This ancient dodderer, who has seen better days, deigned favour me with six
notices (January 2 and March 27, '86; April 30, June 4, August 14, '87, and
July 21, '88), of which No. i., dealing with my first and second volumes, is
written after the facile American fashion, making the book review itself; that
is, supply to the writer all the knowledge and familiarity with the subject
which he parades before an incurious and easily gullible public. This especial
form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the classical
English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which
was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the critic's noddle or note book.
The Saturnine article opens characteristically.
Abroad we English have the character of being the most prudish of nations; we
are celebrated as having Bowdlerized for our babes and sucklings even the
immortal William Shakespeare; but we shall infallibly lose this our character
should the Kamashastra Society flourish. Captain Burton has long been known as
a bold explorer; his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, disguised in the dress
and taking on him the manners and customs of a True Believer, was a marvel of
audacity; but perhaps he may be held now to have surpassed himself, for he has
been bold enough to lay before his countrymen a literal and unexcised
translation of The Arabian Nights.
The writer is kind enough to pat me upon the back for "picturesque and fluent
English" and to confess that I have successfully imitated the rhyming cadence
of the original. But The Saturday would not be The Saturday without carping
criticism, wrong-headedness and the culte of the common-place, together with
absolute and unworthy cruelty to weaker vessels. The reviewer denounces as
"too conceited to be passed over without comment" the good old English
"whenas" (for when, vol. ii. 130), the common ballad-terms "a plump of
spearmen" (ii. 190) and a "red cent" (i. 321), the only literal rendering of
"Fals ahmar" which serves to show the ancient and noble pedigree of a slang
term supposed to be modern and American. Moreover this Satan even condemns
fiercely the sin of supplying him with "useful knowledge." The important note
(ii. 45) upon the normal English mispronunciation of the J in Jerusalem,
Jesus, Jehovah, a corruption whose origin and history are unknown to so many,
and which was, doubtless, a surprise to this Son of King "We," is damned as
"uninteresting to the reader of the Arabian Nights." En revanche, three
mistakes of mine ("p. 43" for "p. 45" in vol. ii., index; "King Zahr Shah" for
"King Suleyman Shah," ii. 285, and the careless confusion of the Caliphs
Al-Muntasir and Al- Mustansir, ii. 817, note i.) were corrected and I have
duly acknowledged the correction. No. i. article ends with Saturnine geniality
and utterly ignoring a bye-word touching dwellers in glass houses:--
Finally, we mark with regret that Captain Burton should find no more courteous
terms to apply to the useful work of a painstaking clergyman than those where
in his note he alludes to "Missionary Porter's miserable Handbook."
As Mr. Missionary Porter has never ceased to malign me, even in his last
Edition of Murray's "miserable Handbook," a cento of Hibernian blunders and
hashed Bible, I have every reason to lui rendre la pareille.
The second article (March 27, '86), treating of vol. iii., opens with one of
those plagiaristic common-places, so dear to the soul of The Saturday, in its
staid and stale old age as in its sprightly youth. "There is particularly one
commodity which all men, therein nobly disregarding their differences of creed
and country, are of a mind that it is better to give than to receive. That
commodity is good advice. We note further that the liberality with which this
is everywhere offered is only to be equalled (he means 'to be equalled only')
by the niggard reception at most times accorded to the munificent donation; in
fact the very goodness of advice given apparently militates against its due
appreciation in (by?) the recipient." The critic then proceeds to fit his ipse
dixit upon my case. The sense of the sentiment is the reverse of new: we find
in The Spectator (No. dxii.), "There is nothing we receive with so much
reluctance as good advice," etc., but Mr. Spectator writes good English and
his plagiarist does not. Nor is the dictum true. We authors who have studied a
subject for years, are, I am convinced, ready enough to learn, but we justly
object to sink our opinions and our judgment in those of a counsellor who has
only "crammed" for his article. Moreover, we must be sure that he can fairly
lay claim to the three requisites of an adviser--capacity to advise rightly,
honesty to advise truly, and courtesy to advise decently. Now the Saturday
Review has neither this, that, nor the other qualification. Indeed his words
read like subtle and lurking irony by the light of those phenomenal and
portentous vagaries which ever and anon illuminate his opaque pages. What
correctness can we expect from a journal whose tomahawk-man, when scalping the
corpse of Matthew Arnold, deliberately applies the term "sonnet" to some
thirty lines in heroic couplets? His confusion of Dr. Jenner, Vaccinator, with
Sir William Jenner, the President of the R. C. of Physicians, is one which
passes all comprehension. And what shall we say of this title to pose as an
Aristarchus (November 4th, '82)? "Then Jonathan Scott, LL.D. Oxon, assures the
world that he intended to re-translate the Tales given by Galland(!) but he
found Galland so adequate on the whole (!!) that he gave up the idea and now
reprints Galland with etchings by M. Lalauze, giving a French view of Arab
life. Why Jonathan Scott, LL.D., should have thought to better Galland while
Mr. Lane's version is in existence, and has just been reprinted, it is
impossible to say." In these wondrous words Jonathan Scott's editio princeps
with engravings from pictures by Smirke and printed by Longmans in 1811 is
confounded with the imperfect reprint by Messieurs Nimmo and Bain, in 1883;
the illustrations being borrowed from M. Adolphe Lalauze, a French artist
(nat. 1838), a master of eaux fortes, who had studied in Northern Africa and
who maroccanized the mise-en-scène of "The Nights" with a marvellous contrast
of white and negro nudities. And such is the Solomon who fantastically
complains that I have disdained to be enlightened by his "modest suggestions."
Au reste the article is not bad simply because it borrows--again
Americanicè--all its matter from my book. At the tail-end, however comes the
normal sting: I am guilty of not explaining "Wuzú" (lesser ablution), "Ghusl"
(greater ablution), and "Zakát" (legal alms which constitute a poor-rate),
proving that the writer never read vol. iii. He confidently suggests replacing
"Cafilah," "by the better known word Caravan," as if it were my speciality (as
it is his) to hunt-out commonplaces: he grumbles about "interrogation-points a
l'Espagnole upside down"(?) which still satisfies me as an excellent
substitute to distinguish the common Q(uestion) from A(nswer) and he seriously
congratulates me upon my discovering a typographical error on the fly- leaf.
No. iii. (August 14, '86, handling vols. vi., vii. and viii.) is free from the
opening pretensions and absurdities of No. ii. and it is made tolerably safe
by the familiar action of scissors and paste. But--desinit in piscem--it ends
fishily; and we find, after saturnine fashion, in cauda venenum. It scolds me
for telling the English public what it even now ignores, the properest way of
cooking meat (à propos of kabábs) and it "trembles to receive vols. ix. and x.
for truly (from a literary point of view, of course, we mean) there seems
nothing of which the translator might not be capable"--capable de tout, as
said Voltaire of Habbakuk and another agnostic Frenchman of the Prophet
Zerubbabel. This was indeed high praise considering the Saturday's sympathy
with and affection for the dead level, for the average man; but as an augury
of ill it was a brutum fulmen. No. iv. (August 30, '87) was, strange to say,
in tone almost civil and ended with a touch simulating approval:--
"The labours of a quarter of a century," writes the translator in L'Envoi,
"are now brought to a close, and certainly no one could have been found better
suited by education and taste to the task of translating the 'Nights' than is
the accomplished author of the 'Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.' His summing
up of the contents and character of 'The Thousand and One Nights' in the
Terminal Essay is a masterpiece of careful analysis and we cannot do better
than conclude our notice with a paragraph that resumes with wonderful effect
the boundless imagination and variety of the picture that is conjured up
before our eyes:--
"Viewed as a tout ensemble in full and complete form, they are a drama of
Eastern life and a Dance of Death made sublime by faith and the highest
emotions, by the certainty of expiation and the fulness of atoning equity,
where virtue is victorious, vice is vanquished and the ways of Allah are
justified to man. They are a panorama which remains kenspeckle upon the mental
retina. They form a phantasmagoria in which archangels and angels, devils and
goblins, men of air, of fire, of water, naturally mingle with men of earth,
where flying horses and talking fishes are utterly realistic, where King and
Prince must meet fishermen and pauper, lamia and cannibal, where citizen
jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief.... The
work is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture, gorgeous palaces
and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadly words, gardens fairer than
those of the Hesperid; seas dashing with clashing billows upon enchanted
mountains, valleys of the Shadow of Death, air-voyages and promenades in the
abysses of the ocean, the duello, the battle, and the siege, the wooing of
maidens and the marriage rite. All the splendour and squalor, the beauty and
baseness the glamour and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the
bravery and the baseness, of Oriental life are here."
And now, after the Saturday Review has condescended severely and sententiously
to bepreach me, I must be permitted a trifling return in kind. As is declared
by the French an objectionable people which prefers la gloire to "duty," and
even places "honour" before "honesty," the calling of the Fourth Estate is un
sacerdoce, an Apostolate: it is a high and holy mission whose ends are the
diffusion of Truth and Knowledge and the suppression of Ignorance and
Falsehood. "Sacrilege," with this profession, means the breaking of its two
great commandments and all sins of commission and omission suggested and
prompted by vain love of fame, by sordid self-esteem or by ignoble rancour.
What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to
"counteract the immorality of The Times," adds to normal journalistic follies,
offences and mistakes an utter absence of literary honour, systematic
misrepresentation, malignity and absolute ruffianism? Let those who hold such
language exaggerated glance at my pièce justicative, the Saturday's article
(June 28, '88) upon Mr. Hitchman's "Biography of Sir Richard Burton." No
denizen of Grub Street in the coarse old day of British mob-savagery could
have produced a more damning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified
scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique,
private and personal. The "Saturday Reviler"--there is, I repeat, much virtue
in a soubriquet--has grown only somewhat feebler, not kindlier, not more
sympathetic since the clever author of "In Her Majesty's Keeping" styled this
Magister Morum "the benignant and judicious foster-parent of literature"; and
since Darwin wrote of it (ii. 260) "One cannot expect fairness in a reviewer;"
nor has it even taken to heart what my friend Swinburne declared (anent its
issue of December 15, '83) "clumsy and shallow snobbery can do no harm." Like
other things waxing obsolete it has served, I hasten to confess, a special
purpose in the world of letters. It has lived through a generation of thirty
years in the glorification of the mediocrities and in pandering to the impish
taint of poor human nature, the ungenerous passions of those who abhor the
novel, the original, the surprising, the startling, and who are only too glad
to witness and to assist in the Procrustes' process of trimming and
lengthening out thoughts and ideas and diction that rise or strive to rise
above the normal and vulgar plane. This virtual descendant of the ancestral
Satirist, after long serving as a spawning-ground to envy, hatred and malice,
now enters upon the decline of an unworthy old age. Since the death of its
proprietor, Mr. Beresford-Hope, it has been steadily going down hill as is
proved by its circulation, once 15,000, and now something nearer 5,000 than
10,000. It has become a poor shadow of its former self--preserving the passive
ill- will but lacking the power of active malevolence--when journalists were
often compelled to decline correspondence upon its misjudgments and to close
to complainants their columns which otherwise would have been engrossed by
just and reasonable protestations. The "young lions" of its prime (too often
behanged with a calf-skin on their recreant limbs) are down among the dead and
the jackal-pack which has now taken up the howling could no longer have caused
Thackeray to fear or can excite the righteous disgust of that votary of
"fair-play" --Mr. John Bright.
And now, before addressing myself to another Reviewer, I would be allowed a
few words upon two purely personal subjects; the style chosen for my
translation and my knowledge of the Arabian language and literature.
I need hardly waste time to point out what all men discern more or less
distinctly, how important are diction and expression in all works of fancy and
fiction and how both branches, poetic and prosaic, delight in beauty adorned
and allow in such matters the extreme of liberty. A long study of Galland and
Torrens, Lane and Payne, convinced me that none of these translators, albeit
each could claim his special merit, has succeeded in preserving the local
colouring of the original. The Frenchman had gallicised and popularised the
general tone and tenor to such extent that even the vulgar English versions
have ever failed to throw off the French flavour. Torrens attempted literalism
laudably and courageously enough; but his execution was of the roughest, the
nude verbatim; nor did his familiarity with Arabic, or rather with Egyptian,
suffice him for the task. Lane, of whom I have already spoken, and of whom I
shall presently be driven by his imprudent relatives and interested friends to
say more, affected the latinised English of the period flat and dull, turgid
and vapid as that of Sale's Koran; and his style proved the most insufficient
and inadequate attire in which an Oriental romance of the Middle Ages could be
arrayed. Payne was perfectly satisfactory to all cultivated tastes but he
designedly converted a romantic into a classical work: none ignores its high
merits regarded merely as strong and vital English, but it lacks one thing
needful--the multiform variety of The Nights. The original Arabic text which
in the first thirteen tales (Terminal Essay, p. 78) must date from before the
xiiith century at the latest (since Galland's MS. in the Bibliothèque
Nationale has been assigned to the early xivth) is highly composite: it does
not disdain local terms, bye-words and allusions (some obsolete now and
forgotten), and it borrows indiscriminately from Persian (e.g. Sháhbandar),
from Turkish (as Khátún) and from Sanscrit (for instance Brahman). As its
equivalent, in vocabulary I could devise only a somewhat archaical English
whose old-fashioned and sub-antique flavour would contrast with our modern and
everyday speech, admitting at times even Latin and French terms, such as res
scibilis and citrouille. The mixture startled the critics and carpers to whom
its object had not been explained; but my conviction still remains that it
represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian.
And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and
unnoticed by reviewers. The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin
(the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) are
instruments admirably fitted for their purpose: crystal-clear, they never
divert even a bittock of the reader's brain from the all-important sense
underlying the sound-symbols. But in works of imagination mar. wants a
treatment totally different, a style which, by all or any means, little
mattering what they be, can avoid the imminent deadly risk of languor and
monotony and which adds to fluency the allurement of variety, of surprise and
even of disappointment, when a musical discord is demanded.
Again, my estimate of a translator's office has never been of the low level
generally assigned to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the habit of
englishing every important or interesting work published on the continent of
Europe. We cannot expect at this period of our literature overmuch from a man
who, as Messieurs Vizetelly assure their clientèle, must produce a version for
a poor £20. But at his best the traducteur, while perfectly reproducing the
matter and the manner of his original, works upon two lines. His prime and
primary object is an honest and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense nor
abating aught of its peculiar cachet whilst he labours his best to please and
edify his readers. He has, however, or should have, another aim wherein is
displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can profitably lend
something to and borrow somewhat from its neighbours, near or far, an epithet,
a metaphor, a turn of phrase, a naive idiom and the translator of original
mind will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother
tongue with alien and novel ornaments, which will justly be accounted
barbarisms until formally adopted and naturalised. Such are the "peoples" of
Kossuth and the useful "lengthy," an American revival of a good old English
term. Nor will my modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the
malpractice of his banal brotherhood the interesting and often startling
phases of his foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with its
commonplace English equivalent--thus doing the clean reverse of what he should
do. It is needless to quote instances concerning this phase of "Bathos:" they
abound in every occidental translation of every Oriental work, especially the
French, such as Baron de Slane's honest and conscientious "Ibn Khaldún." It
was this grand ideal of a translator's duty that made Eustache Deschamps, a
contemporary poet, write of his English brother bard.--
"Grand Translateur, Noble Geoffroy Chaucier."
Here,
"The firste finder of our faire language"
is styled a "Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in conduct
and a great Translator," which apparent anti-climax has scandalised not a
little inditers of "Lives" and "Memoirs." The title is given simply because
Chaucer translated (using the best and highest sense of the term) into his
English tongue and its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and ideas of his
foreign models--the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccacao.
That my attempts to reproduce the form and features of the original and thee
my manner of writing is well adapted to the matter appears from the consensus
of the "Notices" presently to be quoted. Mr. J. Addington Symonds pronounces
the version to be executed with "peculiar literary vigour." Mr. Swinburne is
complimentary, and even the Saturday deigns to declare "Captain Burton is
certainly felicitous in the manner in which he has englished the picturesque
lines of the original." But le style est de l'homme; and this is a matter upon
which any and every educated man who writes honestly will form and express and
retain his own opinion: there are not a few who loathe "Pickwick," and who
cannot relish Vanity Fair. So the Edinburgh Review No. 335 (pp. 174, 181),
concerning which more anon, pronounces my work to be "a jumble of the
vulgarest slang of all nations;" also "an unreadable compound of archæology
and 'slang,' abounding in Americanisms, and full of an affected reaching after
obsolete or foreign words and phrases;" and finally shows the assurance to
assert "Captain Burton has produced a version which is neither Arabic nor
English, but which has at least the merit of being beautifully unreadable" (p.
182).
It has been circulated widely enough by the Lane-Poole clique--poules
mouillees they are called by an Arabist friend--that I do not know Arabic. Let
me at once plead guilty to the charge, adding by way of circonstance
atténuante that I know none who does know or who can thoroughly know a tongue
of which we may say as did honest Izaak Walton of other two crafts, "angling
be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned." Most of us can
master one section of a language concerning which those who use it
vernacularly declare "Only Allah wotteth its entirety", but we lack as yet the
means to study it as a whole. Older by long ages than Babel's fabulous Tower,
and covering a continuous area from Eastern Arabia to the Maghrab al-Aksa
(western Mauritania), from Chaldaea in the North to southern Zanzibar, it
numbers of potential vocabulary 1,200,000 words all of which may be, if they
are not, used, and while they specify the finest shades of meaning, not a few
of them, technically termed "Zidd," bear significations diametrically
opposite, e.g., "Maulá" = lord, slave; and "'Ajúz" with 88 different meanings.
Its literature, poetic, semi-poetic and prosaic, falls into three greater
sections:--Ancient (The Suspendeds, the Kitáb al-Aghání and the Koran),
Mediæval (Al-Mutanabbi, Al-Asm'ài, Abú Nowás and the poets of the Harunic
cycle) and Moderns, of whom not the least important (e.g. Yúsuf al-Yazají) are
those of our own day. Throughout its vast domain there are local differences
of terminology which render every dialect a study; and of these many are
intimately connected with older families, as the Egyptian with Coptic and the
Moorish with Berber. The purest speakers are still the Badawin who are often
not understood by the citizen-folk (e.g. of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad) at
whose gates they tent; and a few classes like the Banú Fahim of Al-Hijáz still
converse sub-classically, ever and anon using the terminal vowels and the
nunnation elsewhere obsolete. These wildlings, whose evening camp-fires are
still their schools for eloquence and whose improvisations are still their
unwritten laws, divide speech into three degrees, Al-'Áli the lofty addressed
to the great, Al-Wasat used for daily converse and Al-Dún the lowly or broken
"loghat" (jargon) belonging to most tribes save their own. In Egypt the purest
speakers are those of the Sa'íd--the upper Nile-region--differing greatly from
the two main dialects of the Delta; in Syria, where the older Aramean is still
current amongst sundry of the villagers outlying Damascus, the best Arabists
are the Druzes, a heterogeneous of Arabs and Curds who cultivate language with
uncommon care. Of the dialectic families which subtend the Mediterranean's
southern sea-board, the Maroccan and the Algerine are barbarised by Berber, by
Spanish and by Italian words and are roughened by the inordinate use of the
Sukún (quiescence or conjoining of consonants), while the Tunisian approaches
nearer to the Syrian and the Maltese was originally Punic. The jargon of
Meccah is confessedly of all the worst. But the wide field has been scratched
not worked out, and the greater part of it, especially the Mesopotamian and
the Himyaritic of Mahrahland, still remains fallow and the reverse of sterile.
Materials for the study of Arabic in general and of its dialects in particular
are still deficient, and the dictionaries mostly content themselves with
pouring old stuff from flask to flask, instead of collecting fresh and unknown
material. Such are recueils of prayers and proverbs, folk-songs and stories,
riddles and satires, not forgetting those polyglot vocabularies so common in
many parts of the Eastern world, notably in Sind and Afghánistán; and the
departmental glossaries such as the many dealing with "Tasawwuf"--the Moslem
form of Gnosticism. The excellent lexicon of the late Professor Dozy,
Supplément aux Dictionnaires Arabes, par R. Dozy, Leyde: E. J. Brill, 1881,
was a step in advance, but we still lack additions like Baron Adolph Von
Kremer's Beitrage zur Arabischen Lexicographie (In commission bei Carl
Gerold's Sohn, Wien, 1884). The French, as might be expected, began early,
e.g. M. Ruphy's Dictionnaire abrege francais-arabe, Paris, Imprimerie de la
Republique, 1810; they have done good work in Algiers and are now carrying it
on in Tunis. Of these we have Marcel, Vocabulaire, etc. (Paris, 1837), Bled de
Braine (Paris, 1846), who to his Cours Synthetique adds a study of Maroccan
and Egyptian, Professor Cherbonneau (Paris, 1854), Précis Historique, and
Dialogues, etc. (Alger, 1858); M. Gasselin (Paris, 1866), Dictionnaire
francais-arabe, M. Brassier (Algiers, 1871), Dictionnaire pratique, also
containing Algerine and Tunisian terms; General Parmentier (Vocabulaire
arabe-francais des Principaux Termes de Geographie, etc.: Paris, rue
Antoine-Dubois, 1882); and, to mention no others, the Grammaire Arabe Vulgaire
(Paris, 1824) of M. Caussin de Perceval (fils) has extended far and wide.
Berggren (Upsal, 1844) published his Guide Francais-Arabe des Voyageurs en
Syrie et en Egypte. Rowland de Bussy printed (Algiers, 1877) his Dialogues
Francais-Arabes in the Algerian dialect. Fr. José de Lerchundi, a respected
Missioner to Tangier, has imitated and even improved upon this in his
Rudimentos del Arabe Vulgar (Madrid, Rivadeneyra, 1872); and his studies of
the Maghrabi dialect are most valuable. Dr. A. Socin produced his Arabische
Sprichwörter, etc. (Tubingen, 1878), and the late Wilhelm Spitta-Bey, whose
early death was so deeply lamented left a grammar of Egyptian which would have
been a model had the author brought to his task more knowledge of Coptic in
his Grammatik des Arabischen vulgär Dialektes von Ægypten, (Leipsig, 1870).
Dr. Landberg published with Brill of Leyden and Maisonneuve of Paris, 1883, a
volume of Syrian Proverbs and promises some five others--No. 2, Damascus and
the Haurán; No. 3, Kasrawán and the Nusayriyah; No. 4, Homs, Hamah and Halab
(Aleppo), and No. 5, the Badawin of Syria. It is evident that the process
might be prolonged ad infinitum by a writer of whom I shall have something to
say presently. M. Clément Huart (Jour. Asiat., Jan. '83) has printed notes on
the dialect of Damascus: Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje published a collection of 77
proverbs and idioms with lengthy notes in his Mehkanische Sprichwörter, etc.
(Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1886), after being expelled from Meccah by the
Turkish authorities who had discovered him only through a Parisian journal Le
Temps (see his Het Mekkanshe Feest, Leyden, 1880). For the lower Najd and
upper Hijaz we have the glossary of Arabic words ably edited by Prof. M. J. de
Goeje in Mr. Charles M. Doughty's valuable and fantastic "Arabia Deserta" (ii.
542-690: see The Academy, July 28th, '88). Thus the local vocabularies are
growing, but it will be long before the ground is covered.
Again the East, and notably the Moslem East since the Massacre of Damascus in
1860, although still moving slowly, shows a distinct advance. The once
secluded and self- contained communities are now shaken by the repeated and
continuous shocks of progress around them; and new wants and strange objects
compel them nilly-willy to provide vernacular equivalents for the nomenclature
of modern arts and sciences. Thus the Orientalist, who would produce a
contemporary lexicon of Persian, must not only read up all the diaries and
journals of Teheran and the vocabularies of Yezd and Herat, he must go further
a-field. He should make himself familiar with the speech of the Iliyát or
wandering pastoral tribes and master a host of cognate tongues whose chiefs
are Armenian (Old and New), Caucasian, a modern Babel, Kurdish, Lúri
(Bakhtiyári), Balochki and Pukhtú or Afghan, besides the direct descendants of
the Zend, the Pehlevi, Dari and so forth. Even in the most barbarous jargons
he will find terms which throw light upon the literary Iranian of the
lexicons: for instance "Mádiyán" = a mare presupposes the existence of
"Narayán" = a stallion, and the latter is preserved by the rude patois of the
Baloch mountaineers. This process of general collection would in our day best
be effected after the fashion of Professor James A. H. Murray's "New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles." It would be compiled by a committee of
readers resident in different parts of Persia, communicating with the Royal
Asiatic Society (whose moribund remains they might perhaps quicken) and acting
in co-operation with Russia, whom unfriends have converted from a friend to an
angry and jealous rival and who is ever so forward in the linguistic field.
But if the model Persian dictionary have its difficulties, far harder will be
the task with Arabic, which covers incomparably more ground. Here we must
begin with Spain and Portugal, Sardinia and the Balearics, Southern Italy and
Sicily; and thence pass over to Northern Africa and the two "Soudans," the
Eastern extending far South of the Equator and the Western nearly to the Line.
In Asia, besides the vast Arabian Peninsula, numbering one million of square
miles, we find a host of linguistic outliers, such as Upper Hindostan, the
Concan, Malacca, Java and even remote Yun-nan, where al-Islam is the dominant
religion, and where Arabic is the language of Holy Writ.
My initiation into the mysteries of Arabic began at Oxford under my tutor Dr.
W. A. Greenhill, who published a "Treatise on Small-pox and Measles,"
translated from Rhazes --Abú Bakr al-Rází (London, 1847), and where the famous
Arabist, Don Pascual de Gayangos, kindly taught me to write Arabic leftwards.
During eight years of service in Western India and in Moslem Sind, while
studying Persian and a variety of vernaculars it was necessary to keep up and
extend a practical acquaintance with the language which supplies all the
religious and most of the metaphysical phraseology; and during my last year at
Sindian Karáchí (1849), I imported a Shaykh from Maskat. Then work began in
downright earnest. Besides Erpenius' (D'Erp) "Grammatica Arabica," Richardson,
De Sacy and Forbes, I read at least a dozen Perso-Arabic works (mostly of
pamphlet form) on "Serf Wa Nahw"--Accidence and Syntax--and learned by heart
one-fourth of the Koran. A succession of journeys and long visits at various
times to Egypt, a Pilgrimage to the Moslem Holy Land and an exploration of the
Arabic-speaking Somáli-shores and Harar-Gay in the Galla country of Southern
Abyssinia, added largely to my practice. At Aden, where I passed the official
examination, Captain (now Sir. R. Lambert) Playfair and the late Rev. G. Percy
Badger, to whom my papers were submitted, were pleased to report favourably of
my proficiency. During some years of service and discovery in Western Africa
and the Brazil my studies were necessarily confined to the "Thousand Nights
and a Night"; and when a language is not wanted for use my habit is to forget
as much of it as possible, thus clearing the brain for assimilating fresh
matter. At the Consulate of Damascus, however, in West Arabian Midian and in
Maroccan Tangier the loss was readily recovered. In fact, of this and sundry
other subjects it may be said without immodesty that I have forgotten as much
as many Arabists have learned. But I repeat my confession that I do not know
Arabic and I have still to meet the man who does know Arabic.
Orientalists, however, are like poets and musicians, a rageous race. A passing
allusion to a Swedish student styled by others (Mekkanische Sprichwörter,
etc., p.1) "Dr. Landberg," and by himself "Doctor Count Carlo Landberg"
procured me the surprise of the following communication. I quote it in full
because it is the only uncourteous attempt at correspondence upon the subject
of The Nights which has hitherto been forced upon me.
In his introduction (p. xx.) to the Syrian Proverbes et Dictons Doctor Count
Landberg was pleased to criticise, with less than his usual knowledge, my
study entitled "Proverbia Communia Syriaca" (Unexplored Syria, i. 264-269).
These 187 "dictes" were taken mainly from a MS. collection by one Hanná Misk,
ex-dragoman of the British Consulate (Damascus), a little recueil for private
use such as would be made by a Syro Christian bourgeois. Hereupon the critic
absurdly asserted that the translator a voulu s'occuper de la langue classique
au lieu de se faire * * * l'interprète fidèle de celle du peuple. My reply was
(The Nights, vol. viii. 148) that, as I was treating of proverbs familiar to
the better educated order of citizens, his critique was not to the point; and
this brought down upon me the following letter under the ægis of a portentous
coronet and initials blazing with or, yules and azure.
Paris, le 24 Févr., 1888.
Monsieur,
J'ai l'honneur de vous adresser 2 fascicules de mes Critica Arabica. Dans le
vol. viii. p. 48 de votre traduction de 1001 Nuits vous avez une note qui me
regard (sic). Vous y cites que je ne suds pas "Arabist." Ce n'est pas votre
jugement qui m'impressionne, car vous n'êtes nullement à même de me juger.
Votre article contient, comme tout ce que vous avez écrit dans le domaine de
la langue arabe, des bévues. C'est vous qui n'êtes pas arabisant: cela est
bien connu et reconnu, et nous ne nous donnons pas même la peine de relever
toutes les innombrables erreurs don't vos publications fourmillent. Quant à
"Sahífah" vous êtes encore en erreur. Mon étymologie est acceptée par tout le
monde et je vous renvoie à Fleischer, Kleinre Schriften, p. 468, Leipzig,
1885, où vous trouverez ['instruction nécessaire. Le dilettantism qui se
trahit dans tout ce que vous écrivez vous fait faire de telles erreurs. Nous
autres arabisants et professo (?) nous ne vous avons jamais et nous ne vous
pouvons jamais considérer comme arabisant. Voila ma réponse à votre note.
Agréez, Monsieur,
l'expression de mes sentiments distingués,
Comte Lasdberg,
Dr.-ès-lettres.
After these preliminaries I proceed to notice the article (No. 335, of July
'86) in