CHAPTER XIX.

POSTSCRIPTA.

Early in the year 1896 a company of Jews performed at the Novelty Theatre, London, in the Hebrew language, a drama entitled "King Solomon." It was an humble affair, and only about three score in the audience-I and one very dear to me being apparently the only "Gentiles" present. The drama was mainly the legend of the Judgment of Solomon and that of the visit of the Queen of Sheba, both conventionalized, and performed in an automatic way, no spark of human passion or emotion animating either of the women claiming the babe, or the Queen of Sheba. The part of Solomon was acted by a fine-looking man, who went through it in the same perfunctory way that characterized Joseph Meyer, the Oberammergau Christ, as he appears to the undevout critical eye. Such has the biblical Solomon become in Europe.

In the same week I attended a matinée of “Aladdin” in Drury Lane Theatre, which was crowded, mainly with children, who were filled with delight by the fairy play. The leading figures were elaborated from Solomonic lore. A beautiful being in dazzling white raiment and crown appears to Aladdin; she is a combination of the Queen of Sheba and Wisdom; she presents the youth with a ring (symbol of Solomon's espousal with Wisdom, or as the Abyssinians say, with the

Queen of Sheba); by means of this ring he obtains the Wonderful Lamp (the reflected or terrestrial wisdom). An Asmodeus, well versed in modern jugglery, charms the audience with his tricks and antics, before proceeding to get hold of the magic ring of Aladdin, and commanding the lamp, which he succeeds in doing, as he succeeded with Solomon. This is what legendary Solomon has become in Europe.

In European Folklore, Solomon and his old adversary, Asmodeus, now better known as Mephistopheles, have long been blended. Solomon's seal was the mediæval talisman to which the demon eagerly responds. The Wisdom involved is all a matter of magic. It is wonderful that so little recognition has been given in literature to the epical dignity and beauty of the biblical legends of Solomon. In early English literature there was at one time a tendency to ascribe to Solomon various proverbs not in the Bible. In one old manuscript he is credited with saying:

"Save a thief from the gallows and he'll help to hang thee." Also,

"Many a one leads a hungry life,

And yet must needs wed a wife."

In Chaucer's "Melibæus" there are ten proverbs ascribed to Solomon which are not in the Bible. But generally it is Solomon the magician who has interested the poets. In the old work, "Salomon and Saturn," the wise man informs Saturn that the most potent of all talismans is the Bible:

"Golden is the Word of God,

Stored with gems;

It hath silver leaves;

Each one can,

Through spiritual grace

A Gospel relate."

And it is further said, "Each (leaf) will subdue devils." In a profounder vein Solomon says: “All Evil is from Fate; yet a wise-minded man may moderate every fate with self-help, help of friends, and the divine spirit."

In Prospero burying his Book, Shakespeare seems to have followed the rabbinical legend that after Solomon by his written formulas had made the devils serve him, in building the temple and other works, he resolved to practice magic no more, and buried his book. But the devils said to the people, "he only ruled you by his book," and pointed out where it was hidden; so they left the prophets and followed magic.

At what time the notion arose that Solomon had demonic familiars does not appear, but the story in I Kings iii. of the gift of wisdom has some appearance of a reclamation for the deity of a credit that was popularly ascribed to a rival power. However this may be, there is a popular habit of tracing unusual human performances to Satan. As I write this paragraph (in Paris) I note a theatrical placard announcing "les sataniques devins" of Williany de Torre, a man who cries out the name and address you secretly select in the Paris Directory. Why not advertise the divinations as "angelic" instead of satanic? The heavenly beings have somehow no great reputation for cleverness. Probably this is due to the long association of intellectuality and science with heresy.

The late Lord Lytton ("Owen Meredith") wrote a

brief poem on a version given him by Robert Browning of the story in my Preface, of Solomon leaning on his staff long after he was dead: a worm gnaws the end of the staff and Solomon falls, crumbled to dust, and nothing left visible but his crown. A poem by Leigh Hunt, "The Inevitable" (in some editions, "The Angel of Death"), tells of a man who, in terror of Death, entreats Solomon to transport him to the remotest mountain of Cathay. Solomon does so.

"Solomon wished and the man vanished straight; Up comes the Terror, with his orbs of fate:

'Solomon,' with a lofty voice said he,

'How came that man here, wasting time with thee?
I was to fetch him ere the close of day,

From the remotest mountain of Cathay.
Solomon said, bowing him to the ground,

'Angel of death, there will the man be found.'

The story of the Fall of Man, in Genesis, so fascinated Schopenhauer that he was ready to forgive the Bible all its blunders. The whole world, said the great pessimist, looks like a vast accumulation of evil developed from some absurdly small misstep. And this misstep was precisely in accord with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who says that the great mistake of the universe is "consciousness."

That there were Schopenhaueresque ideas among some of the Solomonic school may be seen in Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), who says, "Be not overwise; why commit suicide?" (vii. 16.) I have remarked elsewhere that the story of the serpent in Eden may have been put there as a fling at Solomon and the scientific people, but on the other hand it may be argued that it was a fable devised by the Solomonic school to show how

Jahveh was outwitted in his attempt to breed a race of idiots, for fear mankind might become as clever as himself. For it was not the serpent that deceived Adam and Eve, but Jahveh, in saying the forbidden fruit was fatal; the serpent told them the truth.

The folk-tale that Solomon's staff was gnawed by a worm, and his crowned body reduced to dust, suggests the idea of grandeur laid low by some insignificant form, and in the same way Jahveh's creation was overthrown by a worm. This humiliation of Jahveh has been now somewhat lessened by the theory that Satan took the form of the serpent, which Dante calls the worm, but nowhere in the Bible is there any confusion of the reptile in Eden with any devil. "If," says Kalisch, "the serpent represented Satan it would be extremely surprising that the former only was cursed, and that the latter is not even alluded to." In Genesis the extreme cleverness of the serpent is recognized, and the truth of his statement to Eve admitted, while Jahveh is shown in the ridiculous light of having his deception about the fruit exposed by a worm, and betaking himself to curses all round. These be thy gods, O Christians—for the Jews absolutely ignored the tale in all their scriptures, and in the New Testament Paul alone alludes to it.*

The serpent in Eden is evidently the symbol of wisdom, of medical art-Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek— lifted in the wilderness by Moses, and recognised by Jesus ("Be wise as serpents"), with whom as an uplifted healer of mankind the serpent-symbol was associated. But all of this is in contradiction to the curses

* Paul (1 Tim. ii. 14), supposing him to have written the passage, uses the story simply to justify the subordination of woman to man, but a witty lady remarked to me that according to the story in Genesis no harm came to the world by Eve's eating the fruit of knowledge. It was only by the man's eating it that the thorns sprang up.