The Joy of the Chase
COLLECTIONS can be made of any object under the sun which will bear transportation, and thus, though it must be for ever impossible to collect volcanoes or snow-flakes, a collection of elephants, if you have room for them in your flat, is no whit more fantastic (and surely much nicer) than a collection of fleas, which has more than once formed a life-long hobby with distinguished naturalists. Birds' eggs, Botticellis, butterflies, postage stamps, Greek gems, china, coins, antique silver, seals, jade, first editions of books (and why not second editions of books by less popular and eminent authors, which are surely of enviable rarity ?), all these, transportable, but otherwise differing from one another in every conceivable way, are the normal quarry of collectors. Indeed, a perfectly sane man once made a collection of walking-sticks, which seems a curious thing to do, and left it, by will, to the British Museum. But the acceptance of this bequest was so much more curious, that the British Museum itself ought to have been put in a Museum for so crazy a piece of acquisitiveness.
Collectors are just as various as collections. We have at one end of the scale (I will not say which) the monstrous millionaire, who having seen some Italian masterpiece of painting, in the house of a friend, commissions his " art agent " to purchase for him any Italian pictures of the great age that he can obtain, provided that the price asked for them is sufficiently preposterous. He does not hunt his quarry himself, he sends out a representative, while he lies abed and calls out " Tally-ho!" ; he does not care for it when he has got it, and the sum of his languid satisfaction is that it cost a great deal, and that now nobody else can get it. . . . Indeed to be a millionaire at all, almost excludes a man from the austere fellowship of true collectors, for acquisition is too easy for him, and one of the authentic joys of collecting consists in its difficulty. Moreover to get other people to make your collection for you means a sound black-balling from the elect, since without personal search, rewarded by only infrequent acquisitions, the rapture of the quest expires from the mere commonness of its gratification. The only chance in fact, for the millionaire, is personally to collect something rare but cheap, or to resign himself to being a mere patriot, and presenting his treasures to national collections.
There is again another spurious type of collector, who should more justly be called an accumulator. I have been of that rather sordid company myself, for I once had a really immense collection of concert programmes, as I preserved all the menus of these music feasts which I attended for many years. But it was not a real collection for the reason that I had not gone to these concerts in order to obtain the programmes, but in order to hear the music. My collection therefore, was not an end in itself, as all true collections are bound to be in the eyes of their collector, but a mere by- product of concerts. Had I detested music, but for the sake of acquiring programmes had clattered about London on winter evenings and sat out dismal hours in odious halls, then I should have been a collector ; as it was I was a mere accumu- lator. The case of those amazing folk who collect dinner menus (and who really do exist) is similar ; they do not go out to dinner in order to filch a menu card, but for social or gastronomic reasons. Their trophies are at the most mementoes of succulent hours, as my programmes were of melodious ones. So as soon as I saw that these were no collection at all, I threw them away, and should advise the hoarders of menus to do the same. The seed from which true collections spring, is constantly scattered in our minds. Every day we see objects that rather please us, a postage-stamp, it may be, a pretty wine- glass, a piece of Salopian china : those are the seeds, and suddenly one of them strikes root. We instantly want more of the same sort, and to the great detriment of our purses and professions we haunt dingy thoroughfares and peer through the windows of pawnshops in search of our desire. From that moment we begin to taste the indescribable joys of the collector, and among them we must place the human delight of making a bargain, and with a relish that no millionaire can share, unless he is a miser as well, we penurious folk hug ourselves to think that we bought a Salopian milkjug (erased numeral mark) for the like of which the merchants of the Brompton Road ask twice the price we paid. That was clever of us, and we value our specimen not only because it is a piece of Salopian but because it was cheap. The joy of the chase and the kill is far the finer and the keener, but no one is insensible to the pleasure of profitable purchase.
The true collector, it is hardly necessary to state, must have an expert knowledge of all his hobbies, and also he must have a definite personal relation to his specimens. A collection may easily get too large, if the collector cannot hold his hand, and then his collection outgrows his capacity for enjoyment : he becomes almost like the wicked millionaire who does not know what he has got. In order to feel the zest of the hunt again, he must weed, or consider his collection finished, and begin on something else. For myself I should never care to collect objects that are not in themselves beautiful, but tastes differ about that. The ardent philatelist, I believe, is never found musing over the exquisite colour and design of his stamps ; he values them entirely for their rarity. The collector of first editions reeks nothing of the contents of his book, and as for beauty the shabby boards or original paper covers of his specimens are far lovelier to his eyes than the finest toolings. But the joy of the collector is theirs, and what a constant spice that sprinkles over life, for any barrow in the street, any dingy window may hold a pearl of great price. But in our rapturous scrutinies, it is most important to have our senses alert. It is unlikely that any one of these dingy windows will hold a treasure at all, and practically impossible that it should hold two. It is therefore not the slightest use to give it a vague and general glance ; an eager and minute search is necessary, for we certainly shall not find (if old silver is our quarry) a Stuart tankard, or a Tudor salt lounging in the window, but occasionally (very occasionally, for if discoveries were common, they would lose their rapture) we shall be rewarded with something that will make us happy for days. Such a find, no very great thing in itself, was once mine as I took the air in the gaunt streets of Leeds between the concerts of a festival. For in the window of a very seedy curiosity shop, I saw, huddled up among little modern brie-i-brat and Dutch boxes, a silver tumbler, and on it, just visible through • the dim panes was the date-letter for 1714, and the maker's mark of Nathaniel Locke. So it joined a tankard already in my possession made by the same silversmith in the same year. And some day, without doubt, I shall find what I have sought for years, namely, a rat-tail spoon that has been used by generations of left-handed owners. I shall know it for certain when I see it, but how ? . . . Think I
E. F. BENSON.
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