A Quartet of Potters - from All Manner of Folk (in 1912: Short Works Collection )

MP3 Audio CD. A Quartet of Potters - from All Manner of Folk (in 1912: Short Works Collection )

BEFORE me as I write stands a. vase. There
is nothing remarkable in that ; but this is a
vase of distinctive yet unobtrusive grace ; it
is not necessarily the grace that holds you in thrall
at the first glance, although it has that power also,
but the grace that insinuates and wins you unawares.
Its proportion is so exquisite that it affects the mind
like music, like slow, stately music ; or, better, like
the balance of the large, easy flight of certain sea-
birds. It compels you to think of such things, of
balanced, accomplished things, things which round
off, as it were, the infinitude in which every man*s
thoughts flounder and fret or take their ease.

Yet you are not only delighted by the proportion
of my vase, for this proportion is wedded unto a
subtle colouring of equal charm. There is something
strident, something of the brass band, in the colour-
ing of so much pottery, even in Iniari and Satzuma,
in Sevres and Derby and in Delft, but no hints of
high sounds spring out of the greens and greys which
bewitch the eye on the shell-like surface of my vase.
All is modulated to a harmony of whispering quiet.
To look at my vase after the hurly-burly of the
modem day is like going into a retreat where tlie tele-
phone bell is not and the motor never was. You feel
grateful to those greens fading into greys and greys
fading into green, in and out of which curve and
float the quaintest and most graceful of fishes etched
richly into the'clay.