MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
1 T is prudent to treat collectors delicately, since they are sensitive
folk. When I ventured last summer to question the value of the contribution made by philatelists to human society, I aroused a storm of obloquy which did not subside until I had fled the country and placed the Channel between myself and the outraged community of stamp-lovers. It is indeed difficult to understand why collectors should be so touchy about their tastes. I happen myself to like politics, books, architecture, history, pictures, gardening, chaffinches and lots of very expensive port. But I do not expect other people to share all, or any, of these tastes. Nor do I feel personally affronted if someone tells me that he loathes port wine. Collectors possess little of this humane tolerance ; they feel them- selves to be a minority, and they are not at all sure that they are not a persecuted minority. Observe the wince of pain which darts across their faces if an outsider ventures to intrude rough fingers into their peculiar delights ; observe also how, when they meet a fellow- collector, they hurry into confederate conclave, oblivious of the earth around them, crooning necromancies together with sparkling eyes. Since surely, among the many careless phrases which we use, one of the most meaningless is the phrase "the collector's instinct." An instinct, according to the dictionary, is "a natural or spontaneous tendency or inclination." But the sad obsession which afflicts collec- tors is only questionably natural and quite certainly not spontaneous. It is not an instinct at all ; it is a slow, and perhaps even contagious, disease. It is a malady which creeps gradually upon the system, infecting the glands and the arteries, and eventually envenoming the brain itself. That is why, I suppose, collectors are so touchy about themselves. Both touchy and defiant, even as kleptomaniacs or those who indulge in heroin or cocaine.
* * * The very real sympathy which I feel for those who are afflicted with obsessive mania induces me therefore to treat all collectors with kindliness and that respect which is due to every form of human frailty. This does not mean that I am not startled by the schizo- phrenic symptoms which they display. The other evening, for instance, Miss Edith Craig discoursed shamelessly upon the wireless about the particular form of mania with which it seems she has for years been afflicted. Miss Craig is a woman for whom I have the deepest respect ; she is a woman of strong character and high intellec- tual qualities ; she is the finest type of artist, namely one who not only possesses high standards herself but inspires othei artists with a similar sense of values. And what is it that Miss Craig, the inheritor of so much charm and genius, has collected all these years? She has collected the brass ornaments which on hangs on horses. Miss Craig, so far as I know, is no inveterate horse-lover ; she has never been a dray-man's mate. It is not the horses which she loves so much, but the gauds or symbols which they wear. What " instinct" can it have been which led Miss Craig to diverge from the broad pathways of dramatic art in order to clutter up her life with the brass ornaments of cart-horses? When she spoke of those ornaments which were made by hand she flung into her voice that deep aesthetic reverence with which one refers to the Divina Corn- media : when she spoke of the brass"--ware which was turned out by machinery her voice assumed the ringing accents of scorn. It can have been no instinct which suborned Miss Craig to collect the ornaments of horses ; it can only have been some insidious malady. It was almost with defiance that to a listening world she proclaimed her vice.
* Then there is the sad, the almost tragic, case of Mr. Michael Sadleir. I have known Mr. Sadleir since his youth ; he has been my publisher for twenty years ; he will always be my publisher. When year after year I have visited him in his office I have observed an ever increasing array of Victorian yellow-backs upon his shelves. I have made no comment upon this sad collection, even as no gentleman would exclaim aloud if he observed a hypodermic syringe upon the dressing table of a friend. But when Mr. Michael Sadleir and Mr. John Carter (a fellow addict) get torther, they croon. Mr.
Jennings croons, Mr. John Sparrow croons ; the crooning of bibilio- philes emits a distinctive note. Is the irritation which the peculiar sound arouses in me due merely to the fact that one is mortified by discovering a whole area of scholarship or enjoyment from which one is temperamentally barred? Or is that I really believe such obses- sions are unworthy of man's unconquerable mind? Nobody can really love a yellow-back ; all that they love is knowing more about yellow-backs than other people, or possessing a yellow-back which Mr. Carter or (mutatis mutandis) Mr. Sadleir does not possess. Is this an unfair conclusion? Perhaps it is Anyhow it was in a mood of hostility that I visited this week the exhibition of Victorian Fiction which Mr. Carter and Mr. Sadleir, Arcadians both, have organised in the pleasant premises of the National Book League at No. 7 Albemarle Street. The snow outside was whirling turbulently ; the galoshes of previous visitors had left little hoof-marks of snow in the hail; it was warm inside. My attention was first drawn to the drop-scene which the "learned and ingenious" Mr. Osbert Lancaster had designed. I was pleased by this drop-scene ; it gave to the ex- hibition a human touch ; it suggested that the bibliophiles did not take themselves quite so seriously as all that. My resentment melted in the warmth of such a welcome ; I examined the exhibits in a recep- tive mood.
In the two-decker introduction to the admirable catalogue Mr. Sadleir says nice things about Mr. Carter and Mr. Carter says even nicer things about Mr. Sadleir. Had it not been, says Mr. Carter, for "the devotion and discriminating skill of a single collector, Mr. Michael Sadleir," it would not have heen possible to display such a collection "almost all of it in a brilliant state of preservation." The epithet " brilliant " is doubtless a comparative term, but I must admit that the interest of this exhibition far transcends a merely specialist interest. No person who has any concern with the relation between literature and the public can fail to be stimulated and im- pressed. Here is something more important than an assemblage of forgotten first editions ; one has in front of one, in concise shape, the summarised history of English book-production from 1837 to *or. In 1836, for instance, Messrs. Chapman and Hall thought it would be a good idea to produce a part-issue of sporting plates. They commissioned Robert Seymour to design the plates and then invited an obscure journalist of the name of Charles Dickens to add the letterpress. The first number of the "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" was not a commercial success. Thereafter Robert Seymour died and Dickens became more interested in the character of Sam Weller than he ever had been in the sporting episodes which he had been commissioned to write. The public shared this interest and Pickwick was born and thrived. "The success of that letterpress," writes Mr. Carter, "changed the whole status of the part-issue for the next fifty years." Similarly one can trace in this exhibition the fluctuations of supply and demand and the curious adjustments between the publishers and the libraries, between the book-sellers and the reading public. One learns much.
* * *
The ordinary layman, who knows little about original boards, will be fascinated to observe how the taste in book production changed suddenly from 1885 onwards. It seems incredible to us that an artist such as George. du Maurier could have allowed his illustrations to Florence Montgomery's Misunderstood to appear in so ghastly a form ; it is strange that Meredith, as late as 1876, could have permitted Beauchamp's Career to carry such ungainly lettering upon the spine. The yellow-backs, which we only find today in the gun-rooms or billiard-rooms of the largest country houses, were gay enough. But the ordinary volumes were drab and green and brown. Gradually the illustrators, such as Walter Crane and Hugh Thomson, exerted their influence. And then come the 'eighties and such books as Routledge's two volumes of Lord Lytton's The Parisians. If the collector's instinct can prolluce an exhibition such as this I withdraw all the hard things that I have said.
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