labour of love. He began them in conjunction with his friend
Steinhaeuser, soon after his return from the Mecca pilgrimage, more
than thirty years ago, and he has been doing something to them ever
since. In the swampy jungles of West Africa a tale or two has been
turned into English, or a poem has been versified during the tedium
of official life in the dank climate of Brazil. From Sind to Trieste
the manuscript has formed part and parcel of his baggage, and
though, in the interval, the learned author has added many a volume
to the shelf-full which he has written, the “Thousand Nights and a
Night” have never been forgotten. And now when he nears the end of
his labours it seems as if we had never before known what the
beauteous Shahrazad told the King who believed not in the constancy
of women. Captain Burton seems the one sober man among drunkards. We
have all the old company, though they appear in dresses so entirely
new that one scans the lines again and again before the likeness is
quite recognised. However, Tajal-Mulook will no doubt be as knightly
as ever when his turn comes, for the Barber is garrulous, after the
old fashion, and the three Shaykhs relate their experiences with the
Jinns, the gazelles, and mules as vividly as they have done any time
these thousand years or more. King Yoonan and the Sage Dooban are
here, and so are King Sindibad and his falcon, the young Prince of
the Black Islands, the envious Weezer and the Ghoolah; and the story
of the Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad lose nothing of their charms
in the new, and, we may add, extremely unsophisticated version. For
Captain Burton’s work is not _virginibus puerisque_, and, while
disclaiming for his version anything like intentional indecorum, he
warns the readers that they will be guilty of a breach of good faith
should they permit a work prepared only for students to fall into
the hands of boys and girls. From the first to almost the
penultimate edition of these stories the drawing-room alone has been
consulted. Even Mr. Payne, though his otherwise faithful version was
printed for the Villon Society, had the fear of Mrs. Grundy before
his eyes. Moreover, no previous editor—not even Lane himself—had a
tithe of Captain Burton’s acquaintance with the manners and customs
of the Moslem East. Hence, not unfrequently, they made ludicrous
blunders, and in no instance did they supply anything like the
explanatory notes which have added so greatly to the value of this
issue of “Alf Laylah wa Laylah.” Some of these are startling in
their realism, and often the traveller who believed that he knew
something of the East, winces at the plainness with which the
Wazir’s daughter tells her tales to Shahryar, King of the Banu
Sasan. The language is, however, more frequently coarse than loose,
and smacks more of the childish plainness with which high and low
talk in the family circles from Tangier to Malaysia, than of
prurience or suggestiveness. The Oriental cannot understand that it
is improper to refer in straightforward terms to anything which
Allah has created, or of which the Kuran treats. But in his
conversation, as in his folk-lore, there is no subtle corruption or
covert licentiousness—none of the vicious suggestion and false
sentiment that pervade so many of the productions of the modern
romantic school.
It is, indeed, questionable whether there is much in these
inimitable romances half so objectionable as many of the chapters in
Rabelais and Boccaccio. Nor do the most archaic of the passages
which Captain Burton declines to “veil in the decent obscurity of a
learned language” leave much room for the admirers of Shakespeare,
or Greene, or Nash, or Wycherley, or Swift, or Sterne to cry shame.
Their coarseness was a reflection of the times. The indelicacy was
not offensive to those who heard it. On the other hand, apart from
the language, the general tone of “The Nights” is exceptionally high
and pure. The devotional fervour, as Captain Burton justly claims,
often rises to the boiling-point of fanaticism, and the pathos is
sweet and deep, genuine and tender, simple and true. Its
life—strong, splendid, and multitudinous—is everywhere flavoured
with that unaffected pessimism and constitutional melancholy which
strike deepest root under the brightest skies. The Kazi administers
poetical justice with exemplary impartiality; and so healthy is the
_morale_ that at times we descry through the voluptuous and
libertine picture “vistas of a transcendental morality—the morality
of Socrates in Plato.” In no other work of the same nature is
Eastern life so vividly pourtrayed. We see the Arab Knight, his
prowess and his passion for adventure, his love and his revenge, the
craft of his wives, and the hypocrisy of his priests, as plainly as
if we had lived among them. Gilded palaces, charming women, lovely
gardens, caves full of jewels, and exquisite repasts, captivate the
senses and give variety to the panorama which is passing before our
eyes. Yet we repeat that, though there is much in the excellent
version now begun which is very plain speaking, there is nothing
intentionally demoralising. Evidently, however, the translator is
prepared to hear this charge brought against his labour of love.
Indeed, there is a tinge of melancholy pervading the preface in
which the Editor refers to his “unsuccessful professional life,” and
to the knowledge of which his country has cared so little to avail
itself. * * * * Even in the recent Egyptian troubles—which are
referred to somewhat bitterly—his wisdom was not utilised, though,
after the death of Major Morice, there was not an English official
in the camps before Suakin capable of speaking Arabic. On this
scandal, and on the ignorance of Oriental customs which was
everywhere displayed, Captain Burton is deservedly severe. The issue
of the ten volumes now in the press, accompanied by notes so full of
learning as those with which they are illuminated, will surely give
the nation an opportunity for wiping away the reproach of that
neglect which Captain Burton seems to feel more keenly than he cares
to express.
This was a sop to the friend and a sore blow dealt to the enemy.
Moreover it was speedily followed up by another as swashing and
trenchant in the _Morning Advertiser_ (September 15, ’85), of which long
extracts are presently quoted. The journal was ever friendly to me
during the long reign of Mr. James Grant, and became especially so when
the editorial chair was so worthily filled by my old familiar of Oxford
days, the late Alfred Bate Richards, a man who made the “Organ of the
Licensed Victuallers” a power in the state and was warmly thanked for
his good services by that model conservative, Lord Beaconsfield.
A phrase in the _Standard_, the “most archaic of the passages,” acted
upon
_THE "PALL MALL GAZETTE"_
like a red rag upon a rageous bull. I should rather say that it excited
the so-called “Sexual Journal” by suggesting another opportunity for its
unclean sensationalism: perhaps also the staff hoped to provide company
and a fellow-sufferer for their editor, who was then in durance vile,
his offences being “inciting to an indecent assault” and an act of
criminal immorality. I should not have felt called upon to remind my
readers of a scandal half-forgotten in England, while still held in
lively remembrance by the jealous European world, had not the persistent
fabrications, calumnies, and slanders of the _Pall Mall_, which continue
to this day, compelled me to move in self-defence, and to explain the
mean underlying motives.
Some three years and a half ago (June 3, ’85), the paper startled the
world of London by a prodigy of false, foul, and fulsome details in the
shape of articles entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The
object of the editor, Mr. William T. Stead, a quondam teacher in the
London schools and a respectable Methodist strengthened by
non-Conformist support, in starting this ignoble surprise on the public
was much debated. His partisans asserted that he had been honestly
deceived by some designing knave—as if such child-like credulity were
any excuse for a veteran journalist! His foes opined that under the
cloak of a virtue, which Cato never knew, he sought to quicken his
subscription-list ever dwindling under the effects of his exaggerated
Russophilism and Anglophobia.
But whatever may have been the motive, the effect was deplorable. The
articles, at once collected into a pamphlet (price twopence), as the
“Report of the _Pall Mall Gazette’s_ Secret Commission,” and headed by a
laudatory quotation from one of the late Lord Shaftesbury’s indiscreetly
philanthropic speeches, were spread broadcast about every street and
lane in London. The brochure of sixteen pages divided into three
chapters delighted the malignant with such sensational section-headings
as—How Girls are Bought and Ruined—Why the Cries of the Victims are not
Heard—Procuresses in the West End—How Annie was Procured—You Want a
Maid, do You?—The Ruin of Children—A London Minotaur (?)—The Ruin of the
Young Life—The Demon Child and—A Close Time for Girls, the latter being
intended to support the recommendation of the Lords’ Committee and the
promise of a Home Secretary that the age of consent be raised from
thirteen to sixteen. And all this catchpenny stuff (price 2d.) ended
characteristically with “Philanthropic and Religious Associations can be
supplied with copies of this reprint _on special terms_.” Such artless
benevolence and disinterested beneficence must, of course, be made to
pay.
Read by every class and age in the capital, the counties and the
colonies, this false and filthy scandal could not but infect the very
children with the contagion of vice. The little gutter-girls and
street-lasses of East London looked at men passing-by as if assured that
their pucelages were or would become vendible at £3 to £5. But, the
first startling over, men began to treat the writer as he deserved. The
abomination was “boycotted” by the Press, expelled the clubs, and driven
in disgrace from the “family breakfast-table,” an unpleasant predicament
for a newspaper which lives, not by its news, but by its advertisements.
The editor had the impudence to bemoan a “conspiracy of silence,” which
can only mean that he wanted his foul sheets to be bought and discussed
when the public thought fit to bury them in oblivion. And yet he must
have known that his “Modern Babylon” is not worse in such matters than
half-a-dozen minor Babylons scattered over Europe, Asia, and America;
and that it is far from being, except by the law of proportion, the
“greatest market of human flesh in the world.” But by carefully and
curiously misrepresenting the sporadic as the systematic, and by
declaring that the “practice of procuration has been reduced to a
science” (instead of being, we will suppose, one of the fine arts), it
is easy to make out a case of the grossest calumny and most barefaced
scandal against any great capital.
The revelations of the _Pall Mall_ were presently pooh-pooh’d at home;
but abroad their effect was otherwise. Foreigners have not yet learned
thoroughly to appreciate our national practice of washing (and suffering
others to wash) the foulest linen in fullest public. Mr. Stead’s
unworthy clap-trap representing London as the head-quarters of
kidnapping, hocussing, and child-prostitution, the author invoking the
while with true Pharisaic righteousness, unclean and blatant, pure
intentions and holy zeal for good works, was welcomed with a shout of
delight by our unfriends the French, who hold virtue in England to be
mostly Tartuffery, and by our cousins-german and rivals the Germans, who
dearly love to use us and roundly abuse us. In fact, the national name
of England was wilfully and wrongfully defiled and bewrayed by a “moral
and religious” Englishman throughout the length and breadth of Europe.
Hard upon those “revelations” comes the Eliza Armstrong case whereby the
editor of the “Sexual Gazette” stultified thoroughly and effectually his
own assertions; and proved most satisfactorily, to the injury of his own
person, that the easiest thing in the world is notably difficult and
passing dangerous. An accomplice, unable to procure a “maiden” for
immoral purposes after boasting her ability as a procuress, proceeded to
kidnap one for the especial benefit of righteous Mr. Stead.
Consequently, he found himself in the dock together with five other
accused, male and female; and the verdict, condemning the arch-plotter
to three months and the assistants to lesser terms of imprisonment for
abduction and indecent assault, was hailed with universal applause. The
delinquent had the fanatical and unscrupulous support, with purse and
influence, of the National Vigilance Association, a troop of busybodies
captained by licensed blackmailers who of late years have made England
their unhappy hunting-ground.[447] Despite, however, the “Stead Defence
Fund” liberally supplied by Methody; despite the criminal’s Pecksniffian
tone, his self-glorification of the part he had taken, his _effronté_
boast of pure and lofty motives and his passionate enthusiasm for sexual
morality, the trial emphasised the fact that no individual may break the
law of the land in order that good may come therefrom. It also proved
most convincingly the utter baselessness of the sweeping indictment
against the morality of England and especially of London—a charge which
“undoubtedly had an enormous influence for harm at home and cruelly
prejudiced the country abroad.” In the words of Mr. Vaughan of the Bow
Street Police Court (September 7, ’85) the _Pall Mall’s_ “Sensational
articles had certainly given unlimited pain and sorrow to many good
people at home and had greatly lowered the English nation in the
estimation of foreigners.” In a sequel to the Eliza Armstrong case Mr.
Justice Manisty, when summing up, severely condemned the “shocking
exhibition that took place in the London streets by the publication of
statements containing horrible details, and he trusted that those who
were responsible for the administration of the law would take care that
such outrage should not be permitted again.” So pure and pious Mr. Stead
found time for reflection during the secluded three-months life of a
“first-class misdemeanant” in “happy Holywell,” and did not bring out
his intended articles denouncing London as the head-quarters of a
certain sin named from Sodom.
About mid-September, when Mr. Stead still lay in durance vile, a
sub-editor Mr. Morley (Jun.) applied to me for an interview which I did
not refuse. It was by no means satisfactory except to provide his paper
with “copy.” I found him labouring hard to place me “in the same box”
with his martyred principal and to represent my volume (“a book of
archaic delights”) as a greater outrage on public decency than the
two-penny pamphlet. This, as said the _London Figaro_ (September 19,
’85), is a “monstrous and absurd comparison.” It became evident to me,
during the first visit, that I was to play the part of Mr. Pickwick
between two rival races of editors, the pornologists and the
anti-pornologists; and, having no stomach for such sport I declined the
rôle. In reply to a question about critics my remark to the interviewer
was, “I have taken much interest in what the classics call Skiomachia
and I shall allow Anonymus and Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also
treat with scornful silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent
prospect, a landscape adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art,
can only see in a field corner here and there a little heap of muck.
‘You must have been looking for it, Madam!’ said, or is said to have
said, sturdy old Doctor Samuel Johnson.”
Moreover Mr. Morley’s style of reporting “interviews” was somewhat too
advanced and American—that is, too personal, too sensation-mongering and
too nauseously familiar—to suit my taste; and I would have none other of
them. Hereupon being unable to make more copy out of the case the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ let loose at me a German Jew penny-a-liner, who signs
himself Sigma. This _pauvre diable_ delivered himself of two articles,
“Pantagruelism or Pornography?” (September 14, ’85) and “The Ethics of
the Dirt” (September 19, ’85), wherein with matchless front of brass he
talks of the “unsullied British breakfast-table,” so pleasantly provided
with pepper by his immaculate editor. And since that time the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ has never ceased to practise at my expense its old trade,
falsehood and calumny, and the right of private judgment, sentence and
execution. In hopes that his splenatic and vindictive fiction might bear
fruit, at one time the _Pall Mall Gazette_ has “heard that the work was
to be withdrawn from circulation” (when it never circulated). Then, “it
was resolved by the authorities to request Captain Burton not to issue
the third volume and to prosecute him if he takes no notice of the
invitation;” and, finally, “Government has at last determined to put
down Captain Burton with a strong hand.” All about as true as the
political articles which the _Pall Mall Gazette_ indites with such
heroic contempt for truth, candour and honesty. One cannot but apply to
the “Gutter Gazette” the words of the Rev. Edward Irving:—“I mean by the
British Inquisition that court whose ministers and agents carry on their
operations in secret; who drag every man’s most private affairs before
the sight of thousands and seek to mangle and destroy his life, trying
him without a witness, condemning him without a hearing, nor suffering
him to speak for himself; intermeddling in things of which they have no
knowledge and cannot on any principle have a jurisdiction. * * * I mean
the ignorant, unprincipled, unhallowed spirit of criticism, which in
this Protestant country is producing as foul effects against truth, and
by as dishonest means as ever did the Inquisition of Rome” (p. 5
“Preliminary Discourse to Ben Ezra,” etc.).
Of course men were not wanting to answer the malevolent insipidities of
the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and to note the difference between newspaper
articles duly pamphleted and distributed to the disgust of all decency,
and the translation of an Arabian classic, limited in issue and intended
only for the few select. Nor could they fail to observe that
blackballing the Nights and admitting the “revelations” was a desperate
straining at the proverbial gnat and swallowing the camel. My readers
will hardly thank me for dwelling upon this point yet I cannot refrain
from quoting certain of the protests:—
_To the Editor of the_ “PALL MALL GAZETTE.”
SIR,—
Your correspondent “Sigma” has forgotten the considerable number of
“students” who will buy Captain Burton’s translation as the only
literal one, needing it to help them in what has become necessary to
many—a masterly knowledge of Egyptian Arabic. The so-called “Arabian
Nights” are about the only written halfway house between the
literary Arabic and the colloquial Arabic, both of which they need,
and need introductions too. I venture to say that its largest use
will be as a grown-up school-book, and that it is not coarser than
the classics in which we soak all our boys’ minds at school.
ANGLO-EGYPTIAN.
_September 14th, 1885._
And the _Freethinker’s_ answer (Oct. 25, ’85) to these repeated and
malicious assaults is as follows:—
Here is a fine illustration of Mr. Stead’s Pecksniffian
peculiarities. Captain Burton, a gentleman and a scholar whose boots
Mr. Stead is not fit to black, is again hauled over the coals for
the hundredth time, about his new translation of the Arabian Nights,
which is so “pornographic” that the price of the first volume has
actually risen from a pound to twenty-five shillings. Further down,
in the very same column, the _P.M.G._ gloats proudly over the fact
that thirty-five shillings have been given for a single copy of its
own twopennyworth of smut.
The last characteristic touch which I shall take the trouble to notice
is the following gem of September 16, ’87:—
I was talking to an American novelist the other day, and he assured
me that the Custom-house authorities on “the other side” seized all
copies of Sir Richard Burton’s “Nights” that came into their hands,
and retained them as indecent publications. Burned them, I hope he
meant, and so, I fear, will all holders of this notorious
publication, for prices will advance, and Sir Richard will chuckle
to think that indecency is a much better protection than
international copyright.
Truly the pen is a two-edged tool, often turned by the fool against his
own soul. So an honest author “chuckles” when his subscribers have lost
their copies _because_ this will enhance the value of his book! I ask,
Can anything be better proven than the vileness of a man who is ever
suspecting and looking for vileness in his fellow-men? Again, the
assertion that the Custom-house authorities in the United States had
seized my copies is a Pall-Mallian fiction pure and simple, and the
“Sexual Gazette” must have known this fact right well. In consequence of
a complaint lodged by the local Society for the Suppression of Vice, the
officials of the Custom-house, New York, began by impounding the first
volumes of the Villon Version; but presently, as a literary friend
informs me (February 10, ’88), “the new translations of The Nights have
been fully permitted entry at the Custom-house and are delivered on the
payment of 25% duty.” To my copies admittance was never refused.
Mr. Stead left his prison-doors noisily declaring that the rest of his
life should be “devoted to Christian chivalry”—whatever that majestic
dictum may mean. As regards his subsequent journalistic career I can
observe only that it has been unfortunate as inconsequent. He took up
the defence, abusing the Home Secretary after foulest fashion, of the
coldblooded murderer Lipski, with the result that his protégé was hanged
after plenary confession and the Editor had not the manliness to
apologise. He espoused the cause of free speech in Ireland with the
result that most of the orators were doomed to the infirmaries connected
with the local gaols. True to his principle made penal by the older and
wiser law of libel, that is of applying individual and irresponsible
judgment to, and passing final and unappealable sentence upon, the
conduct of private individuals and of public men, he raged and inveighed
with all the fury of outraged (and interested) virtue against Colonel
Hughes-Hallett with the consequence of seating that M.P. more firmly
than before. He took up the question of free public meeting in England
with the result that a number of deludeds (including Mr. Cunninghame
Graham, M.P.) found their way to prison, which the “Christian chevalier”
had apparently contracted to supply with inmates. But there is more to
say concerning the vaunted morality of this immoral paper.—Eheu! quantum
mutatus from the old decent days when, under Mr. Frederic Greenwood, it
was indeed “written by gentlemen for gentlemen” (and ladies).
A journal which, like the _Pall Mall Gazette_, affects preferably and
persistently sexual subjects and themes lubric, works more active and
permanent damage to public morals than books and papers which are
frankly gross and indecent. The latter, so far as the world of letters
knows them, are read either for their wit and underlying wisdom (_e.g._
Rabelais and Swift), for their historical significance (Petronius
Arbiter) or for their anthropological interest as the Alf Laylah. But
the public print which deals, however primly and decently, piously and
unctuously with sexual and intersexual relations, usually held to be of
the Alekta or taboo’d subjects, is the real perverter of conduct, the
polluter of mental purity, the corrupter-general of society. Amongst
savages and barbarians the comparatively unrestrained intercourse
between men and women relieves the brain through the body; the mind and
memory have scant reason, physical or mental, to dwell fondly upon
visions amatory and venereal, to live in a “rustle of (imaginary)
copulation.” On the other hand the utterly artificial life of
civilisation, which debauches even the monkeys in “the Zoo,” and which
expands the period proper for the reproductory process from the vernal
season into the whole twelvemonth, leaves to the many, whose lot is
celibacy, no bodily want save one and that in a host of cases either
unattainable or procurable only by difficulty and danger. Hence the
prodigious amount of mental excitement and material impurity which is
found wherever civilisation extends, in maid, matron, and widow, save
and except those solely who allay it by some counteragent—religion,
pride, or physical frigidity. How many a woman in “Society,” when
stricken by insanity or puerperal fever, breaks out into language that
would shame the slums and which makes the hearers marvel where she could
have learned such vocabulary. How many an old maid held to be cold as
virgin snow, how many a matron upon whose fairest fame not a breath of
scandal has blown, how many a widow who proudly claims the title
_univira_, must relieve their pent-up feelings by what may be called
mental prostitution. So I would term the dear delights of sexual
converse and that sub-erotic literature, the phthisical “French novel,”
whose sole merit is “suggestiveness,” taking the place of Oriental
_morosa voluptas_ and of the unnatural practices—Tribadism and so forth,
still rare, we believe, in England. How many hypocrites of either sex,
who would turn away disgusted from the outspoken Tom Jones or the
Sentimental Voyager, revel in and dwell fondly upon the sly romance or
“study” of character whose profligacy is masked and therefore the more
perilous. And a paper like the (modern) _Pall Mall Gazette_ which
deliberately pimps and panders to this latent sense and state of
aphrodisiac excitement, is as much the more infamous than the loose book
as hypocrisy is more hateful than vice and prevarication is more ignoble
than a lie. And when such vile system is professionally practised under
the disguise and in the holy names of Religion and Morality, the effect
is loathsome as that spectacle sometimes seen in the East of a wrinkled
old eunuch garbed in woman’s nautch-dress ogling with painted eyes and
waving and wriggling like a young Bayadère.