On the Track of the Object of Virtue

A Few Remarks About Collectors and—To Hear Them Tell It—Their Finds

DEEMS TAYLOR

THE collecting mania isn't particularly I modern, of course. Josephine, I suppose, -d-L used to bore her friends daily with stories of how "Napoleon came back from Venice this year with four of the darlingest bronze horses that he picked up for practically nothing! Just wait till you sec them!" But never in any age, I am sure, has there been anything to equal our modern passion for buying aged and useless objects in out-of-the way places, in the hope that they will turn out to be something that somebody else wants. Most of my friends put in a considerable portion of their leisure doing what they call "picking up" such treasures, at invariably absurd prices. I do it myself—at least M. does it while I reluctantly look on. And after we have done it, we all gather of an evening and exchange lies about the contrasting price and value of our finds.

I notice one difference, however, between such poor tales of collecting prowess as I am able to muster and my friends' accounts of their deeds of derring-do. Generally, when I lug something home that has been acquired for practically nothing, it turns out to be worth just that. But my friends—! To hear them talk, they would slink shamefaced to a monastery if any of their antiques turned out to be worth what they paid for them. The rickety stool that was picked up for thirty-five cents always reveals itself later as a genuine something-or-other, worth as many dollars. The stone that the dealers rejected is purchased by some eagle-eyed friend of mine and resold for countless times its original price. As I listen to their sagas I sometimes wonder why my friends are not all down at the city dumps, making their fortunes.

NOT all the finds arc made by friends, of course. In fact, most of the really good ones were made by vague people whose friends told mine about it. Some of these coufs are so famous, and have been recounted so often, that they have attained the dignity, if not of history at least of folk-lore. There is the tale, for instance, of the young woman who was caught in the rain in an English village, and stopped for shelter at an antique shop. Not wishing to leave without making some small purchase, she bought a small necklace of dark beads. One day, after she had worn them for several weeks, the string broke, and she took them to a jeweller's to have them repaired. He looked them over, indifferently at first, then with awakening interest.

"Where did you get these?" he asked.

She told him. "I'll give you fifty pounds for them," he said.

She refused, and he raised his bid to one hundred, two hundred, and finally a thousand pounds. To make a long story short, the beads were a string of black pearls that Mary, Queen of Scots had given to the headsman as she went to the block, and the fortunate finder sold them for enough to make her independently wealthy —and incidentally, to present the shopkeeper with a cottage and a life annuity.

In another variant of this account the young woman bought a string of glass beads in an east-side junk shop, took them to Cartier's for repairs, and was offered $5 00,000 for them (they were diamonds, of course).

Another legend concerns the man who bought an apparently worthless old painting for five dollars, tried to clean it, and found a genuine Raphael underneath. The dealer, by the way, is said to have had a paralytic stroke upon hearing the news.

Then there is the man who was riding through the Strand on top of a bus, saw a curious object in the window of a second-hand dealer, stopped the bus, and bought it (the object) for ten shillings. It was a frog, made apparently of soapstone, which was later pronounced by experts to be the largest, the oldest, and—naturally—the most valuable piece of white jade in Western Europe.

ONE of these stories is undoubtedly true, for, I have seen the find myself. A few summers ago, when Esther Sayles Root was in Madrid, she was caught in one of those rainstorms that are such a boon to collectors, and took refuge under the awning of a second-hand bookshop. To while away her enforced leisure she looked over the books displayed on the bargain counters. They were mostly Spanish and French works of no particular value, but among them was a volume of Jane Taylor's Essays in Rime. She bought it for one and one half pesetas—in plain English, about thirteen cents. Arrived home with her treasure, she opened it, to find the flyleaf inscribed, "John Keats to his dear sister." The book had been given by the poet to his sister Fanny (the gift is mentioned in the Letters from Oxford, London, 1817), who later married a Spaniard. The inscription has been pronounced genuine by the authorities of the British Museum library, and the book's market value as a Keats' relic is estimated at about a thousand dollars.

Even the defeats of these collector friends of mine would be accounted triumphs by you or me. One of them, a young actor, spied two soapstone figures in an antique shop that were, he was quite sure, white jade. (He had been hearing about the man on the Strand bus, no doubt), hie bought them for three dollars and bore them in triumph to Yamanaka's shop on Fifth Avenue, for appraisal. "Soapstone" was the verdict; however, we hasten to add, even at that the figures were worth two hundred dollars.

But, like the young man who does not possess Elbert Hubbard's scrap-book, I have to sit dumb while these marvels are being recounted. My feeble voice, were it raised at these experience meetings, would sound the discordant note of failure. My finds never quite come off. If I were to descend from a Strand bus and buy a soapstone frog for ten shillings it would turn out to be a soapstone frog, worth ten shillings. Indeed, my most memorable adventures in the field of collecting objets de vertu are of a sort that I don't care to think about. I remember, for instance, a rainy night in Madison Square when a mysterious figure emerged from the shadows and a hoarse voice whispered, "Sable neckpiece—smuggled—cops—ten dollars!" I paid the ten dollars, and gave the neckpiece to M.

"Here," I remarked, "is a trifle for you that I picked up in a queer old place on the lower east side. By the way," I added carelessly, silencing her thanks with a gesture, "you might take it over to Jaeckel's and have it appraised."

She did. "Well," I asked confidently, "what did they say?"

"Rabbit. Eight dollars."

On another memorable day a friend in the Ear West sent me a dozen dark, glittering objects about the size of pigeon's eggs. "Out here," he wrote, "they call these Arizona rubies. They were given to me by an old Indian chief. They might be worth something."

Rubies! I paid the taxi-driver double fare to get me down to Tiffany's in the shortest possible time, and after considerable argument managed to get an audience with Dr. Kunz himself, the famous gem expert. He glanced at my treasure with almost indescribable apathy.

"Those," he said, "are obsidian; volcanic glass."

"And how much are they worth, Doctor?"

1 asked, still hopeful.

"About twelve dollars a ton."

M., too, has had her triumphs. She once telephoned excitedly from Hartford, Connecticut, to announce that she had just acquired an 18th century sampler for twenty-five cents, including the frame. But it wasn't exactly a sampler. It was a worsted wall motto, announcing tersely, "The Old Oaken Bucket", and we have since been offered thirty cents for it if we would keep the frame. M. visited the Cro-Magnon caves at Les Eyzics last summer, and by the exercise of enormous stealth managed to secrete and carry away undetected a prehistoric implement which later turned out to be a bottle top.

OF course I have set up what the Freudians call a defense mechanism against this. My defense is that most so-called art collectors are not collectors at all, but speculators, whose aesthetic standards are too dependent upon market values. The man who collects works of art in the spirit of one who collects postage stamps, hardly deserves to be called an art lover. If a terra cotta bust, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, is pronounced a priceless masterpiece by the experts, it is no more or less a masterpiece, I should think, when it is found to have a core composed of rolled-up contemporary newspapers. After all, the scarcity of an object has exactly nothing to do with its beauty. I have given up trying to beat the collecting game. I still buy just as much junk as the next man; but I buy it because I like it, even if it is junk, and not because I hope it will rise in value, like an oil stock. If the three-legged table that I bought on Third Avenue turns out to be worth ten cents less than the two dollars I paid for it, so much the better. There is just ten cents' worth less danger of its being stolen.