fabliaux, partly historiettes of men and beasts and partly apologues
proper—a subject already noticed. We have then (iii. 162) the saddening
and dreary love-tale of Ali bin Bakkár, a Persian youth and the Caliph’s
concubine Shams al-Nahár. Here the end is made doleful enough by the
deaths of the “two martyrs,” who are killed off, like Romeo and
Juliet,[288] a lesson that the course of true Love is sometimes troubled
and that men as well as women _can_ die of the so-called “tender
passion.” It is followed (iii. 212) by the long tale of Kamar al-Zamán,
or Moon of the Age, the first of that name, the “Camaralzaman” whom
Galland introduced into the best European society. Like “The Ebony
Horse” it seems to have been derived from a common source with “Peter of
Provence” and “Cleomades and Claremond”; and we can hardly wonder at its
wide diffusion: the tale is brimful of life, change, movement,
containing as much character and incident as would fill a modern
three-volumer and the Supernatural pleasantly jostles the Natural;
Dahnash the Jinn and Maymúnah daughter of Al-Dimiryát,[289] a renowned
King of the Jann, being as human in their jealousy about the virtue of
their lovers as any children of Adam, and so their metamorphosis to
fleas has all the effect of a surprise. The _troupe_ is again drawn with
a broad firm touch. Prince Charming, the hero, is weak and wilful,
shifty and immoral, hasty and violent: his two spouses are rivals in
abominations as his sons, Amjad and As’ad, are examples of a fraternal
affection rarely found in half-brothers by sister-wives. There is at
least one fine melodramatic situation (iii. 228); and marvellous feats
of indecency, a practical joke which would occur only to the canopic
mind (iii. 300–305), emphasise the recovery of her husband by that
remarkable “blackguard,” the Lady Budúr. The interpolated tale of
Ni’amah and Naomi (iv. 1), a simple and pleasing narrative of youthful
amours, contrasts well with the boiling passions of the incestuous and
murderous Queens and serves as a pause before the grand _dénoûement_
when the parted meet, the lost are found, the unwedded are wedded and
all ends merrily as a xixth century novel.
The long tale of Alá al-Din, our old friend “Aladdin,” is wholly out of
place in its present position (iv. 29): it is a counterpart of Ali Núr
al-Dín and Miriam the Girdle-girl (vol. ix. 1); and the mention of the
Shahbandar or Harbour-master (iv. 29), the Kunsúl or Consul (p. 84), the
Kaptán (Capitano), the use of cannon at sea and the choice of Genoa-city
(p. 85) prove that it belongs to the xvth or xvith century and should
accompany Kamar al-Zamán II. and Ma’aruf at the end of The Nights.
Despite the lutist Zubaydah being carried off by the Jinn, the Magic
Couch, a modification of Solomon’s carpet, and the murder of the King
who refused to islamize, it is evidently a European tale and I believe
with Dr. Bacher that it is founded upon the legend of “Charlemagne’s”
daughter Emma and his secretary Eginhardt, as has been noted in the
counterpart (vol. ix. 1).
This quasi-historical fiction is followed by a succession of fabliaux,
novelle and historiettes which fill the rest of vol. iv. and the whole
of vol. v. till we reach the terminal story, The Queen of the Serpents
(vol. v. pp. 304–329). It appears to me that most of them are historical
and could easily be traced. Not a few are in Al-Mas’udi; for instance
the grim Tale of Hatim of Tayy (vol. iv. 94) is given bodily in “Meads
of Gold” (iii. 327); and the two adventures of Ibrahim al-Mahdi with the
barber-surgeon (vol. iv. 103) and the Merchant’s sister (vol. iv. 176)
are in his pages (vol. vii. pp. 68 and 18). The City of Lubtayt (vol.
iv. 99) embodies the legend of Don Rodrigo, last of the Goths, and may
have reached the ears of Washington Irving; Many-columned Iram (vol. iv.
113) is held by all Moslems to be factual and sundry writers have
recorded the tricks played by Al-Maamun with the Pyramids of Jízah which
still show his handiwork.[290] The germ of Isaac of Mosul (vol. iv. 119)
is found in Al-Mas’udi who (vii. 65) names “Burán” the poetess (Ibn
Khall. i. 268); and Harun al-Rashid and the Slave-girl (vol. iv. 153) is
told by a host of writers. Ali the Persian is a rollicking tale of fun
from some Iranian jest-book: Abu Mohammed hight Lazybones belongs to the
cycle of “Sindbad the Seaman,” with a touch of Whittington and his Cat;
and Zumurrud (“Smaragdine”) in Ali Shar (vol. iv. 187) shows at her sale
the impudence of Miriam the Girdle-girl and in bed the fescennine device
of the Lady Budur. The “Ruined Man who became Rich,” etc. (vol. iv. 289)
is historical and Al-Mas’udi (vii. 281) relates the coquetry of Mahbúbah
the concubine (vol. iv. 291): the historian also quotes four couplets,
two identical with Nos. 1 and 2 in The Nights (vol. iv. 292) and
adding:—
Then see the slave who lords it o’er her lord ✿ In lover privacy and
public site:
Behold these eyes that one like Ja’afar saw: ✿ Allah on Ja’afar reign
boons infinite!
Uns al-Wujúd (vol. v. 32) is a love-tale which has been translated into
a host of Eastern languages; and The Lovers of the Banu Ozrah belong to
Al-Mas’udí’s “Martyrs of Love” (vii. 355), with the ozrite “Ozrite love”
of Ibn Khallikan (iv. 537). “Harun and the Three Poets” (vol. v. 77) has
given to Cairo a proverb which Burckhardt (No. 561) renders “The day
obliterates the word or promise of the Night,” for
The promise of night is effaced by day.
It suggests Congreve’s Doris:—
For who o’er night obtain’d her grace,
She can next day disown, etc.
“Harun and the three Slave-girls” (vol. v. 81) smacks of Gargantua (lib.
i. c. II): “It belongs to me, said one: ’Tis mine, said another”; and so
forth. The Simpleton and the Sharper (vol. v. 83) like the Foolish
Dominie (vol. v. 118) is an old Joe Miller in Hindu as well as Moslem
folk-lore. “Kisra Anushirwán” (vol. v. 87) is “The King, the Owl and the
Villages of Al-Mas’údi” (iii. 171), who also notices the Persian
monarch’s four seals of office (ii. 204); and “Masrur the Eunuch and Ibn
Al-Káribi” (vol. v. 109) is from the same source as Ibn al-Magházili the
Reciter and a Eunuch belonging to the Caliph Al-Mu’tazad (vol. viii.
161). In the Tale of Tawaddud (vol. v. 139) we have the fullest
development of the disputations and displays of learning then so common
in Europe, teste the “Admirable Crichton”; and these were affected not
only by Eastern tale-tellers but even by sober historians. To us it is
much like “padding” when Nuzhat al-Zamán (vol. ii. 156 etc.) fags her
hapless hearers with a discourse covering sixteen mortal pages; when the
Wazir Dandan (vol. ii. 195 etc.) reports at length the cold speeches of
the five high-bosomed maids and the Lady of Calamities and when Wird
Khan, in presence of his papa (Nights cmxiv-xvi.) discharges his
patristic exercitations and heterogeneous knowledge. Yet Al-Mas’udi also
relates, at dreary extension (vol. vi. 369) the disputation of the
twelve sages in presence of Barmecide Yahya upon the origin, the
essence, the accidents and the omnes res of Love; and in another place
(vii. 181) shows Honayn, author of the Book of Natural Questions,
undergoing a long examination before the Caliph Al-Wásik (Vathek) and
describing, amongst other things, the human teeth. See also the dialogue
or catechism of Al-Hajjáj and Ibn Al-Kirríya in Ibn Khallikan (vol. i.
238–240).
These disjecta membra of tales and annals are pleasantly relieved by the
seven voyages of Sindbad the Seaman (vol. vi. 1–83). The “Arabian
Odyssey” may, like its Greek brother, descend from a noble family, the
“Shipwrecked Mariner,” a Coptic travel-tale of the twelfth dynasty (B.C.
3500) preserved on a papyrus at St. Petersburg. In its actual condition
“Sindbad” is a fanciful compilation, like De Foe’s “Captain Singleton,”
borrowed from travellers’ tales of an immense variety and extracts from
Al-Idrísi, Al-Kazwíni and Ibn al-Wardi. Here we find the Polyphemus, the
Pygmies and the cranes of Homer and Herodotus; the escape of
Aristomenes; the Plinian monsters well known in Persia; the magnetic
mountain of Saint Brennan (Brandanus); the aeronautics of “Duke Ernest
of Bavaria”[291] and sundry cuttings from Moslem writers dating between
our ninth and fourteenth centuries.[292] The “Shaykh of the Seaboard”
appears in the Persian romance of Kámarupa translated by Francklin, all
the particulars absolutely corresponding. The “Odyssey” is valuable
because it shows how far Eastward the mediæval Arab had extended:
already in The Ignorance he had reached China and had formed a centre of
trade at Canton. But the higher merit of the cento is to produce one of
the most charming books of travel ever written, like Robinson Crusoe the
delight of children and the admiration of all ages.
The hearty life and realism of Sindbad are made to stand out in strong
relief by the deep melancholy which pervades “The City of Brass” (vol.
vi. 83), a dreadful book for a dreary day. It is curious to compare the
doleful verses (pp. 103, 105) with those spoken to Caliph Al-Mutawakkil
by Abu al-Hasan Ali (Al-Mas’udi, vii. 246). We then enter upon the
venerable Sindibad-nameh, the Malice of Women (vol. vi. 122), of which,
according to the Kitab al-Fihrist, (vol. i. 305) there were two
editions, a Sinzibád al-Kabír and a Sinzibád al-Saghír, the latter being
probably an epitome of the former. This bundle of legends, I have shown,
was incorporated with The Nights as an editor’s addition; and as an
independent work it has made the round of the world. Space forbids any
detailed notice of this choice collection of anecdotes for which a
volume would be required. I may, however, note that the “Wife’s device”
(vol. vi. 152) has its analogues in the Kathá (chapt. xiii.) in the
Gesta Romanorum (No. xxviii.) and in Boccaccio (Day iii. 6 and Day vi.
8), modified by La Fontaine to Richard Minutolo (Contes lib. i. tale 2):
it is quoted almost in the words of The Nights by the Shaykh al-Nafzáwi
(p. 207). That most witty and indecent tale The Three Wishes (vol. vi.
180) has forced its way disguised as a babe into our nurseries. Another
form of it is found in the Arab proverb “More luckless than Basús”
(Kamus), a fair Israelite who persuaded her husband, also a Jew, to wish
that she might become the loveliest of women. Jehovah granted it,
spitefully as Jupiter; the consequence was that her contumacious
treatment of her mate made him pray that the beauty might be turned into
a bitch; and the third wish restored her to her original state.
The Story of Júdar (vol. vi. 207) is Egyptian, to judge from its local
knowledge (pp. 217 and 254) together with its ignorance of Marocco (p.
223). It shows a contrast, in which Arabs delight, of an almost
angelical goodness and forgiveness with a well-nigh diabolical
malignity, and we find the same extremes in Abú Sír the noble-minded
Barber and the hideously inhuman Abú Kír. The excursion to Mauritania is
artfully managed and gives a novelty to the _mise-en-scène_. Gharíb and
Ajíb (vi. 207, vii. 91) belongs to the cycle of Antar and King Omar bin
Nu’man: its exaggerations make it a fine type of Oriental Chauvinism,
pitting the superhuman virtues, valour, nobility and success of all that
is Moslem, against the scum of the earth which is non-Moslem. Like the
exploits of Friar John of the Chopping-knives (Rabelais i. c. 27) it
suggests ridicule cast on impossible battles and tales of giants,
paynims and paladins. The long romance is followed by thirteen
historiettes all apparently historical: compare “Hind, daughter of
Al-Nu’man” (vol. viii. 7–145) and “Isaac of Mosul and the Devil” (vol.
vii. 136–139) with Al-Mas’udi v. 365 and vi. 340. They end in two long
detective-tales like those which M. Gaboriau has popularised, the
Rogueries of Dalilah and the Adventures of Mercury Ali, based upon the
principle, “One thief wots another.” The former, who has appeared before
(vol. ii. 329), seems to have been a noted character: Al-Mas’udi says
(viii. 175) “in a word this Shaykh (Al-’Ukáb) outrivalled in his
rogueries and the ingenuities of his wiles _Dállah_ (Dalilah?) the
_Crafty_ and other tricksters and coney-catchers, ancient and modern.”
The Tale of Ardashir (vol. vii. 209–264) lacks originality: we are now
entering upon a series of pictures which are replicas of those
preceding. This is not the case with that charming Undine, Julnár the
Sea-born (vol. vii. 264–308) which, like Abdullah of the Land and
Abdullah of the Sea (vol. ix. Night cmxl.), describes the vie intime of
mermen and merwomen. Somewhat resembling Swift’s inimitable creations,
the Houyhnhnms for instance, they prove, amongst other things, that
those who dwell in a denser element can justly blame and severely
criticise the contradictory and unreasonable prejudices and
predilections of mankind. Sayf al-Mulúk (vol. viii. Night dcclviii.),
the romantic tale of two lovers, shows by its introduction that it was
originally an independent work and it is known to have existed in Persia
during the eleventh century: this novella has found its way into every
Moslem language of the East even into Sindi, which calls the hero
“Sayfal.” Here we again meet the Old Man of the Sea or rather the Shaykh
of the Seaboard and make acquaintance with a Jinn whose soul is outside
his body: thus he resembles Hermotimos of Klazamunæ in Apollonius, whose
spirit left his mortal frame à discretion. The author, philanthropically
remarking (vol. viii. 4) “Knowest thou not that a single mortal is
better, in Allah’s sight, than a thousand Jinn?” brings the wooing to a
happy end which leaves a pleasant savour upon the mental palate.
Hasan of Bassorah (vol. viii. 7–145) is a Master Shoetie on a large
scale like Sindbad, but his voyages and travels extend into the
supernatural and fantastic rather than the natural world. Though long
the tale is by no means wearisome and the characters are drawn with a
fine firm hand. The hero with his hen-like persistency of purpose, his
weeping, fainting and versifying is interesting enough and proves that
“Love can find out the way.” The charming adopted sister, the model of
what the feminine friend should be; the silly little wife who never
knows that she is happy till she loses happiness; the violent and
hardhearted queen with all the cruelty of a good woman, and the manners
and customs of Amazon-land are outlined with a life-like vivacity.
Khalífah the next tale (vol. viii. 145–184) is valuable as a study of
Eastern life, showing how the fisherman emerges from the squalor of his
surroundings and becomes one of the Caliph’s favourite cup-companions.
Ali Nur al-Din (vol. viii. 264) and King Jali’ad (vol. ix., Night
dcccxciv.) have been noticed elsewhere and there is little to say of the
concluding stories which bear the evident impress of a more modern date.
Dr. Johnson thus sums up his notice of The Tempest. “Whatever might have
been the intention of their author, these tales are made instrumental to
the production of many characters, diversified with boundless invention,
and preserved with profound skill in nature, extensive knowledge of
opinions, and accurate observation of life. Here are exhibited princes,
courtiers and sailors, all speaking in their real characters. There is
the agency of airy spirits and of earthy goblin, the operations of
magic, the tumults of a storm, the adventures of a desert island, the
native effusion of untaught affection, the punishment of guilt, and the
final happiness of those for whom our passions and reason are equally
interested.”
We can fairly say this much and far more for our Tales. 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 ken-speckle 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 meet fisherman and pauper,
lamia and cannibal; where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight;
the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief; the pure and pious sit down to the
same tray with the bawd and the pimp; where the professional
religionist, the learned Koranist and the strictest moralist consort
with the wicked magician, the scoffer and the debauchee-poet like Abu
Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor and where the sweep is
bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are “finished and
quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams.”
The work is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture; gorgeous
palaces and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadly wolds;
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 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: its pictures of the three great Arab
passions, love, war and fancy, entitle it to be called “Blood, Musk and
Hashish.”[293] And still more, the genius of the story-teller quickens
the dry bones of history, and by adding Fiction to Fact revives the dead
past: the Caliphs and the Caliphate return to Baghdad and Cairo, whilst
Asmodeus kindly removes the terrace-roof of every tenement and allows
our curious glances to take in the whole interior. This is perhaps the
best proof of their power. Finally, the picture-gallery opens with a
series of weird and striking adventures and shows as a tail-piece, an
idyllic scene of love and wedlock in halls before reeking with lust and
blood.
I have noticed in my Foreword that the two main characteristics of The
Nights are Pathos and Humour, alternating with highly artistic contrast,
and carefully calculated to provoke tears and smiles in the coffee-house
audience which paid for them. The sentimental portion mostly breathes a
tender passion and a simple sadness: such are the Badawi’s dying
farewell (vol. i. 75); the lady’s broken heart on account of her lover’s
hand being cut off (vol. i. 277); the Wazir’s death, the mourner’s song
and the “tongue of the case” (vol. ii. 10); the murder of Princess
Abrízah with the babe sucking its dead mother’s breast (vol. ii. 128);
and, generally, the last moments of good Moslems (_e.g._ vol. v. 167),
which are described with inimitable terseness and naïveté. The sad and
the gay mingle in the character of the good Hammamstoker who becomes Roi
Crotte; and the melancholy deepens in the Tale of the Mad Lover (vol. v.
138); the Blacksmith who could handle fire without hurt (vol. v. 271);
the Devotee Prince (vol. v. 111) and the whole Tale of Azízah (vol. ii.
298), whose angelic love is set off by the sensuality and selfishness of
her more fortunate rivals. A new note of absolutely tragic dignity seems
to be struck in the Sweep and the Noble Lady (vol. iv. 125), showing the
piquancy of sentiment which can be evolved from the common and the
unclean. The pretty conceit of the Lute (vol. v. 244) is afterwards
carried out in the Song (vol. viii. 281), which is a masterpiece of
originality[294] and (in the Arabic) of exquisite tenderness and poetic
melancholy, the wail over the past and the vain longing for reunion. And
the very depths of melancholy, of majestic pathos and of true sublimity
are reached in Many-columned Iram (vol. iv. 113) and the City of Brass
(vol. vi. 83): the metrical part of the latter shows a luxury of woe; it
is one long wail of despair which echoes long and loud in the hearer’s
heart.
In my Foreword I have compared the humorous vein of the comic tales with
our northern “wut,” chiefly for the dryness and slyness which pervade
it. But it differs in degree as much as the pathos varies. The staple
article is Cairene “chaff,” a peculiar banter possibly inherited from
their pagan forefathers: instances of this are found in the Cock and Dog
(vol. i. 22), the Eunuch’s address to the Cook (vol. i. 244), the
Wazir’s exclamation, “Too little pepper!” (vol. i. 246), the
self-communing of Judar (vol. vi. 219), the Hashish-eater in Ali Shár
(vol. iv. 213), the scene between the brother-Wazirs (vol. i. 197), the
treatment of the Gobbo (vol. i. 221, 228), the Water of Zemzem (vol. i.
284), and the Eunuchs Bukhayt and Kafur[295] (vol. ii. 49, 51). At times
it becomes a masterpiece of fun, of rollicking Rabelaisian humour
underlaid by the caustic mother-wit of Sancho Panza, as in the orgie of
the Ladies of Baghdad (vol. i. 92, 93); the Holy Ointment applied to the
beard of Luka the Knight—“unxerunt regem Salomonem” (vol. ii. 222); and
Ja’afar and the Old Badawi (vol. v. 98), with its reminiscence of
“chaffy” King Amasis. This reaches its acme in the description of ugly
old age (vol. v. 3); in The Three Wishes, the wickedest of satires on
the alter sexus (vi. 180); in Ali the Persian (vol. iv. 139); in the
Lady and her Five Suitors (vol. vi. 172), which corresponds and
contrasts with the dully told Story of Upakosa and her Four Lovers of
the Kathá (p. 17); and in The Man of Al-Yaman (vol. iv. 245) where we
find the true Falstaffian touch. But there is sterling wit, sweet and
bright, expressed without any artifice of words, in the immortal
Barber’s tales of his brothers, especially the second, the fifth and the
sixth (vol. i. 324, 325 and 343). Finally, wherever the honest and
independent old debauchee Abu Nowas makes his appearance the fun becomes
fescennine and milesian.
B.—THE MANNER OF THE NIGHTS.
And now, after considering the matter, I will glance at the language and
style of The Nights. The first point to remark is the peculiarly happy
framework of the Recueil, which I cannot but suspect set an example to
the Decamerone and its host of successors.[296] The admirable
Introduction, a perfect _mise-en-scène_, gives the amplest raison d’être
of the work, which thus has all the unity required for a great romantic
recueil. We perceive this when reading the contemporary Hindu work the
Kathá Sarit Ságara,[297] which is at once so like and so unlike The
Nights: here the preamble is insufficient; the whole is clumsy for want
of a thread upon which the many independent tales and fables should be
strung[298]; and the consequent disorder and confusion tell upon the
reader, who cannot remember the sequence without taking notes.
As was said in my Foreword “without the Nights no Arabian Nights!” and
now, so far from holding the pauses “an intolerable interruption to the
narrative,” I attach additional importance to these pleasant and restful
breaks introduced into long and intricate stories. Indeed beginning
again I should adopt the plan of the Cal. Edit. opening and ending every
division with a dialogue between the sisters. Upon this point, however,
opinions will differ and the critic will remind me that the consensus of
the MSS. would be wanting: The Bresl. Edit. in many places merely
interjects the number of the night without interrupting the tale; the
MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale used by Galland contains only cclxxxii
and the Frenchman ceases to use the division after the ccxxxvith Night
and in some editions after the cxcviith.[299] A fragmentary MS.,
according to Scott whose friend J. Anderson found it in Bengal, breaks
away after Night xxix; and in the Wortley Montagu, the Sultan relents at
an early opportunity, the stories, as in Galland, continuing only as an
amusement. I have been careful to preserve the balanced sentences with
which the tales open; the tautology and the prose-rhyme serving to
attract attention, _e.g._, “In days of yore and in times long gone
before there was a King,” etc.; in England where we strive not to waste
words this becomes “Once upon a time.” The closings also are artfully
calculated, by striking a minor chord after the rush and hurry of the
incidents, to suggest repose: “And they led the most pleasurable of
lives and the most delectable, till there came to them the Destroyer of
delights and the Severer of societies and they became as though they had
never been”. Place this by the side of Boccaccio’s favourite
formulæ:—Egli conquistò poi la Scozia, e funne re coronato (ii, 3); Et
onorevolmente visse infino àlla fine (ii, 4),; Molte volte goderono del
loro amore: Iddio faccia noi goder del nostro (iii, 6): E cosi nella sua
grossezza si rimase e ancor vi si sta (vi, 8). We have further docked
this tail into: “And they lived happily ever after.”