London is full of antique shops--places where Chinese Buddhas gaze
pointedly at the alleged work of Chippendale--but if you asked me
which is the most remarkable of all I would take you to a shop which
deals only in articles more than a thousand years old.
When you enter, the centuries drop away like sand in an hour-glass.
Through the frosted opacity of the door you are dimly aware of the
red blur of a passing omnibus, of shadows that are men and women
busying about their day's work. You hear the sound that is London;
but it means nothing in here. How can it? It is a fluid
unimportance called To-day and you are surrounded by Yesterday. The
Present and the Future are intangible things. The Past only can be
grasped and loved. That, at least, is how they think in this queer
shop where Time is regarded as a mere convention; a shoreless ocean
in which each man's life is just a spoonful taken and returned.
The men who wander in look mostly dull and dry, sunk in whiskers and
absent-mindedness. They sometimes leave their umbrellas in the rack
and say "yes" when they should have said "no." They often remark on
the wonderful weather when it is pouring with rain. They are
probably thinking, you see, of some Grecian dawn or the raising of
the siege of Troy. When you know them, and can pull them out of the
Past a little, you realize that there is nothing more human on earth
than the average archæologist, because he has learned that human men
and women have always been much the same, and that a little thing
like two thousand years and a pair of spats makes no real difference
to human nature, its passions, its frailties, and its frequent
glories. In their packed minds Thebes, Athens, Rome, London, Paris,
and New York, march shoulder to shoulder with nothing to distinguish
them, except, perhaps, a red omnibus going to Victoria.
It is so delightful to hear them talk about Jason as if he threw up
work in Threadneedle Street to go out to Australia in search of
fleeces; and once an old man told me about the marriage of his
grand-daughter with such remote charm that it was three days before I
realized that he had not been talking about Cupid and Psyche.
* * *
However, let us glance round this shop. The first impression is that
some tidal wave of Time has swept into it all kinds of articles
caught up in the ruin of the ancient world of Egypt, Greece,
Rome--these three great early civilizations are the chief
contributors, though, of course, Assyria and Babylon are represented
too.
Nearly everything you see has come from a tomb. There are hundreds
of thousands of objects from the tombs of ancient Egypt. There is
blue, green, and gold glass from tombs in Cyprus; there is amazing
coloured glass blown by Phœnicians at the time of the Exodus,
and--to come down to quite modern times--there are lamps which lit
the ancient Romans to bed a thousand years ago, and Greek vases with
shaggy, horned satyrs leaping round them after flying nymphs.
There are bronzes green with age, bright gold which never loses its
colour no matter how old it is, shining glazed pottery which looks as
if it had come yesterday from Staffordshire, save for the fact that
it is finer than modern pottery and contains a rough scratched cross
and the words in Latin: "Caius, his plate."
* * *
What is the charm of it? What chains these men to the past,
archæologist and collector? Most of them are poor, for there is no
money in it, and most of them are intensely happy.
Just see the way they finger a bronze that was cast when St. Paul was
bearing the message of Christianity through the world. There is
perhaps one part æstheticism in their love and one part association.
For them an object is not only full of beauty but also full of magic;
it is like a talisman that has the power to call up visions. I have
no doubt that when these old men hold their treasures they can see
the hosts of Pharaoh sweeping through Syria, the nodding of the
plumes, the drive of arrows and all the confusion of an ancient war.
They can recreate round a relic a dead empire. They feel that they
possess something of the mighty personality of old times just as in
millions of lives a treasured letter can call up "the touch of a
vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still."
In these old things the Past lives again; they release the perfume of
old loves, the violence of old ambitions, the thunder of marching
troops, and the sailing of galleys over a morning world.
* * *
So if you collide violently with an old man who is carefully holding
a little paper parcel, do not blame him for not seeing you!
You! Good Lord--you!