THE HAMILTON SALE.
THE interest taken by the public in the Hamilton Sale is not only a ,:urious sign of the times, but something of an intellectual puzzle. Why are people so interested ? They do not care very much about the Hamiltons, who have never been conspicuous figures in England, never popular, like some of the great Houses, and they have only a languid interest in Art, yet they are as curious about the details of this auction as if the contents of Windsor Castle—probably the most marvellous mass of this kind of wealth in Europe—were about to pass under the hammer. They read whole columns of prices given for articles they never saw with unmistakable gusto, and recollect the amounts as they recollect the details of the evidence on great trials. Not only do great metropolitan papers, like the Times, write articles on the things to be sold, articles in which admiration and contempt are strangely mingled, as if the writers were ashamed of their own inner longing ; but the best provincial papers do the same thing, inserting details about the magnificence of certain tables and chimney ornaments, which they obviously think will be attractive to their readers. We do not doubt they are right, and that their audiences are pleased to hear about the costly things, but we want to know why they are pleased. That the millionaire collectors and the great body of the rich should be interested is natural enough. They do not get such a chance once in twenty years. For generation after generation the owners of Hamilton Palace have filled it with fine furniture, and rare china, and scarce articles in unprocur- able stone, and books of marvellous binding, and beautiful pictures, until it has become a grand museum of all rare and costly things. They have been men of taste and cosmopolitan experience, they have had large incomes, and they have rejected with unusual vigour the temi)tation to resell. Hardly any house except Windsor Castle so full of treasures has escaped the desolator so long. Now, therefore, that the financial muddling of the head of the house—for, as appears in his suits, it is financial muddling rather than the usual mad wastefulness which has partly crippled the Duke— has brought the long collected treasures of Hamilton Palace to that Clearing-house of the millionaires, Christy and Manson's, the great buyers are all agog. The collection of rarities, too costly even for the rich, is not only their custom, one of their modes of investing wealth so that it may be at once safe and visible, but it is their pleasure and their pride. They ransack earth for anything which nobody else can get. They love their costly treasures for themselves, as artists love great pictures. They make them feel wealthy and separate, as no accumulation of Bonds can do. They know just as well as the most scornful artist does that Marie Antoinette's buhl furni- ture is not pretty, that precious porphyry is in its wrong place in a table, that a bottle of jade has no artistic beauty— we are not questioning the beauty of the material, which is often the perfection of subdued colour, or the charm of its end- less durability, a durability which may survive the modern world—but they have a joy in the possession of things so rare and expensive that Kings, if they had spare money, would com- pete for them, and that their possessors become in the inter- national world, of collectors illustrious by their mere possession. They like to contend with each other, too, in the great battle of purses, and up to a certain limit feel a joy in the very strife, which, however, rarely makes them totally forgetful of the cash their purchases may be worth one day. That the twenty-five or thirty persons who buy all the rarer rarities of Europe—often at prices which explain the legends about the old Roman nobles, who gave the plunder of provinces for a table or a vase—should, there- fore, flock to Christy's, that all the House of Rothschild, that invisible incarnation of wealth, should be visible in the iiesh in London, that all Jew agents should swell with importance and all their Christian rivals with anxiety, is natural enough. And, of course, the general body of the rich share their interest. They are just near enough to true millionairedom to care to know what the true millionaires do, what they buy, what they reject, what figures they think reasonable, and what is the extent of their entrain when the competition becomes sharp and bitter. But why do the general public care ? Of what conceivable interest is it to them that certain bits of furniture, certain morsels of semi-translucent stone, certain well-bound books, certain pictures, none of which they have seen or know of—for Hamilton Palace is to most Londoners a terra incognita —fetch the prices of small estates ? They do care, unques- tionably, for they discuss the sale to any extent, and we
suppose the reason is the same as that which makes them care about grand pageants—that descriptions of such sales gratify an inherent taste for magnificence and splendour. Christy's catalogue, with prices affixed, is to them a new chapter in "The Arabian Nights." The things are no more real to them than Aladdin's jewels, but they like them as well as Aladdin's jewels, or even better, because, being most of them the perfection of ordinary articles, they can conceive them more accurately. An "uncut diamond as big as a roc's egg" is a phrase only, but they all know what writing-tables are, they all would like nice writing-tables ; and that a writing- table should be worth six thousand pounds is a positive plea- sure to their minds, as great a pleasure as that there should be a man who can afford to give such a sum for such an article. They feel richer for it, as they do when they read the lists of grand bequests in the Illustrated London News. That may be foolish, nay, is foolish, but there is another side to the folly. We know of no illustration of the English freedom from envy, at once more odd and more convincing, than the undoubted fact that if Marie Antoinette's buhl furniture had been sold at ordinary prices, most readers of the Times would have acknowledged to a shade of disappointment. The English do not grudge.
We wonder whether the old idea that there was something wicked in giving such prices for articles of mere display, an idea which has lasted from the days of Suetonius, and was once conspicuous in England, has entirely died away. It certainly has much diminished. It does not appear in the newspapers at all, and when it comes out in conversation, it is usually prefaced with the shamefaced remark, "You see, I am so old-fashioned." The old horror of luxury is decaying, and although the decrease may mark the growth, visible in many directions, of a certain un- healthy sympathy with extravagance, and especially extrava- gance in decoration, it arises also from a better cause, the spread of knowledge. The general public understands, as it never did before, that other things than Bonds have a durable com- mercial value. It does not precisely know why such things should be so valuable, but it has caught up from the experts a conviction that they are, and that huge as the prices given at such sales may be, there is little or no waste in them. The costly things will sell again, when the money is wanted, for just as much as they fetched this week. So permanent is the tendency of the very rich to invest part of their wealth in this way, to collect about them articles match- less in their rarity and concentrated value, that the buyer of an unique vase of jade for £1,600 is probably safer than if he had purchased fifty acres of land. The jade is nearly inde- structible, it will not be readily stolen, and fifty years hence there will probably be as many to compete at even higher prices for its possession. The millionaires of the world do not decline, but increase in number. They invest in all countries, and even if the immense number of peasant-proprietors did not guarantee property, a social over-turn would hardly happen in many countries at once. Mr. Vanderbilt wants jade as much as any Baron Rothschild, and one day St. Louis may be as full of treasures as London or Vienna is now. A fresh and large supply of such articles is extremely unlikely, though a new Statute of Distributions might conceivably pass them more quickly through the market ; and without a new supply, a great fall in the value of such things is improbable. It is urged that the fancy for rare things may disappear, and so, of course, it may, but the testimony of history shows that such " fancies " have extraordinary durability. The great Roman nobles "collected," at prices which struck historians as insane, just as the millionaires do now, and probably understood their own interests quite as well. If a Julius were ruined, some enriched freedman would buy his Murrhine vases. Even furniture, if taken care of and soundly made, will last for centuries ; while the stone things are imperishable. Nothing seems to thinkers so unintelligible as the value placed upon the diamond, but diamonds have been valued since history began, and will probably be valued when it ends. Mr. Watts has a picture in the Grosvenor this year which the present writer, who is no art critic, would rather possess than all the rest of the Gallery. It is called "The Dove which Returned Not," and consists of a rotting branch, on which sits the weary dove, looking out on the waste of waters which you know somehow cover a ruined world. The branch has survived the Flood, and on it Mr. Watts, with the audacity of genius, has painted a string of pearls, hung there by some proud woman drowned by the rising waters, as on a last place of refuge. That is
audacious, as we said, though pearls from the Persian Gulf may well have been worn in Babylon, but the thought in it is true. The " fancy " of man for the rare, and therefore costly, is as enduring as his eyesight. The Rothschilds and the Due d'Aumale and Mr. Denison would like nothing better than to bid for the contents of the Aurea. Domus, the Hamilton Palace of the day. Semiramis, we doubt not, smiled on the subjects who sent her inlaid furniture ; and that New Zealander of Macaulay's, if he is as rich as he should be, will ransack ruined England for any recoverable vestige of the treasures which his books will tell him were once heaped there in such profusion that the furniture of a single house, of a single noble, sold for 1'300,000. It is the pictures which are the dangerous invest- ments for families which mean to live ; but science, though it can- not preserve, may yet reproduce them. The New Zealander will not, it is probable, greatly admire Rubens' "Daniel in the Lions' Den," for realism must conquer ; but he will know Rubens' queer idea of a lion just as well as any bidder at Saturday's sale, and be just as interested in the jade, which even then will be as soft to the touch as velvet, and yet outlast the diamond.
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