplanted men are
the ones who do the things worth while, and transplanted girls are the
only ones who inspire a mighty passion. Audrey transplanted might have
evolved into a Nell Gwynn or a Lady Hamilton.
In such immortal love-stories as Romeo and Juliet, Tristram and Isolde,
and Paolo and Francesca, a love so mad in its wild impetus is pictured
that it dashes itself against danger; and death for the lovers, we feel
from the beginning, is the sure climax when the curtain shall fall on
the fifth act.
The sustained popular interest in these tragedies proves that the
entranced auditors have dabbled in the eddies, so they feel a fervent
interest in those hopelessly caught in the current, and from the snug
safety of the parquette live vicariously their lives and the loves that
might have been.
But let us begin with a life-story, where love resolved its "moonshine"
into life, and justified itself even to stopping the mouths of certain
self-appointed censors, who caviled much and quibbled overtime. Here is
a love so great that in its beneficent results we are all yet
partakers.
* * * * *
About all the civilization England has she got from the Dutch; her
barbarisms are all her own. It was the Dutch who taught the English how
to print and bind books and how to paint pictures.
It was the Dutch who taught the English how to use the potter's wheel
and glaze and burn earthenware. Until less than two hundred years ago,
the best pottery in use in England came from Holland. It was mostly made
at Delft, and they called it Delftware.
Finally they got to making Delftware in Staffordshire. This was about
the middle of the Eighteenth Century. And it seems that, a little before
this time, John Wesley, a traveling preacher, came up this way on
horseback, carrying tracts in his saddlebags, and much love in his
heart. He believed that we should use our religion in our life--seven
days in the week, and not save it up for Sunday. In ridicule, some one
had called him a "Methodist," and the name stuck.
John Wesley was a few hundred years in advance of his time. He is the
man who said, "Slavery is the sum of all villainies." John Wesley had a
brother named Charles, who wrote hymns, but John did things. He had
definite ideas about the rights of women and children, also on
temperance, education, taxation and exercise, and whether his followers
have ever caught up with him, much less gone ahead of him, is not for
me, a modest farmer, to say.
In the published "Journal of John Wesley," is this: "March 8, 1760.
Preached at Burslem, a town made up of potters. The people are poor,
ignorant, and often brutal, but in due time the heart must be moved
toward God, and He will enlighten the understanding."
And again: "Several in the congregation talked out loud and laughed
continuously. And then one threw at me a lump of potter's clay that
struck me in the face, but it did not disturb my discourse."
This whole section was just emerging out of the Stone Age, and the
people were mostly making stoneware. They worked about four days in a
week. The skilful men made a shilling a day--the women one shilling a
week. And all the money they got above a meager living went for folly.
Bear-baiting, bullfighting and drunkenness were the rule. There were
breweries at Staffordshire before there were potteries, but now the
potters made jugs and pots for the brewers.
These potters lived in hovels, and, what is worse, were quite content
with their lot. In the potteries women often worked mixing the mud, and
while at work wore the garb of men.
Wesley referred to the fact of the men and women dressing alike, and
relates that once a dozen women wearing men's clothes, well plastered
with mud, entered the chapel where he was preaching, and were urged on
by the men to affront him and break up the meeting.
Then comes this interesting item: "I met a young man by the name of J.
Wedgwood, who had planted a flower-garden adjacent to his pottery. He
also had his men wash their hands and faces and change their clothes
after working in the clay. He is small and lame, but his soul is near to
God."
I think that John Wesley was a very great man. I also think he was great
enough to know that only a man who is in love plants a flower-garden.
Yes, such was the case--Josiah Wedgwood was in love, madly, insanely,
tragically in love! And he was liberating that love in his work. Hence,
among other forms that his "insanity" took, he planted a flower-garden.
And of course, the garden was for the lady he loved.
Love must do something--it is a form of vital energy and the best thing
it does, it does for the beloved. Flowers are love's own properties. And
so flowers, natural or artificial, are a secondary sex manifestation.
I said Josiah Wedgwood was tragically in love--the word was used
advisedly. One can play comedy; two are required for melodrama; but a
tragedy demands three.
A tragedy means opposition, obstacle, objection. Josiah Wedgwood was
putting forth a flower-garden, not knowing why, possibly, but as a form
of attraction. And John Wesley riding by, reined in, stopped and after
talking with the owner of the flower-garden wrote, "He is small and
lame, but his soul is near to God."
* * * * *
Josiah Wedgwood, like Richard Arkwright, his great contemporary, was the
thirteenth child of his parents.
Let family folk fear no more about thirteen being an unlucky number. The
common law of England, which usually has some good reason based on
commonsense for its existence, makes the eldest son the heir: this on
the assumption that the firstborn inherits brain and brawn plus. If the
firstborn happened to be a girl, it didn't count.
The rest of the family grade down until we get "the last run of shad."
But Nature is continually doing things just as if to smash our theories.
The Arkwrights and the Wedgwoods are immortal through Omega and not
Alpha.
Thomas Wedgwood, the father of Josiah, was a potter who made butter-pots
and owned a little pottery that stood in the yard behind the house. He
owned it, save for a mortgage, and when he died, he left the mortgage
and the property to his eldest son Thomas, to look after.
Josiah was then nine years old, but already he was throwing clay on the
potter's wheel. It would not do to say that he was clay in the hand of
the potter, for while the boys of his age were frolicking through the
streets of the little village of Burslem where he lived, he was learning
the three R's at his mother's knee.
I hardly suppose we can speak of a woman who was the mother of thirteen
children before she was forty, and taking care of them all without a
servant, as highly cultivated. Several of Josiah's brothers and sisters
never learned to read and write, for like Judith Shakespeare, the
daughter of William, they made their mark: which shows us that there are
several ways of turning that pretty trick. Children born of the same
parents are not necessarily related to each other, nor to their parents.
Mary Wedgwood, Josiah's mother, wrote for him his name in clay, and some
years after he related how he copied it a hundred times every day for a
week, writing with a stick in the mud.
Lame children or weakly ones seem to get their quota of love all right,
so let us not feel sorry for them--everything is equalized.
When Josiah was fourteen he could write better than either his mother or
his brother Thomas; for we have the signatures of all three appended to
an indenture of apprenticeship, wherein Josiah was bound to his brother
Thomas for five years. The youngster was to be taught the "mystery,
trade, occupation and secrets of throwing and handling clay, and also
burning it." But the fact was that as he was born in the pottery and had
lived and worked in it, and was a most alert and impressionable child,
he knew quite as much about the work as his brother Thomas, who was
twenty years older. Years are no proof of ability.
At nineteen, Josiah's apprenticeship to his brother expired. "I have my
trade, a lame leg and the marks of smallpox--and I never was
good-looking, anyway," he wrote in his commonplace-book.
The terrific attack of smallpox that he had undergone had not only
branded his face, but had left an inflammation in his right knee that
made walking most difficult. This difficulty was no doubt aggravated by
his hard work turning the potter's wheel with one foot. During the
apprenticeship the brother had paid him no wages, simply "booarde,
meate, drink and cloatheing."
Now he was sick, lame and penniless. His mother had died the year
before. He was living with his brothers and sisters, who were poor, and
felt that he was more or less of a burden to them and to the world: the
tide was at ebb. And about this time it was that Richard Wedgwood,
Esquire, from Cheshire, came over to Burslem on horseback. Richard has
been mentioned as a brother of Thomas, the father of Josiah, but the
fact seems to be that they were cousins.
Richard was a gentleman in truth, if not in title. He had made a fortune
as a cheesemonger and retired. He went to London once a year, and had
been to Paris. He was decently fat, was senior warden of his village
church, and people who knew their business addressed him as Squire. The
whole village of Burslem boasted only one horse and a mule, but Squire
Wedgwood of Cheshire owned three horses, all his own. He rode only one
horse though, when he came to Burslem, and behind him, seated on a
pillion, was his only and motherless daughter Sarah, aged fourteen,
going on fifteen, with dresses to her shoe-tops.
He brought her because she teased to come, and in truth he loved the
girl very much and was extremely proud of her, even if he did reprove
her more than was meet. But she usually got even by doing as she
pleased.
Now they were on their way to Liverpool and just came around this way
a-cousining.
And among others on whom they called were the Wedgwood potters. In the
kitchen, propped up on a bench, with his lame leg stretched out before
him, sat Josiah, worn, yellow and wan, all pitted with smallpox-marks.
The girl looked at the young man and asked him how he got hurt--she was
only a child. Then she asked him if he could read. And she was awful
glad he could, because to be sick and not to be able to read was awful!
Her father had a copy of Thomson's "Seasons" in his saddlebags. She went
and got the book and gave it to Josiah, and told her father about it
afterward. And when the father and daughter went away, the girl stroked
the sick boy's head, and said she hoped he would get well soon. She
would not have stroked the head of one of those big, burly potters; but
this potter was different--he was wofully disfigured, and he was sick
and lame. Woman's tenderness goes out to homely and unfortunate
men--read your Victor Hugo!
And Josiah--he was speechless, dumb--his tongue paralyzed! The room swam
and then teetered up and down, and everything seemed touched with a
strange, wondrous light. And in both hands Josiah Wedgwood tenderly held
that precious copy of James Thomson's "Seasons."
* * * * *
In Eighteen Hundred Sixty, just one hundred years after John Wesley
visited Burslem, Gladstone came here and gave an address on the founding
of the Wedgwood Memorial Institute.
Among other things said in the course of his speech was this: "Then
comes the well-known smallpox, the settling of the dregs of the disease
in the lower part of the leg, and the eventual amputation of the limb,
rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable
occasion to record our obligations to calamity. But in the wonderful
ways of Providence, that disease which came to him as a twofold scourge
was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him
from growing up to be the active, vigorous workman, possessed of all his
limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; but it put him upon
considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something
else, and something greater. It sent his mind inward; it drove him to
meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was that he
arrived at a perception and grasp of them which might, perhaps, have
been envied, certainly have been owned, by an Athenian potter.
Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of
King Numa receiving in a cavern, from the nymph of Egeria, the laws
which were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that
illness and that mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made a
cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching,
meditative mind."
You remember how that great and good man, Richard Maurice Bucke, once
said, "After I had lost my feet in the Rocky Mountain avalanche, I lay
for six weeks in a cabin, and having plenty of time to think it over, I
concluded that, now my feet were gone, I surely could no longer depend
upon them, so I must use my head." And he did.
The loss of an arm in a sawmill was the pivotal point that gave us one
of the best and strongest lawyers in Western New York. And heaven knows
we need good lawyers: the other kind are so plentiful!
Gladstone thought it was smallpox that drove Josiah Wedgwood to books
and art. But other men have had the smallpox--bless me!--and they never
acquired much else.
Josiah kept Thomson's "Seasons" three months, and then returned it to
Sarah Wedgwood, with a letter addressing her as "Dear Cousin." You will
find it set down in most of the encyclopedias that she was his cousin,
but this seems to be because writers of encyclopedias are literalists,
and lovers are poets.
Josiah said he returned the book for two reasons: first, inasmuch as he
had committed it to memory, he no longer needed it; second, if he sent
it back, possibly another book might be sent him instead. Squire
Wedgwood answered this letter himself, and sent two books, with a good,
long letter of advice about improving one's time, and "not wasting life
in gambling and strong drink, as most potters do."
Six months had passed since the Squire and his daughter had been to
Burslem. Josiah was much better. He was again at work in the pottery.
And now, instead of making brown butter-crocks and stone jugs all of the
time, he was experimenting in glazes. In fact, he had made a little
wooden workbox and covered it over with tiny pieces of ornamental
"porcelain" in a semi-transparent green color, that he had made himself.
And this pretty box he sent to Sarah. Unfortunately, the package was
carried on horseback in a bag by the mail-carrier, and on the way the
horse lay down, or fell down and rolled on the mail-bag, reducing the
pretty present to fragments. When the wreck was delivered to Sarah, she
consulted with her father about what should be done.
We ask advice, not because we want it, but because we wish to be backed
up in the thing we desire to do.
Sarah wrote to Josiah, acknowledging receipt of the box, praising its
beauty in lavish terms, but not a word about the condition in which it
arrived. A few weeks afterward the Squire wrote on his own account and
sent ten shillings for two more boxes--"just like the first, only
different." Ten shillings was about what Josiah was getting for a
month's work.
Josiah was now spending all of his spare time and money in
experimenting with new clays and colors, and so the ten shillings came
in very handy.
He had made ladles, then spoons, and knife-handles to take the place of
horn, and samples of all his best work he sent on to his "Uncle
Richard."
His brother Thomas was very much put out over this trifling. He knew no
way to succeed, save to stick to the same old ways and processes that
had always been employed. Josiah chafed under the sharp chidings of his
brother, and must have written something about it to Sarah, for the
Squire sent some of the small wares made by Josiah over to Sheffield to
one of the big cutlers, and the cutler wrote back saying he would like
to engage the services of so talented a person as the young man who
could make a snuffbox with beautiful leaves modeled on it. Thomas
Wedgwood, however, refused to allow his brother to leave, claiming the
legal guardianship over him until he was twenty-one. From this we assume
that Josiah's services were valuable.
Josiah had safely turned his twenty-first year before he decided to go
down to Cheshire and see his Uncle Richard. He had anticipated the visit
for weeks, but now as he was on the verge of starting he was ready to
back out. A formal letter of excuse and apology was written, but never
dispatched. On the appointed day, Josiah was duly let down from the
postman's cart at the gate of Squire Wedgwood, Spen Green, Cheshire.
The young woman who came down the steps to meet him at the gate might
indeed be Sarah Wedgwood, but she wasn't the same little girl who had
ridden over to Burslem on a pillion behind her father! She was tall,
slender, and light of step. She was a dream of grace and beauty, and her
presence seemed to fill the landscape. Over Josiah's being ran a bitter
regret that he had come at all. He looked about for a good place to
hide, then he tried to say something about "how glad I am to be here,"
but there was a bur on his tongue and so he stammered, "The roads are
very muddy." In his pocket he had the letter of regret, and he came near
handing it to her and climbing into the postman's cart that still stood
there.
He started to go through the gate, and the postman coughed, and asked
him for his fare. When the fare was paid, Josiah felt sure that Sarah
thought he had tried to cheat the poor postman.
He protested to her that he hadn't, in a strange falsetto voice that was
not his own.
As they walked toward the house, Josiah was conscious he was limping,
and as he passed his hand over his forehead he felt the pockmarks stand
out like moles.
And she was so gracious and sprightly and so beautiful! He knew she was
beautiful, although he really had not looked at her; but he realized the
faint perfume of her presence, and he knew her dress was a light
blue--the color of his favorite glaze.
He decided he would ask her for a sample of the cloth that he might make
her a plate just like it.
When they were seated on the veranda, over which were climbing-roses,
the young lady addressed him as "Mr. Wedgwood," whereas in her letters
she had called him "Dear Cousin" or "Josiah."
It was now Sarah's turn to be uncomfortable, and this was a great relief
to him. He felt he must put her at ease, so he said, "These roses would
look well on a platter--I will model one for you when I go home." This
helped things a little, and the girl offered to show him the garden.
There were no flowers in Burslem. People had no time to take care of
them.
And just then the Squire appeared, bluff, bold and hearty, and soon
everything was all right. That evening the young lady played for them on
the harpsichord; the father told stories and laughed heartily at them
because nobody else did; and Josiah seated in a dim corner recited pages
from Thomson's "Seasons," and the next day was frightened at his
temerity.
* * * * *
When Josiah returned to Burslem, it was with the firm determination that
he must get away from his brother and branch out for himself. That he
loved Sarah or had any idea of wedding her, he was not conscious. Yet
her life to him was a great living presence, and all of his plans for
the future were made with her in mind. Brown butter-crocks were
absolutely out of the question! It was blue plates, covered with vines
and roses, or nothing; and he even had visions of a tea-set covered with
cupids and flying angels.
In a few weeks we find Josiah over near Sheffield making knife-handles
for a Mr. Harrison, an ambitious cutler. Harrison lacked the art spirit
and was found too mercenary for our young man, who soon after formed a
partnership with a man named Whieldon, "to make tortoise-shell and ivory
from ground flint and other stones by processes secret to said
Wedgwood." Whieldon furnished the money and Wedgwood the skill. Up to
this time the pottery business in England had consisted in using the
local clays. Wedgwood invented a mill for grinding stone, and
experimented with every kind of rock he could lay his hands on.
He also became a skilled modeler, and his success at ornamenting the
utensils and pretty things they made caused the business to prosper. In
a year he had saved up a hundred pounds of his own. This certainly was
quite a fortune, and Sarah had written him, "I am so proud of your
success--we all predict for you a great future."
Such assurances had a sort of undue weight with Josiah, for we find him
not long after making bold to call on Squire Wedgwood on "a matter of
most important business."
The inspired reader need not be told what that business was. Just let it
go that the Squire told Josiah he was a fool to expect that the only
daughter of Richard Wedgwood, Esquire, retired monger in Cheshire
cheese, should think of contracting marriage with a lame potter from
Burslem. Gadzooks! The girl would some day be heiress to ten thousand
pounds or so, and the man she would marry must match her dowry, guinea
for guinea. And another thing: a nephew of Lord Bedford, a rising young
barrister of London, had already asked for her hand.
To be a friend to a likely potter wasn't the same as asking him into the
family!
Josiah's total sum of assurance had been exhausted when he blurted out
his proposal to the proud father; there was now nothing he could do but
to grow first red and then white. He was suppressed, undone, and he
could not think of a thing to say, or an argument to put forth. The air
seemed stifling. He stumbled down the steps and started down the road as
abruptly as he had appeared.
What he would do or where he would go were very hazy propositions in
his mind. He limped along and had gone perhaps a mile. Things were
getting clearer in his mind. His first decision as sanity returned was
that he would ask the first passer-by which way it was to the river.
Now he was getting mad. "A Burslem potter!" that is what the Squire
called him, and a lame one at that! It was a taunt, an epithet, an
insult! To call a person a Burslem potter was to accuse him of being
almost everything that was bad.
The stage did not go until the next day--Josiah had slackened his pace
and was looking about for an inn. He would get supper first anyway, and
then the river--it would only be one Burslem potter less.
And just then there was a faint cry of "Oh, Josiah!" and a vision of
blue. Sarah was right there behind him, all out of breath from running
across the meadows. "Oh, Josiah--I--I just wanted to say that I hate
that barrister! And then you heard papa say that you must match my
dowry, guinea for guinea--I am sorry it is so much, but you can do it,
Josiah, you can do it!"
She held out her hand and Josiah clutched and twisted it, and then
smacked at it, but smacked into space.
And the girl was gone! She was running away from him. He could not hope
to catch her--he was lame, and she was agile as a fawn. She stepped upon
a stile that led over through the meadow, and as she stood there she
waved her hand, and Josiah afterward thought she said, "Match my dowry,
guinea for guinea, Josiah: you can do it, you can do it." Just an
instant she stood there, and then she ran across the meadow and
disappeared amid the oaks.
An old woman came by and saw him staring at the trees, but he did not
ask her the way to the river.
* * * * *
From a shy youth, Josiah Wedgwood had evolved into a man of affairs, and
was surely doing a man's work. He had spent about five years making
curious earthenware ornaments for the Sheffield cutlers; and then with
full one thousand pounds he had come back to Burslem and started
business on his own account. He had read and studied and worked, and he
had evolved. He was an educated man; that is to say, he was a competent
and useful man. He determined to free Burslem from the taint that had
fallen upon it. "Burslem?" he once wrote to Sarah, "Burslem? the name
shall yet be a symbol of all that is beautiful, honest and true; we
shall see! I am a potter--yes, but I'll be the best one that England has
ever seen."
And the flower-garden was one of the moves in the direction of
evolution.
Occasionally, Josiah made visits to Cheshire, riding forty miles on
horseback, for he now had horses of his own. The roads in Spring and
Winter were desperately bad, but Josiah by persistent agitation had
gotten Parliament to widen and repair, at the expense of several hundred
pounds, the road between Lawton in Cheshire to Cliffe Bank at
Staffordshire.
And it so happened that this was the road which led from where Wedgwood
lived to where lived his lady-love. Josiah and Sarah had many a smile
over the fact that Cupid had taken a hand in road-building. Evidently
Dan Cupid is a very busy and versatile individual.
Sarah was her father's housekeeper. She had one brother, a young man of
meager qualities. These two were joint heirs to their father's estate of
something over twenty thousand pounds. Josiah and Sarah thought what a
terrible blow it would be if this brother should die and Sarah thus have
her dowry doubled!
The Squire depended upon Sarah in many ways. She wrote his letters and
kept his accounts; and his fear for her future was founded on a selfish
wish not to lose her society and services, quite as much as a solicitude
for her happiness.
For a year after Josiah had exploded his bombshell by asking Squire
Richard for his daughter's hand, the lover was forbidden the house.
Then the Squire relaxed so far that he allowed Josiah and Sarah to meet
in his presence. And finally there was a frank three-cornered
understanding. And that was that, when Josiah could show that he had ten
thousand pounds in his own name, the marriage would take place. This
propensity on the part of parents to live their children's lives is very
common. Few be the parents and very great are they who can give liberty
and realize that their children are only loaned to them. I fear we
parents are prone to be perverse and selfish.
Josiah and Sarah reviewed their status from all sides. They could have
thrown the old gentleman overboard entirely and cut for Gretna Green,
but that would have cost them an even ten thousand pounds. It would
also have secured the Squire's enmity, and might have caused him a fit
of apoplexy. And surely, as it was, the lovers were not lost to each
other. To wed is often fatal to romance; but it is expecting too much to
suppose that lovers will reason that too much propinquity is often worse
than obstacle. The road between them was a good one--the letter-carrier
made three trips a week, and an irascible parent could not stop dreams,
nor veto telepathy, even if he did pass a law that one short visit a
month was the limit.
Lovers not only laugh at locksmiths, but at most everything else. Josiah
and Sarah kept the line warm with a stream of books, papers, manuscripts
and letters. By meeting the mail-carrier a mile out of the village, the
vigilant Squire's censorship was curtailed by Sarah to reasonable
proportions.
And so the worthy Richard had added the joys of smuggling to the natural
sweets of a grand passion. In thus giving zest to the chase, no thanks,
however, should be sent his way. Even stout and stubborn old gentlemen
with side-whiskers have their uses.
And it was about this time that John Wesley came to Burslem and was
surprised to find a flower-garden in a community of potters. He looked
at the flowers, had a casual interview with the owner and wrote, "His
soul is near to God."
* * * * *
Wedgwood knew every part of his business. He modeled, made designs,
mixed clay, built kilns, and at times sat up all night and fed fuel into
a refractory furnace. Nothing was quite good enough--it must be better.
And to make better pottery, he said, we must produce better people. He
even came very close to plagiarizing Walt Whitman by saying, "Produce
great people--the rest follows!"
Wedgwood instituted a class in designing and brought a young man from
London to teach his people the rudiments of art.
Orders were coming in from nobility for dinner-sets, and the English
middle class, instead of dipping into one big pot set in the center of
the table, were adopting individual plates.
Knives and forks came into use in England about the time of Good Queen
Bess, who was only fairly good. Sir Walter Raleigh, who never posted
signs reading, "No Smoking," records, "Tiny forks are being used to
spear things at table, instead of the thumb-and-finger method sanctified
by long use." But until the time of Wedgwood a plate and a cup for each
person at the table was a privilege only of the nobility, and napkins
and finger-bowls were on the distant horizon.
Wedgwood had not only to educate his workmen, but he had also to educate
the public. But he made head. He had gotten a good road to Cheshire, and
an equally good one to Liverpool, and was shipping crockery in large
quantities to America. Occasionally, Wedgwood taught the designing
classes, himself. As a writer he had developed a good deal of facility,
for three love-letters a week for five years will educate any man. To
know the right woman is a liberal education. Wedgwood also had given
local addresses on the necessity of good roads, and the influence of a
tidy back-yard on character.
He was a little past thirty years old, sole owner of a prosperous
business and was worth pretty near the magic sum of ten thousand pounds.
Squire Wedgwood had been formally notified to come over to Burslem and
take an inventory. He came, coughed and said that pottery was only a
foolish fashion, and people would soon get enough of it. Richard felt
sure that common folks would never have much use for dishes.
On being brought back to concrete reasons, he declared that his
daughter's dowry had increased, very much increased, through wise
investments of his own. The girl had a good home--better than she would
have at Burslem. The man who married her must better her condition,
etc., etc.
It seems that Josiah and Sarah had a little of the good Semitic instinct
in their make-up. The old gentleman must be managed; the dowry was too
valuable to let slip. They needed the money in their business, and had
even planned just what they would do with it. They were going to found
a sort of Art Colony, where all would work for the love of it, and where
would take place a revival of the work of the Etruscans. As classic
literature had been duplicated, and the learning of the past had come
down to us in books, so would they duplicate in miniature the statues,
vases, bronzes and other marvelous beauty of antiquity.
And the name of the new center of art was chosen--it should be
"Etruria." It was a great dream; but then lovers are given to dreams: in
fact, they have almost a monopoly on the habit!
* * * * *
Great people have great friends. Wedgwood had a friend in Liverpool
named Bentley. Bentley was a big man--a gracious, kindly, generous,
receptive, broad, sympathetic man. Your friend is the lengthened shadow
of yourself.
Bentley was both an artist and a businessman. Bentley had no quibble or
quarrel with himself, and therefore was at peace with the world; he had
eliminated all grouch from his cosmos. Bentley began as Wedgwood's
agent, and finally became his partner, and had a deal to do with the
evolution of Etruria.
When Bentley opened a showroom in London and showed the exquisite,
classic creations of Flaxman and the other Wedgwood artists, carriages
blocked the streets, and cards of admission had to be issued to keep
back the crowds. Bentley dispatched a messenger to Wedgwood with the
order, "Turn every available man on vases--London is vase mad!"
A vase, by the way, is a piece of pottery that sells for from one to ten
shillings; if it sells for more than ten shillings, you should pronounce
it vawse.
On the ninth of January, Seventeen Hundred Sixty-four, Wedgwood wrote
Bentley this letter: "If you know my temper and sentiments on these
affairs, you will be sensible how I am mortified when I tell you I have
gone through a long series of bargain-making, of settlements,
reversions, provisions and so on. 'Gone through it,' did I say? Would to
Hymen that I had! No! I am still in the attorney's hands, from which I
hope it is no harm to pray, 'Good Lord, Deliver me!' Sarah and I are
perfectly agreed, and would settle the whole affair in three minutes;
but our dear papa, over-careful of his daughter's interest, would by
some demands which I can not comply with, go near to separate us if we
were not better determined.
"On Friday next, Squire Wedgwood and I are to meet in great form, with
each of us our attorney, which I hope will prove conclusive. You shall
then hear further from your obliged and very affectionate friend, Josiah
Wedgwood."
On January Twenty-ninth, Sarah and Josiah walked over to the little
village of Astbury, Cheshire, and were quietly married, the witnesses
being the rector's own family, and the mail-carrier. Just why the latter
individual was called in to sign the register has never been explained,
but I imagine most lovers can. He surely had been "particeps criminis"
to the event.
And so they were married, and lived happily afterward. Josiah was
thirty-four, and Sarah twenty-nine when they were married. The ten years
of Laban service was not without its compensation. The lovers had lived
in an ideal world long enough to crystallize their dreams.
In just a year after the marriage a daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs.
Josiah Wedgwood, and they called her name Susannah.
And Susannah grew up and became the mother of Charles Darwin, the
greatest scientist the world has ever produced.
Writers of romances have a way of leaving their lovers at the
church-door, a cautious and wise expedient, since too often love is one
thing and life another. But here we find a case where love was worked
into life. From the date of his marriage Wedgwood's business moved
forward with never a reverse nor a single setback.
When Wedgwood and Bentley were designated "Potters to the Queen," and
began making "queensware," coining the word, they laid the sure
foundation for one of the greatest business fortunes ever accumulated in
England.
Two miles from Burslem, they built the little village of Etruria--a
palpable infringement on the East Aurora caveat. And so the dream all
came true, and in fact was a hundred times beyond what the lovers had
ever imagined.
Sarah's brother accommodatingly died a few years after her marriage, and
so she became sole heiress to a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, and
this went to the building up of Etruria.
Wedgwood, toward the close of his life, was regarded as the richest man
in England who had made his own fortune. And better still, he was rich
in intellect and all those finer faculties that go into the making of a
great and generous man.
Twenty-two years after his marriage, Wedgwood wrote to his friend Lord
Gower: "I never had a great plan that I did not submit to my wife. She
knew all the details of the business, and it was her love for the
beautiful that first prompted and inspired me to take up Grecian and
Roman Art, and in degree, reproduce the Classic for the world. I worked
for her approval, and without her high faith in me I realize that my
physical misfortunes would have overcome my will, and failure would have
been written large where now England has carved the word Success."