  Your true collector does not apologize for his hobbies; he exalts their virtues. Necessity may occasionally compel him to resort to the camouflage of mid-interest, as when his family is not in sympathy with his pursuits; or, again, as when fate has placed him in arid communion with unsympathetic associates, individuals whose personalities have developed independently of their souls, leaving them pronounced in the directions they invariably select; directions, in consequence, invariably divergent from those paths which the true collector loves to tread. While not secretive by nature, and by the same nature eager to share his joys with his fellow-beings, the true collector is endowed, more often than not, with a certain intuitive perception which enables him to appreciate the futility of hoping to convert the unequipped infidel to the solaces of his own faith in the delights of the lares and penates of another generation, an intuition which warns him to protect his peace of mind by harmlessly appearing to accept with good grace the commonplacenesses undoubtedly enjoyed by the many, but with no culpable renunciation of his own lively interest in the quaint and curious mementos of the world of yesterdays, a world into which our own to-days slip, one by one, silently, but as surely followed by our to-morrows. Was it not Charles Lamb who exclaimed: “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity,—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we forever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! The past is everything, being nothing!” Your true collector may often maintain reticence in order that he may enjoy a normal place in the community, undisturbed by the merely idle curious, the undeft rummaging of the clumsy, the curt depreciation of the supercilious, the gushing of the undiscriminating susceptible, or the skepticism of those who measure the sanity of their fellows by the canons of their own irrevocable and undeviating limitations, those to whom no music but the echoes of caverns can appeal. Such are beyond the pale of any errand in missionary spirit. The true collector is born, not made. Yet one cannot discover the mirror without knowledge of the reflection. The contentment to be found in the acquisition and in the contemplation of the things that are dear to the heart of the antiquarian and the art-lover is a contentment that is the gift of the gods, always awarded the intelligent, though not always disclosed to them. A friend, then, will be he who discovers to one a treasure like that which the joy of collecting uncovers. What we read and what we see pictured for us is precious, indeed, if it holds up to us the image of that which we immediately know to be congenial to our natural tastes. And so it is that this little book is not devised for savages, but tenderly has been nurtured in sympathy with the interesting and the beautiful things of yesterday. May it find friends among those who love them as well as among those who love the things of to-day which have prospered in their heritage from the days of long ago! The author wishes to express his grateful acknowledgments to those who have made possible the preparation of this volume—to Messrs. CondÉ Nast & Company, Inc., publishers of “House & Garden,” Messrs. Munn & Company, Inc., formerly publishers of “American Homes and Gardens,” the publishers of “The Cosmopolitan,” the publishers of “The House Beautiful,” and the publishers of “The Sun,” New York, for permission to include in this volume portions of the material contributed by him to those periodicals; to Dr. George Frederick Kunz, Mr. Richardson Wright, Mr. Charles Allen Munn, Mr. Robert H. Van Court, Mrs. Elizabeth C. Lounsbery, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, Mr. Robert Lemmon, Mr. H. E. Bauer, Miss Mary H. Northend, Mr. AndrÉ M. Rueff, Mr. T. C. Turner, Mr. William A. Cooper, Mr. William Francis Phillips, Miss Elizabeth Robinson, Mr. William C. Clifford, Mr. G. H. Buek, Mr. Frederick H. Howell, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose photographs have been drawn upon for illustration, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the New York Public Library, and to those authors whose works are noted in the Bibliography. Gardner Teall New York |
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