Once, in my old book-hunting days, I picked up, on the Quai Voltaire, a
copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_. Then it was more possible than
today to make finds in that quaint open-air library which, still more
than any library housed within governmental or diplomaed walls, is
haunted by the spirit of those passionate, dream-led scholars that
made the Renaissance, and crowded to those lectures filled with that
dangerous new charm which always belongs to the poetic presentation of
new knowledge--those lectures, "musical as is Apollo's lute," being
given up on the hill nearby, by a romantic young priest named Abelard.
My copy of the Great King's Wisdom was of no particular bibliographical
value, but it was one of those thick-set, old-calf duodecimos "black
with tarnished gold" which Austin Dobson has sung, books that, one
imagines, must have once made even the Latin Grammar attractive. The
text was the Vulgate, a rivulet of Latin text surrounded by meadows of
marginal comments of the Fathers translated into French,--the whole
presided over, for the edification of the young novice, to whom my copy
evidently belonged, by a distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the
time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand
the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested
that Solomon lived long ago--and, yet, was one of the pillars of the
church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as
I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a
thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as
curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a
paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its
sunlit life--a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw
it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly.
What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking
heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring
morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high
garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted
and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the
hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering
trees--delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its
wings a message he must not read....
The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and
the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his
hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in
those days: _Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the
flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my
fair one, and come away._
The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised
on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly,
like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened
hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were
discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were
carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys
swing their censers in the hushed chancel,--but ah! so different an
incense.
_The flowers appear on the earth_, he repeated to himself, beguiled for
a moment, _the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing
of birds is come...._
But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there
came to him other stern everlasting words:
_The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord
endureth forever._
Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice
of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little
messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then,
the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so
after--the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire--guarding
that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon. I
wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself--in words
that have grown commonplace since his time--the words of that strange
emperor Hadrian--_Animula, vagula, blandula_!
Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old
Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the
_Proverbs of Solomon_--with the butterfly so strangely crushed between
its pages--had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the
other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel.
Many weary men and women were travelling--in an enforced, yet in some
way humorously understanding, society--from Brooklyn Bridge to the
Bronx. I got in at Wall Street. The "crush-hour" was near, for it was
4:25--still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe
our neighbours. In the particular car in which I was sitting, there
was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your
fellow-passengers. Weary men going home--many of them having used them
all day long--have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my
car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future. As I looked at
them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day's work they
had done, and the innumerable days' work they had still to do. No one
smiled. No one observed the other. An automatic courtesy gave a seat
here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his
own thoughts and his own sad station.
It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by
men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that
men knew women from men, or _vice versa_, yet, at last, there seemed to
dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature
reading a book on the other side of the aisle--a lovely young woman,
with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that
enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of
her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails
and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that
nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the
rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat
in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her
incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,--to vanish as swiftly
as she had come--and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and
dazzled--
bright with her past presence yet--
I, who had fortunately, and fearfully, sat by her side was aware that
the book she had been reading was lying forgotten on the seat. It was
mine by right of accident,--treasure-trove. So I picked it up, braving
the glares of the four sad men facing me.
Naturally, I had wondered what book it was; but its being bound in
tooled and jewelled morocco, evidently by one of the great bookbinders
of Paris, made it unprofitable to hazard a guess.
I leave to the imagination of lovers of books what book one would
naturally expect to find in hands so fair. Perhaps _Ronsard_--or some
other poet from the Rose-Garden of old France. No! it was a charmingly
printed copy of The New Testament.
The paradox of the discovery hushed me for a few moments, and then I
began to turn over the pages, several of which I noticed were dog eared
after the manner of beautiful women in all ages. A pencil here and there
had marked certain passages. _Come unto me_, ran one of the underlined
passages, _all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest_,--and
I thought how strange it was that she whose face was so calm and still
should have needed to mark that. And another marked passage I noted--_He
was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him
not_. Then I put down the book with a feeling of awe--such as the Bible
had never brought to me before, though I had been accustomed to it from
my boyhood, and I said to myself: "How very strange!" And I meant how
strange it was to find this wonderful old book in the hands of this
wonderful young beauty.
It had seemed strange to find that butterfly in that old copy of the
_Proverbs of King Solomon_, but how much stranger to find the New
Testament in the hands, or, so to speak, between the wings, of an
American butterfly.
I found something written in the book at least as wonderful to me as
the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly--a name almost as
beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There
is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as
good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most
beautiful actress in the world.
There is a moral to this story. Morals--to stories--are once more
coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such
associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its
pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a
very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish
ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had
used the pages of his copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, that of
crushing out the joy of life.
My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel
in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself,
prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve
the apparently endless _ennui_ of the service by eating surreptitious
apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a
heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve
of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book
which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a
very weighty book--to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that
happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its
contents--to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into
silence and good behaviour.
So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more
terrible than Caesar's _Commentaries_ or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil--the
dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you
bore as courageously as you could.
So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice
against the Bible.
Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found
its poetic beauty. We read the _Book of Job_--which, by the way, Mr.
Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the
stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their
marvel and mystery:
_Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of
Orion?_
_Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide
Arcturus with his sons?_
Or we read in the 37th chapter of the _Book of Ezekiel_ of that weird
valley that was full of bones--"_and as I prophesied, there was a noise,
and behold a shaking, and the bones came together bone to bone_,"
surely one of the most wonderful visions of the imagination in all
literature.
Or we read the marvellous denunciatory rhetoric of Jeremiah and Isaiah,
or the music of the melodious heart-strings of King David; we read the
solemn adjuration of the "King Ecclesiast" to remember our Creator in
the days of our youth, with its haunting picture of old age: and the
loveliness of _The Song of Songs_ passed into our lives forever.
To this purely literary love of the Bible there has been added within
the last few years a certain renewed regard for it as the profoundest
book of the soul, and for some minds not conventionally religious it has
regained even some of its old authority as a spiritual guide and stay.
And I will confess for myself that sometimes, as I fall asleep at
night, I wonder if even Bernard Shaw has written anything to equal the
Twenty-third Psalm.