genius, there are hundreds who, at the end of a decade, will gladly buy, at almost any price, the works of the great artist of the age; so the one who bought very cheaply is rewarded for his sagacity by the eagerness of hundreds.
“And further than this, there is that great extrinsic element of value which essentially belongs to all works of genius, limitation in supply in opposition to increased demand,—for the weakness of old age must come, and the spontaneity of thought will be dulled, and the right hand will lose its cunning—the possibility of the best work is at an end, and presently the possibility of all work is ended; for brain and hand are resting for ever in the rest of death. New genius may be rising up, but the old greatness to which men were accustomed,—no fresh tokens of that; no more sunsets of the Téméraire: no more sunrises of defiant Ulysses; no more sweet rendering of beauty and grace by the tender hand of Reynolds or of Gainsborough. The future will doubtless bring us good things, but nought can be added to the store of the past, and men pay higher prices to an immortal fame than they ever did to the living artist.
“A well-vouched story is told that Reynolds asked three hundred guineas for his pictures of the Cardinal Virtues, and he refused the offer of three hundred pounds, saying that he would rather die with the Cardinal Virtues in his possession, than part with them for less than the price he had named.
And Reynolds did die with the Cardinal Virtues in his possession; and the Cardinal Virtues were sold at Christie’s, in the days of old Christie, for fourteen thousand pounds!
“Not thus with diamonds—their value can never fluctuate in any degree to compensate the holder for loss of interest; it may, indeed, rise or fall with the value of gold and money, or in accordance with the slow laws of supply and demand, but there is no incentive to purchase the diamond out of love and admiration for the labour and thought bestowed upon it. They say there are famous diamond-cutters at Amsterdam, among the Jews there, but who ever heard of a diamond-cutter’s name? Can we entertain one spark of enthusiasm for a human intellect reduced to a continuous creation of angles? It is impossible to cut fame and sympathy out of adamant! The labour bestowed upon a diamond may have been immense, but there can be no enthusiasm created by purely mechanical work, that men should pay marvellous sums for it, as they pay for the high thought and genius which is evidenced in the labour of a great work of art.
“Just think of it,” exclaimed my reason warmly, “sixty thousand pounds for the parure of diamonds, and in the whole of that sum not one atom of feeling excited for the men who have laboured in the preparation of the stones, neither by the perfection of their work, which is only mechanical perfection, nor by failure here and there, which may touch our sympathy by its evidence that the strong hand and thinking brain have grown weary in their toil—a material at once too hard for any impress of man’s greatness or man’s weakness.
“As we are comparing,” continued my reason, “the value of diamonds and pictures, I will just mention an additional value which pictures possess—namely, ‘historical value.’ We may observe that historical value has no connection with the beauty of any given object—it is simply the interest which men attach to the remains of the past; an interest which, in its abuse, often amounts to an absurd superstition; but, at the worst, expresses a deep-rooted desire in mankind to possess something beyond mere verbal record of the past, something which may render the past tangible and visible to present hands and eyes. The veneration for relics exhibits this feeling in its debased form, but in its noblest condition it associates us with the efforts and thoughts and affections of great men long passed away—supplementing the history of any given period, and showing us the application and result of the feelings and sentiments which history records. But the diamond in itself is without a history—it is never old in the common decay of ordinary matter—its lustre represents an eternal youth without one reminiscence of the past, a perpetual newness though it has been in wear for hundreds of years.
That given diamond may have belonged to Charles the Fifth, or have been ‘loot’ from Delhi; it may have formed a portion of the necklace with which Herr Boehmer sought to fascinate Marie Antoinette, or it may have been ground from the rough in the grinding-lathe of ‘Hunt & Roskell’ at this Exhibition of ‘’62.’ There is no possibility of affirming—the past is wholly lost in the refracted light of the present. It is certainly true that there are some few stones which possess a history, but the interest here is no higher than the interest which is attached to the lowest order of historic value—mere relic interest. In this matter the poor onyx-stone holds its own triumphantly against the diamond; it is elevated to such a value by the hand of man, that it has been deemed worthy of the choicest setting—a setting in which diamonds are only used as auxiliaries to its beauty—its beauty, the genius of fine workers in past times. When the dazzle of the diamonds has satisfied the eye, examine, at Hancock’s stall, the Devonshire gems (cameos and intaglios) which were mounted for the late Lady Granville to wear at the coronation of the Emperor of Russia. Every stone enshrines some artistic creation, it tells some tale of the art and faith or incidents of classic times; perhaps perpetuating, as a reduced copy, some great work of sculpture long ago destroyed—appealing at once to the lover of art, the antiquary, and the historian by its intrinsic beauty and its high historic value.
“I trust,” continued my reason, “that I have convinced you that diamonds are not subject to that condition, which, in the case of pictures and fine works of art, may be reasonably anticipated to guard the dealer from loss of interest, while the property remains in his possession. The jeweller must, therefore, from the very first, place such a price on the parure of diamonds, as will guarantee him from that loss of interest on his capital pending the sale.”
“Of course he must,” said I to my reason; “every tradesman must do that, whether he trades in diamonds or penny whistles.”
