Volume 6 — THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK AND ITS REVIEWERS REVIEWED.

[“It has occurred to me that perhaps it would be a good plan to put a set of notes ... to the ‘Origin,’ which now has none, exclusively devoted to the errors of my reviewers. It has occurred to me that where a reviewer has erred, a common reader might err. Secondly, it will show the reader that we must not trust implicitly to reviewers.”—Darwin’s Life, ii. 349.]

386

TO RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON. The Thousand Nights and a Night.

Athwart the welkin slant the snows and pile

On sill and balcony; their feathery feet

Trip o’er the landscape, and pursuing sleet,

Earth’s brow beglooming, robs the skies of smile:

Lies in her mourning-shroud our Northern Isle,

And bitter winds in battle o’er her meet.

Her world is death-like, when behold! we greet

Light-gleams from morning-land in welcome while.

A light of golden mine and orient pearl—

Vistas of fairy-land, where Beauty reigns

And Valiance revels; cloudless moon, fierce sun,

The wold, the palm-tree; cities; hosts; a whirl

Of life in tents and palaces and fanes:

The light that streams from Thousand Nights and One.

Isabel Burton.

Tangier, Marocco: Feb. 19, 1886.

387

THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK

AND

ITS REVIEWERS REVIEWED.

PRELIMINARY.

I here propose to produce what may be called the “biography” of a book whereof, methinks, the writer has some reason to be proud, a work which, after occupying him for the third of a century, well nigh half the life of average man and the normal endurance of a generation, can show for result these sixteen volumes. A labour of such parts and magnitude deserves, in my humble opinion, some notice of the main features distinguishing its career, especially of its presentation to Court (Public Opinion) and its reception by the high officials of the Palace, the critics, reviewers and criticasters.

And there is yet another consideration. To ignore the charges and criminations brought forward by certain literary Sir Oracles would be wilfully suffering judgment to go by default. However unpopular and despised may be, as a rule, the criticism of critique and however veridical the famous apothegm, “A controversy in the Press with the Press is the controversy of a fly with a spider,” I hold it the author’s bounden duty, in presence of the Great Public, to put forth his reply, if he have any satisfactory and interesting rejoinder, and by such ordeal to purge himself and prove his innocence unless he would incur wittingly impeachment for contumacy and contempt of court.

It is not only an instinct of human nature expressed by nemo me impunè lacessit which impels to answering in presence of the passers-by the enemy at the gate; it is also a debt which his honour and a respectful regard for the good opinion of his fellows compel the author to repay. The man who is feeble enough silently to suffer detraction and calumny at the hands of some sciolist or Halb-bildung sheltering his miserable individuality under the shadow (may it never be less!) of “King We,” simply sins against himself as the Arabs say and offends good manners by holding out a premium to wanton aggression and injurious doing. The reading world has a right to hear the alteram 388partem before it shall deliver that judgment and shall pronounce that sentence wherefrom lies no appeal. To ignore and not to visit with représailles unworthy and calumnious censure, may become that ideal and transcendental man who forgives (for a personal and egoistical reason) those who trespass against him. But the sublime doctrine which commands us to love our enemies and affect those who despitefully entreat us is in perilous proximity to the ridiculous; at any rate it is a vain and futile rule of life which the general never thinks of obeying. It contrasts poorly with the common sense of the pagan—Fiat Justitia, ruat cœlum; and the heathenish and old-Adamical sentiment of the clansman anent Roderick Dhu—

“Who rights his wrong where it was given,

If it were in the court of Heaven,”

L. of the Lake, v. 6.

—commends itself far more to what divines are pleased to call “fallen human nature” that is the natural man.

And here before crossing the threshold, I would seize the opportunity of expressing my cordial gratitude and hearty thanks to the Press in general, which has received my Eastern studies and contributions to Oriental knowledge in the friendliest and most sympathetic spirit, appreciating my labours far beyond the modicum of the offerer’s expectation and lending potent and generous aid to place them before the English world in the fairest and most favourable point of view. To number a small proportion of “black sheep” is no shame for a flock amounting to myriads: such exceptional varieties must be bred for the use and delectation of those who prefer to right wrong and darkness to light. It is with these only that my remarks and retorts will deal and consequently I have assigned to them the post of honour. The various extracts from notices favourable, appreciative and complimentary, appear as the “Opinions of the Press” at the end of this volume, and again I take the opportunity of professing myself truly thankful for the good word of the Fourth Estate, and for its wisely detecting the soul of good in things evil.

The romantic and exceptional circumstances under which my large labour was projected and determined have been sufficiently described in the Foreword (vol. i. pp. vi-ix). I may here add that during a longsome obligatory halt of some two months at East African Zayla’ and throughout a difficult and dangerous march across the murderous Somali country upon Harar-Gay, then the Tinbukhtú of Eastern Africa, The Nights rendered me the best of service. The wildlings listened with the rapt attention of little lads and lasses to the marvellous recitals of the charming Queen and the monotonous interpellations of her lay-image sister and looked forward to the evening lecture as the crown and guerdon of the toilsome day. And assuredly never was there a more suitable setting, a more admirable 389mise-en-scène for The Nights than the landscape of Somali-land, a prospect so adapted to their subject-matter that it lent credibility even to details the least credible. Barren and grisly for the most part, without any of the charms gladdening and beautifying the normal prospects of earth, grassy hill and wooded dale, park-like plain and placid lake, and the snaking of silvery stream, it displays ever and anon beauties made all its own by borrowing from the heavens, in an atmosphere of passing transparency, reflections of magical splendours and of weird shadows proper to tropical skies. No rose-hue pinker than the virginal blush and dewy flush of dawn in contrast with the shivering reek of flaming noon-tide, when all brightness of colour seems burnt out of the world by the white heat of sun-glow. No brilliancy more gorgeous or more ravishing than the play of light and shade, the rainbow shiftings and the fiery pinks and purples and ambers and carmines of the sunset scenery—the gorgeous death-bed of the Day. No tint more tender, more restful, than the uniform grey, pale and pearly, invading by slowest progress that ocean of crimson that girds the orb of the Sun-King, diminishing it to a lakelet of fire and finally quenching it in iridescent haze. No gloom more ghostly than the murky hangings drooping like curtains from the violet heavens during those traveller’s trials the unmooned nights, when the world seems peopled by weird phantoms and phantasms of man and monster, moving and at rest. No verdure more exquisite than earth’s glazing of greenery, the blend of etherial azure and yellow; no gold more sheeny than the foregrounds of sand shimmering in the slant of the sun; no blue more profound and transparent than the middle distances; no neutral tints more subtle, pure, delicate and sight-soothing than the French gray which robes the clear-cut horizon; no variety of landscape more pronounced than the alternations of glowing sunlight and snowy moonlight and twinkling starlight, all streaming through diaphanous air. No contrast more admirable than the alternation of iron upland whereupon hardly a blade of grass may grow and the Wady with its double avenue of leek-green tamarisks, hedging now a furious rain-torrent then a ribbon of purest sand; or the purple-grey shadow rising majestic in the Orient to face the mysterious Zodiacal Light, a white pyramid whose base is Amenti—region of resting Osiris—and whose apex pierces the zenith. And not rarely this “after-glow” is followed by a blush of “celestial rosy-red” mantling the whole circle of the horizon where the hue is deepest and paling into the upper azure where the stars shine their brightest. How often in Somali-land I repeated to myself

—Contentez-vous, mes yeux,

Jamais vous ne verrez chose plus belle;

and the picture still haunts me.

And now, turning away from these and similar pleasures of memory, and 390passing over the once-told tale (Foreword, vol. i. pp. ix., x.) of how, when and where work was begun, together with the disappointment caused by the death of my friend and collaborator, Steinhaeuser; concerning the copying process which commenced in 1879 and anent the precedence willingly accorded to the “Villon Edition,” I proceed directly to what may be termed

THE ENGINEERING OF THE WORK.

During the autumn of ’82, after my return from the Gold Coast (with less than no share of the noble metal which my companion Cameron and I went forth to find and found a failure), my task began in all possible earnest with ordering the old scraps of translation and collating a vast heterogeneous collection of notes. I was fortunate enough to discover, at unlettered Trieste, an excellent copyist able and willing to decypher a crabbed hand and deft at reproducing facetious and drolatic words without thoroughly comprehending their significance. At first my exertions were but fitful and the scene was mostly a sick bed to which I was bound between October ’83 and June ’84. Marienbad, however, and Styrian Sauerbrunn (bei Rohitsch) set me right and on return to Trieste (Sept. 4, ’84), we applied ourselves to the task of advertising, the first two volumes being almost ready for print. And here we were confronted by a serious question, What number of copies would suffice my public? A distinguished Professor who had published some 160,000 texts with prices ranging from 6d. to 50 guineas, wrote to me in all kindness advising an issue of 150 to 250: an eminent printer-publisher would have ventured upon some 500: others rose to 750 with a warning-note anent “wreckage,” great risk and ruinous expenditure, while only one friend—and he not in business—urged an edition of 2,000 to 3,000 with encouraging words as to its probable reception. After long forethought I choose 1,000 as a just middle.

We then drew up a long list, names of friends, acquaintances and strangers likely to patronise the novelty and caused the following three papers to be lithographed and printed at Trieste.

No. I.

Captain Burton, having neither agent nor publisher for his forthcoming Arabian Nights, requests that all subscribers will kindly send their names and addresses to him personally (Captain Burton, Trieste, Austria), when they will be entered into a book kept for the purpose.

There will be 10 volumes at a guinea a piece, each to be paid for on delivery. Subscribers may count on the first three volumes being printed in March next. Captain 391Burton pledges himself to furnish copies to all subscribers who address themselves to him; and he also undertakes not to issue, nor to allow the issue of a cheaper Edition. One thousand copies will be printed; the whole Manuscript will be ready before going to press in February, and the ten volumes will be issued within Eighteen Months.

This was presently followed by

No. II.

The Student of Arabic who reads “The Nights” with this version, will not only be competent to join in any conversation, to peruse the popular books and newspapers, and to write letters to his friends, he will also find in the notes a repertoire of those Arabian Manners and Customs, Beliefs and Practices, which are not discussed in popular works.

The 10 volumes will be handsomely bound in black and gold.

No subscriptions will be received until the work is done, and then at Coutts’ Bank, Strand, London.

Subscribers who apply directly are preferred.

The author will pay carriage of volumes all over the United Kingdom. A London address is requested.

And, lastly, after some delay, came the subjoined cutting from the Daily Tribune, New York.

No. III.

“It has already been announced that the first instalment of Captain Burton’s new translation of the Arabian Nights may be expected this autumn. I am indebted to a friend of his for some details which have not yet, I think, been made public. There is still room for a translation of the Arabian Nights. All or nearly all the popular editions, of which there are hundreds, are but renderings, more or less imperfect, from Professor Galland’s French version, which is itself an abridgment from the original, and turns a most valuable ethnographical work into a mere collection of fairy tales. Moreover, these English translations abound in Gallicisms, and their style offers but a painful contrast to the French of the seventeenth century. Some years since a Mr. Torrens undertook a complete translation from the original, but his work did not go beyond a single volume, or fifty tales out of the 1,001. Then came Mr. Lane in 1839, whose success was but moderate. In his three large and (in the 1839 edition) beautifully illustrated volumes, he has given not more than half the tales. He used the Cairo Arabic edition, which is itself an abridgment, and took all kinds of liberties with the text, translating verse into prose, and excising everything that was not ‘strictly proper.’

“Lastly, there is Mr. John Payne’s excellent translation, which has occupied him during seven years and is just brought to a conclusion. Mr. Payne bound himself to print not more than 500 copies, and his nine volumes, not published but printed, nominally for the Villon Society, are unprocurable except at a price which to the general public is prohibitive.

392“Captain Burton began his work on this extraordinary monument of Oriental literature in 1852, at Aden, with some help from his friend Dr. Steinhaeuser, of the Bombay Army. He has gone on with it as opportunity offered, and as other literary and official labours and his many journeys in savage lands permitted. The text and the subject offer many difficulties, and it is to these difficulties that he has devoted especial attention. His object is to reproduce the book in a form as entirely Arabian as possible, preserving the strict division of the nights, and keeping (a more questionable matter) to the long unbroken sentences in which the composer indulged, imitating also the rhythmic prose which is a characteristic of the Arabic. The effect in English remains to be seen, but of the value of Captain Burton’s method as an experiment in literature there can be no doubt, or of its great interest to everybody who cares for Oriental habits of thought and language. He will not shirk any of the passages which do not suit the taste of the day; but these Captain Burton thinks, will not commonly be found more objectionable than some which are in Shakespeare and in Shakespeare’s contemporaries. At the same time it will be understood that the book is intended for men only and for the study;—not for women or children, nor for the drawing-room table or dentist’s waiting-room. It will be printed by subscription and not published.

“Few are the Oriental scholars in England who could do justice to this picture of the mediæval Arab. Captain Burton is perhaps the only one who joins to the necessary linguistic knowledge that varied practical experience of Eastern life which alone in many cases can supply the true meaning of a troublesome passage or an accurate comment upon it. His aim is to make the book in its English dress not only absolutely literal in text but Oriental in tone and colour. He knows the tales almost by heart, and used to keep the Bedouin tribes in roars of laughter in camp during the long summer nights by reciting them. Sheiks to whom a preternatural solemnity of demeanour is usual were to be seen rolling on the ground in paroxysms of uncontrollable mirth. It was also Burckhardt’s custom to read the stories aloud, but the Arabs would snatch the book from his hand because his pronunciation was so bad. Captain Burton is said to have an Arab accent not easily distinguishable from the native. When he contents himself with the English tongue here in England, he is one of the most picturesque talkers to be met with. I can remember a certain dinner-party, now many years ago, where the great traveller kept us all listening till long past day-break; narrating, as he did, the most singular adventures with the most vivid fidelity to facts. That, however, is a digression. I have only to add that Captain Burton has the names of many subscribers and will doubtless be glad to receive others, which may, I suppose, be sent to him at Trieste. His present hope is to be ready to go to press next February and to bring out the whole of the volumes in 1885.”

(Signed) G. W. S.

Concerning this “American” communication and its author I shall have more to say in a future page.

Some 24,000 to 30,000 circulars were posted at an expense of £126 and they produced about 800 favourable replies which, after my return to England (May ’85), rose to 1,500 and to 2,000, as my unprofessional friend, and he only, had anticipated. Meanwhile occurred an incident characteristic of such appeals by the inexperienced to the public. A case containing 1,100 circulars had been sent to my agent for mailing in London, and my secretary had unfortunately gummed their envelopes. Hereupon I should have been subjected by the Post Office to the pains and penalties of the law, perhaps to a fine of £200. But when the 393affair was reported, with due explanations, to the late lamented Postmaster-General Henry Fawcett—a man in a million, and an official in ten millions—he had the justice and generosity to look upon the offence as the result of pure ignorance, and I received a caution “not to do it again.”

Needless to say that I lost no time about advertising my mistake in the dailies, giving the name of my agent and in offering to refund the money. Some of the sealed and unpaid envelopes had, however, been forwarded prematurely and the consequence was a comical display of wrath in quarters where it was hardly to be expected. By way of stemming the unpleasant tide of abuse I forwarded the following communiqué to The Academy.

“TUPPENCE as a Touchstone.”

Trieste, Nov. 2, ’85.

“Can you kindly find space for a few lines on a purely personal matter which is causing me abundant trouble? A box of circulars giving details concerning my forthcoming version of the Arabian Nights was sent to London with directions to stamp and post the contents. The envelopes having been inadvertently gummed down, the case was stopped by the Custom-house, and was transmitted to the Post Office where it was found to contain circulars not letters; and of these sundry were forwarded without pre-payment. The pleasant result was that one outspoken gentleman writes upon the circular, which he returns,—When you send your trash again, put postage-stamps on. A second is peremptorily polite, Please forward four stamps to the Adjutant of the —th Regiment. The ‘Chaplain of the Forces at ——,’ at once ironical and severe, ventures to suggest to Captain Burton that it is advisable, if he thinks his book worth selling, to put the postage on future advertisements. A fourth who, I regret to say, signs himself Lieutenant-Colonel, gives me advice about pre-payment written in an orderly’s hand upon a torn envelope (gratuitously insulting!); encloses the 2d. stamp and sends the missive under official cover ‘On Her Majesty’s Service.’ The idea of a French or an Austrian Colonel lowering himself so infinitely low! Have these men lost all sense of honour, all respect for themselves (and others) because they can no longer be called to account for their insolence more majorum? I never imagined ‘Tuppence’ to be so cunning a touchstone for detecting and determining the difference between gold and dross; nor can I deeply regret that circumstance and no default of mine has placed in hand Ithuriel’s spear in the shape of the said ‘Tuppence’.”

I am, Sir, etc.

Richard F. Burton.

The process of filling-up my list presented a fine and varied study of character; and an extensive experience of subscribers, as well as of nonsubscribers, presently enabled me to distribute the genus into the following eight species. The friendly subscriber who takes ten copies (more or less) forwarding their value. The gentleman subscriber who pays down his money confidingly. The cautious-canny subscriber who ventures £5. 5s., or half the price. The impudent and snobbish subscriber who will address his victim as follows:—

394Sir,

Send me the first volume of your Arabian Nights and if I like it I will perhaps take more.

Yours obediently,

X. Y. Z.

And Cynophron will probably receive for all reply:—

Sir,

Send me ten guineas and take one or ten volumes as you please.

Yours obediently, etc.

No. vi. is the fussy and troublesome subscriber who gives more bother than he is worth, and who takes a vicious pride in not paying till pushed to the last point. The professional subscriber fights hard for the most favourable terms, and holds it his vested right to “part” by dribblets. And lastly comes the dishonest subscriber who does not pay at all. I must, however, in justice own that species No. viii. is rare: of one thousand the proportion was only about a score.

In mid-June, ’85, I returned to London and began at once to prepare for issuing the book. Having found the publisher peculiarly unsatisfactory—with one single and remarkable exception my venerable friend, Mr. Van Voorst, whilome of Paternoster Row—I determined, like Professor Arber, to do without him, although well aware how risky was the proceeding, which would, in the case of a work for general reading, have arrayed against me the majority of the trade and of their “hands,” the critics. Then I sought hard, but sought in vain, for the agency of a literary friend or friends, men of name and note, like those who assisted in the Villon version: all feared the responsibility and the expected storm of abuse which, however, failed to burst.

Under these circumstances “The Printing Times,” a professional periodical produced by Messieurs Wymans, was pleased (August 25, ’85) to be unpleasantly intrusive on the subject of my plan. “We always heard associated with the publication of this important work, the name of Mr. ——, which is now conspicuous by its absence, nor is, apparently the name of any other leading publishing house to be identified with its production.” (The Printer’s Devil is, I presume, responsible for the English!) The writer then warns me in all (un-)friendliness that if the printers forget to add their imprint, they would become liable to a legal penalty; that the work is unsafe for literal translation and, lastly, that although printed by private subscription, “it is likely enough to be pronounced an injury to public morals to the danger of the author and his printers.” The unhappy article concludes, “We await the issue of the first volume since much will depend upon the spirit (!) in which the translation has been undertaken; certainly the original text is not suitable 395for general circulation (connu!) unless edited with the utmost care and discretion.”

To this production so manifestly inspired by our old friend £ s. d., I replied in The Academy (August 7, ’85), the gist of the few lines being as follows:—

In answer to many inquiries from friends and others, will you allow me to repeat, through your columns, that my translation of the “Arabian Nights” will be strictly limited to 1,000 copies, each sent to picked subscribers, and to renew the promise which I before made, that no cheaper edition shall be printed? Correspondents have complained that I have not stated the price; but I have mentioned over and over again that there are ten volumes, at one guinea each—my object in making it so expensive being to keep it from the general public. I am also troubled with inquiries as to who is my publisher. I am my own publisher, inaugurating (Inshallah!) a golden age for authors. Jesting apart, the book has no publisher. It is printed by myself for the benefit of Orientalists and Anthropologists, and nothing could be more repugnant to me than the idea of a book of the kind being published or being put into the hands of any publisher.

The first volume dated “Benares: MDCCCLXXXV: Printed by the Kamashastra Society for Private Subscribers only,” did not appear till September 12, ’85: it had been promised for March and had been delayed by another unavoidable detention at Trieste. But my subscribers had no further cause of complaint; ten tomes in sixteen months ought to satisfy even the most exigent.

No. i. volume was accompanied by a circular earnestly requesting that the book might not be exposed for sale in public places or permitted to fall into the hands of any save curious students of Moslem manners. Yet the birth of the first-born was accompanied (I am fain to confess) with no small trouble and qualms to the parent and to all who assisted at the parturition. Would the “little stranger” robed in black and gold, the colours of the Abbaside Caliphs, with its brick-red night-cap after the fashion of ecclesiastical bantlings, be kindly welcomed or would it be regarded as an abortion, a monster? The reader will readily understand how welcome to an author in such perplexity came the following article from the Standard (September 12), usually attributed to the popular and trenchant pen of Mr. Alfred Austin. I must be permitted to quote it entire, because it expresses so fully and so admirably all and everything I could desire a reviewer to write. And the same paper has never ceased to give me the kindest encouragement: its latest notice was courteous and appreciative as its earliest.

The first volume of Captain Burton’s long-expected edition of the “Arabian Nights” was issued yesterday to those who are in a position to avail themselves of the wealth of learning contained in this monumental labour of the famous Eastern traveller. The book is printed for subscribers only, and is sold at a price which is not likely to be paid by any save the scholars and students for whose instruction it 396is intended. But though the Benares “Kamashastra Society” are careful to let the world know that the “Thousand Nights and a Night” is not “published” in the technical sense of the term, the pages which will be read by a thousand purchases may be fittingly regarded as the property of the world at large. In any case, the day when the experience of a life was embodied into this fresh translation of the “Alf Laylah wa Laylah” marks a distinct stage in the history of Oriental research. The world has had numerous versions of these stories. For at least a century and a half they have delighted old and young, until Shahrazade and Dunyazade, the Fisherman and the Jinn, and the tales told by the Tailor, the Kalendar, the Nazarene broker, and the Hunchback ... to say nothing of Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor, and Camaralzaman and Badoura—seem like the most familiar of friends. Yet many of those who know the ordinary epitome prepared for the nursery and the drawing-room have little idea of the nature of the original. Galland’s abridgment was a mere shadow of the Arabic. Even the editions of Lane and Habicht and Torrens and Von Hammer represented but imperfectly the great corpus of Eastern folk-lore which Captain Burton has undertaken to render into English, without regard to the susceptibilities of those who, not having bought the book, are, therefore, in no way concerned in what is the affair of him and his subscribers. The best part of two centuries have passed away since Antoine Galland first turned some of the tales into French, and got stigmatised as a forger for his pains. Never was there such a sensation as when he printed his translations. For weeks he had been pestered by troops of roysterers rousing him out of bed, and refusing to go until the shivering Professor recited one of the Arab stories to the crowd under his window. Nor has the interest in them in any way abated. Thousands of copies pass every year into circulation; and any one who has ever stood in the circle around the professional story-teller of the East must have noticed how often he draws on this deathless collection. The camel-driver listens to them as eagerly as did his predecessors ages ago. The Badawi laughs in spite of himself, though next moment he ejaculates a startling “Astaghfaru’llah” for listening to the light mention of the sex whose name is never heard amongst the Nobility of the Desert. Or if the traveller is a scholar and a gentleman, he will pull out his book for the amusement of the company squatted round the camp fire, as did Captain Burton many a time and oft in the course of his Eastern wanderings.

To Captain Burton the preparation of these volumes must have been a labour of love. He began them in conjunction with his friend Steinhaeuser, soon after his return from the Mecca pilgrimage, more than thirty years ago, and he has been doing something to them ever since. In the swampy jungles of West Africa a tale or two has been turned into English, or a poem has been versified during the tedium of official life in the dank climate of Brazil. From Sind to Trieste the manuscript has formed part and parcel of his baggage, and though, in the interval, the learned author has added many a volume to the shelf-full which he has written, the “Thousand Nights and a Night” have never been forgotten. And now when he nears the end of his labours it seems as if we had never before known what the beauteous Shahrazad told the King who believed not in the constancy of women. Captain Burton seems the one sober man among drunkards. We have all the old company, though they appear in dresses so entirely new that one scans the lines again and again before the likeness is quite recognised. However, Tajal-Mulook will no doubt be as knightly as ever when his turn comes, for the Barber is garrulous, after the old fashion, and the three Shaykhs relate their experiences with the Jinns, the gazelles, and mules as vividly as they have done any time these thousand years or more. King Yoonan and the Sage Dooban are here, and so are King Sindibad and his falcon, the young Prince of the Black Islands, the envious Weezer and the Ghoolah; and the story of the Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad lose nothing of their 397charms in the new, and, we may add, extremely unsophisticated version. For Captain Burton’s work is not virginibus puerisque, and, while disclaiming for his version anything like intentional indecorum, he warns the readers that they will be guilty of a breach of good faith should they permit a work prepared only for students to fall into the hands of boys and girls. From the first to almost the penultimate edition of these stories the drawing-room alone has been consulted. Even Mr. Payne, though his otherwise faithful version was printed for the Villon Society, had the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes. Moreover, no previous editor—not even Lane himself—had a tithe of Captain Burton’s acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Moslem East. Hence, not unfrequently, they made ludicrous blunders, and in no instance did they supply anything like the explanatory notes which have added so greatly to the value of this issue of “Alf Laylah wa Laylah.” Some of these are startling in their realism, and often the traveller who believed that he knew something of the East, winces at the plainness with which the Wazir’s daughter tells her tales to Shahryar, King of the Banu Sasan. The language is, however, more frequently coarse than loose, and smacks more of the childish plainness with which high and low talk in the family circles from Tangier to Malaysia, than of prurience or suggestiveness. The Oriental cannot understand that it is improper to refer in straightforward terms to anything which Allah has created, or of which the Kuran treats. But in his conversation, as in his folk-lore, there is no subtle corruption or covert licentiousness—none of the vicious suggestion and false sentiment that pervade so many of the productions of the modern romantic school.

It is, indeed, questionable whether there is much in these inimitable romances half so objectionable as many of the chapters in Rabelais and Boccaccio. Nor do the most archaic of the passages which Captain Burton declines to “veil in the decent obscurity of a learned language” leave much room for the admirers of Shakespeare, or Greene, or Nash, or Wycherley, or Swift, or Sterne to cry shame. Their coarseness was a reflection of the times. The indelicacy was not offensive to those who heard it. On the other hand, apart from the language, the general tone of “The Nights” is exceptionally high and pure. The devotional fervour, as Captain Burton justly claims, often rises to the boiling-point of fanaticism, and the pathos is sweet and deep, genuine and tender, simple and true. Its life—strong, splendid, and multitudinous—is everywhere flavoured with that unaffected pessimism and constitutional melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies. The Kazi administers poetical justice with exemplary impartiality; and so healthy is the morale that at times we descry through the voluptuous and libertine picture “vistas of a transcendental morality—the morality of Socrates in Plato.” In no other work of the same nature is Eastern life so vividly pourtrayed. We see the Arab Knight, his prowess and his passion for adventure, his love and his revenge, the craft of his wives, and the hypocrisy of his priests, as plainly as if we had lived among them. Gilded palaces, charming women, lovely gardens, caves full of jewels, and exquisite repasts, captivate the senses and give variety to the panorama which is passing before our eyes. Yet we repeat that, though there is much in the excellent version now begun which is very plain speaking, there is nothing intentionally demoralising. Evidently, however, the translator is prepared to hear this charge brought against his labour of love. Indeed, there is a tinge of melancholy pervading the preface in which the Editor refers to his “unsuccessful professional life,” and to the knowledge of which his country has cared so little to avail itself. * * * * Even in the recent Egyptian troubles—which are referred to somewhat bitterly—his wisdom was not utilised, though, after the death of Major Morice, there was not an English official in the camps before Suakin capable of speaking Arabic. On this scandal, and on the ignorance of Oriental customs which was everywhere displayed, Captain Burton is deservedly severe. The issue of the ten volumes now in the press, accompanied by notes 398so full of learning as those with which they are illuminated, will surely give the nation an opportunity for wiping away the reproach of that neglect which Captain Burton seems to feel more keenly than he cares to express.

This was a sop to the friend and a sore blow dealt to the enemy. Moreover it was speedily followed up by another as swashing and trenchant in the Morning Advertiser (September 15, ’85), of which long extracts are presently quoted. The journal was ever friendly to me during the long reign of Mr. James Grant, and became especially so when the editorial chair was so worthily filled by my old familiar of Oxford days, the late Alfred Bate Richards, a man who made the “Organ of the Licensed Victuallers” a power in the state and was warmly thanked for his good services by that model conservative, Lord Beaconsfield.

A phrase in the Standard, the “most archaic of the passages,” acted upon

THE "PALL MALL GAZETTE"

like a red rag upon a rageous bull. I should rather say that it excited the so-called “Sexual Journal” by suggesting another opportunity for its unclean sensationalism: perhaps also the staff hoped to provide company and a fellow-sufferer for their editor, who was then in durance vile, his offences being “inciting to an indecent assault” and an act of criminal immorality. I should not have felt called upon to remind my readers of a scandal half-forgotten in England, while still held in lively remembrance by the jealous European world, had not the persistent fabrications, calumnies, and slanders of the Pall Mall, which continue to this day, compelled me to move in self-defence, and to explain the mean underlying motives.

Some three years and a half ago (June 3, ’85), the paper startled the world of London by a prodigy of false, foul, and fulsome details in the shape of articles entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The object of the editor, Mr. William T. Stead, a quondam teacher in the London schools and a respectable Methodist strengthened by non-Conformist support, in starting this ignoble surprise on the public was much debated. His partisans asserted that he had been honestly deceived by some designing knave—as if such child-like credulity were any excuse for a veteran journalist! His foes opined that under the cloak of a virtue, which Cato never knew, he sought to quicken his subscription-list ever dwindling under the effects of his exaggerated Russophilism and Anglophobia.

But whatever may have been the motive, the effect was deplorable. The articles, at once collected into a pamphlet (price twopence), as the “Report of the Pall Mall Gazette’s Secret Commission,” and headed by a laudatory quotation from one of the late Lord Shaftesbury’s indiscreetly philanthropic speeches, were spread broadcast about every 399street and lane in London. The brochure of sixteen pages divided into three chapters delighted the malignant with such sensational section-headings as—How Girls are Bought and Ruined—Why the Cries of the Victims are not Heard—Procuresses in the West End—How Annie was Procured—You Want a Maid, do You?—The Ruin of Children—A London Minotaur (?)—The Ruin of the Young Life—The Demon Child and—A Close Time for Girls, the latter being intended to support the recommendation of the Lords’ Committee and the promise of a Home Secretary that the age of consent be raised from thirteen to sixteen. And all this catchpenny stuff (price 2d.) ended characteristically with “Philanthropic and Religious Associations can be supplied with copies of this reprint on special terms.” Such artless benevolence and disinterested beneficence must, of course, be made to pay.

Read by every class and age in the capital, the counties and the colonies, this false and filthy scandal could not but infect the very children with the contagion of vice. The little gutter-girls and street-lasses of East London looked at men passing-by as if assured that their pucelages were or would become vendible at £3 to £5. But, the first startling over, men began to treat the writer as he deserved. The abomination was “boycotted” by the Press, expelled the clubs, and driven in disgrace from the “family breakfast-table,” an unpleasant predicament for a newspaper which lives, not by its news, but by its advertisements. The editor had the impudence to bemoan a “conspiracy of silence,” which can only mean that he wanted his foul sheets to be bought and discussed when the public thought fit to bury them in oblivion. And yet he must have known that his “Modern Babylon” is not worse in such matters than half-a-dozen minor Babylons scattered over Europe, Asia, and America; and that it is far from being, except by the law of proportion, the “greatest market of human flesh in the world.” But by carefully and curiously misrepresenting the sporadic as the systematic, and by declaring that the “practice of procuration has been reduced to a science” (instead of being, we will suppose, one of the fine arts), it is easy to make out a case of the grossest calumny and most barefaced scandal against any great capital.

The revelations of the Pall Mall were presently pooh-pooh’d at home; but abroad their effect was otherwise. Foreigners have not yet learned thoroughly to appreciate our national practice of washing (and suffering others to wash) the foulest linen in fullest public. Mr. Stead’s unworthy clap-trap representing London as the head-quarters of kidnapping, hocussing, and child-prostitution, the author invoking the while with true Pharisaic righteousness, unclean and blatant, pure intentions and holy zeal for good works, was welcomed with a shout of delight by our unfriends the French, who hold virtue in England to be mostly Tartuffery, and by our cousins-german and rivals the Germans, who dearly love to use us and roundly abuse us. In fact, the national name of England was 400wilfully and wrongfully defiled and bewrayed by a “moral and religious” Englishman throughout the length and breadth of Europe.

Hard upon those “revelations” comes the Eliza Armstrong case whereby the editor of the “Sexual Gazette” stultified thoroughly and effectually his own assertions; and proved most satisfactorily, to the injury of his own person, that the easiest thing in the world is notably difficult and passing dangerous. An accomplice, unable to procure a “maiden” for immoral purposes after boasting her ability as a procuress, proceeded to kidnap one for the especial benefit of righteous Mr. Stead. Consequently, he found himself in the dock together with five other accused, male and female; and the verdict, condemning the arch-plotter to three months and the assistants to lesser terms of imprisonment for abduction and indecent assault, was hailed with universal applause. The delinquent had the fanatical and unscrupulous support, with purse and influence, of the National Vigilance Association, a troop of busybodies captained by licensed blackmailers who of late years have made England their unhappy hunting-ground.^[447] Despite, however, the “Stead Defence Fund” liberally supplied by Methody; despite the criminal’s Pecksniffian tone, his self-glorification of the part he had taken, his effronté boast of pure and lofty motives and his passionate enthusiasm for sexual morality, the trial emphasised the fact that no individual may break the law of the land in order that good may come therefrom. It also proved most convincingly the utter baselessness of the sweeping indictment against the morality of England and especially of London—a charge which “undoubtedly had an enormous influence for harm at home and cruelly prejudiced the country abroad.” In the words of Mr. Vaughan of the Bow Street Police Court (September 7, ’85) the Pall Mall’s “Sensational articles had certainly given unlimited pain and sorrow to many good people at home and had greatly lowered the English nation in the estimation of foreigners.” In a sequel to the Eliza Armstrong case Mr. Justice Manisty, when summing up, severely condemned the “shocking exhibition that took place in the London streets by the publication of statements containing horrible details, and he trusted that those who were responsible for the administration of the law would take care that such outrage should not be permitted again.” So pure and pious Mr. Stead found time for reflection during the secluded three-months life of a “first-class misdemeanant” in “happy Holywell,” and did not bring out his intended 401articles denouncing London as the head-quarters of a certain sin named from Sodom.

About mid-September, when Mr. Stead still lay in durance vile, a sub-editor Mr. Morley (Jun.) applied to me for an interview which I did not refuse. It was by no means satisfactory except to provide his paper with “copy.” I found him labouring hard to place me “in the same box” with his martyred principal and to represent my volume (“a book of archaic delights”) as a greater outrage on public decency than the two-penny pamphlet. This, as said the London Figaro (September 19, ’85), is a “monstrous and absurd comparison.” It became evident to me, during the first visit, that I was to play the part of Mr. Pickwick between two rival races of editors, the pornologists and the anti-pornologists; and, having no stomach for such sport I declined the rôle. In reply to a question about critics my remark to the interviewer was, “I have taken much interest in what the classics call Skiomachia and I shall allow Anonymus and Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also treat with scornful silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent prospect, a landscape adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art, can only see in a field corner here and there a little heap of muck. ‘You must have been looking for it, Madam!’ said, or is said to have said, sturdy old Doctor Samuel Johnson.”

Moreover Mr. Morley’s style of reporting “interviews” was somewhat too advanced and American—that is, too personal, too sensation-mongering and too nauseously familiar—to suit my taste; and I would have none other of them. Hereupon being unable to make more copy out of the case the Pall Mall Gazette let loose at me a German Jew penny-a-liner, who signs himself Sigma. This pauvre diable delivered himself of two articles, “Pantagruelism or Pornography?” (September 14, ’85) and “The Ethics of the Dirt” (September 19, ’85), wherein with matchless front of brass he talks of the “unsullied British breakfast-table,” so pleasantly provided with pepper by his immaculate editor. And since that time the Pall Mall Gazette has never ceased to practise at my expense its old trade, falsehood and calumny, and the right of private judgment, sentence and execution. In hopes that his splenatic and vindictive fiction might bear fruit, at one time the Pall Mall Gazette has “heard that the work was to be withdrawn from circulation” (when it never circulated). Then, “it was resolved by the authorities to request Captain Burton not to issue the third volume and to prosecute him if he takes no notice of the invitation;” and, finally, “Government has at last determined to put down Captain Burton with a strong hand.” All about as true as the political articles which the Pall Mall Gazette indites with such heroic contempt for truth, candour and honesty. One cannot but apply to the “Gutter Gazette” the words of the Rev. Edward Irving:—“I mean by the British Inquisition that court whose ministers and agents carry on 402their operations in secret; who drag every man’s most private affairs before the sight of thousands and seek to mangle and destroy his life, trying him without a witness, condemning him without a hearing, nor suffering him to speak for himself; intermeddling in things of which they have no knowledge and cannot on any principle have a jurisdiction. * * * I mean the ignorant, unprincipled, unhallowed spirit of criticism, which in this Protestant country is producing as foul effects against truth, and by as dishonest means as ever did the Inquisition of Rome” (p. 5 “Preliminary Discourse to Ben Ezra,” etc.).

Of course men were not wanting to answer the malevolent insipidities of the Pall Mall Gazette, and to note the difference between newspaper articles duly pamphleted and distributed to the disgust of all decency, and the translation of an Arabian classic, limited in issue and intended only for the few select. Nor could they fail to observe that blackballing the Nights and admitting the “revelations” was a desperate straining at the proverbial gnat and swallowing the camel. My readers will hardly thank me for dwelling upon this point yet I cannot refrain from quoting certain of the protests:—

To the Editor of the “Pall Mall Gazette.”

Sir,—

Your correspondent “Sigma” has forgotten the considerable number of “students” who will buy Captain Burton’s translation as the only literal one, needing it to help them in what has become necessary to many—a masterly knowledge of Egyptian Arabic. The so-called “Arabian Nights” are about the only written halfway house between the literary Arabic and the colloquial Arabic, both of which they need, and need introductions too. I venture to say that its largest use will be as a grown-up school-book, and that it is not coarser than the classics in which we soak all our boys’ minds at school.

Anglo-Egyptian.

September 14th, 1885.

And the Freethinker’s answer (Oct. 25, ’85) to these repeated and malicious assaults is as follows:—

Here is a fine illustration of Mr. Stead’s Pecksniffian peculiarities. Captain Burton, a gentleman and a scholar whose boots Mr. Stead is not fit to black, is again hauled over the coals for the hundredth time, about his new translation of the Arabian Nights, which is so “pornographic” that the price of the first volume has actually risen from a pound to twenty-five shillings. Further down, in the very same column, the P.M.G. gloats proudly over the fact that thirty-five shillings have been given for a single copy of its own twopennyworth of smut.

The last characteristic touch which I shall take the trouble to notice is the following gem of September 16, ’87:—

I was talking to an American novelist the other day, and he assured me that the Custom-house authorities on “the other side” seized all copies of Sir Richard Burton’s 403“Nights” that came into their hands, and retained them as indecent publications. Burned them, I hope he meant, and so, I fear, will all holders of this notorious publication, for prices will advance, and Sir Richard will chuckle to think that indecency is a much better protection than international copyright.

Truly the pen is a two-edged tool, often turned by the fool against his own soul. So an honest author “chuckles” when his subscribers have lost their copies because this will enhance the value of his book! I ask, Can anything be better proven than the vileness of a man who is ever suspecting and looking for vileness in his fellow-men? Again, the assertion that the Custom-house authorities in the United States had seized my copies is a Pall-Mallian fiction pure and simple, and the “Sexual Gazette” must have known this fact right well. In consequence of a complaint lodged by the local Society for the Suppression of Vice, the officials of the Custom-house, New York, began by impounding the first volumes of the Villon Version; but presently, as a literary friend informs me (February 10, ’88), “the new translations of The Nights have been fully permitted entry at the Custom-house and are delivered on the payment of 25% duty.” To my copies admittance was never refused.

Mr. Stead left his prison-doors noisily declaring that the rest of his life should be “devoted to Christian chivalry”—whatever that majestic dictum may mean. As regards his subsequent journalistic career I can observe only that it has been unfortunate as inconsequent. He took up the defence, abusing the Home Secretary after foulest fashion, of the coldblooded murderer Lipski, with the result that his protégé was hanged after plenary confession and the Editor had not the manliness to apologise. He espoused the cause of free speech in Ireland with the result that most of the orators were doomed to the infirmaries connected with the local gaols. True to his principle made penal by the older and wiser law of libel, that is of applying individual and irresponsible judgment to, and passing final and unappealable sentence upon, the conduct of private individuals and of public men, he raged and inveighed with all the fury of outraged (and interested) virtue against Colonel Hughes-Hallett with the consequence of seating that M.P. more firmly than before. He took up the question of free public meeting in England with the result that a number of deludeds (including Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P.) found their way to prison, which the “Christian chevalier” had apparently contracted to supply with inmates. But there is more to say concerning the vaunted morality of this immoral paper.—Eheu! quantum mutatus from the old decent days when, under Mr. Frederic Greenwood, it was indeed “written by gentlemen for gentlemen” (and ladies).

A journal which, like the Pall Mall Gazette, affects preferably and persistently sexual subjects and themes lubric, works more active and permanent damage to public morals than books and papers which are frankly gross and indecent. The latter, so far as the world of letters 404knows them, are read either for their wit and underlying wisdom (e.g. Rabelais and Swift), for their historical significance (Petronius Arbiter) or for their anthropological interest as the Alf Laylah. But the public print which deals, however primly and decently, piously and unctuously with sexual and intersexual relations, usually held to be of the Alekta or taboo’d subjects, is the real perverter of conduct, the polluter of mental purity, the corrupter-general of society. Amongst savages and barbarians the comparatively unrestrained intercourse between men and women relieves the brain through the body; the mind and memory have scant reason, physical or mental, to dwell fondly upon visions amatory and venereal, to live in a “rustle of (imaginary) copulation.” On the other hand the utterly artificial life of civilisation, which debauches even the monkeys in “the Zoo,” and which expands the period proper for the reproductory process from the vernal season into the whole twelvemonth, leaves to the many, whose lot is celibacy, no bodily want save one and that in a host of cases either unattainable or procurable only by difficulty and danger. Hence the prodigious amount of mental excitement and material impurity which is found wherever civilisation extends, in maid, matron, and widow, save and except those solely who allay it by some counteragent—religion, pride, or physical frigidity. How many a woman in “Society,” when stricken by insanity or puerperal fever, breaks out into language that would shame the slums and which makes the hearers marvel where she could have learned such vocabulary. How many an old maid held to be cold as virgin snow, how many a matron upon whose fairest fame not a breath of scandal has blown, how many a widow who proudly claims the title univira, must relieve their pent-up feelings by what may be called mental prostitution. So I would term the dear delights of sexual converse and that sub-erotic literature, the phthisical “French novel,” whose sole merit is “suggestiveness,” taking the place of Oriental morosa voluptas and of the unnatural practices—Tribadism and so forth, still rare, we believe, in England. How many hypocrites of either sex, who would turn away disgusted from the outspoken Tom Jones or the Sentimental Voyager, revel in and dwell fondly upon the sly romance or “study” of character whose profligacy is masked and therefore the more perilous. And a paper like the (modern) Pall Mall Gazette which deliberately pimps and panders to this latent sense and state of aphrodisiac excitement, is as much the more infamous than the loose book as hypocrisy is more hateful than vice and prevarication is more ignoble than a lie. And when such vile system is professionally practised under the disguise and in the holy names of Religion and Morality, the effect is loathsome as that spectacle sometimes seen in the East of a wrinkled old eunuch garbed in woman’s nautch-dress ogling with painted eyes and waving and wriggling like a young Bayadère.

There is much virtue in a nickname: at all events it shows the 405direction whither the aura popularis sets. The organ of Christian Chivalry is now universally known to Society as “The Gutter Gazette;” to the public as “The Purity-Severity Paper,” and the “Organ of the Social Pruriency Society,” and to its colleagues of the Press as “The Dirt-Squirt.” In the United States fulsomely to slander a man is “to Pall Mall Gazette him:” “Just like your Pall Mall Gazette,” said an American to me when describing a disreputable print “over the water.” And Mr. Stead, now self-constituted coryphæus of the Reptile Press in Great Britain, has apparently still to learn that lying and slandering are neither Christian nor chivalrous.

The diminutive Echo of those days (October 13 and 14, ’85) followed suit of the Pall Mall Gazette and caught lightly the sounds as they fell from the non-melliferous lips of the charmer who failed to charm wisely. The precious article begins by informing me that I am “always eager after the sensational,” and that on this occasion I “cater for the prurient curiosity of the wealthy few,” such being his synonym for “readiness to learn.” And it ends with the following comical colophon:—“Captain Burton may possibly imitate himself (?) and challenge us (!) to mortal combat for this expression of opinion.” If so, the writer of these lines will imitate himself (?) and take no notice of such an epistle. The poor scribe suggests the proverbial “Miss Baxter, who refused a man before he axed her.” And what weapon could I use, composing-stick or dung-fork upon an anonymous correspondent of the hawkers’ and newsboys’ “Hecker,” the favourite ha’porth of East London? So I left him to the tender mercies of Gaiety (October 14, ’84):—

The Echo is just a bit wild

Its “par.” is indeed, a hard hitter:

In fact, it has not drawn it mild;

’Tis a matter of “Burton and bitter.”

I rejoice to subjoin that the Echo has now (1888) made a name for decent and sensible writing, having abandoned the “blatant” department to the Star (see, for the nonsense about a non-existent Alderman Waterlow its issue of Sept. 6, ’88).

In the opinions of the Press will be found a selection from half a century of laudatory notices to which the few curious touching such matters will turn, while those who misjudged my work are duly acknowledged in this paper. Amongst friends I would specify, without invidious distinction, The Bat (September 29, ’85), who on this occasion and sundry others sturdily defended me, showing himself a bird of “light and leading.” To the St. James’s Gazette (September 12, ’85), the Whitehall Review (September 17), the Home News (September 18), and the Nottingham Journal (September 19), I am also indebted for most appreciative and intelligent notices. My cordial thanks are likewise due 406to the Editor and especially to “Our London Correspondent” of the Lincoln Gazette (October 10 and November 2, ’85, not to notice sundry minor articles): the articles will be reprinted almost entire because they have expressed my meaning as though it came from my own mouth. I have quoted Mr. J. Addington Symonds in extenso: if England now possess a writer who can deliver an authoritative judgment on literary style it is this littérateur. Of the journals which profess letters The Academy has ever been my friend and I have still the honour of corresponding with it: we are called “faddists” probably from our “fad” of signing our articles and thus enabling the criticised to criticise the critic.

I now turn to another of my unfriends, amongst whom is and long has been

THE “SATURDAY REVIEW.”

This ancient dodderer, who has seen better days, deigned favour me with six notices (January 2 and March 27, ’86; April 30, June 4, August 14, ’87; and July 21, ’88), of which No. i., dealing with my first and second volumes, is written after the facile American fashion making the book review itself; that is supply to the writer all the knowledge and familiarity with the subject which he parades before an incurious and easily gullible public. This especial form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the classical English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the critic’s noddle or note book. The Saturnine article opens characteristically.

Abroad we English have the character of being the most prudish of nations; we are celebrated as having Bowdlerized for our babes and sucklings even the immortal William Shakspeare; but we shall infallibly lose this our character should the Kamashastra Society flourish. Captain Burton has long been known as a bold explorer; his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, disguised in the dress and taking on him the manners and customs of a True Believer, was a marvel of audacity; but perhaps he may be held now to have surpassed himself, for he has been bold enough to lay before his countrymen a literal and unexcised translation of The Arabian Nights.

The writer is kind enough to pat me upon the back for “picturesque and fluent English” and to confess that I have successfully imitated the rhyming cadence of the original. But The Saturday would not be The Saturday without carping criticism, wrong-headedness and the culte of the commonplace, together with absolute and unworthy cruelty to weaker vessels. The reviewer denounces as “too conceited to be passed over without comment” the good old English “whenas” (for when, vol. ii. 130), the common ballad-term “a plump of spearmen” (ii. 190) and a “red 407cent” (i. 321), the only literal rendering of “Fals ahmar” which serves to show the ancient and noble pedigree of a slang term supposed to be modern and American. Moreover this Satan even condemns fiercely the sin of supplying him with “useful knowledge.” The important note (ii. 45) upon the normal English mispronunciation of the J in Jerusalem, Jesus, Jehovah, a corruption whose origin and history are unknown to so many and which was, doubtless, a surprise to this Son of King “We,” is damned as “uninteresting to the reader of the Arabian Nights.” En revanche, three mistakes of mine (“p. 43” for “p. 45”) in vol. ii., index; “King Zahr Shah” for King Suleyman Shah (ii. 285) and the careless confusion of the Caliphs Al-Muntasir and Al-Mustansir (ii. 817, note i.) were corrected and I have duly acknowledged the correction. No. i. article ends with Saturnine geniality and utterly ignoring a bye-word touching dwellers in glass houses:—

Finally, we mark with regret that Captain Burton should find no more courteous terms to apply to the useful work of a painstaking clergyman than those where in his note he alludes to “Missionary Porter’s miserable Handbook.”

As Mr. Missionary Porter has never ceased to malign me, even in his last Edition of Murray’s “miserable Handbook,” a cento of Hibernian blunders and hashed Bible, I have every reason to lui rendre la pareille.

The second article (March 27, ’86), treating of vol. iii., opens with one of those plagiaristic commonplaces, so dear to the soul of The Saturday, in its staid and stale old age as in its sprightly youth. “There is particularly one commodity which all men, therein nobly disregarding their differences of creed and country, are of a mind that it is better to give than to receive. That commodity is good advice. We note further that the liberality with which this is everywhere offered is only to be equalled (he means ‘to be equalled only’) by the niggard reception at most times accorded to the munificent donation; in fact the very goodness of advice—given apparently militates against its due appreciation in (by?) the recipient.” The critic then proceeds to fit his ipse dixit upon my case. The sense of the sentiment is the reverse of new: we find in The Spectator (No. dxii.), “There is nothing we receive with so much reluctance as good advice,” etc.; but Mr. Spectator writes good English and his plagiarist does not. Nor is the dictum true. We authors who have studied a subject for years, are, I am convinced, ready enough to learn, but we justly object to sink our opinions and our judgment in those of a counsellor who has only “crammed” for his article. Moreover, we must be sure that he can fairly lay claim to the three requisites of an adviser—capacity to advise rightly, honesty to advise truly and courtesy to advise decently. Now the Saturday Review has neither this, that, nor the other qualification. Indeed his words read like subtle and lurking irony by the light of those phenomenal and portentous vagaries which ever and anon 408illuminate his opaque pages. What correctness can we expect from a journal whose tomahawk-man, when scalping the corpse of Matthew Arnold, deliberately applies the term “sonnet” to some thirty lines in heroic couplets? His confusion of Dr. Jenner, the Vaccinator, with Sir William Jenner, the President of the R. C. of Physicians, is one which passes all comprehension. And what shall we say of this title to pose as an Aristarchus (November 4th, ’82)? “Then Jonathan Scott, LL.D. Oxon, assures the world that he intended to re-translate the Tales given by Galland (!); but he found Galland so adequate on the whole (!!) that he gave up the idea and now reprints Galland with etchings by M. Lalauze, giving a French view of Arab life. Why Jonathan Scott, LL.D., should have thought to better Galland while Mr. Lane’s version is in existence, and has just been reprinted, it is impossible to say.” In these wondrous words Jonathan Scott’s editio princeps with engravings from pictures by Smirke and printed by Longmans in 1811 is confounded with the imperfect reprint by Messieurs Nimmo and Bain, in 1883; the illustrations being borrowed from M. Adolphe Lalauze, a French artist (nat. 1838), a master of eaux fortes, who had studied in Northern Africa and who maroccanized the mise-en-scène of “The Nights” with a marvellous contrast of white and negro nudities. And such is the Solomon who fantastically complains that I have disdained to be enlightened by his “modest suggestions.” Au reste the article is not bad simply because it borrows—again Americanicè—all its matter from my book. At the tail-end, however, comes the normal sting: I am guilty of not explaining “Wuzú” (lesser ablution), “Ghusl” (greater ablution) and “Zakát” (legal alms which constitute a poor-rate) proving that the writer never read vol. iii. He confidently suggests replacing “Cafilah,” “by the better-known word Caravan,” as if it were my speciality (as it is his) to hunt-out commonplaces: he grumbles about “interrogation-points à l’Espagnole upside-down” (¿) which still satisfies me as an excellent substitute to distinguish the common Q(uestion) from A(nswer); and he seriously congratulates me upon my discovering a typographical error on the fly-leaf.

No. iii. (August 14, ’86, handling vols. vi. vii. and viii.) is free from the opening pretensions and absurdities of No. ii. and it is made tolerably safe by the familiar action of scissors and paste. But—desinit in piscem—it ends fishily; and we find, after saturnine fashion in cauda venenum. It scolds me for telling the English public what it even now ignores, the properest way of cooking meat (à propos of kabábs) and it “trembles to receive vols. ix. and x. for truly (from a literary point of view, of course, we mean) there seems nothing of which the translator might not be capable”—capable de tout, as said Voltaire of Habbakuk and another agnostic Frenchman of the Prophet Zerubbabel. This was indeed high praise considering the Saturday’s sympathy with and affection for the dead level, for the average man; but as an augury of ill it was a brutum fulmen. 409No. iv. (August 30, ’87) was, strange to say, in tone almost civil and ended with a touch simulating approval:—

“The labours of a quarter of a century,” writes the translator in L’Envoi, are now brought to a close, and certainly no one could have been found better suited by education and taste to the task of translating the ‘Nights’ than is the accomplished author of the ‘Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.’ His summing up of the contents and character of ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ in the Terminal Essay is a masterpiece of careful analysis, and we cannot do better than conclude our notice with a paragraph that resumes with wonderful effect the boundless imagination and variety of the picture that is conjured up before our eyes:—

“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 must meet fishermen and pauper, lamia and cannibal; where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief.... 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 the 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.”

And now, after the Saturday Review has condescended severely and sententiously to bepreach me, I must be permitted a trifling return in kind. As is declared by the French, an objectionable people which prefers la gloire to “duty,” and even places “honour” before “honesty,” the calling of the Fourth Estate is un sacerdoce, an Apostolate: it is a high and holy mission whose ends are the diffusion of Truth and Knowledge and the suppression of Ignorance and Falsehood. “Sacrilege,” with this profession, means the breaking of its two great commandments and all sins of commission and omission suggested and prompted by vain love of fame, by sordid self-esteem or by ignoble rancour. What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to “counteract the immorality of The Times,” adds to normal journalistic follies, offences and mistakes an utter absence of literary honour, systematic misrepresentation, malignity and absolute ruffianism? Let those who hold such language exaggerated glance at my pièce justicative, the Saturday’s article (June 28, 88) upon Mr. Hitchman’s “Biography of Sir Richard Burton.” No denizen of Grub Street in the coarse old day of British mob-savagery could have produced a more damning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique, private and personal. The “Saturday Reviler”—there is, 410I repeat, much virtue in a soubriquet—has grown only somewhat feebler, not kindlier, not more sympathetic since the clever author of “In Her Majesty’s Keeping” styled this Magister Morum “the benignant and judicious foster-parent of literature”; and since Darwin wrote of it (ii. 260) “One cannot expect fairness in a reviewer;” nor has it even taken to heart what my friend Swinburne declared (anent its issue of December 15, ’83) “clumsy and shallow snobbery can do no harm.” Like other things waxing obsolete it has served, I hasten to confess, a special purpose in the world of letters. It has lived through a generation of thirty years in the glorification of the mediocrities and in pandering to the impish taint of poor human nature, the ungenerous passions of those who abhor the novel, the original, the surprising, the startling, and who are only too glad to witness and to assist in the Procrustes’ process of trimming and lengthening out thoughts and ideas and diction that rise or strive to rise above the normal and vulgar plane. This virtual descendant of the ancestral Satirist, after long serving as a spawning-ground to envy, hatred and malice, now enters upon the decline of an unworthy old age. Since the death of its proprietor, Mr. Beresford-Hope, it has been steadily going down hill as is proved by its circulation, once 15,000, and now something nearer 5,000 than 10,000. It has become a poor shadow of its former self—preserving the passive ill-will but lacking the power of active malevolence—when journalists were often compelled to decline correspondence upon its misjudgments and to close to complainants their columns which otherwise would have been engrossed by just and reasonable protestations. The “young lions” of its prime (too often behanged with a calf-skin on their recreant limbs) are down among the dead and the jackal-pack which has now taken up the howling could no longer have caused Thackeray to fear or can excite the righteous disgust of that votary of “fair-play”—Mr. John Bright.

And now, before addressing myself to another Reviewer, I would be allowed a few words upon two purely personal subjects; the style chosen for my translation and my knowledge of the Arabian language and literature.

I need hardly waste time to point out what all men discern more or less distinctly, how important are diction and expression in all works of fancy and fiction and how both branches, poetic and prosaic, delight in beauty adorned and allow in such matters the extreme of liberty. A long study of Galland and Torrens, Lane and Payne, convinced me that none of these translators, albeit each could claim his special merit, has succeeded in preserving the local colouring of the original. The Frenchman had gallicised and popularised the general tone and tenor to such extent that even the vulgar English versions have ever failed to throw off the French flavour. Torrens attempted literalism laudably and courageously enough; but his execution was of the roughest, the nude verbatim; 411nor did his familiarity with Arabic, or rather with Egyptian, suffice him for the task. Lane, of whom I have already spoken, and of whom I shall presently be driven by his imprudent relatives and interested friends to say more, affected the latinised English of the period, flat and dull, turgid and vapid as that of Sale’s Koran; and his style proved the most insufficient and inadequate attire in which an Oriental romance of the Middle Ages could be arrayed. Payne was perfectly satisfactory to all cultivated tastes, but he designedly converted a romantic into a classical work: none ignores its high merits regarded merely as strong and vital English, but it lacks one thing needful—the multiform variety of The Nights. The original Arabic text which in the first thirteen tales (Terminal Essay, p. 80) must date from before the XIIIth century at the latest (since Galland’s MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale has been assigned to the early XIVth) is highly composite: it does not disdain local terms, bye-words and allusions (some obsolete now and forgotten), and it borrows indiscriminately from Persian (e.g. Sháhbandar), from Turkish (as Khátún) and from Sanscrit (for instance Brahman). As its equivalent, in vocabulary I could devise only a somewhat archaical English whose old-fashioned and sub-antique flavour would contrast with our modern and every-day speech, admitting at times even Latin and French terms, such as res scibilis and citrouille. The mixture startled the critics and carpers to whom its object had not been explained; but my conviction still remains that it represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian. And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and unnoticed by reviewers. The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin (the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) are instruments admirably fitted for their purpose: crystal-clear, they never divert even a bittock of the reader’s brain from the all-important sense underlying the sound-symbols. But in works of imagination man wants a treatment totally different, a style which, by all or any means, little mattering what they be, can avoid the imminent deadly risk of languor and monotony and which adds to fluency the allurement of variety, of surprise and even of disappointment, when a musical discord is demanded.

Again, my estimate of a translator’s office has never been of the low level generally assigned to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the habit of englishing every important or interesting work published on the continent of Europe. We cannot expect at this period of our literature overmuch from a man who, as Messieurs Vizetelly assure their clientèle, must produce a version for a poor £20. But at his best the traducteur while perfectly reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, works upon two lines. His prime and primary object is an honest and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense nor abating aught of its peculiar cachet whilst he labours his best to please and edify his readers. He has 412however, or should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can profitably lend something to and borrow somewhat from its neighbours, near or far, an epithet, a metaphor, a turn of phrase, a naïve idiom; and the translator of original mind will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother tongue with alien and novel ornaments, which will justly be accounted barbarisms until formally adopted and naturalised. Such are the “peoples” of Kossuth and the useful “lengthy,” an American revival of a good old English term. Nor will my modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his banal brotherhood, the interesting and often startling phases of his foreign author’s phraseology and dull the text with its commonplace English equivalent—thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It is needless to quote instances concerning this phase of “Bathos:” they abound in every occidental translation of every Oriental work, especially the French, such as Baron de Slane’s honest and conscientious “Ibn Khaldún.” It was this grand ideal of a translator’s duty that made Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary poet, write of his English brother bard:—

“GRAND TRANSLATOUR, NOBLE GEOFFROY CHAUCIER.”

Here,

“The firste finder of our faire langage”

is styled a “Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in conduct and a great Translator,” which apparent anti-climax has scandalised not a little inditers of “Lives” and “Memoirs.” The title is given simply because Chaucer translated (using the best and highest sense of the term) into his English tongue and its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and ideas of his foreign models—the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccaccio.

That my attempts to reproduce the form and features of the original and that my manner of writing is well adapted to the matter appears from the consensus of the “Notices” presently to be quoted. Mr. J. Addington Symonds pronounces the version to be executed with “peculiar literary vigour.” Mr. Swinburne is complimentary and even the Saturday deigns to declare “Captain Burton is certainly felicitous in the manner in which he has englished the picturesque lines of the original.” But le style est de l’homme; and this is a matter upon which any and every educated man who writes honestly will form and express and retain his own opinion: there are not a few who loathe “Pickwick,” and who cannot relish Vanity Fair. So the Edinburgh Review No. 335 (pp. 174, 181), concerning which more anon, pronounces my work to be “a jumble of the vulgarest slang of all nations;” also “an unreadable compound of 413archæology and ‘slang,’ abounding in Americanisms, and full of an affected reaching after obsolete or foreign words and phrases;” and finally shows the assurance to assert “Captain Burton has produced a version which is neither Arabic nor English, but which has at least the merit of being beautifully unreadable” (p. 182).

It has been circulated widely enough by the Lane-Poole clique—poules mouillées they are called by an Arabist friend—that I do not know Arabic. Let me at once plead guilty to the charge, adding by way of circonstance atténuante that I know none who does know or who can thoroughly know a tongue of which we may say as did honest Izaak Walton of other two crafts, “angling be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.” Most of us can master one section of a language concerning which those who use it vernacularly declare “Only Allah wotteth its entirety”; but we lack as yet the means to study it as a whole. Older by long ages than Babel’s fabulous Tower, and covering a continuous area from Eastern Arabia to the Maghrab al-Aksá (western Mauritania), from Chaldæa in the north to southern Zanzibar, it numbers of potential vocabulary 1,200,000 words all of which may be, if they are not, used; and while they specify the finest shades of meaning, not a few of them, technically termed “Zidd,” bear significations diametrically opposite, e.g., “Maulá” = lord, slave; and “’Ajúz” with 88 different meanings. Its literature, poetic, semi-poetic and prosaic, falls into three greater sections:—Ancient (The Suspendeds, the Kitáb al-Aghání and the Koran), Mediæval (Al-Mutanabbi, Al-Asm’ái, Abú Nowás and the poets of the Harunic cycle) and Moderns, of whom not the least important (e.g. Yúsuf al-Yazají) are those of our own day. Throughout its vast domain there are local differences of terminology which render every dialect a study; and of these many are intimately connected with older families, as the Egyptian with Coptic and the Moorish with Berber. The purest speakers are still the Badawín who are often not understood by the citizen-folk (e.g. of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad) at whose gates they tent; and a few classes like the Banú Fahim of Al-Hijáz still converse sub-classically, ever and anon using the terminal vowels and the nunnation elsewhere obsolete. These wildlings, whose evening camp-fires are still their schools for eloquence and whose improvisations are still their unwritten laws, divide speech into three degrees; Al-’Áli the lofty addressed to the great, Al-Wasat used for daily converse and Al-Dún the lowly or broken “loghat” (jargon) belonging to most tribes save their own. In Egypt the purest speakers are those of the Sa’íd—the upper Nile-region—differing greatly from the two main dialects of the Delta: in Syria, where the older Aramean is still current amongst sundry of the villagers outlying Damascus, the best Arabists are the Druzes, a heterogeneous amalgam of Arabs and Kurds who cultivate language with uncommon care. Of the dialectic families which subtend the Mediterranean’s southern sea-board, the Maroccan and the Algerine are 414barbarised by Berber, by Spanish and by Italian words and are roughened by the inordinate use of the Sukún (quiescence or conjoining of consonants); while the Tunisian approaches nearer to the Syrian and the Maltese was originally Punic. The jargon of Meccah is confessedly of all the worst. But the wide field has been scratched not worked out, and the greater part of it, especially the Mesopotamian and the Himyaritic of Mahrahland, still remains fallow and the reverse of sterile.

Materials for the study of Arabic in general and of its dialects in particular are still deficient and the dictionaries mostly content themselves with pouring old stuff from flask to flask, instead of collecting fresh and unknown material. Such are recueils of prayers and proverbs, folk-songs and stories, riddles and satires, not forgetting those polyglot vocabularies so common in many parts of the Eastern world, notably in Sind and Afghánistán; and the departmental glossaries such as the many dealing with “Tasawwuf”—the Moslem form of Gnosticism. The excellent lexicon of the late Professor Dozy, Supplément aux Dictionnaires Arabes, par R. Dozy, Leyde: E. J. Brill, 1881, was a step in advance; but we still lack additions like Baron Adolph Von Kremer’s Beitrage zur Arabischen Lexicographie (In commission bei Carl Gerold’s Sohn, Wien, 1884.) The French, as might be expected began early, e.g. M. Ruphy’s Dictionnaire abrégé français-arabe, Paris, Imprimerie de la Republique, An 10; they have done good work in Algiers and are now carrying it on in Tunis. Of these we have Marcel, Vocabulaire, etc. (Paris, 1837); Bled de Braine (Paris, 1846), who to his Cours Synthétique adds a study of Maroccan and Egyptian; Professor Cherbonneau (Paris, 1854) Précis Historique, and Dialogues, etc., (Alger, 1858); M. Gasselin (Paris, 1866) Dictionnaire français-arabe; M. Brassier (Algiers, 1871) Dictionnaire pratique also containing Algerine and Tunisian terms; General Parmentier (Vocabulaire arabe-français des Principaux Termes de Geógraphie, etc.: Paris, rue Antoine-Dubois, 1882); and, to mention no others, the Grammaire Arabe Vulgaire (Paris, 1824) of M. Caussin de Perceval (fils) has extended far and wide. Berggren (Upsal, 1844) published his Guide Français-Arabe des Voyageurs en Syrie et en Egypte. Rowland de Bussy printed (Algiers, 1877) his Dialogues Français-Arabes in the Algerian dialect. Fr. José de Lerchundi, a respected Missioner to Tangier has imitated and even improved upon this in his Rudimentos del Arabe Vulgar (Madrid, Rivadeneyra, 1872); and his studies of the Maghrabi dialect are most valuable. Dr. A. Socin produced his Arabische Sprichwörter, etc., (Tubingen, 1878), and the late Wilhelm Spitta-Bey, whose early death was so deeply lamented, left a grammar of Egyptian which would have been a model had the author brought to his task more knowledge of Coptic in his Grammatik des Arabischen vulgär dialektes von Ægypten, Leipzig, 1870. Dr. Landberg published with Brill of Leyden and Maisonneuve, of Paris, 1883, a volume of Syrian Proverbs and promises some five others—No. 2, 415Damascus and the Haurán; No. 3, Kasrawán and the Nusayriyah; No. 4, Homs, Hamah and Halab (Aleppo), and No. 5, the Badawin of Syria. It is evident that the process might be prolonged ad infinitum by a writer of whom I shall have something to say presently. M. Clément Huart (Jour. Asiat. Jan. ’83), has printed notes on the dialect of Damascus: Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje published a collection of 77 proverbs and idioms with lengthy notes in his Mehkanische Sprichwörter, etc. (Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1886), after being expelled from Meccah by the Turkish authorities who had discovered him only through a Parisian journal Le Temps (see his Het Mekkanshe Feest, Leyden, 1880). For the lower Najd and upper Hijaz we have the glossary of Arabic words ably edited by Prof. M. J. de Goeje in Mr. Charles M. Doughty’s valuable and fantastic “Arabia Deserta” (ii. 542–690: see The Academy, July 28th, ’88). Thus the local vocabularies are growing, but it will be long before the ground is covered.

Again the East, and notably the Moslem East since the Massacre of Damascus in 1860, although still moving slowly, shows a distinct advance. The once secluded and self-contained communities are now shaken by the repeated and continuous shocks of progress around them; and new wants and strange objects compel them nilly-willy to provide vernacular equivalents for the nomenclature of modern arts and sciences. Thus the Orientalist, who would produce a contemporary lexicon of Persian, must not only read up all the diaries and journals of Teheran and the vocabularies of Yezd and Herat, he must go further a-field. He should make himself familiar with the speech of the Iliyát or wandering pastoral tribes and master a host of cognate tongues whose chiefs are Armenian (Old and New), Caucasian, a modern Babel; Kurdish, Lúri (Bakhtiyári), Balochki and Pukhtú or Afghan, besides the direct descendants of the Zend, the Pehlevi, Dari and so forth. Even in the most barbarous jargons he will find terms which throw light upon the literary Iranian of the lexicons: for instance “Mádiyán” = a mare presupposes the existence of “Narayán” = a stallion, and the latter is preserved by the rude patois of the Baloch mountaineers. This process of general collection would in our day best be effected after the fashion of Professor James A. H. Murray’s “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.” It would be compiled by a committee of readers resident in different parts of Persia, communicating with the Royal Asiatic Society (whose moribund remains they might perhaps quicken) and acting in co-operation with Russia, whom unfriends have converted from a friend to an angry and jealous rival and who is ever so forward in the linguistic field.

But if the model Persian dictionary have its difficulties, far harder will be the task with Arabic which covers incomparably more ground. Here we must begin with Spain and Portugal, Sardinia and the Balearics, Southern Italy and Sicily; and thence pass over to Northern Africa and 416the two “Soudans,” the Eastern extending far South of the Equator and the Western nearly to the Line. In Asia, besides the vast Arabian Peninsula, numbering one million of square miles, we find a host of linguistic outliers, such as Upper Hindostan, the Concan, Malacca, Java and even remote Yun-nan, where al-Islam is the dominant religion, and where Arabic is the language of Holy Writ.

My initiation into the mysteries of Arabic began at Oxford under my tutor Dr. W. A. Greenhill, who published a “Treatise on Small-pox and Measles,” translated from Rhazes—Abú Bakr al-Rází (London, 1847); and where the famous Arabist, Don Pascual de Gayangos, kindly taught me to write Arabic leftwards. During eight years of service in Western India and in Moslem Sind, while studying Persian and a variety of vernaculars, it was necessary to keep up and extend a practical acquaintance with the language which supplies all the religious and most of the metaphysical phraseology; and during my last year at Sindian Karáchí (1849), I imported a Shaykh from Maskat. Then work began in downright earnest. Besides Erpenius’ (D’Erp) “Grammatica Arabica,” Richardson, De Sacy and Forbes, I read at least a dozen Perso-Arabic works (mostly of pamphlet form) on “Sarf Wa Nahw”—Accidence and Syntax—and learned by heart one-fourth of the Koran. A succession of journeys and long visits at various times to Egypt, a Pilgrimage to the Moslem Holy Land and an exploration of the Arabic-speaking Somáli-shores and Harar-Gay in the Galla country of Southern Abyssinia, added largely to my practice. At Aden, where I passed the official examination, Captain (now Sir R. Lambert) Playfair and the late Rev. G. Percy Badger, to whom my papers were submitted, were pleased to report favourably of my proficiency. During some years of service and discovery in Western Africa and the Brazil my studies were necessarily confined to the “Thousand Nights and a Night;” and when a language is not wanted for use my habit is to forget as much of it as possible, thus clearing the brain for assimilating fresh matter. At the Consulate of Damascus, however, in West Arabian Midian and in Maroccan Tangier the loss was readily recovered. In fact, of this and sundry other subjects it may be said without immodesty that I have forgotten as much as many Arabists have learned. But I repeat my confession that I do not know Arabic and I have still to meet the man who does know Arabic.

Orientalists, however, are like poets and musicians, a rageous race. A passing allusion to a Swedish student styled by others (Mekkanische Sprichwörter etc. p. 1) “Dr. Landberg” and by himself “Doctor Count Carlo Landberg” procured me the surprise of the following communication. I quote it in full because it is the only uncourteous attempt at correspondence upon the subject of The Nights which has hitherto been forced upon me. In his introduction (p. xx.) to the Syrian Proverbes et Dictons Doctor Count Landberg was pleased to criticise, with less than 417his usual knowledge, my study entitled “Proverbia Communia Syriaca” (Unexplored Syria i. 264–294). These 187 “dictes” were taken mainly from a MS. collection by one Hanná Misk, ex-dragoman of the British Consulate, (Damascus), a little recueil for private use such as would be made by a Syro-Christian bourgeois. Hereupon the critic absurdly asserted that the translator a voulu s’occuper de la langue classique au lieu de se faire * * * l’interprète fidèle de celle du peuple. My reply was (The Nights, vol. viii. 148) that, as I was treating of proverbs familiar to the better educated order of citizens, his critique was not to the point; and this brought down upon me the following letter under the ægis of a portentous coronet and initials blazing with or, gules and azure.

Paris, le 24 Févr., 1888.

Monsieur,

J’ai l’honneur de vous adresser 2 fascicules de mes Critica Arabica. Dans le vol. viii. p. 48 de votre traduction de 1001 Nuits vous avez une note qui me regard (sic). Vous y dites que je ne suis pas “Arabist.” Ce n’est pas votre jugement qui m’impressionne, car vous n’êtes nullement à même de me juger. Votre article contient, comme tout ce que vous avez écrit dans le domaine de la langue arabe, des bévues. C’est vous qui n’êtes pas arabisant: cela est bien connu et reconnu, et nous ne nous donnons pas même la peine de relever toutes les innombrables erreurs dont vos publications tourmillent. Quant à ليت vous êtes encore en erreur. Mon étymologie est acceptée par tout le monde, et je vous renvoie à Fleischer, Kleinre Schriften, p. 468, Leipzig. 1885, où vous trouverez l’instruction nécessaire. Le dilettantism qui se trahit dans tout ce que vous écrivez vous fait faire de telles erreurs. Nous autres arabisants et professo (?) nous ne vous avons jamais et nous ne vous pouvons jamais considérer comme arabisant. Voila ma réponse à votre note. والسلام

Agréez, Monsieur,

l’expression de mes sentiments distingués,

Comte Landberg,

Dr.-ès-lettres.

After these preliminaries I proceed to notice the article (No. 335, of July ’86) in

THE “EDINBURGH REVIEW,”

and to explain its private history with the motives which begat it.

“This is the Augustan age of English criticism,” say the reviewers who are fond of remarking that the period is one of literary appreciation rather than of original production; that is, contemporary reviewers, critics and monograph-writers are more important than “makers” in verse or in prose. In fact it is their aurea ætas. I reply “Virgin ore, no!” on the whole mixed metal some noble, much ignoble; a little gold, more silver and an abundance of brass, lead and dross. There is the criticism of Sainte-Beuve, 418of the late Matthew Arnold and of Swinburne; there is also the criticism of the Saturday Reviler and of the Edinburgh criticaster. The golden is truth and honour incarnate: it possesses outsight and insight: it either teaches and inspires or it comforts and consoles, save when a strict sense of duty compels it to severity: briefly, it is keen and guiding and creative. Let the young beginner learn by rote what one master says of another:—“He was never provoked into coarseness: his thrusts were made with the rapier according to the received rules of fence; he firmly upheld the honour of his calling and in the exercise of it was uniformly fearless, independent and incorrupt.” The Brazen is partial, one-sided, tricksy, misleading, immoral; serving personal and interested purposes and contemptuously forgetful of every obligation which an honest and honourable pen owes to the public and to itself. Such critiques bring no profit to the reviewed. He feels that he has been written up or written down by a literary hireling who has possibly been paid to praise or abuse him secondarily, and primarily to exalt or debase his publisher or his printer.

My own literary career has supplied me with many a curious study. Writing upon subjects, say The Lake Regions of Central Africa, which were then a type of the Unknown, I could readily trace in the journalistic notices all the tricks and dodges of the trade. The rare honest would confess that they could say nothing upon the subject; they came to me therefore for information and professed themselves duly thankful. The many dishonest had recourse to a variety of devices. The hard worker would read-up voyages and travels treating of the neighbouring countries, Abyssinia, the Cape and the African Coasts, Eastern and Western; thus he would write in a kind of reflected light without acknowledging his obligation to my volumes. Another would review my book after the easy American fashion of hashing up the author’s production, taking all its facts from me without disclosing that one fact to the reader and then proceed to “butter” or “slash.” The worst, “fulfyld with malace of froward entente,” would choose for theme not the work but the worker, upon the good old principle “Abuse the plaintiffs attorney.” These arts fully account for the downfall of criticism in our day and the deafness of the public to such literary verdicts. But a few years ago a favourable review in a first-rate paper was “fifty pounds in the author’s pocket:” now it is not worth as many pence unless signed by some well-known scribbling statesman or bustling reverend who caters for the public taste. The decline and fall is well expressed in the old lines:—