fallen in with some rude and fantastic barbarian of Buddhistic
“persuasion” and indigenous origin: so Reynard the Fox has its
analogue amongst the Kafirs and the Vái tribe of Mandengan
negroes in Liberia[FN#235] amongst whom one Doalu invented or
rather borrowed a syllabarium. The modern Gypsies are said also
to have beast-fables which have never been traced to a foreign
source (Leland). But I cannot accept the refinement of
difference which Professor Benfey, followed by Mr. Keith-Falconer,
discovers between the Æsopic and the Hindu apologue:—
“In the former animals are allowed to act as animals: the latter
makes them act as men in the form of animals.” The essence of
the beast-fable is a reminiscence of Homo primigenius with
erected ears and hairy hide, and its expression is to make the
brother brute behave, think and talk like him with the superadded
experience of ages. To early man the “lower animals,” which are
born, live and die like himself, showing all the same affects and
disaffects, loves and hates, passions, prepossessions and
prejudices, must have seemed quite human enough and on an equal
level to become his substitutes. The savage, when he began to
reflect, would regard the carnivor and the serpent with awe,
wonder and dread; and would soon suspect the same mysterious
potency in the brute as in himself: so the Malays still look upon
the Uran-utan, or Wood-man, as the possessor of superhuman
wisdom. The hunter and the herdsman, who had few other
companions, would presently explain the peculiar relations of
animals to themselves by material metamorphosis, the bodily
transformation of man to brute giving increased powers of working
him weal and woe. A more advanced stage would find the step easy
to metempsychosis, the beast containing the Ego (alias soul) of
the human: such instinctive belief explains much in Hindu
literature, but it was not wanted at first by the Apologue.
This blending of blood, this racial baptism would produce a fine
robust progeny; and, after our second century,
Ægypto-Græco-Indian stories overran the civilised 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.[FN#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.[FN#237] Voltaire[FN#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’education du genre humain, on trouve
les fables de Pilpay, de Lokman,[FN#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.”[FN#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. [FN#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,[FN#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[FN#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 Göethe 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.”[FN#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 commonplace 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
out-stripping 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?”[FN#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[FN#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,[FN#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 . 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 “other worldly” 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 circumstances
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[FN#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. [FN#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[FN#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,
Light-land,” 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 Visva-karma, the Anti-creator,[FN#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.”[FN#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.