A bibliophile is expected to enter with an apology,—he is generally called a bibliomaniac, but let your foreboded homage check your tongue; remember, if you prefer your mother’s Bible to the one left by the tract society, or the one left by the tract society to your mother’s (bibliophiles are liable to any preference), you are open to the infection and the mania is incurable.

But do not books become ours by what we, individually, get from them? What does it matter whether it lies in the cover or the text or between the lines? “Piece out our imperfection with your thought,” implores the greatest poet. Though it is dwelt upon with some truth that bibliophiles do not read their books (must we therefore infer that other people have the contents of their libraries at their tongue’s ends), they have their own attitude toward them—an attitude which has proved of the profoundest service to letters.

The professional critic enters the library in state, receiving and dismissing new books with sovereign assurance: so uniformly has he erred that the dictum has gone forth that no age can pass on its writers.

The gentle reader enters the library modestly; although he may read the new books that perish, he does not neglect the new books that live, as any one who makes a study of editions will discover; he buys the good works of his own day. The publisher of the first edition of Shakespeare remarked that purchase “best commends a book,” on the strength of which idea he collected the stray plays of the Bard of the Avon. The preface which he wrote for his edition stands forth as the modest advertisement of history; but absurdly condescending as it is, it shows that he foresaw a good, immediate sale; also that he foresaw no farther.

The bibliophile enters the library abstractedly, there to muse upon volumes true and tried; and through the ages his reverent, disinterested spirit has builded better than it knew. Indeed, it alone tided books across the Dark Ages; for even when they could not read, some there were who had wit enough to appreciate letters in the abstract. Contrast their attitude with that of the executive Caliph Omar, who burned a great library at Alexandria in 635, declaring that if the books were orthodox (Mohammedan orthodoxy, of course) they were unnecessary; if heterodox, pernicious. That is what it means to have mere practical people around among books.

I can conceive of no human relic more touching than a Bible copied with conscientious care during this unsympathetic era. Hence the Book of Kells,[5] which is destitute of one touch of the native artist, however immature, is often spoken of as the most beautiful book in the world. It is supposed to have been executed about the eighth century, since its illuminators had advanced from the mere red capitals adorned with twisted dragons to pictures relating to the text. The symbols of the apostles, especially the bird-like lion of Saint Mark, appear repeatedly on the margins; also, there is a representation of Saint Matthew with hands growing from his shoulders, holding up to the world two copies of “The Book.” Among its illustrations are the Arrest of Jesus, the Agony of the Garden, and, most interesting of all, four angels and a Virgin and Child appear on the old pages, for, crude as these figures are, they may be reckoned among the direct ancestors of those beautiful Holy Families born on Italian and Flemish canvases eight or nine hundred years later, whose sweet faces still sway the world.

Christian art began as illustration on the pages of holy books, and as illustration it expanded onto wood and canvas, bronze and marble. The peculiar grace of pictorial art crept into it incidentally, by accident of genius. That famous Giotto of the Louvre showing “Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata” is simply a direct explanation of the subject, far more beautiful in idea than in execution. There are the figures of Jesus and of Saint Francis; Christ is flying toward “the most Christ-like of men,” and gilt lines from every wound in our Savior piercing Saint Francis in the same parts of the body bind that sympathetic saint to his Redeemer, while unknown to the holy brother a halo appears back of his head. This idea of illustration made beautiful that it might be worthy of the subject which it treated, that arose in the old scriptoriums, reached its perfection on Ghiberti’s doors to the Baptistry at Florence. Michael Angelo called them the Gates of Paradise. Illuminated books of a later date display equally noble, artistic connections. I have seen little Madonnas in Books of Hours in the British Museum that seem like imperfect copies of Raphael, whereas they precede him by nearly a century.

MediÆval story is full of the visits of angels to despairing illuminators and scribes who found themselves unable to execute books worthy in their material beauty to convey the word of God. Our Lady herself sometimes came down to console them. Did forecasts of the beautiful pictures yet to come sometimes appear to the humble dreamers of the cloister as they worked away on the margins of holy books? Not literally, of course, for taste was too crude to conceive of a developed art. But may not some old artist have conceived in his cell of a pictured Madonna, so beautiful that pilgrims came from afar to do her honor, so sweet that she could uplift them from sin? And perhaps the soul of that humble old scribe finds its paradise in the better part of some inscrutable genius whose Madonnas perpetually uplift the world, for the soul of a saint is active forever.

But from the vantage-ground of the Old Book of Kells it is as pretty to look backward as to look forward, so sweetly does it recall a certain monastery on the Island of Iona which casts its ray in history like a good deed in a naughty world. This old book speaks eloquently of the lonely Irish cloisters where, in perhaps the darkest hour of written history, the seeds of occidental civilization were laid away until a more favorable season dawned in which to sow them broadcast.

About a hundred years after the blessed Saint Patrick converted Ireland, in which time many had fallen from grace, Saint Columba appeared on the scene, made a second conversion of that region and founded the old Scotch Kirk (very indirectly). When Saint Columba appealed to the canny Scots and the thrifty northern Irishmen for a situation for his monastery, they hospitably turned over to his use the rocky Island of Iona. Though agriculturally it was not much, through long ages it had borne the fruits of the spirit until even its stones did duty as amulets. In its bosom slept the Scottish kings, King Macbeth being the last of the royal line to lie there. Iona was hallowed ground to the Druid, and is, to this day, a haven of superstition. There Saint Columba, the scribe, located his lonely monastery wherein books were made, wondrous in their day and generation, and there or at some Columbian monastery in the neighborhood, perhaps at Kells, the Book of Kells was executed.

One of its big pages, which is covered by a great cross wherein eight circles are incorporated in a network of infinitely involved interlacements, especially illustrates one phase of early art—its reverent patience. Study that cross as you may you will find no false line, no irregular interlacement, for all this was done in the olden time when the ways of holy men were made so clear unto them. That none might disturb the holy calm of the silent scribes as they multiplied the precious “Word” Saint Jerome had taken down from the direct dictation of the angels, a code of signs was in use in the scriptoriums of the monasteries. The sign of the cross indicated a missal, the sign of the crown, King David’s psalms, while a contemptuous scratching of the ear, in the manner of a dog, was an order for a mere pagan volume; for then “the world was very wicked,” as the good monks droned; or at least very rude, cruel, lazy and barbarous, as history affirms, and gentle spirits were only too prone to recoil from it.

The early Christians in general were filled with contempt for this life and proud certainty of reward in the next: those whose practice was no higher than their theory withdrew from the world to secure to themselves particularly high seats in heaven. The composite story of their lives emphasizes the barrenness of the scoffer, the futility of the contemptuous. But the story of the scribe, though he may have seen through the glass just as darkly as the anchorite did, is the living story of Christian brotherhood.

One of the first of these scribes, old Cassiodorus of Ravenna, writes: “All who sing form but a single voice, and we may mingle our notes with those of the angels, though we may not hear them.” I am sure that was the sentiment which finally turned this old statesman from the world, even though he did not retire till after the death of Theodoric, his patron. Perhaps the career of a statesman prepared him to be a statesman of the world of letters; at any rate, when he repaired to the cloister he gathered together, according to his lights, the best books of his world, and especially enjoined upon the monks the noble duty of multiplying them.

All this was some hundred years before Saint Columba’s time, but angel voices carry, and I do believe in their highest moments the ignorant, undeveloped scribes of the old Irish monasteries vaguely echoed ideals like those of Cassiodorus.

These scribes came to feel a certain ownership in the great Bibles on which they worked. At the end of each section of the old Book of Durrow its scribe smuggled in his petition that all who take the book in hand might pray for him. I have known a merry old scribe to insert a jingle in very bad Latin at the end of a chapter, indicating that after so much good work he should be rewarded with a drink. The jolly old monk has always appealed to me most unreasonably.

Within the century of the making of the old Book of Kells in Ireland, stirring old Charlemagne brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and the Frank and, “that requests should not be made to God in bad language,” he regulated copists and reproductions by law; he ordered holy books elaborately adorned, and collected, to the best of his ability, artists for that purpose, thereby leaving his mark on the books of his time and of some generations following, which are technically known as Carlovingians. Indeed, as a bibliophile Charlemagne shows the most charming side of his character. In his enthusiasm he went to work and learned to read, but he never could succeed in learning to write.

As might be expected, Carlovingians are mechanically decorated. They show Byzantine importation rather than the loving development of an early and original art. We still have a couple of pages of the Amiens copy of a work written by the Abbot of Fulda during Charlemagne’s reign. One page is covered by a lone figure, without ground or background, of Louis the Pious with text printed all over it. (Not that in the Dark Ages anybody read between the lines; that they failed to do so was their greatest difficulty.) Then other Carlovingians are examples of the dyers’ art, being written in gold on purple vellum, like the “Golden Gospels” which one thousand one hundred years later proved such an excellent speculation on Wall street. But that is unquestionably “another story.”

There is a certain book in the Bodleian not quite so old which I should value more highly. With considerably more evidence than usual in such cases, it is identified as the book of mass of Queen Margaret of Scotland. I wonder if the lovely Saxon princess had it with her when she fled to Scotland after the Norman Conquest to implore the protection of Malcomb Canmore who made her his Queen? But, better still, his people afterwards made her their patron saint, realizing that she had done more to refine them than any other early ruler. Tradition tells how the King, though he could not read, loved to handle the Queen’s precious books—perhaps he gave this little volume adorned with gold and jewels to the lady of his reverent love.

The thirteenth century has great attractions for a bibliophile. Never were the embellishments on books more liberal and amusing. Nowadays illuminators consider the fitness of things, but in the thirteenth century they just designed. I know of a most charming psalter of the late thirteenth century with the capitals filled with the spirited knights and the margins with all-colored dragons whose attenuated tails form circles, sometimes not more than an eighth of an inch in diameter, that separate tiny butting goats or strutting cocks, or Darwinian monkeys or other irrelevant matter from the text.

Did these dragons creep in from the Norse mythologies, I wonder, or were they just creatures of adaptive anatomy for decorative purposes? The early illuminators did not turn to nature; simple people never do. This illustrator’s mind certainly wandered; whether it started with the psalms I cannot determine, but he displays two tiny gilded stops one-eighth of an inch by two inches that the seriously inclined might take as sermons. One represents a jester, with cap and bells and wand, and little other raiment, successfully charging a fully armed knight; and the other, Venus, attended by a blue dragon, pursuing a cross between a man and a devil.

The fourteenth and fifteenth century illuminators and illustrators begin to think; indeed, they are among the best historians we find of that period: modern illustration is fast returning to their methods.

At the commencement of the fourteenth century, miniatures of the noble owners of elaborate volumes began to be inserted in their books. Thus a consecutive history of two hundred years of French portraiture is safely folded away in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where we may watch the stiff early miniatures gradually develop into charming little genre pictures. Though the consideration of atmosphere was passed over at that time, many of them are models of composition.

Some of these little illustrations show the conceptions as well as the manners of the age. In one of these old Bibles is a picture of six seigneurs (two famous bibliophiles among them), in full regalia (no grave clothes for them), cordially received by Saint Peter at the Gothic Gates of Paradise in the courteous days of the old regime. There is that magnificent jeweled Bible of Jean Sans Peur, Duc de Bourgoyne, decorated with his armorial bearings, which was given to him by some monks of his domain when he deigned to honor them with a visit; it contains a charming little picture of the presentation scene.

Those were royal days for bibliophiles; but a change was to come over the spirit of their dreams. Printing was invented and the democracy of letters set in,—jeweled bindings made way for calf, and collectors are diverted from painting to presses. Bibliophiles develop individual tastes and such a plebeian variety of them; it is akin to free speech—one doting on prayer-books, another on cook-books; one on pamphlets, another on palimpsests; one on school-books, another on Virgils; one on curiosities of literature, execrably illustrated books of travel in impossible lands and comedies of error generally; another on distant glimpses of dawning light, until within the order arises the confusion of Babel, one no longer understanding the language of another.

But there is an early Episcopal prayer-book in the British Museum before which all the brotherhood right gallantly might bow. It was Lady Jane Grey’s companion in distress; she is said to have taken it with her to the scaffold, where she certainly carried its lessons. In it she wrote her last message to her father: “The Lord comfort Your Grace in this world wherein all creatures are only to be comforted.” Her story is almost too harrowing to recall. This studious young girl, just seventeen, is offered the English crown. Her common sense tells her to decline it. “His Grace,” always harsh, even for his day and generation, forces her to accept. In consequence, after a ten days’ reign, she is imprisoned in the Tower. While she is held there “His Grace” makes another false move; as a result of his idiocy Lady Jane and her young husband are condemned to death.

Could we believe this gentle message on hearsay? We should probably argue, the age was so narrow, the girl was so young, the expression is too condensed, too mature. The rational doubt would blur one of the loveliest pictures in Time’s gallery of fair women. A martyr without the spur, or the blemish of fanaticism! A Queen of ten days but a Defender of the Faith forever. The crown jewels pale before this illuminated prayer-book of Her Most Christian Majesty. This dear little Protestant called forth the one tender letter extant from the highly practical Diana of Poitiers. “I have just been hearing the account of the poor young Queen Jane, and I could not keep myself from weeping at the sweet, resigned words she spoke to them on the scaffold; surely never was such a sweet and accomplished princess.”

Indeed, the best thing in the world of books, as well as in the world of men, “is something out of it,” and it is the appreciation of this “something,” manifest to sympathetic souls, which makes us bibliophiles. If unknown to history a tender touch of hands long dead lurks in an old edition, is it not beyond price?

Although there are priceless books like this little prayer-book of Queen Jane, every good bibliophile is a bit of a speculator; to bet on an author is as loyal an excitement as to bet on a racer; and to feel a beloved volume appreciating upon one’s shelves is like watching the development of a promising child.

Robert Browning, who was brought up in the fold, his father being a collector, writes:

That eightpence has the regular bibliomaniacal ring. Next to giving fifty prices for a book, the genuine collector delights in paying an improperly low one—a tour de force either of wit or of purse.

Just think of getting material for the longest poem of the century for eightpence! and material so unique! with the inspiration of the old tome thrown in!

But now, when books are so cheap they are almost free, when exact reproductions of wonderful editions might flood the market at any day, when venders of old books have become too expert for book hunters, we are assured that bibliophiles, grasping the tangible in the hope of realizing the intangible, are the absurdities of a rational age.

Remember our record in the past and trust us a little in the present. In blind reverence we saved books and inaugurated Christian art. Historians suddenly began to demand documents and they grow more and more insistent on that point. Well, we can come to their aid and they can come to ours; many a pretty bargain has been struck in the exchange. Along with its old books and letters we have especially preserved the gentler, though none too gentle, side of the past.

We can introduce you to men of other days in their libraries: a very good place to study them sympathetically.

Among other charming facts, we can assure you that even during the confusion of a period of infinite intrigue complicated by religious wars and the Fronde, Richelieu and Mazarin found time to play at bibliomania, and perhaps we can persuade you that of all their games it was the most profitable. The executive Mazarin got hold of an invaluable expert, NaudÉ, who brought him bargains by the yard. What fun they must have had out of it,—NaudÉ literally taking a measuring-stick with him when he went “book-hunting,” and “the stalls where he had passed were like the towns through which Attila or the Tartars had swept!” But the result was different. Deserving books were sumptuously decked out in red and olive morocco with gold-tooled cardinal hats thereon, and took their rightful place in Mazarin’s palace, that Earthly Paradise of the bibliophile graced by beautiful books and gentle readers, for Mazarin’s library was cordially free, the first really free library in France.

It is true that Saint Louis, always open to a beautiful idea, hearing of a sultan who had had copies made of the manuscripts of his realm for the benefit of the savants, endeavored to follow the example of the Moslem. Accordingly he made a beautiful collection of copies which were kept in the royal chapel—hardly a convenient place for the reading public; but then there was no reading public.

However humble a Christian, however gentle a knight Saint Louis may have been, he was destitute of one instinct of the democrat. After his death his collection was broken up, but his idea descended to Charles the Wise, who practically started the Royal Library which, joined to the Mazarin, developed into the present Bibliotheque Nationale.

As the oldest branch of the Public Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale occupies the ancestral home, the Palais Mazarin at Paris, where Mazarin’s motto, “Time and I,” rings forth in the majesty of accomplishment.

As “Ever since the days of Captain Kidd, the Yankees think there’s money hid,” so ever since the disappearance of MoliÈre’s library the bibliophiles think there’s treasure hid. Only one book which belonged to that prince of bibliophiles has turned up so far, a little Elzevir of 1651, in which he obligingly wrote his name and the price, 1 livre, 10 sous. But think of his two hundred and forty odd comedies which he handled so deftly both in the letter and in the spirit, “taking his property wherever he found it!” What pearls of price if one could only trace them!

We know this collection was broken up; it cannot be that every single book has perished. One is almost justified in counting such chickens before they are hatched. MoliÈre was not only one of the greatest but one of the most lovable of authors—that quality we collectors value so highly! Why a book of his would be like a relic of a saint (there is a bit of mediÆvalism in every good bibliophile); a saint, a bibliophile of other days, an actor, a gentle reader and a genius! What might not any one of them bring? Ah, there is still a golden fleece for the quest of the Romantic Modern.

Romance will always deal in talismans. We bibliophiles make ours a thing of the mind, which we lay away between the lines of some gentle old volume, hoping that some day, somewhere in the vague realm of Books, it may work its pleasant magic upon some unknown comrade.