progeny; and, after our second century, Ægypto-Græco-Indian stories
overran the civilized globe between Rome and China. Tales have wings and
fly farther than the jade hatchets of proto-historic days. And the
result was a book which has had more readers than any other except the
Bible. Its original is unknown.[236] The volume, which in Pehlevi became
the Jávidán Khirad (“Wisdom of Ages”) or the Testament of Hoshang, that
ancient guebre King, and in Sanskrit the Panchatantra (“Five Chapters”),
is a recueil of apologues and anecdotes related by the learned Brahman,
Vishnu Sharmá, for the benefit of his pupils the sons of an Indian
Rajah. The Hindu original has been adapted and translated into a number
of languages; Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac, Greek and Latin, Persian and
Turkish, under a host of names.[237] Voltaire[238] wisely remarks of
this venerable production:—Quand on fait réflexion que presque toute la
terre a été enfatuée de pareils contes, et qu’ils ont fait l’éducation
du genre humain, on trouve les fables de Pilpay, de Lokman,[239]
d’Ésope, bien raisonables. But methinks the sage of Ferney might have
said far more. These fables speak with the large utterance of early man;
they have also their own especial beauty—the charms of well-preserved
and time-honoured old age. There is in their wisdom a perfume of the
past, homely and ancient-fashioned like a whiff of _pot pourri_,
wondrous soothing withal to olfactories agitated by the patchoulis and
jockey clubs of modern pretenders and petit-maîtres, with their grey
young heads and pert intelligence, the motto of whose ignorance is
“Connu!” Were a dose of its antique, mature experience adhibited to the
Western before he visits the East, those few who could digest it might
escape the normal lot of being twisted round the fingers of every rogue
they meet from Dragoman to Rajah. And a quotation from them tells at
once: it shows the quoter to be a man of education, not a “Jangalí,” a
sylvan or savage, as the Anglo-Indian official is habitually termed by
his more civilised “fellow-subject.”
The main difference between the classical apologue and the fable in The
Nights is that while Æsop and Gabrias write laconic tales with a single
event and a simple moral, the Arabian fables are often “long-continued
novelle involving a variety of events, each characterised by some social
or political aspect, forming a narrative highly interesting in itself,
often exhibiting the most exquisite moral, and yet preserving, with rare
ingenuity, the peculiar characteristics of the actors.”[240] And the
distinction between the ancient and the mediæval apologue, including the
modern which, since “Reineke Fuchs,” is mainly German, appears equally
pronounced. The latter is humorous enough and rich in the wit which
results from superficial incongruity; but it ignores the deep underlying
bond which connects man with beast. Again, the main secret of its
success is the strain of pungent satire, especially in the Renardine
Cycle, which the people could apply to all unpopular “lordes and
prelates, gostly and worldly.”
Our Recueil contains two distinct sets of apologues.[241] The first
(vol. iii.) consists of eleven, alternating with five anecdotes (Nights
cxlvi.-cliii.), following the lengthy and knightly romance of King Omar
bin al Nu’man and followed by the melancholy love tale of Ali bin
Bakkár. The second series in vol. ix., consisting of eight fables, not
including ten anecdotes (Nights cmi.-cmxxiv.), is injected into the
romance of King Jali’ad and Shimas mentioned by Al-Mas’udi as
independent of The Nights. In both places the Beast-fables are
introduced with some art and add variety to the subject-matter,
obviating monotony—the deadly sin of such works—and giving repose to the
hearer or reader after a climax of excitement such as the murder of the
Wazirs. And even these are not allowed to pall upon the mental palate,
being mingled with anecdotes and short tales, such as the Hermits (iii.
125), with biographical or literary episodes, acroamata, table-talk and
analects where humorous Rabelaisian anecdote finds a place; in fact the
fabliau or novella. This style of composition may be as ancient as the
apologues. We know that it dates as far back as Rameses III., from the
history of the Two Brothers in the Orbigny papyrus,[242] the prototype
of Yusuf and Zulaykha, the Koranic Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. It is
told with a charming naïveté and such sharp touches of local colour as,
“Come, let us make merry an hour and lie together! _Let down thy hair!_”
Some of the apologues in The Nights are pointless enough, rien moins
qu’amusants; but in the best specimens, such as the Wolf and the
Fox[243] (the wicked man and the wily man), both characters are
carefully kept distinct and neither action nor dialogue ever flags.
Again The Flea and the Mouse (iii. 151), of a type familiar to students
of the Pilpay cycle, must strike the home-reader as peculiarly quaint.
Next in date to the Apologue comes the Fairy Tale proper, where the
natural universe is supplemented by one of purely imaginative existence.
“As the active world is inferior to the rational soul,” says Bacon with
his normal sound sense, “so Fiction gives to Mankind what History denies
and in some measure satisfies the Mind with Shadows when it cannot enjoy
the Substance. And as real History gives us not the success of things
according to the deserts of vice and virtue, Fiction corrects it and
presents us with the fates and fortunes of persons rewarded and punished
according to merit.” But I would say still more. History paints or
attempts to paint life as it is, a mighty maze with or without a plan:
Fiction shows or would show us life as it should be, wisely ordered and
laid down on fixed lines. Thus Fiction is not the mere handmaid of
History: she has a household of her own and she claims to be the triumph
of Art which, as Goëthe remarked, is “Art because it is not Nature.”
Fancy, _la folle du logis_, is “that kind and gentle portress who holds
the gate of Hope wide open, in opposition to Reason, the surly and
scrupulous guard.”[244] As Palmerin of England says and says well, “For
that the report of noble deeds doth urge the courageous mind to equal
those who bear most commendation of their approved valiancy; this is the
fair fruit of Imagination and of ancient histories.” And, last but not
least, the faculty of Fancy takes count of the cravings of man’s nature
for the marvellous, the impossible, and of his higher aspirations for
the Ideal, the Perfect: she realises the wild dreams and visions of his
generous youth and portrays for him a portion of that “other and better
world,” with whose expectation he would console his age.
The imaginative varnish of The Nights serves admirably as a foil to the
absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being carried away
from trivial and common-place characters, scenes and incidents; from the
matter of fact surroundings of a work-a-day world, a life of eating and
drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting and loving, into a society and a
mise-en-scène which we suspect can exist and which we know does not.
Every man at some turn or term of his life has longed for supernatural
powers and a glimpse of Wonderland. Here he is in the midst of it. Here
he sees mighty spirits summoned to work the human mite’s will, however
whimsical, who can transport him in an eye-twinkling whithersoever he
wishes; who can ruin cities and build palaces of gold and silver, gems
and jacinths; who can serve up delicate viands and delicious drinks in
priceless chargers and impossible cups and bring the choicest fruits
from farthest Orient: here he finds magas and magicians who can make
kings of his friends, slay armies of his foes and bring any number of
beloveds to his arms. And from this outraging probability and
outstripping possibility arises not a little of that strange fascination
exercised for nearly two centuries upon the life and literature of
Europe by The Nights, even in their mutilated and garbled form. The
reader surrenders himself to the spell, feeling almost inclined to
enquire “And why may it not be true?”[245] His brain is dazed and
dazzled by the splendours which flash before it, by the sudden
procession of Jinns and Jinniyahs, demons and fairies, some hideous,
others preternaturally beautiful; by good wizards and evil sorcerers,
whose powers are unlimited for weal and for woe; by mermen and mermaids,
flying horses, talking animals, and reasoning elephants; by magic rings
and their slaves and by talismanic couches which rival the carpet of
Solomon. Hence, as one remarks, these Fairy Tales have pleased and still
continue to please almost all ages, all ranks and all different
capacities.
Dr. Hawkesworth[246] observes that these Fairy Tales find favour
“because even their machinery, wild and wonderful as it is, has its
laws; and the magicians and enchanters perform nothing but what was
naturally to be expected from such beings, after we had once granted
them existence.” Mr. Heron “rather supposes the very contrary is the
truth of the fact. It is surely the strangeness, the unknown nature, the
anomalous character of the supernatural agents here employed, that makes
them to operate so powerfully on our hopes, fears, curiosities,
sympathies, and, in short, on all the feelings of our hearts. We see men
and women, who possess qualities to recommend them to our favour,
subjected to the influence of beings, whose good or ill will, power or
weakness, attention or neglect, are regulated by motives and
circumstances which we cannot comprehend: and hence, we naturally
tremble for their fate, with the same anxious concern, as we should for
a friend wandering, in a dark night, amidst torrents and precipices; or
preparing to land on a strange island, while he knew not whether he
should be received, on the shore, by cannibals waiting to tear him
piecemeal, and devour him, or by gentle beings, disposed to cherish him
with fond hospitality.” Both writers have expressed themselves well, but
meseems each has secured, as often happens, a fragment of the truth and
holds it to be the whole Truth. Granted that such spiritual creatures as
Jinns walk the earth, we are pleased to find them so very human, as wise
and as foolish in word and deed as ourselves: similarly we admire in a
landscape natural forms like those of Staffa or the Palisades which
favour the works of architecture. Again, supposing such
preternaturalisms to be around and amongst us, the wilder and more
capricious they prove, the more our attention is excited and our
forecasts are baffled to be set right in the end. But this is not all.
The grand source of pleasure in Fairy Tales is the natural desire to
learn more of the Wonderland which is known to many as a word and
nothing more, like Central Africa before the last half century: thus the
interest is that of the “Personal Narrative” of a grand exploration to
one who delights in travels. The pleasure must be greatest where faith
is strongest; for instance amongst imaginative races like the Kelts and
especially Orientals, who imbibe supernaturalism with their mother’s
milk. “I am persuaded,” writes Mr. Bayle St. John,[247] “that the great
scheme of preternatural energy, so fully developed in The Thousand and
One Nights, is believed in by the majority of the inhabitants of all the
religious professions both in Syria and Egypt.” He might have added “by
every reasoning being from prince to peasant, from Mullah to Badawi,
between Marocco and Outer Ind.”
The Fairy Tale in The Nights is wholly and purely Persian. The gifted
Iranian race, physically the noblest and the most beautiful of all known
to me, has exercised upon the world-history an amount of influence which
has not yet been fully recognised. It repeated for Babylonian art and
literature what Greece had done for Egyptian, whose dominant idea was
that of working for eternity a κτῆμα εἰς ἀεί. Hellas and Iran
instinctively chose as their characteristic the idea of Beauty,
rejecting all that was exaggerated and grotesque; and they made the
sphere of Art and Fancy as real as the world of Nature and Fact. The
innovation was hailed by the Hebrews. The so-called Books of Moses
deliberately and ostentatiously ignored the future state of rewards and
punishments, the other world which ruled the life of the Egyptian in
this world: the lawgiver, whoever he may have been, Osarsiph or Moshe,
apparently held the tenet unworthy of a race whose career he was
directing to conquest and isolation in dominion. But the Jews, removed
to Mesopotamia, the second cradle of the creeds, presently caught the
infection of their Asiatic media; superadded Babylonian legend to
Egyptian myth; stultified The Law by supplementing it with the
“absurdities of foreign fable” and ended, as the Talmud proves, with
becoming the most wildly superstitious and “otherworldly” of mankind.
The same change befel Al-Islam. The whole of its supernaturalism is
borrowed bodily from Persia, which had “imparadised Earth by making it
the abode of angels.” Mohammed, a great and commanding genius, blighted
and narrowed by surroundings and circumstance to something little higher
than a Covenanter or a Puritan, declared to his followers,
“I am sent to ’stablish the manners and customs;”
and his deficiency of imagination made him dislike everything but
“women, perfumes, and prayers,” with an especial aversion to music and
poetry, plastic art and fiction. Yet his system, unlike that of Moses,
demanded thaumaturgy and metaphysical entities, and these he perforce
borrowed from the Jews who had borrowed them from the Babylonians: his
soul and spirit, his angels and devils, his cosmogony, his heavens and
hells, even the Bridge over the Great Depth are all either Talmudic or
Iranian. But there he stopped and would have stopped others. His enemies
among the Koraysh were in the habit of reciting certain Persian fabliaux
and of extolling them as superior to the silly and equally fictitious
stories of the “Glorious Koran.” The leader of these scoffers was one
Nazr ibn Háris who, taken prisoner after the Battle of Bedr, was
incontinently decapitated, by apostolic command, for what appears to be
a natural and sensible preference. It was the same furious fanaticism
and one-idea’d intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could
find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books
of the Persian Guebres. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will
be said of a pious man, “He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and
other books of Law and Religion; and he never reads poems nor listens to
music or to stories.”
Mohammed left a dispensation or rather a reformation so arid, jejune and
material that it promised little more than the “Law of Moses,” before
this was vivified and racially baptised by Mesopotamian and Persic
influences. But human nature was stronger than the Prophet and, thus
outraged, took speedy and absolute revenge. Before the first century had
elapsed, orthodox Al-Islam was startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or
Sufyism[248] a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism,
with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing
imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most
poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental
ever invented; satisfying all man’s hunger for “belief” which, if placed
upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to be
belief.
I will take from The Nights, as a specimen of the true Persian romance,
“The Queen of the Serpents” (vol. v. 298), the subject of Lane’s
Carlylean denunciation. The first gorgeous picture is the Session of the
Snakes which, like their Indian congeners the Nága kings and queens,
have human heads and reptile bodies, an Egyptian myth that engendered
the “old serpent” of Genesis. The Sultánah welcomes Hásib Karím al-Dín,
the hapless lad who had been left in a cavern to die by the greedy
woodcutters; and, in order to tell him her tale, introduces the
“Adventures of Bulúkiyá”: the latter is an Israelite converted by editor
and scribe to Mohammedanism; but we can detect under his assumed faith
the older creed. Solomon is not buried by authentic history “beyond the
Seven (mystic) Seas,” but at Jerusalem or Tiberias; and his seal-ring
suggests the Jám-i-Jam, the crystal cup of the great King Jamshíd. The
descent of the Archangel Gabriel, so familiar to Al-Islam, is the
manifestation of Bahman, the First Intelligence, the mightiest of the
Angels who enabled Zarathustra-Zoroaster to walk like Bulukiya over the
Dálatí or Caspian Sea.[249] Amongst the sights shown to Bulukiya, as he
traverses the Seven Oceans, is a battle royal between the believing and
the unbelieving Jinns, true Magian dualism, the eternal duello of the
Two Roots or antagonistic Principles, Good and Evil, Hormuzd and
Ahriman, which Milton has debased into a common-place modern combat
fought also with cannon. Sakhr the Jinni is Eshem chief of the Divs, and
Kaf, the encircling mountain, is a later edition of Persian Alborz. So
in the Mantak al-Tayr (Colloquy of the Flyers) the Birds, emblems of
souls, seeking the presence of the gigantic feathered biped Simurgh,
their god, traverse seven Seas (according to others seven Wadys) of
Search, of Love, of Knowledge, of Competence, of Unity, of Stupefaction,
and of Altruism (_i.e._ annihilation of self), the several stages of
contemplative life. At last, standing upon the mysterious island of the
Simurgh and “casting a clandestine glance at him they saw thirty
birds[250] in him; and when they turned their eyes to themselves the
thirty birds seemed one Simurgh: they saw in themselves the entire
Simurgh; they saw in the Simurgh the thirty birds entirely.” Therefore
they arrived at the solution of the problem “_We_ and _Thou_;” that is,
the identity of God and Man; they were for ever annihilated in the
Simurgh and the shade vanished in the sun (Ibid. iii. 250). The wild
ideas concerning Khalít and Malít (vol. v. 319) are again Guebre. “From
the seed of Kayomars (the androgyne, like pre-Adamite man) sprang a tree
shaped like two human beings and thence proceeded Meshia and Meshianah,
first man and woman, progenitors of mankind;” who, though created for
“Shídistán, Lightland,” were seduced by Ahriman. This “two-man-tree” is
evidently the duality of Physis and Anti-physis, Nature and her
counterpart, the battle between Mihr, Izad or Mithra with his Surush and
Feristeh (Seraphs and Angels) against the Divs who are the children of
Time led by the arch-demon Eshem. Thus when Hormuzd created the planets,
the dog, and all useful animals and plants, Ahriman produced the comets,
the wolf, noxious beasts and poisonous growths. The Hindus represent the
same metaphysical idea by Bramhá the Creator and Visvakarma, the
Anti-creator,[251] miscalled by Europeans Vulcan: the former fashions a
horse and a bull and the latter caricatures them with an ass and a
buffalo,—evolution turned topsy turvy. After seeing nine angels and
obtaining an explanation of the Seven Stages of Earth which is supported
by the Gav-i-Zamín, the energy, symbolised by a bull, implanted by the
Creator in the mundane sphere, Bulukiya meets the four Archangels, to
wit Gabriel who is the Persian Rawánbakhsh or Life-giver; Michael or
Beshter, Raphael or Israfil alias Ardibihisht, and Azazel or Azrail who
is Dumá or Mordad, the Death-giver; and the four are about to attack the
Dragon, that is, the demons hostile to mankind who were driven behind
Alborz-Kaf by Tahmuras the ancient Persian king. Bulukiya then recites
an episode within an episode, the “Story of Jánsháh,” itself a Persian
name and accompanied by two others (vol. v. 329), the _mise-en-scène_
being Kabul and the King of Khorasan appearing in the proem. Janshah,
the young Prince, no sooner comes to man’s estate than he loses himself
out hunting and falls in with cannibals whose bodies divide
longitudinally, each moiety going its own way: these are the Shikk
(split ones) which the Arabs borrowed from the Persian Ním-chihrah or
Half-faces. They escape to the Ape-island whose denizens are human in
intelligence and speak articulately, as the universal East believes they
can: these Simiads are at chronic war with the Ants, alluding to some
obscure myth which gave rise to the gold-diggers of Herodotus and other
classics, “emmets in size somewhat less than dogs but bigger than
foxes.”[252] The episode then falls into the banalities of Oriental
folk-lore. Janshah, passing the Sabbation river and reaching the Jews’
city, is persuaded to be sewn up in a skin and is carried in the normal
way to the top of the Mountain of Gems where he makes acquaintance with
Shaykh Nasr, Lord of the Birds: he enters the usual forbidden room;
falls in love with the pattern Swan-maiden; wins her by the popular
process; loses her and recovers her through the Monk Yaghmús, whose
name, like that of King Teghmús, is a burlesque of the Greek; and,
finally, when she is killed by a shark, determines to mourn her loss
till the end of his days. Having heard this story Bulukiya quits him;
and, resolving to regain his natal land, falls in with Khizr; and the
Green Prophet, who was Wazir to Kay Kobad (vith century B.C.) and was
connected with Macedonian Alexander (!) enables him to win his wish. The
rest of the tale calls for no comment.
Thirdly and lastly we have the histories, historical stories and the
“Ana” of great men in which Easterns as well as Westerns delight: the
gravest writers do not disdain to relieve the dullness of chronicles and
annals by means of such discussions, humorous or pathetic, moral or
grossly indecent. The dates must greatly vary: some of the anecdotes
relating to the early Caliphs appear almost contemporary; others, like
Ali of Cairo and Abu al-Shamat, may be as late as the Ottoman Conquest
of Egypt (sixteenth century). All are distinctly Sunnite and show fierce
animus against the Shi’ah heretics, suggesting that they were written
after the destruction of the Fatimite dynasty (twelfth century) by Salah
al-Din (Saladin the Kurd) one of the latest historical personages and
the last king named in The Nights.[253] These anecdotes are so often
connected with what a learned Frenchman terms the “regne féerique de
Haroun er-Réschid,”[254] that the Great Caliph becomes the hero of this
portion of The Nights. Aaron the Orthodox was the central figure of the
most splendid empire the world had seen, the Viceregent of Allah
combining the powers of Cæsar and Pope, and wielding them right worthily
according to the general voice of historians. To quote a few: Ali bin
Talib al-Khorásáni described him, in A.D. 934, a century and-a-half
after his death when flattery would be tongue-tied, as, “one devoted to
war and pilgrimage, whose bounty embraced the folk at large.” Sa’adi
(ob. A.D. 1291) tells a tale highly favourable to him in the “Gulistan”
(lib. i. 36). Fakhr al-Din[255] (xivth century) lauds his merits,
eloquence, science and generosity; and Al-Siyuti (nat. A.D. 1445)
asserts “He was one of the most distinguished of Caliphs and the most
illustrious of the Princes of the Earth” (p. 290). The Shaykh
al-Nafzáwi[256] (sixteenth century) in his Rauz al-’Átir fí Nazáh
al-Khátir = Scented Garden-site for Heart-delight, calls Harun (chapt.
vii.) the “Master of munificence and bounty, the best of the generous.”
And even the latest writers have not ceased to praise him. Says Alí Azíz
Efendi the Cretan, in the Story of Jewád[257] (p. 81), “Harun was the
most bounteous, illustrious and upright of the Abbaside Caliphs.”
The fifth Abbaside was fair and handsome, of noble and majestic
presence, a sportsman and an athlete who delighted in polo and archery.
He showed sound sense and true wisdom in his speech to the
grammarian-poet Al-Asma’í, who had undertaken to teach him:—“Ne
m’enseignez jamais en public, et ne vous empressez pas trop de me donner
des avis en particulier. Attendez ordinairement que je vous interroge,
et contentez-vous de me donner une response précise à ce que je vous
demanderai, sans y rien ajouter de superflu. Gardez vous surtout de
vouloir me préoccuper pour vous attirer ma créance, et pour vous donner
de l’autorité. Ne vous étendez jamais trop en long sur les histoires et
les traditions que vous me raconterez, si je ne vous en donne la
permission. Lorsque vous verrai que je m’eloignerai de l’équité dans mes
jugements, ramenez-moi avec douceur, sans user de paroles fâcheuses ni
de réprimandes. Enseignez-moi principalement les choses qui sont les
plus nécessaires pour les discours que je dois faire en public, dans les
mosquées et ailleurs; et ne parlez point en termes obscurs, ou
mystérieux, ni avec des paroles trop recherchées.”[258]