Its Comedy.
But there is another side to their imaginings. When the Magian has done beating his copper drum—(how its mysterious murmur still haunts the echoes of memory!)—when Queen Lab has finished her tremendous conjurations, wonder gives place to laughter, the apotheosis of the flesh to the spirit of comedy. The enchanter turns harlequin; and what the lovers ask is not the annihilation of time and space but only that the father be at his
prayers, or the husband gone on a fool’s errand, while they have leave to kiss each other’s mouths, ‘as a pigeon feedeth her young,’ to touch the lute, strip language naked, and ‘repeat the following verses’ to a ring of laughing girls and amid all such comfits and delicates as a hungry audience may rejoice to hear enumerated. And the intrigue begins, and therewith the presentment of character, the portraiture of manners. Merry ladies make love to their gallants with flowers, or scorn them with the huckle-bones of shame; the Mother Coles of Araby pursue the unwary stranger for their mistress’ pleasure; damsels resembling the full moon carouse with genial merchants or inquiring calenders. The beast of burden, even the porter, has his hour: he goes the round at the heels of a veiled but beautiful lady, and lays her in the materials of as liberal and sumptuous a carouse as is recorded in history. Happy lady, and O thrice-fortunate porter! enviable even to the term of time! It is a voluptuous farce, a masque and anti-masque of wantonness and stratagem, of wine-cups and jewels and fine raiment, of gaudy nights and amorous days, of careless husbands and adventurous wives, of innocent fathers and rebel daughters and lovers happy or befooled. And high over all, his heart contracted with the spleen of the East, the tedium of supremacy, towers the great Caliph Haroun, the buxom and bloody tyrant, a Muslim Lord of
Misrule. With Giafar, the finest gentleman and goodliest gallant of Eastern story, and Mesrour, the well-beloved, the immortal Eunuch, he goes forth upon his round in the enchanted streets of Bagdàd, like François Premier in the maze of old-time Paris. The night is musical with happy laughter and the sound of lutes and voices; it is seductive with the clink of goblets and the odour of perfumes: not a shadow but has its secret, or jovial or amorous or terrible: here falls a head, and there you may note the contrapuntal effect of the bastinado. But the blood is quickly hidden with flowers, the bruises are tired over with cloth-of-gold, and the jolly pageant sweeps on. Truly the comic essence is imperishable. What was fun to them in Baghdad is fun to us in London after a thousand years.