The Critic in Anglo-America.
The Boston Daily Advertiser (Jan. 26,'86) contains the following choice
morceau which went the round of the Transatlantic Press:--
G. W. S. writes from London to the New York Tribune in regard to Captain
Burton's notorious translation of the "Arabian Nights." Of Captain Burton's
translation of "The Arabian Nights," two volumes have now appeared. Before
anything had been seen of them, I gave some account of this scheme, and of the
material on which he had worked, with a statement of the reasons which made
all existing versions unsatisfactory to the student, and incomplete. Captain
Burton saw fit to reprint these desultory paragraphs as a kind of circular or
advertisement on his forthcoming book. He did not think it necessary to ask
leave to do this, nor did I know to what use my letter had been put till it
was too late to object. In any ordinary case it would have been of no
consequence, but Captain Burton's version is of such a character that I wish
to state the facts, and to say that when I wrote my letter I had never seen a
line of his translation, and had no idea that what I said of his plans would
be used for the purpose it has been, or for any purpose except to be printed
in your columns. As it is, I am made to seem to give some sort of approval to
a book which I think offensive, and not only offensive, but grossly and
needlessly offensive. If anybody has been induced to subscribe for it by what
I wrote I regret it, and both to him and to myself I think this explanation
due.
Mr. Smalley is the London correspondent of the New York Tribune, which
represents Jupiter Tonans in the Western World. He may be unable to write with
independent tone--few Anglo-Americans can afford to confront the crass and
compound ignorance of a "free and independent majority"--but even he is not
called upon solemnly to state an untruth. Before using Mr. Smalley's article
as a circular, my representative made a point of applying to him for
permission, as he indeed was bound to do by the simplest rules of courtesy.
Mr. Smalley replied at once, willingly granting the favour, as I can prove by
the note still in my possession; and presently, frightened by the puny yelping
of a few critical curs at home, he has the effrontery to deny the fact.
In my last volumes I have been materially aided by two Anglo-American friends,
MM Thayer and Cotheal, and I have often had cause to thank the Tribune and the
Herald of New York for generously appreciating my labours. But no gratitude
from me is due to the small fry of the Transatlantic Press which has welcomed
me with spiteful little pars mostly borrowed from unfriends in England and
mainly touching upon style and dollars. In the Mail Express of New York
(September 7, '85) I read, "Captain Richard Burton, traveller and translator,
intends to make all the money that there may be in his translation of the
'Arabian Nights.' * * * If he only fills his list, and collects his money, he
will be in easy circumstances for the remainder of his days." In a subsequent
issue (October 24) readers are told that I have been requested not to publish
the rest of the series under pain of legal prosecution. In the same paper
(October 31, '85; see also November 7, '85) I find:--
The authorities have discovered where Capt. Burton's "Thousand and One Nights"
is being printed, despite the author's efforts to keep the place a secret, but
are undecided whether to suppress it or to permit the publication of the
coming volumes. Burton's own footnotes are so voluminous that they exceed the
letterpress of the text proper, and make up the bulk of the work.[FN#459] The
foulness of the second volume of his translation places it at a much higher
premium in the market than the first.
The Tribune of Chicago (October 26,'85) honours me by declaring "It has been
resolved to request Captain Burton not to publish the rest of his translation
of the 'Thousand and One Nights,' which is really foul and slipshod as to
style." The New York Times (October 17 and November 9, '85) merely echoes the
spite of its English confrere:--
Capt. Burton's translation of the "Arabian Nights" bears the imprint
"Benares." Of course the work never saw Benares. America, France, Belgium and
Germany have all been suggested as the place of printing, and now the Pall
Mall Gazette affirms that the work was done "north of the Tweed." There is,
without doubt, on British soil, it says, "a press which year after year
produces scores of obscene publications."
And the same is the case with the St. Louis Post Dispatch (November 11, '85)
the Mail Express of New York (November 23,'85); the Weekly Post of Boston
(November 27 '85), which again revives a false report, and with the Boston
Herald (December 16,'85). The Chicago Daily News (January 30, '86) contains a
malicious sneer at the Kamashastra Society. The American Register (Paris, July
25, '86) informs its clientèle, "If, as is generally supposed, Captain
Burton's book is printed abroad, the probability is that every copy will on
arrival be confiscated as 'indecent' by the Custom-house." And to curtail a
long list of similar fadaises I will quote the Bookmart (of Pittsburg, Pa.,
U.S.A., October, '86): "Sir Richard Burton's 'Nights' are terribly in want of
the fig-leaf, if anything less than a cabbage leaf will do, before they can be
fit (fitted?) for family reading. It is not possible (Is it not possible?)
that by the time a household selection has been sifted out of the great work,
everything which makes the originality and the value--such as it is--of
Richard's series of volumes will have disappeared, and nothing will remain but
his diverting lunacies of style." The Bookmart, I am informed, is edited by
one Halkett Lord, an unnaturalised Englishman who finds it pays best to abuse
everything and everyone English. And lastly, the Springfield Republican (April
5, '88) assures me that I have published "fully as much as the (his?) world
wants of the 'Nights'."
In the case of "The Nights," I am exposed to that peculiar Protestant form of
hypocrisy, so different from the Tartuffean original of Catholicism, and still
as mighty a motor force, throughout the length and breadth of the
North-American continent, as within the narrow limits of England. There also
as here it goes hand-in-hand with "Respectability" to blind judgment and good
sense.
A great surgeon of our day said (or is said to have said) in addressing his
students:-- "Never forget, gentlemen, that you have to deal with an ignorant
public." The dictum may fairly be extended from medical knowledge to general
information amongst the many headed of England; and the Publisher, when
rejecting a too recondite book, will repeat parrot-fashion, The English public
is not a learned body. Equally valid is the statement in the case of the
Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being
erudite. The vast country has produced a few men of great and original genius,
such as Emerson and Theodore Parker, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman; but the
sum total is as yet too small to leaven the mighty mass which learns its
rudiments at school and college and which finishes its education with the
newspaper and the lecture. When Emerson died it was said that the intellectual
glory of a continent had departed; but Edgar A. Poe, the peculiar poetic glory
of the States, the first Transatlantic who dared be himself and who disdained
to borrow from Schiller and Byron, the outlander poet who, as Edgar Allan Poe,
is now the prime favourite in France, appears to be still under ban because he
separated like Byron from his spouse, and he led a manner of so-called
"Bohemian" life. Indeed the wide diffusion of letters in the States, that
favourite theme for boasting and bragging over the unenlightened and
analphabetic Old World, has tended only to exaggerate the defective and
disagreeable side of a national character lacking geniality and bristling with
prickly individuality. This disposition of mind, whose favourable and laudable
presentations are love of liberty and self-reliance, began with the beginnings
of American history. The "Fathers," Pilgrim and Puritan, who left their
country for their country's good and their own, fled from lay tyranny and
clerkly oppression only to oppress and tyrannise over others in new and
distant homes. Hardly had a century and a half elapsed before the sturdy
colonists, who did not claim freedom but determined to keep it, formally
revolted and fought their way to absolute independence--not, by the by, a feat
whereof to be overproud when a whole country rose unanimously against a
handful of troops. The movement, however, reacted powerfully upon the politics
of Europe, which stood agape for change, and undoubtedly precipitated the
great French Revolution. As soon as the States became an empire, their
democratic and republican institutions at once attracted hosts of emigrants
from the Old World, thus peopling the land with a selection of species: the
active and the adventurous, the malcontent and the malefactor, readily
expatriate themselves, while the pauvre diable remains at home. The
potato-famine in Ireland (1848) gave an overwhelming impetus to the exode of a
race which had never known a racial baptism; and, lastly, the Germans flying
from the conscription, the blood tax of the Fatherland, carried with them over
the ocean a transcendentalism which has engendered the wildest theories of
socialism and communism. And the emigration process still continues. Whole
regions, like the rugged Bocche di Cattaro in Dalmatia and pauper Iceland, are
becoming depopulated to me the wonder is that a poor man ever consents to live
out of America or a rich man to live.
The result of such selection has been two-fold. The first appears in a
splendid self- esteem, a complacency, a confidence which passes all bounds of
the golden mean. "I am engrossed in calmly contemplating the grandeur of my
native country and her miraculous growth," writes to me an old literary
friend. The feeling normally breaks out in the grossest laudation of
everything American. The ultra-provincial twang which we still hear amongst
the servant-classes of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and which is so notable in
the nouveau riche, modified by traditional nasalisation and, as in Australia,
by climatic influences, is American and, therefore, the purest of English
utterances. The obsolete vocabulary often obsolete in England without just
reason--contrasting with a modern disfigured etymology which strips vocables
of their genealogy and history, is American and ergo admirably progressive.
The spurious facetiousness which deals mainly in mere jargon words ill-spelt
and worse pronounced; in bizarre contrast of ideas, and in ultra-Rabelaisian
exaggeration, is American wit and humour--therefore unsurpassable. The
Newspaper Press, that great reflector of nationalities, that prime expression
of popular taste, too often of an écurant vulgarity, personal beyond all
bounds of common decency, sensational as a transpontine drama, is American;
America is the greatest nation upon earth's face, ergo the daily sheet is
setting-up the standard of English speech and forming the language of the
Future, good and too good for all the world. This low standard of the Press is
the more regretable as its exalted duty is at present to solve the highest
problems social and industrial, such as co-operation in labour, the
development of fisheries, direct taxation versus indirect and a host of
enigmas which the young world, uncumbered by the burdens of the Old World,
alone shall unravel.
The second result is still more prejudicial and perilous. This is the
glorification of mediocrity, of the average man and woman whose low standard
must be a norm to statesman and publicist. Such cult of the common and the
ignoble is the more prejudicial because it "wars against all distinction and
against the sense of elevation to be gained by respecting and admiring
superiority." Its characteristic predominance in a race which, true to its
Anglo-Saxon origin, bases and builds the strongest opinions upon the weakest
foundations, hinders the higher Avatars of genius and interferes with the
"chief duty of a nation which is to produce great men." It accounts for the
ever-incroaching reign of women in literature--meaning as a rule cheap work
and second-rate. And the main lack is not so much the "thrill of awe," which
Göethe pronounces to be the best thing humanity possesses, but that discipline
of respect, that sense of loyalty, not in its confined meaning of attachment
to royalty, but in a far higher and nobler signification, the recognising and
welcoming elevation and distinction whatever be the guise they may assume.
"The soul lives by admiration and hope and love."
And here we see the shady side of the educational process, the diffusion of
elementary and superficial knowledge, of the veneer and polish which mask,
until chipped-off, the raw and unpolished material lying hidden beneath them.
A little learning is a dangerous thing because it knows all and consequently
it stands in the way of learning more or much. Hence, it is sorely impatient
of novelty, of improvement, of originality. It is intolerant of contradiction,
irritable, thin-skinned, and impatient of criticism, of a word spoken against
it. It is chargeable with the Law of Copyright, which is not only legalised
plunder of the foreigner, but is unfair, unjust and ungenerous to native
talent for the exclusive benefit of the short-sighted many-headed. I am far
from charging the United States with the abomination called "International
Copyright;" the English publisher is as sturdy an enemy to "protection" as the
Transatlantic statesman; but we expect better things from a new people which
enjoys the heritage of European civilisation without the sufferings
accompanying the winning of it. This mediocrity has the furious, unpardoning
hatred of l'amour propre offensé. Even a word in favour of my old friends the
Mormons is an unpardonable offence: the dwarfish and dwarfing demon
"Respectability" has made their barbarous treatment a burning shame to a
so-called "free" country: they are subjected to slights and wrongs only for
practicing polygamy, an institution never condemned by Christ or the early
Christians. The calm and dispassionate judgments of Sir Lepel Griffith and the
late Matthew Arnold, who ventured to state, in guarded language, that the
boasted civilisation of the United States was not quite perfect, resulted in
the former being called a snob and the latter a liar. English stolidity would
only have smiled at the criticism even had it been couched in the language of
persiflage. And when M. Max O'Rell traverses the statements of the two
Englishmen and exaggerates American civilisation, we must bear in mind first
that la vulgarité ne se traduit pas, and secondly, that the foes of our foemen
are our friends. Woe be to the man who refuses to fall down and do worship
before that brazen-faced idol (Eidolon Novi Mundi), Public Opinion in the
States; unless, indeed, his name be Brown and he hail from Briggsville.
Some years ago I proposed to write a paper upon the reflex action of
Anglo-America upon England using as a base the last edition of Mrs. Trollope,
who was compelled to confess that almost every pecularity which she had abused
in her first issue had become naturalised at home. Yankee cuteness has already
displaced in a marvellous way old English rectitude and plain-dealing;
gambling on the Stock Exchange, cornering, booms and trusts have invaded the
trading-classes from merchant-princes to shopkeepers, and threaten, at their
actual rate of progress, not to leave us an honest man. But now the student's
attention will be called to the great and ever-growing influence of the New
World upon the Old, and notably upon Europe. Some 50,000 Americans annually
visit the continent, they are rapidly becoming the most important item of the
floating population, and in a few years they will number 500,000. Meanwhile
they are revolutionising all the old institutions; they are abolishing the
classical cicerone whose occupation is gone amongst a herd which wants only to
see streets and people: they greatly increase the cost of traveling; they pay
dollars in lieu of francs, and they are satisfied with inferior treatment at
superior prices:--hence the American hotel abroad is carefully shunned by
Englishmen and natives. At home the "well-to-do class" began by regarding
their kinsmen d'outre mer with contemptuous dislike; then they looked upon
them as a country squire would regard a junior branch which has emigrated and
has thriven by emigration; and now they are welcomed in Society because they
amuse and startle and stir up the duller depths. But however warm may be
private friendship between Englishmen and Anglo-Americans there is no public
sympathy nor is any to be expected from the present generation. "New England
does not understand Old England and never will," the reverse being equally the
fact. "The Millennium must come," says Darwin (ii. 387), "before nations love
each other:" I add that first Homo alalus seu Pithecanthropus must become Homo
Sapiens and cast off his moral slough--egoism and ignorance. Mr. Cleveland, in
order to efface the foul stigma of being the "English President," found it
necessary to adopt the strongest measures in the matter of "Fisheries;" and
the "Irish vote" must quadrennially be bought at the grave risk of national
complications. Despite the much-bewritten "brotherhood of the two great
English-speaking races of the world," the old leaven of cousinly ill-feeling,
the jealousy which embitters the Pole against his Russian congener, is still
rampant. Uncle Sam actively dislikes John Bull and dispraises England. An
Anglo-American who has lived years amongst us and in private intimacy must,
when he returns home, speak disparagingly of the old country unless he can
afford the expensive luxury of telling unpopular truths and of affronting
Demos, the hydra-headed.
But there are even now signs of better things in the Great Republic. Mr. James
R. Lowell, an authority (if there be any) upon the subject of Democracy, after
displaying its fine points and favourable aspects in his addresses to English
audiences, has at length had the uncommon courage to discuss family affairs,
and to teach Boston and New York what "weaknesses and perils there may be in
the practical working of a system never before set in motion under such
favourable circumstances, nor on so grand a scale." He is emboldened to say
firmly and aloud, despite the storming of false and hollow self-praise, that
American civilisation, so strong on the material side, is sadly wanting on the
other, and still lacks much to make it morally acceptable or satisfactory. And
we have some truths concerning that Fool's Paradise, the glorification of the
"average man." Every citizen of the world must wish full success to the
"Independents" (in politics) who sit at the feet of so wise and patriotic a
teacher.