his collection in his pocket
and enjoy it _en route_. I cannot too highly commend his example, and yet
his course is too austere for many of us. Has untrammelled curiosity no
charms? Would I, for example, forego my casual kakemonos, my ignorantly
acquired majolica, some trifling accumulation of Greek coins, that
handful of Eastern rugs? Could I prune away certain excrescent minor
Whistlers? those bits of ivory cutting from old Italy and Japan? those
tarnished Tuscan panels?--in truth, I could and would not. Yet had I
stuck to my first love, prints, I should by this time be mentioned
respectfully among the initiated, my name would be found in the
card-catalogues of the great dealers, my decease would be looked forward
to with resignation by my junior colleagues. As it is, after twenty years
of collecting, and an expenditure shameful in one of my fiscal estate, I
have nothing that even courtesy itself could call a collection. In
apology, I may plead only the sting of unchartered curiosity, the
adventurous thrill of buying on half or no knowledge, the joy of an
instinctive sympathy that, irrespective of boundaries, knows its own when
it sees it. And you austerely single-minded amateurs, you experts that
surely shall be, I revere if I may not follow you.

We have left dangling from the first paragraph the morally important
question, Is collecting merely an habitual contravention of the tenth
commandment? Now, I am far from denying that collecting has its
pathology, even its criminology, if you will. The mere lust of
acquisition may take the ugly form of coveting what one neither loves nor
understands. This pit is digged for the rich collector. Poor collectors,
on the other hand, have at times forgotten where enterprise ends and
kleptomania begins. But these excesses are, after all, rare, and for that
matter they are merely those that attach to all exaggerations of
legitimate passion. As for the notion that one should love beautiful
things without desiring them, it seems to me to lie perilously near a
sort of pseudo-Platonism, which, wherever it recurs, is the enemy of life
itself. As I write, my eye falls upon a Japanese sword-guard. I have seen
it a thousand times, but I never fail to feel the same thrill. Out of the
disc of blued steel the artisan has worked the soaring form of a bird
with upraised wings. It is indicated in skeleton fashion by bars
extraordinarily energetic, yet suavely modulated. There must have been
fe