Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit (5.1930)

appreciation of the fact that machine-made goods
are more exactly made. The machine so completely
conquered man in the England of the last Century
that it is hard to make modern Englishmen believe
that in other countries man has already begun to
conquer the machine. English manufacturers of
the Victorian Age had seldom any real pride of
craftsmanship in the goods they produced. More
often their attitude was purely commercial.
"Quality"—the word as much as the thing—is prob-
ably a greater fetich in England than in any other
country. Nowhere eise do people of all classes and
degrees of wealth respond quite so blindly and
indiscriminatingly to shopkeepers' or manufacturers'
appeals to purchase "something rather better.'' To
buy the cheapest quality of anything—and this quite
apart from such considerations as its relative
serviceableness—gives the Englishman an acute
inferiority complex against which his pride in-
voluntarily reacts. To his credit it must be said
that few nations have a deeper respect for good
workmanship and good materials. Rooted in the
Englishman's mind is the essentially XIXth Century
idea, fostered by William Morris and Ruskin. that
machine-made articles must inevitably be inferior to,
because a Substitute for, hand-made ones. He does
not see that they are simply different. In his scorn
of "Ersatz" he refuses to realise that whole classes
of goods have come into existence recently which
it would be almost physically impossible to make by
hand, and in which hand finish could not hope to be
so satisfactory as machine finish. Wireless sets of
British manufacture are. I believe. excellent in a
technical sense. But the cases of hardly any of
them escape from some "period" influence or other.
The Englishman is not sufficiently logical to see
that an "Adams Style" gramophone cabinet is a
ludicrous anachronism: or that things so wholly
new as wireless sets and gramophones should have
cases designed simply and solely to enclose their
mechanism in the most appropriate manner without
any "artistic" trimmings.

The civilisation of England is too old and has
been too smoothly continuous to enable the average
Englishman to be reconciled to the idea. which
animates the American, that what he buys need not
be of too permanent or durable a nature. because
very soon something better will be perfected with
which it will be to his advantage to supersede it.
Such an attitude profoundly shocks the tradionalism
of the English mind. The Englishman wants things
that last a lifetime. or can be considered as possible
heirlooms: the house he builds he wants to stand
for all time. To secure this quality of durability he is
ready to make the most disproportionate economic
sacrifices, and does not understand that he is
behaving as a "defeatist" to the cause of human
progress in consequence.

All the same there are certain hopeful signs.
Men's clothes provide a good example, if only
because their present international lineaments. both
for everyday and sports wear. have been evolved
and refined by an essentially English process of
simplification and sobriety known as "good taste."
Whether we find these clothes satisfactory. or even
comfortable, is not the point. The point is that they
represent a typical example of English "whittling

down" and reduction in design which in this
particular case has now become universal. Some-
times this amounts to a refinement. Before the
war it was an unheard of thing for any educated
Englishmen to buy ready-made clothes. For it to
have been known would have entailed a sort of
minor social ostracism. This attitude was utterly
illogical, and could only be explained by the notori-
ously bad quality of ready-made clothing, because
hardly anyone had hats, or Shirts, or ties made to
order, and people were quite content to buy these
ready-made. Yet since the war American methods
of wholesale tailoring have been applied with phen-
omenal success. Most Englishmen are already con-
vinced that they can be almost as well, and certainly
as "quietly", dressed in "ready-for-service" suits
at six guineas as in bespoke ones at sixteen.
Indeed, it now needs a very expert eye to teil the
difference between the one and the other. This is
a first step in standardisation, and most significant.
Since all classes and nations dress alike on general
lines the Englishman's morbid dread of being sartori-
ally "conspicuous" is dying a natural death. Now
that he has seen that the once despised ready-made
"reach-me-down" has been perfected by modern
mass-production Organisation to a high enough pitch
of technical excellence for him to be able to wear
it without qualms, it will not be very long before he
begins to realise that articles in daily use such as
furniture, china, glass and metal goods will gain
equally by being standardised; and that by hasten-
ing the process of standardisation he will be ac-
celerating a return to good workmanship and good
design: things which are very near to his heart.
But before this is possible he will have to accustom
himself to the idea that hand-made and machine-
made goods are essentially different in their nature:
and that the era of unbridled individualism, with its
concomitant hand-made goods, has gone for ever.

In pottery and glass things could hardly be in a
worse state than they are at present. The great
Staffordshire china-making firms are still resolutely
living in the past and ignoring the present, to say
nothing of the future. For the most part they are
bent on faithfully reproducing the same shapes and
decorative designs for which they were justly
famous at the end of the XVIIIth Century, and in the
beginning of the XIXth. The füll grotesqueness of
the Situation may be envisaged when it is stated
that Messrs Josiah Wedgwood and Sons of Etruria
have recently appointed as their chief art director
an elderly gentlemen, well known for critical mono-
graphs on the Italian Primitives, who was tili lately
ihe chief curator of the National Gallery in London!

Our general engineering products, where there is
fortunately no scope for any "artistic finish," have
generally a simplicity and compactness of appear-
ance excelling those of other countries. Our eng-
ineering draftsmen are expert in tucking away all
external " gadgets ".. English locomotives have still
the cleanest and simplest lines—lines that are often
of the greatest beauty and purity—of those of any
nation. The English mass-production motor car, on
the other hand. though as good as, if not better
than. the French, German or American mass-produc-
tion cheap car as regards finish, workmanship and
durability, has about the ugliest lines of any. Once

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