THE Dr, T.P.RS IN OLD CHINA.
TT is difficult even for a comparative stranger to walk about 1. West London without noticing the extraordinary number of curiosity-shops, and especially shops dealing in old china and old brass; which have recently sprung up, while habitude wonder daily how their owners contrive to exist. Formerly confined to a few secluded quarters, like Wardour Street, Ilanway Yard, Hemmings Row, and streets of the same kind, generally very retiring thoroughfares, with a good deal of foot-traffic, they have now in- vaded every street in which shops are allowed, until they may be counted in hundreds, half-a-dozen sometimes suddenly appearing together. Many of them seem rich in goods, many exceedingly poor, and a few absolutely poverty-stricken, their owners appar- ently expecting to make a living out of the sale of a few bits of china, old brasses, and other duds, which twenty years ago would have been retailed by the marine-store shops. The purchaser who enters to chaffer for any article in the window finds himself usually in the presence of a woman who talks with absurd volu- bility, tells inconsistent fibs as if she enjoyed the telling, and would find any modicum of truth ennuyant, and often exhibits in the course of five minutes profound and even amazing ignorance of the articles she is selling. When the deal—which is transacted in the Oriental or Italian, and not in the English way, with endless haggling and protestations, and little historiettes, and exhibitions of articles which you do not want, and statements of the price she has given, and pointings to the auction-number on the article, which tells you nothing, and is often a forgery—approaches to a close, a second person advances, who has held aloof from the lying, who really seems to know something, who is sparing of words, but who finally clinches the bargain, which then proceeds in an ordinary business way. Of course it is the rage for "curios," and especially for china, which supports all these people, but extra- ordinary as that rage is—and it is more like a mania than a taste, thousands of persons making themselves unhappy till they have a few " choice " specimens of something the merit of which they scarcely perceive — their number would be far less than it is, were it not for the fact explained at a trial for re- ceiving stolen goods which has been going on in London for the last few weeks. A dealer was accused—falsely, the jury thought, and the probability is they were right—of buying some stolen china, knowing it to have been stolen. As usual, the prosecution relied a good deal on the disparity between the price the dealer had given and the price he had asked, and in most cases there is no getting over that evidence. A man who buys a gold snuff-box for a guinea, and sells it for 120, is either knowingly cheating the seller by representing the box as gilt-metal, or he is buying with a fall knowledge that the seller is either a thief, or a swindler. The dealer in this case had, however, a complete answer. The very business of the curio-dealers is "picking up" things for shillings which they afterwards sell for pounds, or scores of pounds, to particular customers. Sometimes they buy out of a knowledge that, within limits which we can see, but which we confess we are puzzled accurately to define, they have a right to use. The china-cup, say, is worth intrinsically a sovereign, but it has on it a mark which shows that it came from a certain hand, and is, therefore, in connoisseurs' eyes, cheap at ten pounds ; or it has another, proving it to have been manufactured in a certain Emperor's reign, three centuries ago, and is therefore worth fifty ; or finally, it is one of a set of which only five exist, and is there- fore worth 1200. It is hard to say why a dealer in china should not utilise knowledge like that, as a dealer in Stocks utilises his political information, or a dealer in, say, sarsaparilla utilises his experience that the stuff looks rotten long before it is much in- jured. At all events, he does utilise it, and now and then picks up a specimen which, if carried to the right people—whom, by the way, the poor seller does not know—yields him not so much a profit as a prize. He does not make a hundred per cent., but ten thou- sand per cent., in a few days. Of course such coups are rare, as coups are rare at the gaming-table; but the small dealer who knows lives always in hopes of making one, haunts auctions, deals with sailors, and makes forays, sometimes wonder- fully successful, into remote country places, where in past years careful housewives have accumulated china. (We are told, and mention the statement for the benefit of any dealer who may read these lines, and feel sore under them, that the beat chance left him in Great Britain of a real "find" is among the farmhouses of the West Coast of Scotland, where it was, about a century ago, a " way " to buy Chinese china from the sailors, and where the people would regard breaking a piece
,of china as a sign of impending misfortune.) He is not looking out for thieves, but for ignorant people who do not yet know that "sweet colour" will redeem any ugliness of pattern, who cannot understand why a unique specimen should be worth its weight in gold five times over, and who are not yet aware how very rich some of the foolish are. Very often, however, the dealer does not know accurately what he is buying or selling either, and then he always goes on the plan which suggests to the police that he is a receiver of stolen goods. Ile always buys in shillings, and makes long
shots at a selling price, asking, if you obviously know nothing, a merely arbitrary price, fixed by some calculation in his own mind or his need of money; but if he thinks you know a little, some extra- vagant sum. He may be right and the specimen worth money, and he can tell from your manner if he is; and if he is wrong, he has only to ask somebody else in the back-parlour, and return, to acknowledge with grim cheerfulness a total mistake, not in his price—that would be inartistic lying—but in the auction-number on the article. "It was 85, not 80, and is gone to Ealing, to show a gentleman who will give /50 for it. No. 80 is only 12." In trade of this sort there is, to the men engaged in it, all the excitement a gambling and all the excitement of busi- ness, both enhanced by the certainty that they will, in course of time, pick up in all sorts of ways the knowledge which will put them above the necessity of making shots. Even then their profits or prize-takings will depend on their knowledge of the "right channels," as they say—that is, of the men who are able and willing to " collect " at great prices—and there is no trade where the dealers are so anxious to attract wealthy buyers, or so pertinacious in seeking introductions. In none is there so much chance, and in none is the talent for acting, for being silent, and for chaffering, on which such men pride themselves, called so fully into play.
We wonder when this particular china-mania will end. There are a thousand people in London at this moment who are giving prices for specimens of china which would only be justified if they were jewels, or pictures, or rare books, or things the value of which could only decline with a general decline in rich men's purchasing-power ; and the chances are that if they are not buying simply to possess for a time what no one else possesses, they are blundering horribly. Fine china will always have a value. The taste for beautiful colour in particular has been born in the West, is being gratified on every hand, sometimes in the most outrageous ways—there is an account this week in the Daily News of the slaughter of the "ruby humming-bird," a living gem, which is enough to make a naturalist cry with rage—and it will no more die here than it has died in Asia, where the conditions of climate being favourable to its birth, it has lived three thousand years ; but that is no excuse for a mania like this. The taste for colour is not necessarily ruinous. People will always give reasonable sums for fine china, as they will for fine bulbs, but they will only give unreasonable sums while the passion lasts. Mr. Wertheimer, the dealer who gave evidence last week, must be right about that. Nine-tenths of the china bought now has no charm what- ever beyond a perfection of subdued colour, the influence of which will depart as men become accustomed to it, and which, as we believe, is not only imitable, but capable of repetition. There is no subtlety of genius in the Chinese blue, that it should never be repeated, and once it is repeated—once, that is, its peculiar and, we admit, very beautiful effect, has been fully caught and made familiar—the mania-prices will drop down. We do not mean that Messrs. Minton or anybody else will exactly reproduce blue china two centuries old, still less Kaga or Satsuma ware of 1400, but they will pro- duce an identical effect on the eye, will satisfy as completely that particular shade or inflection of the connoisseur's appreciation of beauty, and when that is done, the possibility of unique pos- session in any pleasant sense will be over, and the wild prices will be heard of no more. The value of diamonds has endured for ages, and will probably survive all imitations. But it would not survive the discovery of a method of making diamonds, and this, probably impossible in the case of the jewel, is certain in the case of every variety of china not dependent for its value on the picture placed upon it by a man of genius. We look upon a "fall in old china" as certain, not only from the laws which produce and govern fashion, but from this other law, that a want of the eye fully and incessantly satisfied ceases to be a craving want. Nothing but the reality of the value of china will remain, and allowing always that the genuine pieces now bought are beautiful in colour, that they are indestructible except by fire and careless housemaids, and that they will retainsome of them thecharm of rarity, that value will be far below the prices now
Iconsidered reasonable. At all events, if the very rich choose this form of waste, let not men with moderate means flatter themselves that their knowlege will protect them from all loss. Their knowledge will not help them more than others' ignorance to the price of china in 1900, now only twenty-four years Renee. One touch of national misfortune, one year's stoppage of trade, one short series of calamities a little heavier than those of 1866, and rare china will have, for a year at all events, no value at all. Manias of that kind never survive a sharp and perceptible interruption.
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