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 feeling and intelligence in every touch of the chisel and file that wrought it.  Could that same object seen occasionally in a museum showcase afford me any comparable pleasure?  Is not the education of the eye, like the education of the sentiments, dependent upon stable associations that can be many times repeated?  Shall I seem merely covetous because I crave besides the casual and adventurous contact with beauty in the world, a gratification which is sure and ever waiting for me?  But let me cite rather a certain collector and man of great affairs, who perforce spends his days in adjusting business interests that extend from the arctic snows to the tropics.  His evenings belong generally to his friends, for he possesses in a rare degree the art of companionship.  The small hours are his own, and frequently he spends them in painting beautiful copies of his Japanese potteries.  It is his homage to the artisans who contrived those strange forms and imagined those gorgeous glazes.  In the end he will have a catalogue illustrated from his own designs.  Meanwhile, he knows his potteries as the shepherd knows his flock.  What casuist will find the heart to deny him so innocent a pleasure?  And he merely represents in a very high degree the sort of priestliness that the true collector feels towards his temporary possessions.

And this sense of the high, nay, supreme value of beautiful things, has its evident uses.  That the beauty of art has not largely perished from the earth is due chiefly to the collector.  He interposes his sensitiveness between the insensibility of the average man and the always exiled thing of beauty.  If we have in a fractional measure the art treasures of the past, it has been because the collector has given them asylum.  Museums, all manner of overt