The _Arabian Nights_ was introduced to Europe in a French translation
by Antoine Galland in 1704, and rapidly attained a unique popularity.
There are even accounts of the translator being roused from sleep by
bands of young men under his windows in Paris, importuning him to tell
them another story.
The learned world at first refused to believe that M. Galland had not
invented the tales. But he had really discovered an Arabic manuscript
from sixteenth-century Egypt, and had consulted Oriental
story-tellers. In spite of inaccuracies and loss of color, his twelve
volumes long remained classic in France, and formed the basis of our
popular translations.
A more accurate version, corrected from the Arabic, with a style
admirably direct, easy, and simple, was published by Dr. Jonathan
Scott in 1811. This is the text of the present edition.
The Moslems delight in stories, but are generally ashamed to show a
literary interest in fiction. Hence the world's most delightful story
book has come to us with but scant indications of its origin. Critical
scholarship, however, has been able to reach fairly definite
conclusions.
The reader will be interested to trace out for himself the
similarities in the adventures of the two Persian queens,
Schehera-zade, and Esther of Bible story, which M. de Goeje has
pointed out as indicating their original identity (_Encyclopædia
Britannica_, "Thousand and One Nights"). There are two or three
references in tenth-century Arabic literature to a Persian collection
of tales, called _The Thousand Nights_, by the fascination of which
the lady Schehera-zade kept winning one more day's lease of life. A
good many of the tales as we have them contain elements clearly
indicating Persian or Hindu origin. But most of the stories, even
those with scenes laid in Persia or India, are thoroughly Mohammedan
in thought, feeling, situation, and action.
The favorite scene is "the glorious city," ninth-century Bagdad, whose
caliph, Haroun al Raschid, though a great king, and heir of still
mightier men, is known to fame chiefly by the favor of these tales.
But the contents (with due regard to the possibility of later
insertions), references in other writings, and the dialect show that
our _Arabian Nights_ took form in Egypt very soon after the year 1450.
The author, doubtless a professional teller of stories, was, like his
Schehera-zade, a person of extensive reading and faultless memory,
fluent of speech, and ready on occasion to drop into poetry. The
coarseness of the Arabic narrative, which does not appear in our
translation, is characteristic of Egyptian society under the Mameluke
sultans. It would have been tolerated by the subjects of the caliph in
old Bagdad no more than by modern Christians.
More fascinating stories were never told. Though the oath of an
Oriental was of all things the most sacred, and though Schah-riar had
"bound himself by a solemn vow to marry a new wife every night, and
command her to be strangled in the morning," we well believe that he
forswore himself, and granted his bride a stay of execution until he
could find out why the ten polite young gentlemen, all blind of the
right eye, "having blackened themselves, wept and lamented, beating
their heads and breasts, and crying continually, 'This is the fruit of
our idleness and curiosity.'" To be sure, when the golden door has
been opened, and the black horse has vanished with that vicious switch
of his tail, we have a little feeling of having been "sold,"--a
feeling which great art never gives. But we are in the best of humor;
for were we not warned all along against just this foible of
curiosity, and is not the story-teller smiling inscrutably and
advising us to be thankful that we at least still have our two good
eyes?
Beside the story interest, the life and movement of the tales, the
spirits that enter and set their own precedents, there is for us the
charm of mingling with men so different from ourselves: men
adventurous but never strenuous, men of many tribulations but no
perplexities. Fantastic, magnificent, extravagant, beautiful,
gloriously colored, humorous--was ever book of such infinite
contrasts?
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