"No one, now-a-days, cares for reviews," wrote Darwin as far back as 1849; and it is easy to see the whys and the wherefores. I have already touched upon the duty of reviewing the reviewer when the latter's work calls for the process, despite the pretensions of modern criticism that it must not be criticised. Although to buffet an anonym is to beat the air, still the very effort does good. A well-known and popular novelist of the present day was a favourite butt for certain journalists who, with the normal half-knowledge of men—
"That read too little, and that write too much"—
persistently fell foul of the points in which the author was almost always right and the reviewer was wrong. "An eagle hawketh not at flies;" the object of ill-natured satire despised—
"The creatures of the stall and stye,"
and persisted in contemptuous reticence, giving consent by silence to what was easily refuted, and suffering a fond and foolish sentence to misguide the public which it pretends to direct. "Take each man's censure but reserve thy judgment," is a wise saying when silently practiced; it leads, however, to suffering in public esteem. The case in question was wholly changed when, at my suggestion, the writer was persuaded to catch a few of the culprits and to administer the dressing and redressing they so richly deserved.
And now to my tale.
Mr. Henry Reeve, Editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote to me shortly before my first volume was issued to subscribers (September,'85) asking for advance sheets, as his magazine proposed to produce a general notice of The Arabian Nights Entertainments. But I suspected the man whose indiscretion and recklessness had been so unpleasantly paraded in the shape of the Greville (Mr. Worldly Wiseman's) Memoirs, and I had not forgotten the untruthful and malignant articles of perfervid brutality which during the hot youth and calm middle age of the Edinburgh had disgraced the profession of letters. My answer, which was temporising and diplomatic, induced only a second and a more urgent application. Bearing in mind that professional etiquette hardly justifies publicly reviewing a book intended only for private reading and vividly remembering the evil of the periodical, I replied that the sheets should be forwarded but on one condition, namely, that the reviewer would not dwell too lovingly and longingly upon the "archaics," which had so excited the Tartuffean temperament of the chaste Pall Mall Gazette. Mr. Henry Reeves replied (surlily) that he was not in the habit of dictating to his staff and I rejoined by refusing to grant his request. So he waited until five, that is one half of my volumes had been distributed to subscribers, and revenged himself by placing them for review in the hands of the "Lane-Poole" clique which, as the sequel proved could be noisy and combative as setting hens disturbed when their nest-egg was threatened by an intruding hand.
For the clique had appropriated all right and claim to a monopoly of The Arabian Nights Entertainments which they held in hand as a rotten borough. The "Uncle and Master," Mr. Edward William Lane, eponymous hero of the house, had retranslated certain choice specimens of the Recueil and the "nephews of their uncle" resolved to make a private gold-mine thereof. The book came out in monthly parts at half-a-crown (1839-41) and when offered for sale in 3 vols. royal 8 vo, the edition of 5,000 hung fire at first until the high price (3 pounds 3s.) was reduced to 27 shillings for the trade. The sale then went off briskly and amply repaid the author and the publishers—Charles Knight and Co. And although here and there some "old Tory" grumbled that new-fangled words (as Wezeer, Kádee and Jinnee) had taken the places of his childhood's pets, the Vizier, the Cadi, and the Genie, none complained of the workmanship for the all-sufficient reason that naught better was then known or could be wanted. Its succes de salon was greatly indebted to the "many hundred engravings on wood, from original designs by William Harvey", with a host of quaint and curious Arabesques, Cufic inscriptions, vignettes, head pieces and culs- de-lampes. These, with the exception of sundry minor accessories, [447] were excellent and showed for the first time the realistic East and not the absurdities drawn from the depths of artistical ignorance and self-consciousness—those of Smirke, Deveria, Chasselot and Co., not to speak of the horrors of the De Sacy edition, whose plates have apparently been used by Prof. Weil and by the Italian versions. And so the three bulky and handsome volumes found a ready way into many a drawing room during the Forties, when the public was uncritical enough to hail the appearance of these scattered chapters and to hold that at last they had the real thing, pure and unadulterated. No less than three reprints of the "Standard Edition," 1859 (the last being in '83), succeeded one another and the issue was finally stopped, not by the author's death (ætat 75; London, August 10, 1876: net. Hereford, September 17, 1801), nor by the plates, which are now the property of Messieurs Chatto and Windus, becoming too worn for use, but simply by deficient demand. And the clique, represented by the late Edward Lane-Poole in 1879, who edited the last edition (1883) with a Preface by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, during a long run of forty-three years never paid the public the compliment of correcting the multitudinous errors and short comings of the translation. Even the lengthy and longsome notes, into which The Nights have too often been merged, were left untrimmed. Valuable in themselves and full of information, while wholly misplaced in a recueil of folk-lore, where they stand like pegs behung with the contents of the translator's adversaria, the monographs on details of Arab life have also been exploited and reprinted under the "fatuous" title, "Arabian (for Egyptian) Society in the Middle Ages: Studies on The Thousand and One Nights." They were edited by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole (Chatto and Windus) in 1883.
At length the three volumes fell out of date, and the work was formally pronounced unreadable. Goëthe followed from afar by Emerson, had foreseen the "inevitable increase of Oriental influence upon the Occident," and the eagerness with which the men of the West would apply themselves to the languages and literature of the East. Such garbled and mutilated, unsexed and unsoured versions and perversions like Lane's were felt to be survivals of the unfittest. Mr. John Payne (for whom see my Foreword, vol. i. pp. xi.-xii.) resolved to give the world the first honest and complete version of the Thousand Nights and a Night. He put forth samples of his work in the New Quarterly Magazine (January- April, 1879), whereupon he was incontinently assaulted by Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, the then front of the monopolists, who after drawing up a list of fifteen errata (which were not errata) in two Nights, declared that "they must be multiplied five hundred-fold to give the sum we may expect." (The Academy, April 26, 1879; November 29, 1881; and December 7, 1881.) The critic had the courage, or rather impudence, to fall foul of Mr. Payne's mode and mannerism, which had long become deservedly famous, and concludes: —"The question of English style may for the present be dropped, as, if a translator cannot translate, it little matters in what form his results appear. But it may lie questioned whether an Arab edifice should be decorated with old English wall-papers."
Evidently I had scant reason to expect mercy from the clique: I wanted none and I received none.