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
half-way 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 card-blooded 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 rubric, 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 inter-sexual 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 civilization, 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 civilization 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 practiced 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 nautchdress ogling with painted eyes and waving and
wriggling like a young Bayadére.
There is much virtue in a nickname: at all events it shows the direction
whither the aura popularis sets. The organ of Christian Chivalry is now
universally known to Society as "The Gutter Gazette;" to the public as "The
Purity-Severity Paper," and the "Organ of the Social Pruriency Society," and
to its colleagues of the Press as "The Dirt Squirt." In the United States
fulsomely to slander a man is "to Pall Mall Gazette him:" "Just like your Pall
Mall Gazette," said an American to me when describing a disreputable print
"over the water." And Mr. Stead, now self-constituted coryphæus of the Reptile
Press in Great Britain, has apparently still to learn that lying and
slandering are neither Christian nor chivalrous.
The diminutive Echo of those days (October 13 and 14, '85) followed suit of
the Pall Mall Gazette and caught lightly the sounds as they fell from the
non-melliferous lips of the charmer who failed to charm wisely. The precious
article begins by informing me that I am "always eager after the sensational,"
and that on this occasion I "cater for the prurient curiosity of the wealthy
few," such being his synonym for "readiness to learn." And it ends with the
following comical colophon:--"Captain Burton may possibly imitate himself(?)
and challenge us(!) to mortal combat for this expression of opinion. If so,
the writer of these lines will imitate himself(?) and take no notice of such
an epistle." The poor scribe suggests the proverbial "Miss Baxter, who refused
a man before he axed her." And what weapon could I use, composing-stick or
dung-fork, upon an anonymous correspondent of the hawkers' and newsboys'
"Hecker," the favourite ha'porth of East London? So I left him to the tender
mercies of Gaiety (October 14, '84):--
The Echo is just a bit wild,
Its "par." is indeed a hard hitter:
In fact, it has not drawn it mild
'Tis a matter of "Burton and bitter."
I rejoice to subjoin that the Echo has now (1888) made a name for decent and
sensible writing, having abandoned the "blatant" department to the Star (see,
for the nonsense about a non-existent Alderman Waterlow, its issue of
September 6, '88).
In the opinions of the Press will be found a selection from half a century of
laudatory notices to which the few curious touching such matters will turn,
while those who misjudged my work are duly acknowledged in this paper. Amongst
friends I would specify without invidious distinction, The Bat (September 29,
'85), who on this occasion and sundry others sturdily defended me, showing
himself a bird of "light and leading." To the St. James's Gazette (September
12, '85), the Whitehall Review (September 17), the Home News (September 18),
and the Nottingham Journal (September 19), I am also indebted for most
appreciative and intelligent notices. My cordial thanks are likewise due to
the Editor and especially to "Our London Correspondent" of the Lincoln Gazette
(October 10 and October 17, '85, not to notice sundry minor articles): the
articles will be reprinted almost entire because they have expressed my
meaning as though it came from my own mouth. I have quoted Mr. J. Addington
Symonds in extenso: if England now possesses a writer who can deliver an
authoritative judgment on literary style it is this littérateur. Of the
journals which profess letters The Academy has ever been my friend and I have
still the honour of corresponding with it: we are called "faddists" probably
from our "fad" of signing our articles and thus enabling the criticised to
criticise the critic.