Calling at the smart antique dealers' spacious establishments in London is an édition de luxe version of the same story. Here choice pieces are assembled, polished and poised adroitly to arrest attention. Some of these elegant salons resemble museums; the surroundings breathe order, calm, refinement. Prices rule high as the aristocratic character of the place you visit.
Nothing is cheap in these sanctuaries of the old nobility of furniture and art treasure except courtesy and affability, which are supplied gratis by the faultlessly accoutred gentleman of the department, who checks you on entering and conducts you round. Any object you look at he explains for your edification. He rivals the showman at Windsor Castle or the Tower of London for knowing his part and throwing at you torrents of information as he strides along. He revels in it, and his importance and intelligence mesmerize you and keep most of your five senses stirring. You admire him as an oracle of antique lore, and listen to him with fear and trembling. His beaming smile encourages you to live, and politely you ask another question.
Here the business of selling is practised as a fine art. The attendant is so well bred, well groomed, so condescending and obliging you feel yourself a criminal if you escape him without making a purchase. You say: "I should like to go back and see that satinwood chair again." "Ah," he replies, "that is a most interesting piece; King Edward often sat in that chair. It belonged to the Hon. Oliver Grimes, a great friend of King Edward; it was the King's favourite seat when he visited the Hon. Oliver at Redcote Manor. And here is the oak table you admired so much as we passed along. We know the pedigree of it. It came from Monkwood Hall, Derbyshire. It has been in possession of the family since the year 1620. We bought it at the Hall last week, and so it has never been in the trade. How beautifully the frieze is carved; what a fine patina it has formed; it shines like a mirror; surely the butler must have polished it every week when he waxed the oak floor. It has never been damaged or repaired; it is genuine all over. It is a precious and faultless piece of Jacobean oak, and the price is only...!"
There are dangers and pitfalls besetting the buyer of old furniture. Even in the garden of antiques a slimy serpent spoils the smiling landscape. Fraud is not unknown side by side with honest dealing. Not all furniture is old as it looks. That is where that predatory rascal called the faker creeps in and preys upon humanity in general and the innocent amateur in particular.
There are sly manufactories of old furniture busy to-day in shoddy workshops, building up immaculate high-grade chairs, tables, cabinets, out of oddments of oak and mahogany collected from the scrap-heap of broken and decayed furniture. New wood is added in parts where necessary to complete the transformation, and when these modern antiques are blended, stained to harmonize in colour, and a glowing patina rubbed on by the artful dodgers, it takes a keen eye to detect the villainy of the deed, as that arch-swindler Gaspero Bandini said to his fellow-conspirator: "We must make it as antique as possible: we must sell the old wine with the dust on the bottle."
There is no fixed market value to old furniture as there is to postage-stamps or War Loan stock. The dealer sets his own price on his goods, and the cupidity of the public guides him how best to do it. He is a keen observer of human nature, and plays up to its little weaknesses for his own advantage, and he does it smilingly.
It is wonderful how environment works on our feelings and baffles our judgment. In the twinkling of an eye it changes the value we place on things. Dress the same man in two different suits of clothes, and you have all the difference in our cursory opinion between a lord and a tinker. The same article exhibited in shop-windows East or West of London changes its value appreciably, and we are blindly content to buy in the dearest market if it is the most elegant, and fancy we get full value for money.
I know a man in Florence who wanted an old Tuscan table, and he padded round the city looking for one. In a small shop where much furniture was crowded into little space he saw the article that pleased him. The dealer asked twenty-four pounds for it. He tried to beat down the price, but the dealer would not humour him, so he left without buying. Presently a large dealer in antiques entered the shop, fancied the table, and paid twenty-four pounds for it straightway, and removed it to his own premises, which are spacious and commanding. The man in quest of a Tuscan table visited the spacious premises and saw the table in its grander home, fell in love with it again, and bought it for forty pounds. Afterward he told the dealer in the small shop that he had found the table he wanted at Mr. So-and-so's, and, quite elated, he described his purchase. "Yes, I know about it," replied the rejected dealer. "You have paid forty pounds for the table I offered to sell you for twenty-four." The buyer looked foolish, and said: "But it was so much better displayed at Mr. So-and-so's shop that I did not recognize it being the same table; it looked worth twenty pounds more in his place than it did in yours."
The auction-mart frequently governs the price of old furniture and gives it an upward lift. The psychology of the auction-room is an interesting study. The loaded atmosphere of the place has a compelling influence that gets the better of one's judgment. In a shop a man scoffs at the tall price of a piece of furniture and haggles doggedly with the dealer to reduce it thirty shillings; in the auction-room if the same piece were offered he would compete with the crowd to raise the price of it incontinently. It is the consistent conduct of inconsistent human nature. It is that bellicose little devil who hides himself at the bottom of every human being, impelling him down into the danger zone to fight, who is guilty of the rash and feckless deed. A man enters the auction-room in a happy, breezy frame of mind, not to buy, just to look on and see what things are fetching. The serpent of the place tempts him, and he is a lost soul. His good resolutions evaporate like water on a hot plate, leaving no trace behind. The fighting impulse in him leaps up, and he bids and bids again, and eventually he finds himself the possessor of a rare old mahogany bureau hatched in the reign of our King George, but inadvertently described in the catalogue as a masterpiece of the cabinet-maker's craft composed in the times of Queen Anne!
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