OCR Text |
Show special qualities can explain and interpret them to those qualified to appreciate their good points. When we can no longer get pleasure from them, or give pleasure to others with them, they go to the auction room so that others may find in them the same satisfaction they have given us. N o cold entombment in a museum for our beloved friends or public exposure where they may be subjected to the careless gaze of the casual visitor. We believe with Edmond de Goncourt, as expressed in his will: "My wish is that my drawings, my \ prints, my curios, my books - in a I word those things of art which have been the joy_ of my life - shall not be consigned to the cold tomb of a mu- 1 seum, and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be dis- 1 persed under the hammer of the auc- 32 tioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has · given me shall be given again, in each case, to some inheritor of my own taste." Here is our creed as expressed by one whose name we know not; And if I share my crust, As common manhood must~ With one w hose need is greater than my ow n; Shall I not also give His soul that it may live Of the abundant pleasures I have known? And so if I have wrought, A massed, or conceived aught Of beauty, or intelligence, or power; It is not mine to hoard / It stands there to afford Its generous service simply as a fiower . And now, as Tiny Tim observed, "God bless us, every one." 33 |