The Collectors: Being Cases mostly under the Ninth and Tenth Commandments

by Frank Jewett Mather

Webb with Mayhew's dispassionate aid made a considerable haul below the second stone, though in truth there was nothing there to compare with the first lot. The batch of lustred pots is the pride of his eye, and when it is suggested that he values them highly he answers, "Well rather, they're pretty good, you know, and then they nearly cost me a broken head. I was so keen for them that I set a big stone where it might easily have tumbled on me." Then the rest of the anecdote, which Cleghorn, in whose presence it frequently is told, never hears with complete equanimity. The causes of his uneasiness I do not engage to analyse, for, unlike Webb, Cleghorn is imaginative and difficult.

THE BALAKLAVA CORONAL

As the dinner wore on endlessly, I consoled myself by the thought of the Balaklava Coronal. There in the toastmaster's seat was Morrison who had bought it, at my right loomed Vogelstein who had sold it, far across, towards the foot of the board, sat the critic Brush in whose presence I understood the infamous sale had been made. I missed only Sarafoff, the marvellous peasant-silversmith, who wrought the coronal in his prison workshop in the Viennese ghetto. Now there was nothing strange about Vogelstein's selling it, nor yet about Morrison's buying it; only the making of it by the illiterate Sarafoff and the silence of Brush when it was sold required explanation. Vogelstein, who breathed heavily beside me, undoubtedly held the secret. I felt so hopeful that time and the champagne which we were drinking for the sake of art would give him to me that I took no pains meanwhile to disturb his elaborate indifference to my presence.

Between him and me little love was lost. As the editor of a moneylosing art magazine in the interior, it was my duty occasionally to visit his galleries. After such visits the remnant of my New England conscience usually forced me to diminish or actually to spoil many a sale of the dubious or merely fashionable antiquities in which he dealt. But in the main my power to harm him was slight. He held in a knowing grip the strings of his patrons' vanity and taste. So he regarded me with something between scorn and uneasiness—as a pachyderm might take a predatory bee. For the sake of my steady production of the honey of free advertising he forgave a sting from which he was after all immune. At the beginning of the dinner he had greeted me with what was meant for a civility and then had relapsed into silence. To escape the loquacity of my other neighbour I gave myself to parallel observation of Vogelstein and Morrison—the great dealer and his greater customer.

Both plainly belonged to the same species and it pleased my whim to symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant. Morrison, the dreaded agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature. He moved more precisely and with a sense of wieldy power. His phrases cut where Vogelstein's merely smote. His bigness had something genial about it. He looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down villages chiefly for the joy of the affray? One felt that something more than Morrison's preposterous winnings had been involved in the clashes of railroads and cataclysms on the exchange which had for years past been his major recreation. Vogelstein, though evidently of coarser fibre, belonged to the same formidable breed. The mastodon, we must suppose, lacked much of the finesse of the rogue elephant of later evolution. And Vogelstein's Semitism was of the archaic, potent, monumental type. His abundant fat looked hard. For all the sagging double chin, his jaw retained the character of a clamp. Among the strong race of art dealers he was feared. Whole collections not single objects were his quarry. He paid lavishly, foolishly, counting as confidently on the ignorance and vanity of his clients, as ever Morrison upon the brute expansion of the national wealth. But Vogelstein looked and was as completely the professional as Morrison the amateur. There remained this essential difference that if nothing could be too big to stagger Vogelstein, nothing likewise could be too small to deter him. I knew his shop, or rather his palace, and had observed the relish with which he could shame a timorous art student into giving three prices for a print. It afforded him no more pleasure, one could surmise, to impose a false Rembrandt at six figures upon a wavering iron-master, or, indeed to unload an historic but rather worthless collection upon Morrison himself. For Vogelstein was after all of primitive stamp, to wit the militant publican. So he took toll and plenty, it mattered little where or whence.

To Morrison and Vogelstein no better foil could be imagined than Brush. If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic armies, his analogue was the desert horse. Small, spare, sensitive, shy, his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility. His flair for classical art had become proverbial. By mere touch he detected those remarkable counterfeits of Syracusan coins. It was he who segregated the Renaissance intaglios at Bloomsbury only the winter before he exposed the composite figurines at Berlin. To him the Balaklava Coronal must have proclaimed its nullity as far as its red gold could be seen. For that matter the coronal was a bye-word, and why not? The same dealers who had landed the more famous Tiara in the Louvre had the selling of it. The greater museums in Europe and America had refused it at a bargain. On Fifth Avenue and the Rue Lafitte all the dealers were joking about the Balaklava Coronal. The name of Sarafoff, its maker, had even become accepted slang. For a season we "Sarafoffed" our intimates instead of hoaxing them. And in the face of all this Vogelstein had sold the Coronal to Morrison under Brush's very nose. It seemed so wholly incredible that I began counting Vogelstein's heavy respirations, to make sure I was really awake.

Then the pale, tense mask of Brush—so isolated in the apoplectic row across the table—calmed me. That he was Vogelstein's or anyone's tool was unthinkable. Mercenary suspicions, to be sure, had been put about, but those who knew him merely laughed at such a notion. Vogelstein also laughed, shaking volcanically within, whenever the Coronal, the genuineness of which he still maintained, was mentioned. And he always treated Brush with a curious and almost tender condescension, much in fact as the mastodon might have regarded that fragile ancestor of the horse, the five-toed protohippos.

I have neglected to explain that the occasion which brought me at one table with such major celebrities as Morrison, Vogelstein, and Brush was a public dinner in behalf of civic art. For just as we find the celestial compromised by the naughty Aphrodite, so we distinguish two antithetical sorts of art. There is a bad private art which is produced for dealers and millionaires and takes care of itself, and there is a virtuous public art which we hope to have some day and meanwhile has to be taken care of by special societies. It was one of these that was now dining for the good of the cause. Under the benevolent eye of Morrison, our acting president, we had put pompano upon a soup underlaid with oysters, and then a larded fillet upon some casual tidbit of terrapins. Whereupon a frozen punch. Thus courage was gained, the consecrated sequence of sherry, hock, claret and champagne being absolved, for the proper discussion of woodcock in the red with a famous old burgundy—Morrison's personal compliment to the apostolate of civic art.

At the dessert, Morrison himself spoke a few words. The little speech came brusquely from him, and no one who knew his rapacity for the beautiful could doubt his faith in the universal superlatives he now advocated. Our art, he held, must weigh with our mills and railroads, else our life is out of balance. We never grudged millions to burrow beneath New York for light, or for drink or speed, why then should we grudge them for the beautiful inutilities that might make the surface of the city splendid. A craving for fine objects was his own dearest emotion, he wanted to see cities, states, and the nation ready to spend with equal fervour. It all came apparently to a matter of spending. Morrison entertained no doubt that an imperious demand would create an abundant supply of what he called the best art. Whether we were to transport bodily the great monuments of Europe to America, or merely were to supply beauty off our indigenous bat, was not clear from Morrison's address, and possibly was not wholly so in his own mind. But the talk was solid and forceful, and I could hear Vogelstein grunt with inward joy when he contemplated the city, the state, and the nation in their predicted rôle as customers. I too felt that a real if an incoherent voice had spoken, and that if civic art were indeed to come, it would be through such neo-Roman visionaries as Morrison.

Then the mood changed and a willowy, hirsute, and earnest reviver of tapestry weaving rose and pleaded for the "City Beautiful," castigating the Philistine the while, and looking forward to a time when "the pomp, and chronicle of our time should be splendidly committed to illumined window and pictured wall," with some slight allusion to "those ancient webs through which the Middle Ages still speak glowingly to us."