China Learn

Old China

The love for Old China is not generally an acquired taste. In his essay on the subject, Charles Lamb says: “I am not conscious of the time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.” It is so with me. When I recall “those yesterdays which look backward with a smile” I feel I had already learned to love it in the early days, when the little poem of the “Willow Pattern” was a joy, and I recall the feeling of excitement and awe with which I then beheld” those little lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective, a china tea-cup.”

This love for old china has grown as years have passed; but not until I had mastered the rudiments of Ceramic Art and knew something of the history of my treasures did I really enjoy or appreciate them to the full, and I feel sure that anyone who will take the trouble to acquire this knowledge will, like myself, be more than repaid by the many interests it arouses.

A well-known savant has spoken of china collecting as “a complete education,” but, even if one is unable entirely to endorse his sentiments, it must be allowed that there is a very real and deep fascination in it when we read that it was said of such a man as Horace Walpole:

“China’s the passion of his soul,
A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl,
Can kindle wishes in his breast,
Inflame with joy, or break his rest.”

Perhaps one reason why this hobby has become so increasingly popular is that specimens of the Ceramic Art are so numerous it is quite the exception to find a family which has not some genuine examples; the wonder is how few people know or care to inquire into their history. To them it seems enough that they are the possessors of some “old blue,” or of something which has “been in the family hundreds of years”; but of the place of manufacture, the lives which were spent, the hopes and fears, the ambitions, struggles, successes, and the all too-frequent failures that are writ large on the possessions they so blindly prize, they know nothing, and are the poorer in their lack of knowledge.

Nor is this love for china and earthenware a latter-day craze. It is a time-honored taste, and one about which much has been written in other days. Pope considered that the love of china-collecting in women denoted unusual strength of mind and absence of nerves. In “Lines Addressed to a Lady” he uses these words -

“Spleen, vapors, or small-pox-above them all,
And mistress of herself, tho’ china fall.”

Addison would seem to have been out of sympathy with the hobby. He says: “There are no inclinations in women which more surprise me than their passion for chalk and china. The first of these maladies wears out in a little time, but when a woman is visited by the second, it generally takes possession of her for life. China vessels are the playthings for women of all ages…” “An old lady of fourscore shall be as busy cleaning an Indian mandarin as her great-granddaughter is in dressing her baby. How much anger and affliction are produced daily in the hearts of my dear country-women by the breach of this frail furniture. Some of them pay half their servants’ wages in china fragments which their carelessness has produced.”

The “anger and affliction” so feelingly alluded to by Addison seem to have been recognized drawbacks to the love of earthenware from its earliest days. Thus we read a dictum of Epictetus –

“If thou hast a piece of earthenware consider that it is a piece of earthenware, and by consequence very easy and obnoxious to be broken. Be not, therefore, so void of reason as to be angry or grieved when this comes to pass.”

Either Epictetus had not fallen under the spell, or he had soared to lofty heights attained by few-if any-latter-day enthusiasts.