according to the Marquis de Boissy. He complained without ambages
of murs Arabes in French regiments, and declared that the result
of the African wars was an éffrayable débordement pédérastique,
even as the vérole resulted from the Italian campaigns of that
age of passion, the xvith century. From the military the fléau
spread to civilian society and the Vice took such expansion and
intensity that it may be said to have been democratised in cities
and large towns; at least so we gather from the Dossier des
Agissements des Pédérastes. A general gathering of “La Sainte
Congregation des glorieux Pádárastes” was held in the old Petite
Rue des Marais where, after the theatre, many resorted under
pretext of making water. They ranged themselves along the walls
of a vast garden and exposed their podices: bourgeois, richards
and nobles came with full purses, touched the part which most
attracted them and were duly followed by it. At the Allée des
Veuves the crowd was dangerous from 7 to 8 p.m.: no policeman or
ronde de nun’ dared venture in it; cords were stretched from tree
to tree and armed guards drove away strangers amongst whom, they
say, was once Victor Hugo. This nuisance was at length suppressed
by the municipal administration.
The Empire did not improve morals. Balls of sodomites were held
at No. 8 Place de la Madeleine where, on Jan. 2, ’64, some one
hundred and fifty men met, all so well dressed as women that even
the landlord did not recognise them. There was also a club for
sotadic debauchery called the Cent Gardes and the Dragons de
l’Impératrice.[FN#427] They copied the imperial toilette and kept
it in the general wardrobe: hence “faire l’Impératrice” meant to
be used carnally. The site, a splendid hotel in the Allée des
Veuves, was discovered by the Procureur-Géneral, who registered
all the names; but, as these belonged to not a few senators and
dignitaries, the Emperor wisely quashed proceedings. The club was
broken up on July 16, ’64. During the same year La Petite Revue,
edited by M. Loredan Larchy, son of the General, printed an
article, “Les échappés de Sodome”: it discusses the letter of M.
Castagnary to the Progrès de Lyons and declares that the Vice had
been adopted by plusieurs corps de troupes. For its latest
developments as regards the chantage of the tantes (pathics), the
reader will consult the last issues of Dr. Tardieu’s well-known
Études.[FN#428] He declares that the servant-class is most
infected; and that the Vice is commonest between the ages of
fifteen and twenty five.
The pederasty of The Nights may briefly be distributed into three
categories. The first is the funny form, as the unseemly
practical joke of masterful Queen Budúr (vol. iii. 300–306) and
the not less hardi jest of the slave-princess Zumurrud (vol. iv.
226). The second is in the grimmest and most earnest phase of the
perversion, for instance where Abu Nowas[FN#429] debauches the
three youths (vol. v. 64 69); whilst in the third form it is
wisely and learnedly discussed, to be severely blamed, by the
Shaykhah or Reverend Woman (vol v. 154).
To conclude this part of my subject, the éclaircissement des
obscánités. Many readers will regret the absence from The Nights
of that modesty which distinguishes “Amadis de Gaul,” whose
author, when leaving a man and a maid together says, “And nothing
shall be here related; for these and suchlike things which are
conformable neither to good conscience nor nature, man ought in
reason lightly to pass over, holding them in slight esteem as
they deserve.” Nor have we less respect for Palmerin of England
who after a risqué scene declares, “Herein is no offence offered
to the wise by wanton speeches, or encouragement to the loose by
lascivious matter.” But these are not oriental ideas, and we must
e’en take the Eastern as we find him. He still holds “Naturalla
non sunt turpia,” together with “Mundis omnia munda”; and, as
Bacon assures us the mixture of a lie cloth add to pleasure, so
the Arab enjoys the startling and lively contrast of extreme
virtue and horrible vice placed in juxtaposition.
Those who have read through these ten volumes will agree with me
that the proportion of offensive matter bears a very small ratio
to the mass of the work. In an age saturated with cant and
hypocrisy, here and there a venal pen will mourn over the
“Pornography” of The Nights, dwell upon the “Ethics of Dirt” and
the “Garbage of the Brothel”; and will lament the “wanton
dissemination (!) of ancient and filthy fiction.” This self-constituted
Censor morum reads Aristophanes and Plato, Horace and
Virgil, perhaps even Martial and Petronius, because “veiled in
the decent obscurity of a learned language”; he allows men Latinè
loqui; but he is scandalised at stumbling-blocks much less
important in plain English. To be consistent he must begin by
bowdlerising not only the classics, with which boys’ and youths’
minds and memories are soaked and saturated at schools and
colleges, but also Boccaccio and Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Rabelais; Burton, Sterne, Swift, and a long list of works which
are yearly reprinted and republished without a word of protest.
Lastly, why does not this inconsistent puritan purge the Old
Testament of its allusions to human ordure and the pudenda; to
carnal copulation and impudent whoredom, to adultery and
fornication, to onanism, sodomy and bestiality? But this he will
not do, the whited sepulchre! To the interested critic of the
Edinburgh Review (No. 335 of July, 1886), I return my warmest
thanks for his direct and deliberate falsehoods:—lies are one-legged
and short-lived, and venom evaporates.[FN#430] It appears
to me that when I show to such men, so “respectable” and so
impure, a landscape of magnificent prospects whose vistas are
adorned with every charm of nature and art, they point their
unclean noses at a little heap of muck here and there lying in a
field-corner.
§ V
ON THE PROSE-RHYME AND THE POETRY OF THE NIGHTS
A.—The Saj’a.
According to promise in my Foreword (p. xiii.), I here proceed to
offer a few observations concerning the Saj’a or rhymed prose and
the Shi’r, or measured sentence, that is, the verse of The
Nights. The former has in composition, metrical or unmetrical
three distinct forms. Saj’a mutáwazi (parallel), the most common
is when the ending words of sentences agree in measure, assonance
and final letter, in fact our full rhyme; next is Saj’a mutarraf
(the affluent), when the periods, hemistichs or couplets end in
words whose terminal letters correspond, although differing in
measure and number; and thirdly, Saj’a muwázanah (equilibrium) is
applied to the balance which affects words corresponding in
measure but differing in final letters.[FN#431]
Al-Saj’a, the fine style or style fleuri, also termed Al-Badí’a,
or euphuism, is the basis of all Arabic euphony. The whole of the
Koran is written in it; and the same is the case with the Makámát
of Al-Hariri and the prime masterpieces of rhetorical
composition: without it no translation of the Holy Book can be
satisfactory or final, and where it is not the Assemblies become
the prose of prose. Thus universally used the assonance has
necessarily been abused, and its excess has given rise to the
saying “Al-Saj’s faj’a”—prose rhyme’s a pest. English
translators have, unwisely I think, agreed in rejecting it, while
Germans have not. Mr. Preston assures us that “rhyming prose is
extremely ungraceful in English and introduces an air of
flippancy”: this was certainly not the case with Friedrich
Rückert’s version of the great original and I see no reason why
it should be so or become so in our tongue. Torrens (Pref. p.
vii.) declares that “the effect of the irregular sentence with
the iteration of a jingling rhyme is not pleasant in our
language:” he therefore systematically neglects it and gives his
style the semblance of being “scamped” with the object of saving
study and trouble. Mr. Payne (ix. 379) deems it an “excrescence
born of the excessive facilities for rhyme afforded by the
language,” and of Eastern delight in antithesis of all kinds
whether of sound or of thought; and, aiming elaborately at grace
of style, he omits it wholly, even in the proverbs.
The weight of authority was against me but my plan compelled me
to disregard it. The dilemma was simply either to use the Saj’a
or to follow Mr. Payne’s method and “arrange the disjecta membra
of the original in their natural order”; that is, to remodel the
text. Intending to produce a faithful copy of the Arabic, I was
compelled to adopt the former, and still hold it to be the better
alternative. Moreover I question Mr. Payne’s dictum (ix. 383)
that “the Seja-form is utterly foreign to the genius of English
prose and that its preservation would be fatal to all vigour and
harmony of style.” The English translator of Palmerin of England,
Anthony Munday, attempted it in places with great success as I
have before noted (vol. viii. 60); and my late friend Edward
Eastwick made artistic use of it in his Gulistan. Had I rejected
the “Cadence of the cooing dove” because un-English, I should
have adopted the balanced periods of the Anglican marriage
service[FN#432] or the essentially English system of
alliteration, requiring some such artful aid to distinguish from
the vulgar recitative style the elevated and classical tirades in
The Nights. My attempt has found with reviewers more favour than
I expected; and a kindly critic writes of it, “These melodious
fray meets, these little eddies of song set like gems in the
prose, have a charming effect on the ear. They come as dulcet
surprises and mostly recur in highly-wrought situations, or they
are used to convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in nature
or art. Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but
really it arises from a profound study of the situation, as if
the Tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the
rhythmic strain.”
B.—The Verse.
The Shi’r or metrical part of The Nights is considerable
amounting to not less than ten thousand lines, and these I could
not but render in rhyme or rather in monorhyme. This portion has
been a bugbear to translators. De Sacy noticed the difficulty of
the task (p. 283). Lane held the poetry untranslatable because
abounding in the figure Tajnís, our paronomasia or paragram, of
which there are seven distinct varieties,[FN#433] not to speak of
other rhetorical flourishes. He therefore omitted the greater
part of the verse as tedious and, through the loss of measure and
rhyme, “generally intolerable to the reader.” He proved his
position by the bald literalism of the passages which he rendered
in truly prosaic prose and succeeded in changing the facies and
presentment of the work. For the Shi’r, like the Saj’a, is not
introduced arbitrarily; and its unequal distribution throughout
The Nights may be accounted for by rule of art. Some tales, like
Omar bin al-Nu’man and Tawaddud, contain very little because the
theme is historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and
courtship as that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to
one-fifth of the whole. And this is true to nature. Love, as
Addison said, makes even the mechanic (the British mechanic!)
poetical, and Joe Hume of material memory once fought a duel
about a fair object of dispute.
Before discussing the verse of The Nights it may be advisable to
enlarge a little upon the prosody of the Arabs. We know nothing
of the origin of their poetry, which is lost in the depths of
antiquity, and the oldest bards of whom we have any remains
belong to the famous epoch of the war Al-Basús, which would place
them about A.D. 500. Moreover, when the Muse of Arabia first
shows she is not only fully developed and mature, she has lost
all her first youth, her beauté du diable, and she is assuming
the characteristics of an age beyond “middle age.” No one can
study the earliest poetry without perceiving that it results from
the cultivation of centuries and that it has already assumed that
artificial type and conventional process of treatment which
presages inevitable decay. Its noblest period is included in the
century preceding the Apostolate of Mohammed, and the oldest of
that epoch is the prince of Arab songsters, Imr al-Kays, “The
Wandering King.” The Christian Fathers characteristically termed
poetry Vinum Dæmonorum. The stricter Moslems called their bards
“enemies of Allah”; and when the Prophet, who hated verse and
could not even quote it correctly, was asked who was the best
poet of the Peninsula he answered that the “Man of Al-Kays,” i.e.
the worshipper of the Priapus-idol, would usher them all into
Hell. Here he only echoed the general verdict of his countrymen
who loved poetry and, as a rule, despised poets. The earliest
complete pieces of any volume and substance saved from the wreck
of old Arabic literature and familiar in our day are the seven
Kasídahs (purpose-odes or tendence-elegies) which are popularly
known as the Gilded or the Suspended Poems; and in all of these
we find, with an elaboration of material and formal art which can
go no further, a subject-matter of trite imagery and stock ideas
which suggest a long ascending line of model ancestors and
predecessors.
Scholars are agreed upon the fact that many of the earliest and
best Arab poets were, as Mohammed boasted himself,
unalphabetic[FN#434] or rather could neither read nor write. They
addressed the ear and the mind, not the eye. They “spoke verse,”
learning it by rote and dictating it to the Ráwi, and this
reciter again transmitted it to the musician whose pipe or zither
accompanied the minstrel’s song. In fact the general practice of
writing began only at the end of the first century after The
Flight.
The rude and primitive measure of Arab song, upon which the most
complicated system of metres subsequently arose, was called
Al-Rajaz, literally “the trembling,” because it reminded the
highly imaginative hearer of a pregnant she-camel’s weak and
tottering steps. This was the carol of the camel-driver, the
lover’s lay and the warrior’s chaunt of the heroic ages; and its
simple, unconstrained flow adapted it well for extempore
effusions. Its merits and demerits have been extensively
discussed amongst Arab grammarians, and many, noticing that it
was not originally divided into hemistichs, make an essential
difference between the Shá’ir who speaks poetry and the Rájiz who
speaks Rajaz. It consisted, to describe it technically, of iambic
dipodia (U-U-), the first three syllables being optionally long
or short It can generally be read like our iambs and, being
familiar, is pleasant to the English ear. The dipodia are
repeated either twice or thrice; in the former case Rajaz is held
by some authorities, as Al-Akhfash (Sa’íd ibn Másadah), to be
mere prose. Although Labíd and Antar composed in iambics, the
first Kásídah or regular poem in Rajaz was by Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi
temp. Mohammed: the Alfíyah-grammar of Ibn Málik is in Rajaz
Muzdawij, the hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined
to the couplet. Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and
fifth Assemblies. So far Arabic metre is true to Nature: in
impassioned speech the movement of language is iambic: we say “I
will, I will,” not “I will.”
For many generations the Sons of the Desert were satisfied with
Nature’s teaching; the fine perceptions and the nicely trained
ear of the bard needing no aid from art. But in time came the
inevitable prosodist under the formidable name of Abu Abd al-Rahmán
al-Khalíl, i. Ahmad, i. Amrú, i. Tamím al-Faráhidi (of the
Faráhid sept), al-Azdi (of the Azd clan), al Yahmadi (of the
Yahmad tribe), popularly known as Al-Khalíl ibn Ahmad al-Basri,
of Bassorah, where he died æt. 68, scanning verses they say, in
A.H. 170 (= 786–87). Ibn Khallikán relates (i. 493) on the
authority of Hamzah al-Isfaháni how this “father of Arabic
grammar and discoverer of the rules of prosody” invented the
science as he walked past a coppersmith’s shop on hearing the
strokes of a hammer upon a metal basin: “two objects devoid of
any quality which could serve as a proof and an illustration of
anything else than their own form and shape and incapable of
leading to any other knowledge than that of their own
nature.”[FN#435] According to others he was passing through the
Fullers’ Bazar at Basrah when his ear was struck by the Dak dak
(Arabic letters) and the Dakak-dakak (Arabic letters) of the
workmen. In these two onomapoetics we trace the expression which
characterises the Arab tongue: all syllables are composed of
consonant and vowel, the latter long or short as B and B; or of
a vowelled consonant followed by a consonant as Bal, Bau (Arabic).
The grammarian, true to the traditions of his craft which looks
for all poetry to the Badawi,[FN#436] adopted for metrical
details the language of the Desert. The distich, which amongst
Arabs is looked upon as one line, he named “Bayt,” nighting-place,
tent or house; and the hemistich Misrá’ah, the one leaf of
a folding door. To this “scenic” simile all the parts of the
verse were more or less adapted. The metres, our feet, were
called “Arkán,” the stakes and stays of the tent; the syllables
were “Usúl” or roots divided into three kinds: the first or
“Sabab” (the tent-rope) is composed of two letters, a vowelled
and a quiescent consonant as “Lam.”[FN#437] The “Watad” or tent
peg of three letters is of two varieties; the Majmú’, or united,
a foot in which the two first consonants are moved by vowels and
the last is jazmated or made quiescent by apocope as “Lakad”; and
the Mafrúk, or disunited, when the two moved consonants are
separated by one jazmated, as “Kabla.” And lastly the “Fásilah”
or intervening space, applied to the main pole of the tent,
consists of four letters.
The metres were called Buhúr or “seas” (plur. of Bahr), also
meaning the space within the tent-walls, the equivoque alluding
to pearls and other treasures of the deep. Al-Khalil, the
systematiser, found in general use only five Dáirah (circles,
classes or groups of metre); and he characterised the harmonious
and stately measures, all built upon the original Rajaz, as Al-Tawíl
(the long),[FN#438] Al-Kámil (the complete), Al-Wáfir (the
copious), Al-Basít (the extended) and Al-Khafíf (the
light).[FN#439] These embrace all the Mu’allakát and the Hamásah,
the great Anthology of Abú Tammám; but the crave for variety and
the extension of foreign intercourse had multiplied wants and Al-Khalil
deduced from the original five Dáirah, fifteen, to which
Al-Akhfash (ob. A.D. 830) added a sixteenth, Al-Khabab. The
Persians extended the number to nineteen: the first four were
peculiarly Arab; the fourteenth, the fifteenth and seventeenth
peculiarly Persian and all the rest were Arab and
Persian.[FN#440]
Arabic metre so far resembles that of Greece and Rome that the
value of syllables depends upon the “quantity” or position of
their consonants, not upon accent as in English and the Neo-Latin
tongues. Al-Khalil was doubtless familiar with the classic
prosody of Europe, but he rejected it as unsuited to the genius
of Arabic and like a true Eastern Gelehrte he adopted a process
devised by himself. Instead of scansion by pyrrhics and spondees,
iambs and trochees, anapæsts and similar simplifications he
invented a system of weights (“wuzún”). Of these there are
nine[FN#441] memorial words used as quantitive signs, all built
upon the root “fa’l” which has rendered such notable service to
Arabic and Hebrew[FN#442] grammar and varying from the simple
“fa’ál,” in Persian “fa’úl” (U _), to the complicated
“Mutafá’ilun”(UU - U -), anapæst + iamb. Thus the prosodist
would scan the Shahnámeh of Firdausi as
Fa’úlun, fa’úlun, fa’úlun, fa’ál.
U - - U - - U - - -
These weights also show another peculiarity of Arabic verse. In
English we have few if any spondees: the Arabic contains about
three longs to one short; hence its gravity, stateliness and
dignity. But these longs again are peculiar, and sometimes strike
the European ear as shorts, thus adding a difficulty for those
who would represent Oriental metres by western feet, ictus and
accent. German Arabists can register an occasional success in
such attempts: Englishmen none. My late friend Professor Palmer
of Cambridge tried the tour de force of dancing on one leg
instead of two and notably failed: Mr. Lyall also strove to
imitate Arabic metre and produced only prose bewitched.[FN#443]
Mr. Payne appears to me to have wasted trouble in “observing the
exterior form of the stanza, the movement of the rhyme and (as
far as possible) the identity in number of the syllables
composing the beits.” There is only one part of his admirable
version concerning which I have heard competent readers complain;
and that is the metrical, because here and there it sounds
strange to their ears.
I have already stated my conviction that there are two and only
two ways of translating Arabic poetry into English. One is to
represent it by good heroic or lyric verse as did Sir William
Jones; the other is to render it after French fashion, by
measured and balanced Prose, the little sister of Poetry. It is
thus and thus only that we can preserve the peculiar cachet of
the original. This old world Oriental song is spirit-stirring as
a “blast of that dread horn,” albeit the words be thin. It is
heady as the “Golden Wine” of Libanus, to the tongue water and
brandy to the brain—the clean contrary of our nineteenth century
effusions. Technically speaking, it can be vehicled only by the
verse of the old English ballad or by the prose of the Book of
Job. And Badawi poetry is a perfect expositor of Badawi life,
especially in the good and gladsome old Pagan days ere Al-Islam,
like the creed which it abolished, overcast the minds of men with
its dull grey pall of realistic superstition. They combined to
form a marvellous picture—those contrasts of splendour and
squalor amongst the sons of the sand. Under airs pure as æther,
golden and ultramarine above and melting over the horizon into a
diaphanous green which suggested a resection of Kaf, that unseen
mountain-wall of emerald, the so-called Desert, changed face
twice a year; now brown and dry as summer-dust; then green as
Hope, beautified with infinite verdure and broad sheetings of
rain-water. The vernal and autumnal shiftings of camp,
disruptions of homesteads and partings of kith and kin, friends
and lovers, made the life many-sided as it was vigorous and
noble, the outcome of hardy frames, strong minds and spirits
breathing the very essence of liberty and independence. The day
began with the dawn-drink, “generous wine bought with shining
ore,” poured into the crystal goblet from the leather bottle
swinging before the cooling breeze. The rest was spent in the
practice of weapons, in the favourite arrow game known as Al-Maysar,
gambling which at least had the merit of feeding the
poor; in racing for which the Badawin had a mania, and in the
chase, the foray and the fray which formed the serious business
of his life. And how picturesque the hunting scenes; the
greyhound, like the mare, of purest blood; the falcon cast at
francolin and coney; the gazelle standing at gaze; the desert ass
scudding over the ground-waves; the wild cows or bovine antelopes
browsing with their calves and the ostrich-chickens flocking
round the parent bird! The Musámarah or night-talk round the
camp-fire was enlivened by the lute-girl and the glee-man, whom
the austere Prophet described as “roving distraught in every
vale” and whose motto in Horatian vein was, “To day we shall
drink, to-morrow be sober, wine this day, that day work.”
Regularly once a year, during the three peaceful months when war
and even blood revenge were held sacrilegious, the tribes met at
Ukádh (Ocaz) and other fairsteads, where they held high festival
and the bards strave in song and prided themselves upon doing
honour to women and to the successful warriors of their tribe.
Brief, the object of Arab life was to be—to be free, to be
brave, to be wise; while the endeavours of other peoples was and
is to have—to have wealth, to have knowledge, to have a name;
and while moderns make their “epitome of life” to be, to do and
to suffer. Lastly the Arab’s end was honourable as his life was
stirring: few Badawin had the crowning misfortune of dying “the
straw-death.”