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.
Sacer Vates.
The prose of Mr. Payne’s translation is always readable and often elegant; Sir Richard Burton’s notes and ‘terminal essays’ are a mine of curious and diverting information; but for me the real author of The Arabian Nights is called not Burton nor Payne but Antoine Galland. He it was, in truth, who gave the world as much exactly as it needed of his preposterous original: who eliminated its
tediousness, purged it of its barbarous and sickening immorality, wiped it clean of cruelty and unnaturalness, selected its essentials of comedy and romance, and set them clear and sharp against a light that western eyes can bear and in an atmosphere that western lungs can breathe. Of course the new translations are interesting—especially to ethnologists and the critic with a theory that translated verse is inevitably abominable. But they are not for the general nor the artist. They include too many pages revolting by reason of unutterable brutality of incident and point of view—as also for the vileness of those lewd and dreadful puritans whose excesses against humanity and whose devotion to Islam they record—to be acceptable as literature or tolerable as reading. Now, in Galland I get the best of them. He gave me whatever is worth remembering of Bedreddin and Camaralzaman and that enchanting Fairy Peri-Banou; he is the true poet alike of Abou Hassan and the Young King of the Black Islands, of Ali Baba and the Barber of the Brothers; to him I owe that memory—of Zobeidè alone in the accursed city whose monstrous silence is broken by the voice of the one man spared by the wrath of God as he repeats his solitary prayer—which ranks with Crusoe’s discovery of the footprint in the thrilling moments of my life; it was he who, by refraining from the use of pepper in his cream tarts, contrived to kitchen those confections with the very essence
of romance; it was he that clove asunder the Sultan’s kitchen-wall for me, and took me to the pan, and bade me ask a certain question of the fish that fried therein, and made them answer me in terms mysterious and tremendous yet. Nay, that animating and delectable feeling I cherish ever for such enchanted commodities as gold-dust and sandal-wood and sesame and cloth of gold and black slaves with scimitars—to whom do I owe it but this rare and delightful artist? ‘O mes chers Mille et une Nuits!’ says Fantasio, and he speaks in the name of all them that have lived the life that Galland alone made possible. The damsels of the new style may ‘laugh till they fall backwards,’ etc., through forty volumes instead of ten, and I shall still go back to my Galland. I shall go back to him because his masterpiece is—not a book of reference, nor a curiosity of literature, nor an achievement in pedantry, nor even a demonstration of the absolute failure of Islamism as an influence that makes for righteousness, but—an excellent piece of art.
RICHARDSON
His Fortune.
It is many years since Richardson fell into desuetude; it is many years since he became the novelist not of the world at large but of that inconsiderable section of the world which is interested in literature. His methods are those of a bygone epoch; his ideals, with one or two exceptions, are old-fashioned enough to seem fantastic; his sentiment belongs to ancient history; to a generation bred upon Ouida’s romances and the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merely questionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived he was adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of ‘good, thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke’; he was the idol of female England, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best of mankind. Johnson revered him—Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot ranked him with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George Sand he was the greatest novelist of all time; Rousseau imitated him; Macaulay wrote and talked of him with an enthusiasm that would have sat becomingly on Lady Bradshaigh herself.
But all that is over. Not even the emasculation to which the late Mr. Dallas was pleased to subject his Clarissa could make that Clarissa at all popular; not all the allusions of all the leader-writers of a leader-writing age have been able to persuade the public to renew its interest in the works and ways of Grandison the august and the lovely and high-souled Harriet Byron. Richardson has to be not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed like a lollipop, but attacked secundum artem like a dinner of many courses and wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, you must hold fast to the clue which you have caught up on entering, or the adventure proves impossible, and you emerge from his precincts defeated and disgraced. And by us children of Mudie, to whom a novel must be either a solemn brandy-and-soda or as it were a garrulous and vapid afternoon tea, adventures of that moment are not often attempted.