Silver Magpies
I
I HAD gone to Cambridge for a holiday. I always do this when I get tired of Oxford, for to see a familiar form of life in an unfamiliar setting is, I suppose, the psychological background of a‘busman’s holiday.’
Drawn by the inevitable lure of the antique shop, I made my inevitable visit, and we began the inevitable talk on the state of trade, the supply of antiques, and the usual old gambits: how long it would be before all the antiques of England were in America; when Victorian silver would be worth more than a shilling an ounce, and whether old oak would ever again come into favor.
‘But things have changed a great deal,’ said my antique host. ‘Nowadays in these university towns the professors and dons are n’t what they used to be: why, before the war when a professor died I could stock my shop for months from the sale at his house. But now they’ve nothing to sell. It’s not poverty: why, they’re better off than they ever were. It’s just sheer dullness. Why, the old lot were perfect magpies. They picked up everything, wherever they went, and their houses were full of knickknacks. As they traveled all over the place every long vacation, they got hold of marvelous stuff, usually without knowing it. That’s where I came in, after the sale! But they have n’t got any guts to-day, or else it’s all this damned nonsense about modern decoration that prevents their making their houses look nice.’
(I know those awful houses in North Oxford and the purlieus of Cambridge!) ‘Well, cheer up,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you get an invitation both to my funeral and to the sale afterwards. I’m the King of the Magpies. There’s nothing I have n’t got in my nest. At least there’s one magpie left.’
I am grateful to that amiable man. I never realized before that I was a magpie. The thought pleases me. But I am a super-magpie, for what I adore to pick up most of all is silver spoons. The very first I ever got I simply had to buy because of the circumstances of its finding. I was looking at an old Chippendale chair which had just been mended, when the dealer took from a drawer a lovely little shellbacked teaspoon. ‘I found this yesterday, right underneath that wooden slat in the chair, behind the upholstery,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was one of the family spoons, and had slipped in during some tea party in the time of George III and never been found. Probably some unhappy maid was sacked because of it!’ Unable to afford the chair, I bought the spoon. My magpie instincts could not resist it.
That was years ago, when I was a youngster, and ever since I watch for the lovely pale glitter of old silver in the windows of antique shops and jewelers. How easy it is, when you know how, to spot the color of old silver even among the shine of the modern machine-polished stuff. One old spoon or mustard pot in a window surrounded by the horrible stuff they turn out now stands out not so much because of its shape as because of its color. Years of rough handling, polishing, and use have given to old silver a surface covered with a multitude of minute scratches that makes the light strike on it in such a way that the metal seems a different color. Actually the only difference is that it catches more light than the highly polished modern silver. The color of the metal is the same in each case, but modern surfaces shine dully like mirrors and reflect the dark things round them. Old silver reflects nothing. It refracts. And that is why we magpies like it so much. It catches our eye!
II
The collecting of old silver is not just a simple process of accumulation. One selects and rejects the whole time. And always one is hoping to find the strange historical piece. For, when you come to think of it, one can do by means of silver what can be done in no other way. The presentation of a piece of silver by one person to another or by a group of persons to one is always an event. It commemorates something. It may even be a branch of literature. How often I have wondered if among the initials engraved on old cups and bowls and teapots lie hidden literary events of the first order. For everyone, almost, at some time in his life has had a piece of silver presented to him, inscribed with some name, date, or statement.
Just fancy finding a christening mug with a date mark of the late eighteenth century and the initials ‘P. B. S.’ Such a piece must have existed somewhere, — perhaps it had more simply ‘To Percy’ on it! — but someone must have had it, and you or I may yet find it. Somewhere among the despised mass of mid-Victorian silver lie the cups and teapots which were at some time or another given to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and the rest. Yet for some inexplicable reason we never seem to hear in the sale catalogues of ‘literary silver.’ Possibly this is because so much old silver, as soon as it gets to the dealers’ hands, is repolished and cleaned up and the old engraving rubbed off so as to make it salable. Just think of the literary events we have lost like this! No one has ever written a book on ‘Inscribed Silver’: what a chance awaits some more successful magpie than myself! For I have only one small find to my credit that seems to hide some curious event. But whom it concerns and what it means I have not the slightest idea.
It is a simple trefoil spoon, severe in outline, delightful in its simplicity, which I found in some odd shop in a country town. It bears this inscription, cut in the attractive italics of the period, in one line down the handle of the spoon: ‘Prepare to follow after R. A. 1664.’ I have often wondered what this means. Did ‘R. A.’ leave this spoon at his death to some relative, tempering his gift with a warning, so that it at once became a memento mori? Or, on the other hand, did ‘R. A.’ give it as a christening spoon to his son, suggesting paternally that he should follow the example of his father? Was ‘R. A.,’ in short, a puritan or a prig or something totally different? Anyhow, there it lies on my table with its enigmatic inscription as clear as when it was engraved almost three centuries agone.
But where are all those pieces of ‘literary silver’? Is there no piece to remind us of some event in the life of Samuel Johnson? Surely someone once must have given him a punch ladle or a silver teapot or a tankard! And if I find a piece with ‘S. J.’ engraved on it, can I hope that it was his? Of course, if it had ‘S. J. from his fellow lexicographers,’I snould be certain. But for some inexplicable reason one never seems to see such pieces even in museums. You will see Johnson’s china teapot at Pembroke College, Oxford, with nothing except tradition to authenticate it. You will see in the Bodleian Library Shelley’s trinkets, his very rattle, a tattered book he owned and held in his hand on that last day at Spezia; but where are the tankards, the knives and forks, the saltcellars that he must have owned and that might at least bear his crest? Do they perhaps stand on your own shelves or mine, in your very silver cabinet, all unrecognized? I must look over my silver again. And I must learn the heraldry of the great.
III
I do not think that these are absurd suggestions of mine. Almost everyone whose income is not infinitesimal has at some time or another been given some silver object inscribed or dedicated. Great events are always so commemorated, and the gold pens of Versailles or the silver Monteith bowls of Trafalgar bear witness to history. In the dinner silver of His Majesty’s Guards at St. James’s Palace is the hoof of Marengo, mounted as a snuffbox, which is used nightly, and on it are many lines of closely graven words recording the life and death of that famous nag. And as for Oxford and Cambridge, well, every undergraduate knows something about his college silver and how every single piece came by gift and was suitably inscribed. Possibly that was how I became a silver magpie, from long looking at lovely silver at all the meals that have ever been spread for me in my college! So why should the individual silver of private men and women so mysteriously have vanished? Why is it that those who search the world’s bookshops for author’s presentation copies of famous books of all ages forget to look for the delectable tankards and teapots and christening mugs of their heroes, which may, for all they know, be found in any silversmith’s or at any sale, to be sold for a standard rate per ounce?
But I must confess I have never found any such treasure, though that does not mean that I never shall find it. I am still looking. And I can content myself with other things, for in silver there is so much to look for, and sometimes strange bargains to be made. What, for instance, can be more diverting than to collect those strange objects in silver made only a little while ago whose use has been forgotten or misunderstood? Take that charming little spoon, with a pointed handle and a pierced bowl, which dealers diffidently call the ‘olive spoon.’ You can find these spoons in any shop and buy them for a mere song. Ask your dealer why they are called olive spoons and he will explain uneasily that with the pierced bowl you lifted the olive, and the water or vinegar or oil passed through the pierced pattern of the bowl. Alternatively you spiked it with the pointed handle — though why there were two methods catching the olive I have never understood. Ask another dealer and he will explain, also uneasily, that these spoons are for the use of the hostess at tea. With the pierced bowl she strains the errant leaf from the cup before giving it to the guest; with the spiked end she clears the obstructing leaves from the base of the spout of her teapot as, from time to time, the flotsam accumulates and dams the Pekoan streams.
I often wonder which is right, if either. Or was there some strange rite of eating or drinking of which we are totally ignorant? For the literature of the royal Georges is silent as the grave on these weighty matters.
There are many mysteries such as this. Take, for instance, the lovely spoons of the time of Cromwell whose handles are plain and straight and end abruptly as though a length of them had been cut off with a chisel. We are told that these are really Caroline apostle spoons from which the ruthless iconoclasm of the Puritans cut off the offending images. That is as may be. Possibly someone once tried cutting off an apostle or two and found that the resultant appearance of the spoon was simple and beautiful. Then the Puritan silversmiths copied the type. Of the truth of the story there is no verification and no certain denial.
How simple in comparison is the marrow spoon, a strange object whose bowl was used for ladling up the rich gravy of a baron of beef, and whose narrow scoop for reaching the innermost marrow of those mighty joints. How fallen from glory these marrow spoons look (or their simpler relatives the marrow scoops) when we see them to-day used for extracting chutney from a long bottle. For the days of barons of beef are over; there are none to cook them or to serve them at the groaning board. To-day no board groans.
Rarest of all these oddments is, I believe, the tobacco plate. I have only seen one in a lifetime, and what a beauty it was! Would that I could find one! These were used, so legend has it, for handing round a rich handful of loose tobacco at bachelor feasts when all smoked churchwarden pipes.
The only one I ever saw is in the plate of a Royal Borough, for the use of the Mayor and Corporation. Its inscription authenticates its use beyond all cavil. And it is still used. I am sure there must be many such in Virginia, or, for the matter of that, throughout the United States, the very home of tobacco. Possibly they have been thought to be ordinary plates, but they are a little thicker and a trifle smaller than ordinary silver plates. I expect many of them lurk still unidentified. Strangely enough, not one single specimen graces the silver of any Oxford or Cambridge college. A mystery without explanation. And yet, where punch bowls abound and loving cups are legion, surely the tobacco plate should be found.
Easier to find is the beer tumbler, that jolly little cup with its heavy weighted end which rollicks on the table at one’s side. These are always small, for they were meant to hold ancient and reverend beer that is never drunk swiftly or largely, but sipped gently as a liqueur. Of these there is no shortage, if you can pay the price, for they are much sought for and precious. Alas, my magpie nest cannot boast a single example, and it is small consolation to remember that I once saw one in a window offered as a christening mug at a negligible sum, hurried past to return later, and then found it already gone, snapped up by some odious rival.
IV
The true magpie naturally has a peculiar taste in collecting. He does not merely search for a complete dinner set, a complete tea set, a table piece and eight saltcellars, and then rest contented and retire from the fray. He is always looking for something unusual, something that cannot easily be found. For anyone can go to a silversmith and, without much effort, find a complete set of this or that. The magpie likes to make up his own sets, to gratify himself with the acute pleasure of finding here, there, and everywhere oddments that, when assembled, make a complete series and cease to be oddments. Only the other day I found two fine tablespoons of George II, bearing the Exeter assay mark. Later I found another — soon I shall have six! For there is a peculiar charm in English provincial silver. Away in the west of England local silversmiths could not venture to send their silver all the way to London to be hall-marked. Highway robbers were far too frequent. So the authorities opened an assay office in the smaller country towns, here and there. You can nearly always tell provincialmade silver from the London without looking at the mark. There is an indefinable elegance about all Londonmade work.
But what I have always wondered is, what was the silver that they used in India, in the West Indies, in all the remote colonies of the eighteenth century other than the American colonies? For of American-made silver we naturally know much. For some reason not yet explained, American silver is more elegant, more graceful, and better made than most English silver, at any rate in the early part of the eighteenth century. How I long one day to find a piece of old American silver lying unrecognized in some English shop! That would be turning the tables indeed! I have a set of spoons, with a dove embossed on the back of each bowl, and the only mark they bear is a maker’s initials, stamped twice. There is some faint hope that they are American, but it is much more probable that they are English provincial work made in some town so far removed from the government assay office that the maker did not send them to be marked. Instead he stamped them with his initials, and a double stamp is, I understand, in these cases indication that the maker has used his highest quality.
But we magpies live on dreams, and only on the day that I have found a piece bearing the mark of Paul Lamerie and another made by Paul Revere shall I rest contented.
One great illusion awaits the silver searcher. How often have I read in some novel of how a marvelous piece of English silver has been bought in some old shop in a French village or a Spanish port or in some remote place like Malta or the Balearic Islands, once tenanted by British officers and men who brought their plate with them and lived in state. Alas, you can search the whole continent of Europe until you drop and never a piece will you find. I have combed the small shops of Corfu, — as likely a place as there ever was one in which to find stray British things, — and not a thing have I found. I have searched every cranny of the great bazaar at Constantinople, every antique shop in Paris, Rome, and the rest. Once only did I see a piece of English silver, and that was in the Stamboul bazaar, where I bought a snuffbox of George III, at an exorbitant price.
No, England is still the home of English silver, and there is still more to leave our shores than has yet left them. But oh, what treasures lie hidden somewhere abroad! Just think of all the marvelous Tudor plate that was prodigally given by Elizabeth to the various potentates into whose graces she wished to get! In 1583, she sent by her first ambassador to the Sultan of Turkey ‘gilt plate’ to the value of ‘298.2.7,’ which in those days was an enormous sum. I have searched the nooks and crannies of Constantinople in vain for one small vestige of that plate. Does it still lurk in unopened coffers of the Seraglio? If so, not one piece of it has seen the light from that day to this. And what else lies hid in Russian cellars, relics from those present-giving days? Not one single piece of English plate worth mention has yet appeared on the market coming from a Russian source.
But one of these days when I go round the world I shall stop at Mauritius, and Pondicherry, and St. Helena, and wander round the bazaars of small Indian ports where Clive and Warren Hastings may have sent their merry men, and I shall search for strange silver plate made by English silversmiths in India. For such there must have been. You have but to read the memoirs of that rascal William Hickey to see in what state those ancient Anglo-Indians lived, with their roast beef and bottles of port and velvet suits, which brought most of them to an untimely end in the Indian heat. Silver there must have been, and if there were silversmiths in America in the seventeenth century, surely there were silversmiths in India in the eighteenth.
Were I very, very rich, I should soon become a gold magpie. But even so it would be very hard work, for gold plate — and I mean plate of solid gold — is almost the rarest thing there is in plate. But what a lure there is in solid gold — the oldest lure in the world! A week or so ago I dined with friends in a certain college in Oxford. In front of me on the table was a small porringer, exquisitely chased, apparently silver gilt. I took it up to look at it and found it weighed down almost as heavy as lead in my hand. Lifting the lid to see what was inside, I caught the eye of my host, at once smiling and apprehensive. The porringer was of solid gold, a gift made some three hundred years ago by a benefactor. Nothing had tarnished that unspoilable metal, for it was full twenty-four carat. The touch of it and the lifting of it were a delight. Need I say that I was tempted bitterly to seize the cup and run from the room with it? For who is not when he touches gold? Pure gold and old gold make a combination almost irresistible. Once gold is alloyed, it seems to lose — to me at least — all its beauty.
But you will not find a piece of gold plate that a humble pocket can reach either by chance or by searching. So little of it was ever made in England, and then it was almost always some great presentation piece, some notable gift. And yet if I had the money I would to-morrow make myself just one plain tankard of unalloyed gold.
V
Inexhaustible England — there is no limit to her supply of old silver. Not all the tempting of inflated sale-room prices will lure from their hiding place the stored riches of remote men. Only a few days ago a friend who lives in a small village in Hertfordshire, an hour from London, told me that he had helped to found a local village museum, for it is an ancient village, rich in Roman and monastic remains. Everyone who had any small oddment to put in it produced his treasure. To the amazement of everyone, a farmer brought as his contribution a small silver-gilt reliquary, a perfect piece of pre-Reformation silver, priceless in worth. It had, he said, always been in his family and on his farm, and he did not know how it originally got there. On examination it turned out to be the only surviving piece of plate of the monastery which had originally stood in the village, part of whose domains was the farm in which the reliquary had been preserved. To me at least it is gratifying to think that not all the blandishments of traveling dealers’ touts could lure that ancient piece from its rightful home. And if this can happen an hour from London, what else may lie hidden in the remoter places of our land?
But where one can see whole collections of plate, given over centuries, that nothing short of a revolution can disperse, there one rejoices. Oxford and Cambridge and the City Companies of London have what are probably the most continuous collections of plate in the world. As with all such accumulations, good and bad are mixed. For each corporation is bound to accept a gift, no matter how ugly it may be. But it is an interesting commentary on taste to see how at some periods ugly gifts are never seen, for the simple reason that bad work was never done. Some of the Tudor pieces at Oxford are extravagant and fantastic, priceless in value, but not by any means as lovely as their value would suggest. For Tudor times were ostentatious and sometimes a little vulgar. But from 1630 onward every piece is a delight. True enough, there is little or nothing of the period before 1642, only a few pieces here and there that had been smuggled away and hidden, for Charles I took almost all Oxford’s silver from her to pay the wages of dissolute soldiers and expensive court life. But silver of the time of Cromwell, James II, and William and Mary gets increasingly lovely and graceful, and there is not a single ugly piece from these periods.
In painful contrast are the awful Cellinesque ewers and basins of the time of the great Exhibition of 1851. Most of these are stored away and never used. Perhaps they are just worth their weight in silver. Almost the ugliest piece of silver in Oxford is a notorious cigar box given by a prominent politician, now living and active, to his college. For his own sake he shall be nameless. But the gift is a vast and massive box, intricately worked, fashioned in the likeness of the dome of the Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library. Lift up the dome, and within you will find your cigar! Blasphemy on the Bodleian and an atrocity committed on the generous memory of silversmiths of all the ages — and that done within the lifetime of living men!
No one man can master all the mysteries of the silver of Oxford. I doubt if one man can understand the whole story of the silver of his own college. In my own college there are still many mysteries to clear up. Take two cases only. In 1665, the Spanish Ambassador in London came to reside in my college for six months to escape the infection of the Great Plague. While there he cemented an entente between the University of Salamanca and my college, which lasted a long time and led to many interchanges of visits. When he left, after his stay with us was done, he presented to the college a superb vessel of silver gilt engraved with his coat of arms. Then in 1675 thieves broke into the college and, as the record has it, ‘took plate valued at £200 which was melted by the receiver Doggett’ (may his memory be accursed). One thief only was caught and hanged, but, as far as we know, no silver was recovered then. Later we are told by the antiquary Anthony Wood that the college ‘intended to make another cup in place of that presented by the Count of Molina [the Spanish Ambassador in question] which had been stolen with the rest.’ Now to-day, once or twice a week, we have on our table a superb silver-gilt steeple cup which is said to be the copy made of the piece presented by Molina. But in fact it bears the arms of another Spanish grandee altogether, and does not correspond in weight with the recorded weight of the original piece. Its date mark is 1688. So what is its origin we do not know, nor precisely how it came to us.
An even stranger mystery lies in the history of an old cup of silver, one of those pear-shaped goblets which have two ringed handles — a type, so the experts say, which was never made outside Oxford. I was looking at it one day when my eye was caught by its peculiar inscription. ‘ Ego, firmarius de Birchanger, in Com. Essex, ’ said the inscription, 'a tenebrionibus surreptum denuo in lucem edidi.’ Then followed the name of the ego. I would not insult the reader by presuming that he can translate such debased Latin! The meaning roughly is: ‘This cup, stolen by thieves, at length I gave back into the light of day.’ The recoverer of the stolen cup was a farmer (firmarius, in fact) of Birchanger, which to-day is still part of the college estates in Essex. The date mark of the cup was 1705.
Now what was it all about? This cup could not be a relic of the great theft of plate of 1675, for it was not made till 1705, and yet we have no record of another theft. And what, in any case, was the cup doing away in Essex on the college estates? Conceivably this intelligent farmer had somehow got hold of some of the stolen silver of 1675, and, perhaps because it was too damaged, had it melted down again and made into this presentation cup. For silver was always being melted and remelted so that ‘old-fashioned’ vessels could be remade into something more fashionable. Regrettable though this is, it is true, and at Oxford and Cambridge you will see many a piece of plate which bears a dedication date some fifty years earlier than the date stamp.
I have searched and wondered and never yet solved this mystery of how the lovely two-handled cup came to fall into the hands of a farmer in Essex, who thereupon remade it or restored it to the college, of whose land he was a trusty tenant. And I have often wondered, too, where he learned to write this pompous and archaic Latin. Probably the local incumbent of his parish church lent a hand! But the mystery remains, an ancient and unsolved detective story.
What a tragedy it is that family plate can never have the continuity of plate owned by a society or corporation! When a rich man dies, his silver, as often as not, is divided up among the heirs and assigns. Can anything be more pitiful — and it happens every day — than to see a dozen lovely twopronged forks or rat-tailed spoons divided into three parts by three avaricious heirs? Many a priceless dozen has been ruined in this way because Aunt Mary resolutely refuses to let Uncle Timothy have the whole dozen, or to take from Uncle Timothy the superb ormolu timepiece which he is prepared to sacrifice for this concession. Valuers for probate have told me how the tears came to their eyes as they saw family obstinacy deliberately reduce the value of the family inheritance by this mulish insistence on a proper division of spoil.
VI
I think that every collector of plate, however humble, should read the memoirs and biographies of the period which he fancies most. If it is Regency silver, the lovely ‘Grecian urn’ style of the late eighteenth century, then he will find accounts of banquets and parties and receptions wherein such plate and its uses are occasionally mentioned. Let him also examine the ‘conversation pictures’ of his period and learn how pieces were used and how they were placed on the table. Collectors of Persian rugs of age and beauty search the Flemish and Dutch and English pictures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for specimens of rugs which here and there appear. For here are authentic evidence and strictly scientific means of dating. I have never yet examined the old paintings of European galleries for examples of English plate, but it seems to open a line of research which might be at least productive.
Magpies have another failing: they chatter. And of the chattering there can be about old silver there is no end. For in silver lie so many stories. Those debased people who prefer to collect old china are collecting things which have no private histories. There is no presentation china, or hardly any. China or porcelain was bought for use or as mere odd ornaments. And it cannot be inscribed with words that record or commemorate. It is miserable stuff, easily manufactured, soon broken. In one fine frenzy the housemaid can sweep away the accumulated trophies of a thousand hunts. But can she do the smallest hurt to your silver? The massy tankards of the Georges, the solid spoons and the firmly knit salvers, merely laugh at her vandal efforts. ‘Rough handling never hurt good silver’ is the proverb that should comfort all collectors of it. But while those who have shelf upon shelf of fragile Crown Derby, Sèvres, Dresden, and the rest, lie shivering in their beds of a morning as they hear the maids going their vandal rounds, waiting for the inevitable crash that shall herald another ruined day, we silver collectors sleep solidly and well. We think rather of the aching elbows of those who polish the silver, of the powerful rotundity of those lidded tankards and salts and salvers, which asks the menial to do his worst and defies him to the end. Here is an investment worthy of consideration. And, in the ordinary sordid way of finance, old silver is a good investment also. For when stocks and shares have soared and sunk and banks crashed and broken, still old silver holds its own, steadily and firmly appreciating in value as the years pass.
We magpies sleep easily in our nests. Our silver is of use and beauty; it does not lose its value; no one can break it or harm it much; and against those who wish to steal it we have our own devices.