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About 500 years ago there lived a Turk named Nasr-ed-Din, which means “Victory of the Faith.” He became a teacher and a magistrate in the district of Angora. As a teacher he was called “Khoja,” which means “Teacher” and is a title of respect and honor. He was the author of a series of Æsop-like fables which have come down as perhaps the most authentic and indigenous piece of Turkish literature. There is not much Turkish literature which is not an imitation of, or a borrowing from, Persian or Arabic. The Khoja, or Nasr-ed-Din’s stories, is today as popular and as universally read and repeated as ever.
The work has finally been translated into English with the title, The Khoja: Tales of Nasr-ed-Din. Henry D. Barnham is the translator, and Sir Valentine Chirol, an authority on Turkey and the East, provides an entertaining and instructive foreword. Although the wisdom in these fables is generally for young and old, it can scarcely be illustrated except by quotation. I select for that purpose, and on account of its brevity, a fable for grown-ups:
“The Khoja had two wives. He gave each of them a blue shell as a keepsake, telling each not to let anyone see it. One day they came in together and asked him, ‘Which of us do you love best? Who is your favorite?’
“‘The one,’ he answered, ‘who has my blue shell.’
“Each of the women took comfort. Each one said in her heart, ‘’Tis I he loves best,’ and looked with scornful pity upon the other.
“Clever Khoja! That is the way he managed his wives!”
For contrast, we may pick up Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose Anthology, edited by Joseph Lewis French. Here are selections, and the best selections, from the best American humorous writers, from Artemus Ward to the absolutely contemporary Sam Hellman, of “Low Bridge” reputation. The selections from Josh Billings remind us that he relied for some of his effect on misspelling, just as Ring Lardner does today. Edward Eggleston’s “The Spelling-Bee”; Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras”; Bill Nye’s “Skimming the Milky Way”; and Eugene Field’s “The Cyclopeedy” are representative inclusions. More recent humorists for whom Mr. French has found place are Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Thomas L. Masson, George Horace Lorimer, Stephen Leacock, Don Marquis, Irvin S. Cobb, Ellis Parker Butler, George Fitch, Montague Glass, Christopher Ward, Robert C. Benchley and Harry Leon Wilson. Sixty Years of American Humor provides considerably more than the ordinary humorous book’s quantity of diversion to the square inch.
But I come at last to the two books whose claim to inclusion in this chapter is most undeniable—two books of which it can truthfully be said, not only that they are not found elsewhere, but that they contain a thousand things not to be found elsewhere.
John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is so wonderful in its completeness and its resourcefulness that although it went without revision for twenty-three years, it remained the best book of its kind and no more recent work was able to displace it. It has now been revised and enlarged by Nathan Haskell Dole, so that the new quotations included are from nearly 200 of the more important writers of the last few decades, not included before, among them Stevenson, Swinburne, Kipling and Mark Twain. This, then, is the book without which newspapermen, editors, writers, public speakers, scholars, librarians, and many, many households could not exist—at least, the households could not exist in harmony. It is the book which saves you from saying, “fresh fields and pastures new”; that tells you it should be “fresh woods,” and that the line is Milton’s. Is it possible that in this book of 1,400 pages, citing from nearly 1,000 authors, and with its quotations indexed and cross-indexed under their various outstanding words, so that the index has almost 50,000 entries—is it possible that there is some phrase you half-recall and yet cannot find? It is just possible. If it occurs, there is something left for you yet to do. You may try Frank J. Wilstach’s A Dictionary of Similes (the new and enlarged edition).
Mr. Wilstach’s social register of similes is the only book of reference of its kind. Since its original publication, in 1916, A Dictionary of Similes, with its 17,000 quaint figures of speech, has become pretty nigh indispensable for writers, speakers, teachers and students. One hundred pages have been added in the new edition, as Mr. Wilstach says that similes should be kept fresh, like oysters. And the figures of speech themselves? They are drawn from the writings of a great number of authors, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, through English and American literature, to O. Henry and Irvin S. Cobb. The arrangement is alphabetical under subject headings. I have nothing against the 16,999 other comparisons in the book, though personally I shall always maintain that the best simile in the world is Irvin S. Cobb’s “no more privacy than a goldfish.” I have looked for hours in Mr. Wilstach’s masterpiece in search of a suitable comparison for A Dictionary of Similes.
Well, I cannot find one.