confessions of an incurable collector

Front matter

A GROUP IN PROFILE, PAIN let damm

'Y TOROND (18th century) [End paper

CONFESSIONS OF AN INCURABLE COLLECTOR

Contents

My Case The Truth about Collectors How to Collect—Dully !

. Collecting as a Sport

Panoramas

Chapter I My Case

HOSE scientific know-alls, who can create everything except Life and cure everything but Death,

. persist in telling us that the Collecting Instinct starts in youth with the hoarding of cigarette cards, crests and coins. Some of them, it is true, put forward a more continental explanation; but I utterly refuse to regard the pure delight of collecting as something unpleasantly abnormal. I prefer to look on the scientists themselves as freaks.

I have, in fact, long ago ceased arguing with science. There is no need: it so soon contradicts itself. One year it tells us to fill ourselves with currants, the next it picks them fussily out of our cake. Even in matters possibly more cosmic its assumption of cock-sureness is, I feel sure, terribly unscientific. How we lovers of old things delight in the simplicity of the sixteenth-century astronomers ! How conceited to imagine that Man, 500 years on, will get less joy from what our dear Professors now call their ‘‘ discoveries” !_ How he will love their potty little conception of the Universe !— provided only that any of our shoddy paper shall survive till then.

Why argue, however ; why worry about universals ? Does it really matter what gives men this collecting mania? Certainly it cannot always be a youthful indiscretion, for I myself, a case utterly incurable at forty-eight, never put two stamps, two crests or two cigarette xs B

A cards together in the whole length of my youth. At school I collected nothing ; indeed, I cannot remember that it was “ done ”’ at Shrewsbury, and we all know the strength of convention at a public school. At home, too, I was happy with what came along. My life was laid in pleasant places, as that of a soldier’s son. Who, at Aldershot or at the Curragh, could worry with collecting ? True in three years at Dublin, when I was in my teens, I spent happy hours accompanying my mother—a life-long lover of old things—as she combed thoroughly the dirty shops, innocent of glass-front or of name, that then lined both banks of the Liffey. But I never bought anything, and, more strange (for she was the most generous of mothers), I never recall receiving any gift of this sort from her till much later, when I was in my twenties. Perhaps she knew the strength of this virus and wished to save me from it till I was big enough to bear it.

No, my case is clear, the symptoms definite. It was at Oxford I “ got taken.” Not only does an old snapshot of my room there prove me still to have believed in drapery as fireplace decoration; it also shows my wall hung thick already with small colourprints in oval frames (an early symptom, nearly always), Wedgwood plaques (another line of least resistance), and countless silhouettes. A page cut from an old copy of The Isis, showing a young me as “ Isis Idol,” describes me as an “ eccentric ”’ person who “ dares ” (at Oxford even) to “ decorate his room with antiques,” not with the accustomed freshers’ joys. How happy I was—lI see now, and luckily knew then—as I pottered, all alone, round the shops of kindly dealers, no doubt

A SERIOUS SYMPTOM

Centre of a bow-front curio-case, seen through open doors delighted with so young a devotee, and revelled in the first sensation of overcoming something, of mastering a subject, of stamping philosophically on the inevitable ““learner’s fakes”! . . . Oh yes, long before I left Oxford luxury in favour of a Bayswater attic better suited to young authorship, I had the plague completely in my veins. The Boer War was being fought during those four years, and conscientiously I amassed a collection—‘‘ unique,” I am convinced, but burnt later in the wise providence of Fate—which included every variety of flag button or tie-pin that the jingoistic wore, emblazoned with the faces of our generals, on the lapels of their patriotic coats. Do not suspect, please, that I thought, even then, these objects beautiful. No ; it may have been, but very little if at all, the mere joy of amassing. Chiefly it was, I very well remember, a sincere belief that I expressed thus to amused elders : “ Well, after all, how interesting it’d be now if we had a complete set of the same sort of things which we know were worn at the time of Waterloo!”’ A poisonous young man, yes. Doubtless there was much itching in the toes of elders. But sincerely, as I say, I was wanting so early to provide a priceless collection for some collector whose grandfather might be still unborn. It was a symptom ; I must not conceal it. After all, men do plant mulberry trees ; and I know someone not yet twenty-five, who in the same spirit collected and documented every newspaper, leaflet and news-bulletin that came out in those first chaotic days of the late General Strike.

And when I reached my Bayswater attic, where one could stand up only in the room’s plumb centre ; when for three long-seeming years manuscripts returned with thanks from every editor in London ; when book-reviewing for five separate papers (oh, those ampler days !) alone made the attic even possible and prevented a tame return prodigally to my home and the parent-planned career,—do you imagine that even then I ceased from buying everything that was both good and cheap? Do you imagine that, faced with the choice of a new shirt or a silhouette, of lunch or a good drawing, I was ever sensible or prudent? If so, you are no collector.

But do not please stop reading. Everything else in these singularly unmysterious times has been explained by someone, but I am anxious, optimist that I have always been, to tell the world why men collect, why they enjoy it, why they will suffer the curses of bank managers, the lack of a car and other miseries, yet never dream—not for one disillusioned moment even—of giving up their hobby. 1 want to write frankly and simply, without affectation or any effort to be “ lit’r’y,”’ of what I myself have done and learnt. I hope to convince the general reader that a collector need not be the Professor Dryasdust of comic-strip fame ; that he deals with human subjects, subjects eternally alive ; and that it should not be a bore to read about them.

Don’t laugh, for this is bound to be an egotistic book. I must write as I think, or else it will be nothing. And because, if it is indeed anything, it must be a sort of soul-revealing, I have called it, not in any cheap spirit, a “‘ Confession.”’ Such as this book is, so am I. If you dislike its manner you would hate me. But don’t (I repeat) let us therefore part company before the end.

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Life isn’t like that, God knows. A million married pairs attest it: so what use pretending ?

As to that manner, I am—I swear—a serious collector and student of my own queer subjects, but I have never been able to get the right words. The artcritic jargon and the museum pomposity appal me as a reader. Why then should I copy a style that always has defeated me before the word Finis? Surely it is better to write as I feel moved, without reference to the effect, whether esthetic or emetic, on my reader ?

At this point some may wonder why I am so much on the defensive in this matter. Let me make my first confession.

Some years ago, sooner than be left out of a pretentious fashion, I divided my books up under headings. “* Novels,” “‘ Humour,” “ Belles Lettres ”—you know the type of thing nowadays that faces or backs every title-page. It was a disappointment to me that, under the good-sounding “ Belles Lettres ” I could put, with any honesty, only one book, The Art of Silhouette, and I naturally asked myself why I had never followed this book, which Martin Secker published in 1913, with another like it. Even my resolve to be frank, absolutely frank, does not prevent me from feeling ashamed as I confess the reason ; yet I believe if we were all honest it would not seem very unusual, for most young humans have something sheep-like in them. The critics were kind to my book, to the knowledge in it, to the admirable illustrations, to the beautiful end-paper designed for it by Maxwell Ayrton (I can praise the book, since Mr. Secker wickedly but patriotically pulped it during the war paper-shortage) ; and with all a writer’s vanity I revelled in long, appreciative press-cuttings. ‘Time passed and all this with it, except one word used by a reviewer, and that one word “ quirky.” ‘‘ Mr. Desmond Coke’s manner is a trifle quirky,” I expect this reviewer wrote. He sped at me a good word, old and uncommon. It stuck tight. Whenever I contemplated this present book (and I have promised it myself for quite a dozen years) I said: ‘‘ No, it will be quirky.” Imagine! One critic—one critic only of them all; a human radish like ourselves; probably married and forced to criticise if he would keep his wife—yet with the power, by one word, to put me off my enterprise. How wonderful indeed is Man !

Oh yes, I agree. Naturally I must have thought the word (so far as I understood it) just, or it would not have pricked me. So I went back to my novels, continued to satisfy my itch for writing by presenting

“heroes ”’ of fiction who displayed one side only of my quirky ego.

“Vanity, vanity ...” With fifty well in sight— can it be possible ?-—I shall not now change my spots, nor do I mind so much if they be seen of men. That was a sincere book, The Art of Silhouette, an honest endeavour to light up a little subject that I had studied thoroughly for years : and I wrote it sincerely. Let me do the same now and suffer the result in silence. If you find me quirky (maybe the war washed that out of me) believe that it is not put on; that I am saying nothing for effect ; that I, too, dread the facetious as much as | hate the solemn ; that I am terribly afraid of boring, because fascinated by my subject ; that I can write what I must write only if I quite forget what you will think of me.

From my window I can see, far below me at the Marble Arch, men and women who raise gesticulatory hands in strong desire to testify; to tell less lucky people the faith that is in them, to pass on the happiness that they have found. The world calls them cranks. And I remember how a society woman who wandered inappropriately into my solitary lair, and saw my two drawers full of peep-shows and panoramas, murmured—not, try to believe, in irony—‘* You must be very happy ...” She was a clever woman; admit. Perhaps she was right. It is so hard to say how much pleasure exactly other people get from their special sort of life ; how far they are amused by their amusements. Perhaps the false-looking “ gaiety ” of night clubs is mere concealment of real happiness below it. Certainly I have been happy and amused with life, except when it has staged a tragic scene. Was she right ? Am I like those men and women that I see there below ? Have I too the wish to testify and maybe to convert ? Is their instinct lying hid somewhere far behind this book ?

Chapter II The Truth About Collectors

“ WNCURABLE”? I think so. Fate, at least, [:: vainly made two big attempts to cure me. I have on my desk the documents that were

her prescriptions.

‘* And you can take it,” crisply ends the first in 1919 “that your goods are a total loss.” The goods thus referred to included my whole collection (except for a few silhouettes that I kept in my mother’s home at Horsham) up to the age of thirty-five. I had stored everything, on joining up in 1914, at Hudson’s Depository, near Victoria Station. When the war was over and I was just drawing childish room-plans to show where everything would “‘ go” in my first flat for five years, I opened a newspaper and saw ““ GREAT DEPOSI- TORY BLAZE.” Later I received the letter of which I have quoted the last words. All my Oxford purchases and all that had been added since in London were totally destroyed. Sometimes still, with a hot feeling that collectors probably will understand, I suddenly remember something that thus went and had been forgotten during the long-seeming years of war. Always from nearly the start, I had abandoned prints, china, and all the obvious collections ; buying only the uncommon object, the artist at that time unpopular, the thing made sentimentally with hands. Many wonderful Rowlandson water-colours were lapped up by the flames, notably the famous Anatomy Class and two of the largest and finest drawings by him that I ever saw, of Excavations at Bath ; stump-work that had escaped since the Jacobean times ; two cabinetloads of such choice trifles as nowadays

But where is my philosophy ? What duller than to read of other people’s losses? As well write about health-symptoms. Let us see Fate’s other document, then turn to gayer subjects. This one is a telegram, dated in the first week of this very year. It is from the Tate Gallery, which had borrowed fifty-nine of my Rowlandson drawings for a belated Centenary Exhibition of that neglected artist; ‘‘ Regret serious flood Tate Gallery Basement, everything possible being done.” ‘The Thames—annoyed, maybe by an artist who, more than most, celebrated her, being honoured in a basement gallery under artificial light--suddenly threw ten feet of icy flood-water over the exhibits. Fire and flood would teach the fool to be a collector.

It may be asked, by those immune from my mania, why I did not actually cease a pleasure that exposed me to such unpleasant shocks.

So far as the flood goes, my answer involves something of an anti-climax. The heroism of the director and all his assistants, aided by the fact, hitherto unsuspected, that water-colours will stand such rough treatment far more successfully than oils, finally restored my best drawings to me scarcely injured, Fate having relented sufficiently to damage nothing but the second-best. Moreover, the typical set of drawings lent formed, in any case, a part only of my whole collection. But the trial by fire was, I must admit, very near to making me despair. It seemed hopeless, at thirty-nine and with antiques growing yearly scarcer, to start again from the beginning. What then gave me strength or—if you prefer it—took away my resolution? First, there were those few treasures, still safe at Horsham, as a tempting nucleus; then I remembered the firmness, in like circumstances but at a later age, of Lord Wolseley, excellent collector and hero of my youth. I was appalled by the idea of so-called pleasure or gaiety as my main pastime ; I had totally lost the habit of even a small lunch : above all I was at the moment in the same house as a delightful Italian connoisseur, who travelled a loved Fragonard in his week-end suit-case and was horrified by my protective calm.

“ But why do you not weep ?” he asked me, again and again. ‘“‘ You are so calm. I do not understand. Why do you not—” (he gesticulated fiercely) “* why do you not—I should tear my hair, I should remember this, that, the other treasure that was ruined. I should see them crackling in the flames. I think I should go mad. But you—” and so it all began again. He meant well, and indeed he helped me. That vision of beautiful objects—objects that were beautiful centuries before my birth, and should have been for centuries to come—that very vision of them “ crackling” in the flames was what I had to fight against. The fear of it had given me the calmness which upset him. I put into The Times front page a short announcement thanking correspondents for sympathy and saying that I “‘ hoped in time to make other collections.” A few days later I bought the first of my Rowlandsons— the second, flooded, series !

IO

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THE “ WALLENSTEIN ” BOOK, closed : showing open work in silver on gilt background

And why not? Apart from the problem of filling my life, what should I have hung upon my walls? Framed reproductions from the ‘“ Art Department ” of women’s shops? I had to face the problem of room-decoration.

There seems to me, tolerant though I try to be, a streak of lunacy in anybody who collects doggedly an object that is ugly. So many collectors bore and disgust their friends by rooms that have the air of a specialised museum, whilst all the time they are the very people whose knowledge should allow them the chance to bring off something harmonious in the way of decoration. What can be more depressing than three thousand specimens of any thing, however beautiful the first might be ; what more pretentious and dismal than furniture set out, higgledy-piggledy, as A Collection, when it was planned for beauty and comfortable use ?

Always the collector has two great dangers threatening not only the merit of his achievement but the very beauty of his home. ‘These are the undying twin snobs, scarcity and size.

While I have been busy on this book a pother has upset our Press—always inclined to be rather too easily excited. It seemed anyhow, at first (for news nowadays is a chameleon, revising its shade with every fresh appearance), that there was a disastrous slump in the price of our great auks’ eggs. My own evening paper headed this sad news, rather sweepingly, “ DECLINE OF THE CURIO.” Lord Rothschild it appeared, had bought a great auk’s egg for £350, whereas its owner had asked £500 as a fair price for so big an

II ornithological achievement. (Journalese begins, I see, to infect my style.) Was this a fair price of tradition, or wasn’t it ? Hither and thither, foward and backward, raged the Homeric battle. Finally Lord Rothschild spoilt everything by writing with a quiet dignity to say that he had not recently bought an egg by a great auk ; that none had been “‘ on the market ” since the Soandso auction of some years ago ; that all the “ eighty-odd ” existing eggs had been codified by Mr. Someonelse ; and that £500, nay even £400 had not been ever paid for any of them.

Let no egg-expert think me narrow-minded from the manner in which I refer to this special matter. I have not, I confess frankly, studied the points of an auk’s egg. I do not know whether the value of any given specimen resides in the patina upon its surface, the exact grace of its stream-line, the neatness of its blowhole, or some recorded rapidity of production, ‘True, I once saw such an egg, and even handled it: but I am sure it had no charm of colour or of texture, for I should have remembered that. I recall only a bleak exaggeration, as of a nightmare after over-eating heneggs. I cannot believe that the “ eighty-odd ” existing eggs have any variety of charm among themselves, or that if an island were discovered with eighty-odd thousand auk’s eggs on it, they would—at any rate when blown—be worth more than five-pence, much less those five hundred pounds. If I am wrong, perhaps some collector will tell me what there actually is in a blown great auk’s egg (or a great auk’s blown egg) beyond rarity and bigness.

Next to such camphor-scented abominations of the seaside free library and museum I should place the alleged historic relic : a handkerchief used by Canute, old Blucher’s boots, and all the rest of them. Apart from ugliness, these objects are for the most part of no historical importance whatever. Blucher scattered boots across the continent of Europe. (About Canute, I confess I yielded to alliteration, which pleases me far more than history.) Only a man with the mentality of Grock, of Grock as he blithers delightedly about the stage, could really believe in the faded label attached to these relics. Even “ King Charles I.’s chair,” acquired lately by the Victoria and Albert Museum, has had its claims very badly shaken, I think fatally, by a writer in The Connoisseur (April, 1928), who proves that quite a different one was actually used at that unhappy monarch’s trial. A collector of any experience soon learns that no value must be set upon inscriptions, and hardly more on family traditions. I have in my cabinet, although the youngest child of seven, one family heirloom complete with history: though it came, of course, not from my father but through my mother’s family. It is an exquisite silver pocketbook, stumpy and thick, with covers of fine pierced sixteenth-century silver-work, containing the usual squirrels, roses, and so on of that period, all cut out in silver, thin almost as paper, shown up against gilt. In the four inside covers, so to speak, there are a Virgin, a silver-framed mirror, a compass, sundial, a miniature of a man finely carried out in oils. In the centre are eighteen writing-tablets of thick yellow ivory.

Now that this booklet was picked up on a battle-

CONFESSIONS OF field of the Netherlands by a FitzGerald, (I do not improve upon this pleasant synonym for looting) is of little interest, though an established fact. The story, however, does not end there. This book has been handed down, always, as ‘‘ the Wallenstein book,” and that, if true, distinctly is of interest. But zs it? I have no reason to believe so, or to doubt. I see no reason why it should be, unless my fierce Irish ancestor, as he transfixed his looted foe, asked, with a dentist’s I-fear-I’m-going-to-hurt-you smile, “‘ Oh, by the way, sir, what’s your name?” and got back a gasped “ Wallenstein.” But even then, could one believe the man? He might have had his last revenge by starting falsehood in an alien home. Timeo Danaos CeaGOnd Jerentes... 2) <7 Still, to me also this book, however much I may find weak spots in the story, remains by long association Wallenstein’s.

Mr. Bohun Lynch, too—novelist, ex-champion as boxer, caricaturist, collector after my own heart— has recently confessed in print to an exploded legend of this sort. He wrote, (and I remember reading) an article in The Connoisseur (June, 1913) about a pocket book—not silver, this time, but extremely choice, “ bound in red morocco, exquisitely tooled, and fastened by a small silver clasp.” The ownership of this book could be traced with certainty for some 125 years, and “ the owner of that date had inherited it from a Scotch family with which she and I” (Mr. Lynch) “were both connected . . . and of which an earlier member was alleged to have been in the Scotts Guairdse ’ (which the book concerns) ‘‘ when that regiment was formed, and to have owned the book,”

THE “ WALLENSTEIN ” BOOK, open: showing Virgin, sundial-compass, and date ‘‘ ANNO 1600

1688 to 1691. Now all this a younger and less wise Mr. Lynch set down as fact, boldly putting the name of this officer in print. Imagine his dismay when an eminent Scottish antiquary, though delighted with the hand-written and hitherto unknown information about the Scots Guards, was able to inform Mr. Lynch in turn that no such officer had served in that regiment during the period in question! So died yet one more family tradition.

The case of these two booklets, however, is moderately simple, for they themselves are at least genuine, however true or false the legend that has grown around them. What are we to think of the very common case where we are told that a certain object ‘‘ has been in the family two hundred years,” yet water-mark, workmanship, or other proof beyond dispute, convinces us utterly that it is, on the contrary, a modern fake? Let us not, at all events, be cynical. Delightful people who do not even want to sell spin us the tale with faith and pride radiant in every feature. What can we make of it? We cannot make anything. Art, not psychology, is our affair. . . . Wiser to pass on to another subject, with the mere warning — how necessary, all collectors know—never to be guided by inscription, legend or family tradition, but always to rely on facts interpreted by knowledge.

Perhaps it is rash to mention knowledge, for that inevitably sounds dull to the youthful ear, and already we are told, by those who should know, that the young, preferring cars and other faster pleasures, are ceasing to collect. If so, it is a pity and the loss is theirs. Noman can learn this pleasure late in life, yet it is among the few that last beyond youth ; increase (as we shall see presently) with age; and indeed make youthfulness eternal, not by a grisly pulling in of waists, but by a prolonging of real interest and joy in every work-free moment of each day. The collector is always met with something new ; he never reaches that trying moment which. comes to every man of pleasure—the moment when he has to admit, even to himself, that his amusements are a bore, that prolonged gaiety is a grim task indeed.

Every man, I freely admit, must find his own amusements, but let him see that they amuse him. The world just now is full of grousers—people with no interest outside themselves. Let these, I urge, collect something. If men are happy collecting duchesses or dance invitations I have no word to say, except to repeat that these things do not last. If aman choose to live more excitingly, to collect mistresses or medals, again I merely ask him: Is he happy and can he really keep it up ? Retirement is the end of everything when it involves one’s hobby. The man who collects antiques (that vile word must stand for want of a better) is always overdrawn, but no day is long enough for all he has to do.

It must not be thought, though it too often is, that the collector’s only joy is in the actual buying. When he has got his purchase (and no true collector will let it be sent—he will bear it home below his arm) the real fun is only just beginning. There is the closer inspection than was possible; the showing to a fellow expert (spare your other friends) ; the choice—and making— of a place to put it. If this calls for the rehanging of half a room, bliss is indeed enlarged : and if the whole room has to move round, joy is at last complete.

This, by an obvious connection, leads me to another subject.

I have not yet seen recorded what I take to be a fact : that most of the greatest collections have been formed by bachelors.

The cynic, a fellow whom I hate for his cocksure slashing, will smile here and provide to himself half a dozen reasons. Married men cannot “ afford ” to buy antiques ; wives ‘‘ won’t allow lumber ”—how stale it all is, how it stinks of Ally Sloper and the other penny comics that we enjoyed in childhood ; how far away it lies from ‘Truth! One can see this imaginary collector turned benedick, now known everywhere as “‘ Mr. Henpeck’; can hear his shrill-voiced shrew-wife who nags at him from bed to sell his Canaletto, whilst all the time he can scarcely stand, much less protect his property, poor wretch, so tired is he of bills for spring hats and of bearing a squalling baby up and down the bedroom. . . . Life must be splendidly simple for tame cynics. |

It is not possible to accept, on closer view, an explanation that seems at first more plausible and subtle : that bachelors are selfish, spend more upon themselves. In the first place, as I have already hinted, the whole question of financial wisdom, even of seeming possibility, is alien from the true collector. Not his the petty balancing, with set weights, of other men. When the real thing, the object he “‘ must” have, is offered him, everything—comfort, luxury, even necessary food —gives way to it. I need not elaborate this point. It

17 0 will be obvious to all collectors ; incredible to any other type of man. Fifteen years ago I wrote in The Art of Silhouette : ‘ It is a popular fallacy that the collector must bea rich man. As a matter of contrary fact, it has been shown already that, if he is worth his salt, he never has a penny. But, sophistry apart, the real col- - lector has no need for any special income. He spends no more upon his hobby than other men on theirs, whether horses, wine or taxis. He simply must adjust the choice of subject to his means.” (O, stern, optimistic Youth! As though one did not collect always the thing that one just can’t afford. A thousand bankbooks testify to this.) “‘ The collector is the happiest —if the poorest—of God’s creatures. He is the poorest because, if some miraculous twist of the wheel made him a millionaire to-morrow, he would merely collect elephants instead of silhouettes and never have the cash to pay for all of them.” ‘That last paragraph, I see, vindicates my youthful wisdom. Fifteen years have brought me a far bigger income; a more frequent overdraft at my bank. . . . Absurd to say that married men cannot afford collecting! Collectors cannot afford marriage.