The Pleasures of Collecting

THE PLEASURES OF COLLECTING


BY GARDNER TEALL
Being sundry delectable excursions in the realm of antiques and curios, American, European, and Oriental
New York The Century Company 1920 Copyright, 1920, by The Century Co. TO MY SISTER FRANCES COTHEAL TEALL IN LOVING MEMORY
Your true collector does not apologize for his hobbies; he exalts their virtues. Necessity may occasionally compel him to resort to the camouflage of mid-interest, as when his family is not in sympathy with his pursuits; or, again, as when fate has placed him in arid communion with unsympathetic associates, individuals whose personalities have developed independently of their souls, leaving them pronounced in the directions they invariably select; directions, in consequence, invariably divergent from those paths which the true collector loves to tread.
While not secretive by nature, and by the same nature eager to share his joys with his fellow-beings, the true collector is endowed, more often than not, with a certain intuitive perception which enables him to appreciate the futility of hoping to convert the unequipped infidel to the solaces of his own faith in the delights of the lares and penates of another generation, an intuition which warns him to protect his peace of mind by harmlessly appearing to accept with good grace the commonplacenesses undoubtedly enjoyed by the many, but with no culpable renunciation of his own lively interest in the quaint and curious mementos of the world of yesterdays, a world into which our own to-days slip, one by one, silently, but as surely followed by our to-morrows.
Was it not Charles Lamb who exclaimed: “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity,—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we forever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! The past is everything, being nothing!”