kers, 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