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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
Evidently the learned Baron had not studied such works as the Totá-
kaháni or Parrot-chat which, notably translated by Nakhshabi from
the Sanskrit Suka-Saptati,[164] has now become as orthodoxically
Moslem as The Nights. The old Hindu Rajah becomes Ahmad Sultan
of Balkh, the Prince is Maymún and his wife Khujisteh. Another
instance of such radical change is the later Syriac version of Kalílah
wa Dimnah,[165] old “Pilpay” converted to Christianity. We find
precisely the same process in European folk-lore; for instance the
Gesta Romanorum in which, after five hundred years, the life,
manners and customs of the Romans lapse into the knightly and
chivalrous, the Christian and ecclesiastical developments of
mediæval Europe. Here, therefore, I hold that the Austrian Arabist
has proved his point whilst the Frenchman has failed.
Mr. Lane, during his three years’ labour of translation, first accepted
Von Hammer’s view and then came round to that of De Sacy;
differing, however, in minor details, especially in the native country
of The Nights. Syria had been chosen because then the most familiar
to Europeans: the “Wife of Bath” had made three pilgrimages to
Jerusalem; but few cared to visit the barbarous and dangerous Nile-
Valley. Mr. Lane, however, was an enthusiast for Egypt or rather for
Cairo, the only part of it he knew; and, when he pronounces The
Nights to be of purely “Arab,” that is, of Nilotic origin, his opinion is
entitled to no more deference than his deriving the sub-African and
negroid Fellah from Arabia, the land per excellentiam of pure and
noble blood. Other authors have wandered still further afield. Some
finding Mosul idioms in the Recueil, propose “Middlegates” for its
birth-place and Mr. W. G. P. Palgrave boldly says “The original of this
entertaining work appears to have been composed in Baghdad about
the eleventh century; another less popular but very spirited version
is probably of Tunisian authorship and somewhat later.”[166]

B.—The Date.
The next point to consider is the date of The Nights in its present
form; and here opinions range between the tenth and the sixteenth
centuries. Professor Galland began by placing it arbitrarily in the
middle of the thirteenth. De Sacy, who abstained from detailing
reasons and who, forgetting the number of editors and scribes
through whose hands it must have passed, argued only from the
nature of the language and the peculiarities of style, proposed le
milieu du neuvième siècle de l’hégire (= A.D. 1445–6) as its latest
date. Mr. Hole, who knew The Nights only through Galland’s version,
had already advocated in his “Remarks” the close of the fifteenth
century; and M. Caussin (de Perceval), upon the authority of a
supposed note in Galland’s MS.[167] (vol. iii. fol. 20, verso), declares
the compiler to have been living in A.D. 1548 and 1565. Mr. Lane
says “Not begun earlier than the last fourth of the fifteenth century
nor ended before the first fourth of the sixteenth,” i.e. soon after
Egypt was conquered by Selim, Sultan of the Osmanli Turks in A.D.
1517. Lastly the learned Dr. Weil says in his far too scanty Vorwort
(p. ix. 2nd Edit.):—“Das wahrscheinlichste dürfte also sein, das im
15. Jahrhundert ein Egyptier nach altern Vorbilde Erzählungen für
1001 Nächte theils erdichtete, theils nach mündlichen Sagen, oder
frühern schriftlichen Aufzeichnungen, bearbeitete, dass er aber
entweder sein Werk nicht vollendete, oder dass ein Theil desselben
verloren ging, so dass das Fehlende von Andern bis ins 16.
Jahrhundert hinein durch neue Erzählungen ergänzt wurde.”
But, as justly observed by Mr. Payne, the first step when enquiring
into the original date of The Nights is to determine the nucleus of
the Repertory by a comparison of the four printed texts and the
dozen MSS. which have been collated by scholars.[168] This process
makes it evident that the tales common to all are the following
thirteen:—

1. The Introduction (with a single incidental story “The Bull and

the Ass”).
2. The Trader and the Jinni (with three incidentals).
 3. The Fisherman and the Jinni (with four).
4. The Porter and the three Ladies of Baghdad.
5. The Tale of the Three Apples.
6. The Tale of Núr al-Dín Ali and his son Badr al-Dín Hasan.
7. The Hunchback’s Tale (with eleven).
8. Nur al-Dín and Anís al-Jalís.
9. Tale of Ghánim bin ’Ayyúb (with two).
10. Alí bin Bakkár and Shams al-Nahár (with two).
11. Tale of Kamar al-Zamán.
12. The Ebony Horse; and
13. Julnár the Sea-born.
These forty-two tales, occupying one hundred and twenty Nights,
form less than a fifth part of the whole collection which in the Mac.
Edit.[169] contains a total of two hundred and sixty-four. Hence Dr.
Patrick Russell,[170] the Natural Historian of Aleppo,[171] whose
valuable monograph amply deserves study even in this our day,
believed that the original Nights did not outnumber two hundred, to
which subsequent writers added till the total of a thousand and one
was made up. Dr. Jonathan Scott,[172] who quotes Russell, “held it
highly probable that the tales of the original Arabian Nights did not
run through more than two hundred and eighty Nights, if so many.”
So this suggestion I may subjoin, “habent sua fata libelli.” Galland,
who preserves in his Mille et une Nuits only about one fourth of The
Nights, ends them in No. cclxiv[173] with the seventh voyage of
Sindbad: after that he intentionally omits the dialogue between the
sisters and the reckoning of time, to proceed uninterruptedly with
the tales. And so his imitator, Petis de la Croix,[174] in his Mille et un
Jours, reduces the thousand to two hundred and thirty-two.
The internal chronological evidence offered by the Collection is
useful only in enabling us to determine that the tales were not
written after a certain epoch: the actual dates and, consequently, all
deductions from them, are vitiated by the habits of the scribes. For
instance we find the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni (vol. i. 41)
placed in A.H. 169 = A.D. 785,[175] which is hardly possible. The
immortal Barber in the “Tailor’s Tale” (vol. i. 304) places his
adventure with the unfortunate lover on Safar 10, A.H. 653 (= March
25th, 1255) and 7,320 years of the era of Alexander.[176] This is
supported in his Tale of Himself (vol. i. pp. 317–348), where he
dates his banishment from Baghdad during the reign of the
penultimate Abbaside, Al-Mustansir bi ’llah[177] (A.H. 623–640 =
1225–1242), and his return to Baghdad after the accession of
another Caliph who can be no other but Al-Muntasim bi ’llah (A.H.
640–656 = A.D. 1242–1258). Again at the end of the tale (vol. i.
350) he is described as “an ancient man, past his ninetieth year” and
“a very old man” in the days of Al-Mustansir (vol. i. 318); so that the
Hunchback’s adventure can hardly be placed earlier than A.D. 1265
or seven years after the storming of Baghdad by Huláku Khan,
successor of Janghíz Khan, a terrible catastrophe which resounded
throughout the civilised world. Yet there is no allusion to this crucial
epoch and the total silence suffices to invalidate the date.[178] Could
we assume it as true, by adding to A.D. 1265 half a century for the
composition of the Hunchback’s story and its incidentals, we should
place the earliest date in A.D. 1315.
As little can we learn from inferences which have been drawn from
the body of the book: at most they point to its several editions or
redactions. In the Tale of the “Ensorcelled Prince” (vol. i. 77) Mr.
Lane (i. 135) conjectured that the four colours of the fishes were
suggested by the sumptuary laws of the Mameluke Soldan,
Mohammed ibn Kala’un, “subsequently to the commencement of the
eighth century of the Flight, or fourteenth of our era.” But he forgets
that the same distinction of dress was enforced by the Caliph Omar
after the capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 636; that it was revived by
Harun al-Rashid, a contemporary of Carolus Magnus and that it was
noticed as a long standing grievance by the so-called Mandeville in
A.D. 1322. In the Tale of the Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad the
“Sultáni oranges” (vol. i. 83) have been connected with Sultáníyah
city in Persian Irák, which was founded about the middle of the
thirteenth century: but “Sultáni” may simply mean “royal,” a superior
growth. The same story makes mention (vol. i. 94) of Kalandars or
religious mendicants, a term popularly corrupted, even in writing, to
Karandal.[179] Here again “Kalandar” may be due only to the scribes
as the Bresl. Edit, reads Sa’alúk = asker, beggar. The Khan al-Masrúr
in the Nazarene Broker’s story (i. 265) was a ruin during the early
ninth century A.H. = A.D. 1420; but the Báb Zuwaylah (i. 269) dates
from A.D. 1087. In the same tale occurs the Darb al-Munkari (or
Munakkari) which is probably the Darb al-Munkadi of Al-Makrizi’s
careful topography, the Khitat (ii. 40). Here we learn that in his time
(about A.D. 1430) the name had become obsolete, and the highway
was known as Darb al-Amír Baktamír al-Ustaddar from one of two
high officials who both died in the fourteenth century (circ. A.D.
1350). And lastly we have the Khan al-Jáwali built about A.D. 1320.
In Badr al-Din Hasan (vol. i. 237) “Sáhib” is given as a Wazirial title
and it dates only from the end of the fourteenth century.[180] In
Sindbad the Seaman, there is an allusion (vol. vi. 67) to the great
Hindu Kingdom, Vijayanagar of the Narasimha,[181] the great power
of the Deccan; but this may be due to editors or scribes as the
despotism was founded only in the fourteenth century (A.D. 1320).
The Ebony Horse (vol. v. 1) apparently dates before Chaucer; and
“The Sleeper and The Waker” (Bresl. Edit. iv. 134–189) may precede
Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”: no stress, however, can be
laid upon such resemblances, the nouvelles being world-wide. But
when we come to the last stories, especially to Kamar al-Zaman II.
and the tale of Ma’arúf, we are apparently in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. The first contains (Night cmlxxvii.) the word
Láwandiyah = Levantine, the mention of a watch = Sá’ah in the next
Night[182]; and, further on (cmlxxvi.), the “Shaykh Al-Islam,” an
officer invented by Mohammed II. after the capture of Stambul in
A.D. 1453. In Ma’arúf the ’Ádiliyah is named; the mosque founded
outside the Bab al-Nasr by Al-Malik al-’Ádil, Túmán Bey in A.H. 906
= A.D. 1501. But, I repeat, all these names may be mere
interpolations.
On the other hand, a study of the vie intime in Al-Islam and of the
manners and customs of the people proves that the body of the
work, as it now stands, must have been written before A.D. 1400.
The Arabs use wines, ciders and barley-beer, not distilled spirits;
they have no coffee or tobacco and, while familiar with small-pox
(judrí), they ignore syphilis. The battles in The Nights are fought
with bows and javelins, swords, spears (for infantry) and lances (for
cavalry); and, whenever fire-arms are mentioned, we must suspect
the scribe. Such is the case with the Madfa’ or cannon by means of
which Badr al-Din Hasan breaches the bulwarks of the Lady of
Beauty’s virginity (i. 223). This consideration would determine the
work to have been written before the fourteenth century. We ignore
the invention-date and the inventor of gunpowder, as of all old
discoveries which have affected mankind at large: all we know is
that the popular ideas betray great ignorance and we are led to
suspect that an explosive compound, having been discovered in the
earliest ages of human society, was utilised by steps so gradual that
history has neglected to trace the series. According to Demmin[183],
bullets for stuffing with some incendiary composition, in fact bombs,
were discovered by Dr. Keller in the Palafites or Crannogs of
Switzerland; and the Hindu’s Agni-Astar (“fire-weapon”), Agni-bán
(“fire-arrow”) and Shatagni (“hundred-killer”), like the Roman
Phalarica, and the Greek fire of Byzantium, suggest explosives.
Indeed, Dr. Oppert[184] accepts the statement of Flavius Philostratus
that when Appolonius of Tyana, that grand semi-mythical figure, was
travelling in India, he learned the reason why Alexander of Macedon
desisted from attacking the Oxydracæ who live between the Ganges
and the Hyphasis (Satadru or Sutledge):—“These holy men, beloved
by the gods, overthrow their enemies with tempests and
thunderbolts shot from their walls.” Passing over the Arab sieges of
Constantinople (A.D. 668) and Meccah (A.D. 690) and the disputed
passage in Firishtah touching the Tufang or musket during the reign
of Mahmúd the Ghaznevite[185] (ob. A.D. 1030), we come to the days
of Alphonso the Valiant, whose long and short guns, used at the
Siege of Madrid in A.D. 1084, are preserved in the Armeria Real.
Viardot has noted that the African Arabs first employed cannon in
A.D. 1200, and that the Maghribis defended Algeciras near Gibraltar
with great guns in A.D. 1247, and utilised them to besiege Seville in
A.D. 1342. This last feat of arms introduced the cannon into
barbarous Northern Europe, and it must have been known to
civilised Asia for many a decade before that date.
The mention of wine in The Nights, especially the Nabíz or
fermented infusion of raisins well known to the præ-Mohammedan
Badawis, perpetually recurs. As a rule, except only in the case of
holy personages and mostly of the Caliph Al-Rashid, the “service of
wine” appears immediately after the hands are washed; and women,
as well as men, drink, like true Orientals, for the honest purpose of
getting drunk—la recherche de l’idéal, as the process has been
called. Yet distillation became well known in the fourteenth century.
Amongst the Greeks and Romans it was confined to manufacturing
aromatic waters, and Nicander the poet (B.C. 140) used for a still
the term ἄμβιξ, like the Irish “pot” and its produce “poteen.” The
simple art of converting salt water into fresh, by boiling the former
and passing the steam through a cooled pipe into a recipient, would
not have escaped the students of the Philosopher’s “stone;” and thus
we find throughout Europe the Arabic modifications of Greek terms
Alchemy, Alembic (Al-ἄμβιξ), Chemistry and Elixir; while “Alcohol”
(Al-Kohl), originally meaning “extreme tenuity or impalpable state of
pulverulent substances,” clearly shows the origin of the article.
Avicenna, who died in A.H. 428 = 1036, nearly two hundred years
before we read of distillation in Europe, compared the human body
with an alembic, the belly being the cucurbit and the head the
capital:—he forgot one important difference but n’importe. Spirits of
wine were first noticed in the xiiith century, when the Arabs had
overrun the Western Mediterranean, by Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who
dubs the new invention a universal panacea; and his pupil, Raymond
Lully (nat. Majorca A.D. 1236), declared this essence of wine to be a
boon from the Deity. Now The Nights, even in the latest adjuncts,
never allude to the “white coffee” of the “respectable” Moslem, the
Ráki (raisin-brandy) or Ma-hayát (aqua vitæ) of the modern
Mohametan: the drinkers confine themselves to wine like our
contemporary Dalmatians, one of the healthiest and the most
vigorous of seafaring races in Europe.
Syphilis also, which at the end of the xvth century began to infect
Europe, is ignored by The Nights. I do not say it actually began:
diseases do not begin except with the dawn of humanity; and their
history, as far as we know, is simple enough. They are at first
sporadic and comparatively non-lethal: at certain epochs which we
can determine, and for reasons which as yet we cannot, they break
out into epidemics raging with frightful violence: they then subside
into the endemic state and lastly they return to the milder sporadic
form. For instance, “English cholera” was known of old: in 1831
(Oct. 26) the Asiatic type took its place and now, after sundry violent
epidemics, the disease is becoming endemic on the Northern
seaboard of the Mediterranean, notably in Spain and Italy. So small-
pox (Al-judrí, vol. i. 254) passed over from Central Africa to Arabia in
the year of Mohammed’s birth (A.D. 570) and thence overspread the
civilised world, as an epidemic, an endemic and a sporadic
successively. The “Greater Pox” has appeared in human bones of
prehistoric graves and Moses seems to mention gonorrhœa (Levit.
xv. 12). Passing over allusions in Juvenal and Martial,[186] we find
Eusebius relating that Galerius died (A.D. 302) of ulcers on the
genitals and other parts of his body; and, about a century
afterwards, Bishop Palladius records that one Hero, after
conversation with a prostitute, fell a victim to an abscess on the
penis (phagedænic shanker?). In 1347 the famous Joanna of Naples
founded (æt. 23), in her town of Avignon, a bordel whose inmates
were to be medically inspected—a measure to which England (proh
pudor!) still objects. In her Statuts du Lieu-publique d’Avignon, No.
iv. she expressly mentions the Mal vengut de paillardise. Such
houses, says Ricord who studied the subject since 1832, were
common in France after A.D. 1200; and sporadic venereals were
known there. But in A.D. 1493–94 an epidemic broke out with
alarming intensity at Barcelona, as we learn from the “Tractado
llamado fructo de todos los Sanctos contra el mal serpentino, venido
de la Isla espanola,” of Rodrigo Ruiz Días, the specialist. In Santo
Domingo the disease was common under the names Hipas,
Guaynaras and Taynastizas: hence the opinion in Europe that it
arose from the mixture of European and “Indian” blood.[187] Some
attributed it to the Gypsies who migrated to Western Europe in the
xvth century:[188] others to the Moriscos expelled from Spain. But the
pest got its popular name after the violent outbreak at Naples in
A.D. 1493–4, when Charles VIII. of Anjou with a large army of
mercenaries, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans, attacked
Ferdinand II. Thence it became known as the Mal de Naples and
Morbus Gallicus—una gallica being still the popular term in neo-Latin
lands—and the “French disease” in England. As early as July 1496
Marin Sanuto (Journal i. 171) describes with details the “Mal
Franzoso.” The scientific “syphilis” dates from Fracastori’s poem (A.D.
1521) in which Syphilus the Shepherd is struck like Job, for abusing
the sun. After crippling a Pope (Sixtus IV.[189]) and killing a King
(Francis I.) the Grosse Vérole began to abate its violence, under the
effects of mercury it is said; and became endemic, a stage still
shown at Scherlievo near Fiume, where legend says it was implanted
by the Napoleonic soldiery. The Aleppo and other “buttons” also
belong apparently to the same grade. Elsewhere it settled as a
sporadic and now it appears to be dying out while gonorrhœa is on
the increase.[190]
The Nights, I have said, belongs to the days before coffee (A.D.
1550) and tobacco (A.D. 1650) had overspread the East. The former,
which derives its name from the Káfá or Káffá province, lying south
of Abyssinia proper and peopled by the Sidáma Gallas, was
introduced to Mokha of Al-Yaman in A.D. 1429–30 by the Shaykh al-
Sházili who lies buried there, and found a congenial name in the
Arabic Kahwah = old wine.[191] In The Nights (Mac. Edit.) it is
mentioned twelve times[192]; but never in the earlier tales: except in
the case of Kamar al-Zaman II. it evidently does not belong to the
epoch and we may fairly suspect the scribe. In the xvith century
coffee began to take the place of wine in the nearer East; and it
gradually ousted the classical drink from daily life and from folk-
tales.
It is the same with tobacco, which is mentioned only once by The
Nights (cmxxxi.), in conjunction with meat, vegetables and fruit and
where it is called “Tábah.” Lane (iii. 615) holds it to be the work of a
copyist; but in the same tale of Abu Kir and Abu Sir, sherbet and
coffee appear to have become en vogue, in fact to have gained the
ground they now hold. The result of Lord Macartney’s Mission to
China was a suggestion that smoking might have originated
spontaneously in the Old World.[193] This is undoubtedly true. The
Bushmen and other wild tribes of Southern Africa threw their Dakhá
(cannabis indica) on the fire and sat round it inhaling the intoxicating
fumes. Smoking without tobacco was easy enough. The North
American Indians of the Great Red Pipe Stone Quarry and those who
lived above the line where nicotiana grew, used the kinni-kinik or
bark of the red willow and some seven other succedanea.[194] But
tobacco proper, which soon superseded all materials except hemp
and opium, was first adopted by the Spaniards of Santo Domingo in
A.D. 1496 and reached England in 1565. Hence the word, which,
amongst the so-called Red Men, denoted the pipe, the container, not
the contained, spread over the Old World as a generic term with
additions, like “Tutun,”[195] for especial varieties. The change in
English manners brought about by the cigar after dinner has already
been noticed; and much of the modified sobriety of the present day
may be attributed to the influence of the Holy Herb en cigarette.
Such, we know from history was its effect amongst Moslems; and
the normal wine-parties of The Nights suggest that the pipe was
unknown even when the latest tales were written.

C.

We know absolutely nothing of the author or authors who produced

our marvellous Recueil. Galland justly observes (Epist. Dedic.),
“probably this great work is not by a single hand; for how can we
suppose that one man alone could own a fancy fertile enough to
invent so many ingenious fictions?” Mr. Lane, and Mr. Lane alone,
opined that the work was written in Egypt by one person or at most
by two, one ending what the other had begun, and that he or they
had re-written the tales and completed the collection by new matter
composed or arranged for the purpose. It is hard to see how the
distinguished Arabist came to such a conclusion: at most it can be
true only of the editors and scribes of MSS. evidently copied from
each other, such as the Mac. and the Bul. texts. As the Reviewer
(Forbes Falconer?) in the “Asiatic Journal” (vol. xxx., 1839) says,
“Every step we have taken in the collation of these agreeable fictions
has confirmed us in the belief that the work called the Arabian
Nights is rather a vehicle for stories, partly fixed and partly arbitrary,
than a collection fairly deserving, from its constant identity with
itself, the name of a distinct work, and the reputation of having
wholly emanated from the same inventive mind. To say nothing of
the improbability of supposing that one individual, with every license
to build upon the foundation of popular stories, a work which had
once received a definite form from a single writer, would have been
multiplied by the copyist with some regard at least to his
arrangement of words as well as matter. But the various copies we
have seen bear about as much mutual resemblance as if they had
passed through the famous process recommended for disguising a
plagiarism: ‘Translate your English author into French and again into
English.’”
Moreover, the style of the several Tales, which will be considered in a
future page (§ iii.), so far from being homogeneous, is
heterogeneous in the extreme. Different nationalities show
themselves; West Africa, Egypt and Syria are all represented and,
while some authors are intimately familiar with Baghdad, Damascus
and Cairo, others are equally ignorant. All copies, written and
printed, absolutely differ in the last tales and a measure of the
divergence can be obtained by comparing the Bresl. Edit. with the
Mac. text: indeed it is my conviction that the MSS. preserved in
Europe would add sundry volumes full of tales to those hitherto
translated; and here the Wortley Montagu copy can be taken as a
test. We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights
with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a
collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulæ and verses
traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated
in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together
about the age of Pericles.
To conclude. From the data above given I hold myself justified in
drawing the following deductions:—
1. The framework of the book is purely Persian perfunctorily Arabised; the
archetype being the Hazár Afsánah.[196]
2. The oldest tales, such as Sindibad (the Seven Wazirs) and King Jili’ád, may date
from the reign of Al-Mansur, eighth century A.D.
3. The thirteen tales mentioned above (p. 81) as the nucleus of the Repertory,
together with “Dalilah the Crafty,”[197] may be placed in our tenth century.
4. The latest tales, notably Kamar al-Zaman the Second and Ma’aruf the Cobbler,
are as late as the sixteenth century.
5. The work assumed its present form in the thirteenth century.
6. The author is unknown for the best reason; there never was one: for
information touching the editors and copyists we must await the fortunate
discovery of some MSS.
 § II.
THE NIGHTS IN EUROPE.
The history of The Nights in Europe is one of slow and gradual
development. The process was begun (1704–17) by Galland, a
Frenchman, continued (1823) by Von Hammer, an Austro-German,
and finished by Mr. John Payne (1882–84) an Englishman. But we
must not forget that it is wholly and solely to the genius of the Gaul
that Europe owes The “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” over which
Western childhood and youth have spent so many spelling hours.
Antoine Galland was the first to discover the marvellous fund of
material for the story-teller buried in the Oriental mine; and he had
in a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more
captivating than culture or scholarship. Hence his delightful version
(or perversion) became one of the world’s classics and at once made
Sheherazade and Dinarzarde, Haroun Alraschid, the Calendars and a
host of other personages as familiar to the home reader as Prospero,
Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver and Dr. Primrose. Without the
name and fame won for the work by the brilliant paraphrase of the
learned and single-minded Frenchman, Lane’s curious hash and
latinized English, at once turgid and emasculated, would have found
few readers. Mr. Payne’s admirable version appeals to the Orientalist
and the “stylist,” not to the many-headed; and mine to the
anthropologist and student of Eastern manners and customs.
Galland did it and alone he did it: his fine literary flaire, his pleasing
style, his polished taste and perfect tact at once made his work take
high rank in the republic of letters nor will the immortal fragment
ever be superseded in the infallible judgment of childhood. As the
Encyclopædia Britannica has been pleased to ignore this excellent
man and admirable Orientalist, numismatologist and littérateur, the
reader may not be unwilling to see a short sketch of his biography.
[198]
Antoine Galland was born in A.D. 1646 of peasant parents “poor and
honest” at Rollot, a little bourg in Picardy some two leagues from
Montdidier. He was a seventh child and his mother, left a widow in
early life and compelled to earn her livelihood, saw scant chance of
educating him when the kindly assistance of a Canon of the
Cathedral and President of the Collége de Noyon relieved her
difficulties. In this establishment Galland studied Greek and Hebrew
for ten years, after which the “strait thing at home” apprenticed him
to a trade. But he was made for letters; he hated manual labour and
he presently removed en cachette to Paris, where he knew only an
ancient kinswoman. She introduced him to a priestly relative of the
Canon of Noyon, who in turn recommended him to the “Sous-
principal” of the Collége Du Plessis. Here he made such notable
progress in Oriental studies, that M. Petitpied, a Doctor of the
Sorbonne, struck by his abilities, enabled him to study at the Collége
Royal and eventually to catalogue the Eastern MSS. in the great
ecclesiastical Society. Thence he passed to the Collége Mazarin,
where a Professor, M. Godouin, was making an experiment which
might be revived to advantage in our present schools. He collected a
class of boys, aged about four, and proposed to teach them Latin
speedily and easily by making them converse in the classical
language as well as read and write it.[199] Galland, his assistant, had
not time to register success or failure before he was appointed
attaché-secretary to M. de Nointel named in 1660 Ambassadeur de
France for Constantinople. His special province was to study the
dogmas and doctrines and to obtain official attestations concerning
the articles of the Orthodox (or Greek) Christianity which had then
been a subject of lively discussion amongst certain Catholics,
especially Arnauld (Antoine) and Claude the Minister, and which even
in our day occasionally crops up amongst “Protestants.”[200] Galland,
by frequenting the cafés and listening to the tale-teller, soon
mastered Romaic and grappled with the religious question, under
the tuition of a deposed Patriarch and of sundry Matráns or
Metropolitans, whom the persecutions of the Pashas had driven for
refuge to the Palais de France. M. de Nointel, after settling certain
knotty points in the Capitulations, visited the harbour-towns of the
Levant and the “Holy Places,” including Jerusalem, where Galland
copied epigraphs, sketched monuments and collected antiques, such
as the marbles in the Baudelot Gallery of which Père Dom Bernard
de Montfaucon presently published specimens in his “Palæographia
Græca,” etc. (Parisiis, 1708).
In Syria Galland was unable to buy a copy of The Nights: as he
expressly states in his Epistle Dedicatory, il a fallu le faire venir de
Syrie. But he prepared himself for translating it by studying the
manners and customs, the religion and superstitions of the people;
and in 1675, leaving his chief, who was ordered back to Stambul, he
returned to France. In Paris his numismatic fame recommended him
to MM. Vaillant, Carcary and Giraud who strongly urged a second
visit to the Levant, for the purpose of collecting, and he set out
without delay. In 1691 he made a third journey, travelling at the
expense of the Compagnie des Indes-Orientales, with the main
object of making purchases for the Library and Museum of Colbert
the magnificent. The commission ended eighteen months afterwards
with the changes of the Company, when Colbert and the Marquis de
Louvois caused him to be created “Antiquary to the King,” Louis le
Grand, and charged him with collecting coins and medals for the
royal cabinet. As he was about to leave Smyrna, he had a narrow
escape from the earthquake and subsequent fire which destroyed
some fifteen thousand of the inhabitants: he was buried in the ruins;
but, his kitchen being cold as becomes a philosopher’s, he was dug
out unburnt.[201]
Galland again returned to Paris where his familiarity with Arabic and
Hebrew, Persian and Turkish recommended him to MM. Thevenot
and Bignon: this first President of the Grand Council acknowledged
his services by a pension. He also became a favourite with
D’Herbelot whose Bibliothèque Orientale, left unfinished at his death,
he had the honour of completing and prefacing.[202] President Bignon
died within the twelvemonth, which made Galland attach himself in
1697 to M. Foucault, Councillor of State and Intendant (governor) of
Caen in Lower Normandy, then famous for its academy: in his new
patron’s fine library and numismatic collection he found materials for
a long succession of works, including a translation of the Koran.[203]
They recommended him strongly to the literary world and in 1701 he
was made a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles
Lettres.
At Caen Galland issued in 1704,[204] the first part of his Mille et une
Nuits, Contes Arabes traduits en François which at once became
famous as “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” Mutilated,
fragmentary and paraphrastic though the tales were, the glamour of
imagination, the marvel of the miracles and the gorgeousness and
magnificence of the scenery at once secured an exceptional success:
it was a revelation in romance, and the public recognised that it
stood in presence of a monumental literary work. France was a-fire
with delight at a something so new, so unconventional, so entirely
without purpose, religious, moral or philosophical: the Oriental
wanderer in his stately robes was a startling surprise to the easy-
going and utterly corrupt Europe of the ancien régime with its
indecently tight garments and perfectly loose morals. “Ils
produisirent,” said Charles Nodier, a genius in his way, “dès le
moment de leur publication, cet effet qui assure aux productions de
l’esprit une vogue populaire, quoiqu’ils appartinssent à une
littérature peu connue en France; et que ce genre de composition
admît ou plutôt exigeât des détails de moeurs, de caractère, de
costume et de localités absolument étrangers à toutes les idées
établies dans nos contes et nos romans. On fut étonné du charme
qui résultait de leur lecture. C’est que la vérité des sentimens, la
nouveauté des tableaux, une imagination féconde en prodiges, un
coloris plein de chaleur, l’attrait d’une sensibilité sans prétention, et
le sel d’un comique sans caricature, c’est que l’esprit et le naturel
enfin plaisent partout, et plaisent à tout le monde.”[205]
The Contes Arabes at once made Galland’s name and a popular tale
is told of them and him known to all reviewers who, however, mostly
mangle it. In the Biographie Universelle of Michaud[206] we find:—
Dans les deux premiers volumes de ces contes l’exorde était
toujours, “Ma chère sœur, si vous ne dormez pas, faites-nous un de
ces contes que vous savez.” Quelques jeunes gens, ennuyés de cette
plate uniformité, allèrent une nuit qu’il faisait très-grand froid,
frapper à la porte de l’auteur, qui courut en chemise à sa fenêtre.
Après l’avoir fait morfondre quelque temps par diverses questions
insignifiantes, ils terminèrent en lui disant, “Ah, Monsieur Galland, si
vous ne dormez pas, faites-nous un de ces beaux contes que vous
savez si bien.” Galland profita de la leçon, et supprima dans les
volumes suivants le préambule qui lui avait attiré la plaisanterie. This
legend has the merit of explaining why the Professor so soon gave
up the Arab framework which he had deliberately adopted.
The Nights was at once translated from the French[207] though when,
where and by whom no authority seems to know. In Lowndes’
“Bibliographer’s Manual” the English Editio Princeps is thus noticed,
“Arabian Nights’ Entertainments translated from the French, London,
1724, 12mo, 6 vols.” and a footnote states that this translation, very
inaccurate and vulgar in its diction, was often reprinted. In 1712
Addison introduced into the Spectator (No. 535, Nov. 13) the Story
of Alnaschar (= Al-Nashshár, the Sawyer) and says that his remarks
on Hope “may serve as a moral to an Arabian tale which I find
translated into French by Monsieur Galland.” His version appears,
from the tone and style, to have been made by himself, and yet in
that year a second English edition had appeared. The nearest
approach to the Edit. Princeps in the British Museum[208] is a set of
six volumes bound in three and corresponding with Galland’s first
half dozen. Tomes i. and ii. are from the fourth edition of 1713, Nos.
iii. and iv. are from the second of 1712 and v. and vi. are from the
third of 1715. It is conjectured that the two first volumes were
reprinted several times apart from their subsequents, as was the
fashion of the day; but all is mystery. We (my friends and I) have
turned over scores of books in the British Museum, the University
Library and the Advocates’ Libraries of Edinburgh and Glasgow: I
have been permitted to put the question in “Notes and Queries” and
in the “Antiquary”; but all our researches hitherto have been in vain.
The popularity of The Nights in England must have rivalled their
vogue in France, judging from the fact that in 1713, or nine years
after Galland’s Edit. Prin. appeared they had already reached a
fourth issue. Even the ignoble national jealousy which prompted Sir
William Jones grossly to abuse that valiant scholar, Auquetil du
Perron, could not mar their popularity. But as there are men who
cannot read Pickwick, so they were not wanting who spoke of
“Dreams of the distempered fancy of the East.”[209] “When the work
was first published in England,” says Henry Webber,[210] “it seems to
have made a considerable impression upon the public.” Pope in 1720
sent two volumes (French? or English?) to Bishop Atterbury, without
making any remark on the work; but, from his very silence, it may
be presumed that he was not displeased with the perusal. The
bishop, who does not appear to have joined a relish for the flights of
imagination to his other estimable qualities, expressed his dislike of
these tales pretty strongly and stated it to be his opinion, formed on
the frequent descriptions of female dress, that they were the work of
some Frenchman (Petis de la Croix, a mistake afterwards corrected
by Warburton). The Arabian Nights, however, quickly made their way
to public favour. “We have been informed of a singular instance of
the effect they produced soon after their first appearance. Sir James
Stewart, Lord Advocate for Scotland, having one Saturday evening
found his daughters employed in reading these volumes, seized
them with a rebuke for spending the evening before the ‘Sawbbath’
in such worldly amusement; but the grave advocate himself became
a prey to the fascination of the tales, being found on the morning of
the Sabbath itself employed in their perusal, from which he had not
risen the whole night.” As late as 1780 Dr. Beattie professed himself
uncertain whether they were translated or fabricated by M. Galland;
and, while Dr. Pusey wrote of them “Noctes Mille et Una dictæ, quæ
in omnium firmè populorum cultiorum linguas conversæ, in deliciis
omnium habentur, manibusque omnium terentur,”[211] the amiable
Carlyle, in the gospel according to Saint Froude, characteristically
termed them “downright lies” and forbade the house to such
“unwholesome literature.” What a sketch of character in two words!
The only fault found in France with the Contes Arabes was that their
style is peu correcte; in fact they want classicism. Yet all Gallic
imitators, Trébutien included, have carefully copied their leader and
Charles Nodier remarks:—“Il me semble que l’on n’a pas rendu assez
de justice au style de Galland. Abondant sans être prolixe, naturel et
familier sans être lâche ni trivial, il ne manque jamais de cette
élégance qui résulte de la facilité, et qui présente je ne sais quel
mélange de la naïveté de Perrault et de la bonhomie de La
Fontaine.”
Our Professor, with a name now thoroughly established, returned in
1706 to Paris, where he was an assiduous and efficient member of
the Société Numismatique and corresponded largely with foreign
Orientalists. Three years afterwards he was made Professor of Arabic
at the Collége de France, succeeding Pierre Dippy; and, during the
next half decade, he devoted himself to publishing his valuable
studies. Then the end came. In his last illness, an attack of asthma
complicated with pectoral mischief, he sent to Noyon for his nephew
Julien Galland[212] to assist him in ordering his MSS. and in making
his will after the simplest military fashion: he bequeathed his
writings to the Bibliothèque du Roi, his Numismatic Dictionary to the
Academy and his Alcoran to the Abbé Bignon. He died, aged sixty-
nine on February 17, 1715, leaving his second Part of The Nights
unpublished.[213]
Professor Galland was a French littérateur of the good old school
which is rapidly becoming extinct. Homme vrai dans les moindres
choses (as his Éloge stated); simple in life and manners and single-
hearted in his devotion to letters, he was almost childish in worldly
matters, while notable for penetration and acumen in his studies. He
would have been as happy, one of his biographers remarks, in
teaching children the elements of education as he was in acquiring
his immense erudition. Briefly, truth and honesty, exactitude and
indefatigable industry characterised his most honourable career.
Galland informs us (Epist. Ded.) that his MS. consisted of four
volumes, only three of which are extant,[214] bringing the work down
to Night cclxxxii., or about the beginning of “Camaralzaman.” The
missing portion, if it contained like the other volumes 140 pages,
would end that tale together with the Stories of Ghánim and the
Enchanted (Ebony) Horse; and such is the disposition in the Bresl.
Edit. which mostly favours in its ordinance the text used by the first
translator. But this would hardly have filled more than two-thirds of
his volumes; for the other third he interpolated, or is supposed to
have interpolated, the ten[215] following tales.

1. Histoire du prince Zeyn Al-asnam et du Roi des Génies.[216]

2. Histoire de Codadad et de ses frères.
3. Histoire de la Lampe merveilleuse (Aladdin).
4. Histoire de l’aveugle Baba Abdalla.
5. Histoire de Sidi Nouman.
6. Histoire de Cogia Hassan Alhabbal.
7. Histoire d’Ali Baba, et de Quarante Voleurs exterminés par une
Esclave.
8. Histoire d’Ali Cogia, marchand de Bagdad.
9. Histoire du prince Ahmed et de la fée Peri-Banou.
10. Histoire de deux Sœurs jalouses de leur Cadette.[217]
Concerning these interpolations which contain two of the best and
most widely known stories in the work, Aladdin and the Forty
Thieves, conjectures have been manifold but they mostly run upon
three lines. De Sacy held that they were found by Galland in the
public libraries of Paris. Mr. Chenery, whose acquaintance with Arabic
grammar was ample, suggested that the Professor had borrowed
them from the recitations of the Rawis, rhapsodists or professional
story-tellers in the bazars of Smyrna and other ports of the Levant.
The late Mr. Henry Charles Coote (in the “Folk-Lore Record,” vol. iii.
Part ii. p. 178 et seq.), “On the source of some of M. Galland’s
Tales,” quotes from popular Italian, Sicilian and Romaic stories
incidents identical with those in Prince Ahmad, Aladdin, Ali Baba and
the Envious Sisters, suggesting that the Frenchman had heard these
paramythia in Levantine coffee-houses and had inserted them into
his unequalled corpus fabularum. Mr. Payne (ix. 268) conjectures the
probability “of their having been composed at a comparatively recent
period by an inhabitant of Baghdad, in imitation of the legends of
Haroun er Rashid and other well-known tales of the original work;”
and adds, “It is possible that an exhaustive examination of the
various MS. copies of the Thousand and One Nights known to exist
in the public libraries of Europe might yet cast some light upon the
question of the origin of the interpolated Tales.” I quite agree with
him, taking “The Sleeper and the Waker” and “Zeyn Al-asnam” as
cases in point; but I should expect, for reasons before given, to find
the stories in a Persic rather than an Arabic MS. And I feel convinced
that all will be recovered: Galland was not the man to commit a
literary forgery.
As regards Aladdin, the most popular tale of the whole work, I am
convinced that it is genuine, although my unfortunate friend, the late
Professor Palmer, doubted its being an Eastern story. It is laid down
upon all the lines of Oriental fiction. The mise-en-scène is China,
“where they drink a certain warm liquor” (tea); the hero’s father is a
poor tailor; and, as in “Judar and his Brethren,” the Maghribi
Magician presently makes his appearance, introducing the Wonderful
Lamp and the Magical Ring. Even the Sorcerer’s cry, “New lamps for
old lamps!”—a prime point—is paralleled in the Tale of the
Fisherman’s son,[218] where the Jew asks in exchange only old rings
and the Princess, recollecting that her husband kept a shabby, well-
worn ring in his writing-stand, and he being asleep, took it out and
sent it to the man. In either tale the palace is transported to a
distance and both end with the death of the wicked magician and
the hero and heroine living happily together ever after.
All Arabists have remarked the sins of omission and commission, of
abridgment, amplification and substitution, and the audacious
distortion of fact and phrase in which Galland freely indulged, whilst
his knowledge of Eastern languages proves that he knew better. But
literary license was the order of his day and at that time French,
always the most bégueule of European languages, was bound by a
rigorisme of the narrowest and the straightest of lines from which
the least écart condemned a man as a barbarian and a tudesque. If
we consider Galland fairly we shall find that he errs mostly for a
purpose, that of popularising his work; and his success indeed
justified his means. He has been derided (by scholars) for “Hé
Monsieur!” and “Ah Madame!”; but he could not write “O mon sieur”
and “O ma dame;” although we can borrow from biblical and
Shakespearean English, “O my lord!” and “O my lady!” “Bon Dieu!
ma sœur” (which our translators english by “O heavens,” Night xx.)
is good French for Wa ’lláhi—by Allah; and “cinquante cavaliers bien
faits” (“fifty handsome gentlemen on horseback”) is a more familiar
picture than fifty knights. “L’officieuse Dinarzade” (Night lxi.), and
“Cette plaisante querelle des deux frères” (Night lxxii.) become
ridiculous only in translation—“the officious Dinarzade” and “this
pleasant quarrel;” while “ce qu’il y de remarquable” (Night lxxiii.)
would relieve the Gallic mind from the mortification of “Destiny
decreed.” “Plusieurs sortes de fruits et de bouteilles de vin” (Night
ccxxxi. etc.) europeanises flasks and flaggons; and the violent
convulsions in which the girl dies (Night cliv., her head having been
cut off by her sister) is mere Gallic squeamishness: France laughs at
“le shoking” in England but she has only to look at home especially
during the reign of Galland’s contemporary—Roi Soleil. The terrible
“Old man” (Shaykh) “of the Sea” (-board) is badly described by
“l’incommode vieillard” (“the ill-natured old fellow”): “Brave
Maimune” and “Agréable Maimune” are hardly what a Jinni would
say to a Jinniyah (ccxiii.); but they are good Gallic. The same may be
noted of “Plier les voiles pour marque qu’il se rendait” (Night
ccxxxv.), a European practice; and of the false note struck in two
passages. “Je m’estimais heureuse d’avoir fait une si belle conquête”
(Night lxvii.) gives a Parisian turn; and, “Je ne puis voir sans horreur
cet abominable barbier que voilà: quoiqu’il soit né dans un pays où
tout le monde est blanc, il ne laisse pas à ressembler à un Éthiopien;
mais il a l’âme encore plus noire et horrible que le visage” (Night
clvii.), is a mere affectation of Orientalism. Lastly, “Une vieille dame
de leur connaissance” (Night clviii.) puts French polish upon the
matter of fact Arab’s “an old woman.”
The list of absolute mistakes, not including violent liberties, can
hardly be held excessive. Professor Weil and Mr. Payne (ix. 271)
justly charge Galland with making the Trader (Night i.) throw away
the shells (écorces) of the date which has only a pellicle, as Galland
certainly knew; but dates were not seen every day in France, while
almonds and walnuts were of the quatre mendiants. He preserves
the écorces, which later issues have changed to noyaux, probably in
allusion to the jerking practice called Inwá. Again in the “First
Shaykh’s Story” (vol. i. 27) the “maillet” is mentioned as the means
of slaughtering cattle, because familiar to European readers: at the
end of the tale it becomes “le couteau funeste.” In Badr al-Din a
“tarte à la crême,” so well known to the West, displaces, naturally
enough, the outlandish “mess of pomegranate-seeds.” Though the
text especially tells us the hero removed his bag-trousers (not only
“son habit”) and placed them under the pillow, a crucial fact in the
history, our Professor sends him to bed fully dressed, apparently for
the purpose of informing his readers in a footnote that Easterns “se
couchent en caleçon” (Night lxxx). It was mere ignorance to
confound the arbalète or cross-bow with the stone-bow (Night
xxxviii.), but this has universally been done, even by Lane who ought
to have known better; and it was an unpardonable carelessness or
something worse to turn Nár (fire) and Dún (in lieu of) into “le faux
dieu Nardoun” (Night lxv.): as this has been untouched by De Sacy, I
cannot but conclude that he never read the text with the translation.
Nearly as bad also to make the Jewish physician remark, when the
youth gave him the left wrist (Night cl.), “voilà une grande ignorance
de ne savoir pas que l’on presente la main droite à un médecin et
non pas la gauche”—whose exclusive use all travellers in the East
must know. I have noticed the incuriousness which translates “along
the Nile-shore” by “up towards Ethiopia” (Night cli.), and the “Islands
of the Children of Khaledan” (Night ccxi.) instead of the Khálidatáni
or Khálidát, the Fortunate Islands. It was by no means “des petits
soufflets” (“some tips from time to time with her fingers”) which the
sprightly dame administered to the Barber’s second brother (Night
clxxi.), but sound and heavy “cuffs” on the nape; and the sixth
brother (Night clxxx.) was not “aux lèvres fendues” (“he of the hair-
lips”), for they had been cut off by the Badawi jealous of his fair
wife. Abu al-Hasan would not greet his beloved by saluting “le tapis
à ses pieds:” he would kiss her hands and feet. Haïatalnefous (Hayat
al-Nufús, Night ccxxvi.) would not “throw cold water in the Princess’s
face:” she would sprinkle it with eau-de-rose. “Camaralzaman” I
addresses his two abominable wives in language purely European
(ccxxx.), “et de la vie il ne s’approcha d’elles,” missing one of the
fine touches of the tale which shows its hero a weak and violent
man, hasty and lacking the pundonor. “La belle Persienne,” in the
Tale of Nur al-Din, was no Persian; nor would her master address
her, “Venez çà, impertinente!” (“come hither, impertinence”). In the
story of Badr, one of the Comoro Islands becomes “L’île de la Lune.”
“Dog” and “dog-son” are not “injures atroces et indignes d’un grand
roi:” the greatest Eastern kings allow themselves far more energetic
and significant language. Fitnah[219] is by no means “Force de
cœurs.” Lastly the dénoûement of The Nights is widely different in
French and in Arabic; but that is probably not Galland’s fault, as he
never saw the original, and indeed he deserves high praise for
having invented so pleasant and sympathetic a close, inferior only to
the Oriental device.[220]
Galland’s fragment has a strange effect upon the Orientalist and
those who take the scholastic view, be it wide or narrow. De Sacy
does not hesitate to say that the work owes much to his fellow-
countryman’s hand; but I judge otherwise: it is necessary to
dissociate the two works and to regard Galland’s paraphrase, which
contains only a quarter of The Thousand Nights and a Night, as a
wholly different book. Its attempts to amplify beauties and to correct
or conceal the defects and the grotesqueness of the original,
absolutely suppress much of the local colour, clothing the bare body
in the best of Parisian suits. It ignores the rhymed prose and
excludes the verse, rarely and very rarely rendering a few lines in a
balanced style. It generally rejects the proverbs, epigrams and moral
reflections which form the pith and marrow of the book; and, worse
still, it disdains those finer touches of character which are often
Shakespearean in their depth and delicacy, and which, applied to a
race of familiar ways and thoughts, manners and customs, would
have been the wonder and delight of Europe. It shows only a single
side of the gem that has so many facets. By deference to public
taste it was compelled to expunge the often repulsive simplicity, the
childish indecencies and the wild orgies of the original, contrasting
with the gorgeous tints, the elevated morality and the religious tone
of passages which crowd upon them. We miss the odeur du sang
which taints the parfums du harem; also the humouristic tale and
the Rabelaisian outbreak which relieve and throw out into strong
relief the splendour of Empire and the havoc of Time. Considered in
this light it is a caput mortuum, a magnificent texture seen on the
wrong side; and it speaks volumes for the genius of the man who
could recommend it in such blurred and caricatured condition to
readers throughout the civilised world. But those who look only at
Galland’s picture, his effort to “transplant into European gardens the
magic flowers of Eastern fancy,” still compare his tales with the
sudden prospect of magnificent mountains seen after a long desert-
march: they arouse strange longings and indescribable desires; their
marvellous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of
mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind
them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected—in fact,
all the glamour of the unknown.
The Nights has been translated into every far-extending Eastern
tongue, Persian, Turkish and Hindostani. The latter entitles them
Hikáyát al-Jalílah or Noble Tales, and the translation was made by
Munshi Shams al-Din Ahmad for the use of the College of Fort
George in A.H. 1252 = 1836.[221] All these versions are direct from
the Arabic: my search for a translation of Galland into any Eastern
tongue has hitherto been fruitless.
I was assured by the late Bertholdy Seemann that the “language of
Hoffmann and Heine” contained a literal and complete translation of
The Nights; but personal enquiries at Leipzig and elsewhere
convinced me that the work still remains to be done. The first
attempt to improve upon Galland and to show the world what the
work really is was made by Dr. Max Habicht and was printed at
Breslau (1824–25), in fifteen small square volumes.[222] Thus it
appeared before the “Tunis Manuscript”[223] of which it purports to be
a translation. The German version is, if possible, more condemnable
than the Arabic original. It lacks every charm of style; it
conscientiously shirks every difficulty; it abounds in the most
extraordinary blunders and it is utterly useless as a picture of
manners or a book of reference. We can explain its lâches only by
the theory that the eminent Professor left the labour to his
collaborateurs and did not take the trouble to revise their careless
work.
The next German translation was by Aulic Councillor J. von Hammer-
Purgstall[224] who, during his short stay at Cairo and Constantinople,
turned into French the tales neglected by Galland. After some
difference with M. Caussin (de Perceval) in 1810, the Styrian
Orientalist entrusted his MS. to Herr Cotta the publisher of Tubingen.
Thus a German version appeared, the translation of a translation, at
the hand of Professor Zinserling,[224] while the French version was
unaccountably lost en route to London. Finally the “Contes inédits,”
etc., appeared in a French translation by G. S. Trébutien (Paris,
mdcccxxviii.). Von Hammer took liberties with the text which can
compare only with those of Lane: he abridged and retrenched till the
likeness in places entirely disappeared; he shirked some difficult
passages and he misexplained others. In fact the work did no
honour to the amiable and laborious historian of the Turks.
The only good German translation of The Nights is due to Dr. Gustav
Weil who, born on April 24, 1808, is still (1886) professing at
Heidelburg.[225] His originals (he tells us) were the Breslau Edition,
the Bulak text of Abd al-Rahman al-Safati and a MS. in the library of
Saxe Gotha. The venerable savant, who has rendered such service to
Arabism, informs me that Aug. Lewald’s “Vorhalle” (pp. i.-xv.)[226] was
written without his knowledge. Dr. Weil neglects the division of days
which enables him to introduce any number of tales: for instance,
Galland’s eleven occupy a large part of vol. iii. The Vorwort wants
development; the notes, confined to a few words, are inadequate
and verse is everywhere rendered by prose, the Saj’a or assonance
being wholly ignored. On the other hand the scholar shows himself
by a correct translation, contrasting strongly with those which
preceded him, and by a strictly literal version, save where the
treatment required to be modified in a book intended for the public.
Under such circumstances it cannot well be other than longsome and
monotonous reading.
Although Spain and Italy have produced many and remarkable
Orientalists, I cannot find that they have taken the trouble to
translate The Nights for themselves: cheap and gaudy versions of
Galland seem to have satisfied the public.[227] Notes on the Romaic,
Icelandic, Russian (?) and other versions, will be found in a future
page.
Professor Galland has never been forgotten in France where,
amongst a host of editions, four have claims to distinction;[228] and
his success did not fail to create a host of imitators and to attract
what De Sacy justly terms “une prodigieuse importation de
marchandise de contrebande.” As early as 1823 Von Hammer
numbered seven in France (Trébutien, Préface xviii.) and during later
years they have grown prodigiously. Mr. William F. Kirby, who has
made a special study of the subject, has favoured me with detailed
bibliographical notes on Galland’s imitators which are printed in
Appendix No. II.
 § III.
THE MATTER AND THE MANNER OF THE
NIGHTS.

A.—The Matter.

Returning to my threefold distribution of this Prose Poem (§ I) into

Fable, Fairy Tale and historical Anecdote,[229] let me proceed to
consider these sections more carefully.
The Apologue or Beast-fable, which apparently antedates all other
subjects in The Nights, has been called “One of the earliest creations
of the awakening consciousness of mankind.” I should regard it,
despite a monumental antiquity, as the offspring of a comparatively
civilised age, when a jealous despotism or a powerful oligarchy
threw difficulties and dangers in the way of speaking “plain truths.” A
hint can be given and a friend or foe can be lauded or abused as
Belins the sheep or Isengrim the wolf, when the Author is debarred
the higher enjoyment of praising them or dispraising them by name.
And, as the purposes of fables are twofold—
Duplex libelli dos est: quod risum movet,
Et quod prudenti vitam consilio monet—

The speaking of brute beasts would give a piquancy and a

pleasantry to moral design as well as to social and political satire.
The literary origin of the fable is not Buddhistic: we must especially
shun that “Indo-Germanic” school which goes to India for its origins,
when Pythagoras, Solon, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and possibly
Homer sat for instruction at the feet of the Hir-seshtha, the learned
grammarians of the pharaohnic court. Nor was it Æsopic, evidently
Æsop inherited the hoarded wealth of ages. As Professor Lepsius
taught us, “In the olden times within the memory of man, we know
only of one advanced culture; of only one mode of writing, and of
only one literary development, viz. those of Egypt.” The invention of
an alphabet, as opposed to a syllabary, unknown to Babylonia, to
Assyria and to that extreme bourne of their civilising influences,
China, would for ever fix their literature—poetry, history and
criticism,[230] the apologue and the anecdote. To mention no others
The Lion and the Mouse appears in a Leyden papyrus dating from
B.C. 1200–1166 the days of Rameses III. (Rhampsinitus) or Hak On,
not as a rude and early attempt, but in a finished form, postulating
an ancient origin and illustrious ancestry. The dialogue also is
brought to perfection in the discourse between the Jackal Koufi and
the Ethiopian Cat (Revue Égyptologique ivme. année Part i.). Africa
therefore was the home of the Beast-fable not, as Professor Mahaffy
thinks, because it was the chosen land of animal worship, where
Oppida tota canem venerantur nemo Dianam;[231]

but simply because the Nile-land originated every form of literature

between Fabliau and Epos.
From Kemi the Black-land it was but a step to Phœnicia, Judæa,[232]
Phrygia and Asia Minor, whence a ferry led over to Greece. Here the
Apologue found its populariser in Αἴσωπος, Æsop, whose name,
involved in myth, possibly connects with Αἰθίοψ:—“Æsopus et
Aithiops idem sonant” says the sages. This would show that the
Hellenes preserved a legend of the land whence the Beast-fable
arose, and we may accept the fabulist’s æra as contemporary with
Crœsus and Solon (B.C. 570), about a century after Psammeticus
(Psamethik 1st) threw Egypt open to the restless Greek.[233] From
Africa too the Fable would in early ages migrate eastwards and make
for itself a new home in the second great focus of civilisation formed
by the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The late Mr. George Smith found
amongst the cuneiforms fragmentary Beast-fables, such as dialogues
between the Ox and the Horse, the Eagle and the Sun. In after
centuries, when the conquests of Macedonian Alexander completed
what Sesostris and Semiramis had begun, and mingled the manifold
families of mankind by joining the eastern to the western world, the
Orient became formally hellenised. Under the Seleucidæ and during
the life of the independent Bactrian kingdom (B.C. 255–125),
Grecian art and science, literature and even language overran the
old Iranic reign and extended eastwards throughout northern India.
Porus sent two embassies to Augustus in B.C. 19 and in one of them
the herald Zarmanochagas (Shramanáchárya) of Bargosa, the
modern Baroch in Guzerat, bore an epistle upon vellum written in
Greek (Strabo xv. 1 § 78). “Videtis gentes populosque mutasse
sedes” says Seneca (De Cons. ad Helv. c. vi.). “Quid sibi volunt in
mediis barbarorum regionibus Græcæ artes? Quid inter Indos
Persasque Macedonicus sermo? Atheniensis in Asia turba est.” Upper
India, in the Macedonian days would have been mainly Buddhistic,
possessing a rude alphabet borrowed from Egypt through Arabia and
Phœnicia, but still in a low and barbarous condition: her buildings
were wooden and she lacked, as far as we know, stone-architecture
—the main test of social development. But the Bactrian Kingdom
gave an impulse to her civilisation and the result was classical
opposed to vedic Sanskrit. From Persia Greek letters, extending
southwards to Arabia, would find indigenous imitators and there
Æsop would be represented by the sundry sages who share the
name Lokman.[234] One of these was of servile condition, tailor,
carpenter or shepherd; and a “Habashi” (Æthiopian) meaning a
negro slave with blubber lips and splay feet, so far showing a
superficial likeness to the Æsop of history.
The Æsopic fable, carried by the Hellenes to India, might have fallen
in with some rude and fantastic barbarian of Buddhistic “persuasion”
and indigenous origin: so Reynard the Fox has its analogue amongst
the Kafirs and the Vái tribe of Mandengan negroes in Liberia[235]
amongst whom one Doalu invented or rather borrowed a
syllabarium. The modern Gypsies are said also to have beast-fables
which have never been traced to a foreign source (Leland). But I
cannot accept the refinement of difference which Professor Benfey,
followed by Mr. Keith-Falconer, discovers between the Æsopic and
the Hindu apologue:—“In the former animals are allowed to act as
animals: the latter makes them act as men in the form of animals.”
The essence of the beast-fable is a reminiscence of Homo
primigenius with erected ears and hairy hide, and its expression is to
make the brother brute behave, think and talk like him with the
superadded experience of ages. To early man the “lower animals,”
which are born, live and die like himself, showing all the same
affects and disaffects, loves and hates, passions, prepossessions and
prejudices, must have seemed quite human enough and on an equal
level to become his substitutes. The savage, when he began to
reflect, would regard the carnivore and the serpent with awe,
wonder and dread; and would soon suspect the same mysterious
potency in the brute as in himself: so the Malays still look upon the
Uran-utan, or Wood-man, as the possessor of superhuman wisdom.
The hunter and the herdsman, who had few other companions,
would presently explain the peculiar relations of animals to
themselves by material metamorphosis, the bodily transformation of
man to brute giving increased powers of working him weal and woe.
A more advanced stage would find the step easy to metempsychosis,
the beast containing the Ego (alias soul) of the human: such
instinctive belief explains much in Hindu literature, but it was not
wanted at first by the Apologue.
This blending of blood, this racial baptism would produce a fine
robust progeny; and, after our second century, Ægypto-Græco-
Indian stories overran the civilized globe between Rome and China.
Tales have wings and fly farther than the jade hatchets of proto-
historic days. And the result was a book which has had more readers
than any other except the Bible. Its original is unknown.[236] The
volume, which in Pehlevi became the Jávidán Khirad (“Wisdom of
Ages”) or the Testament of Hoshang, that ancient guebre King, and
in Sanskrit the Panchatantra (“Five Chapters”), is a recueil of
apologues and anecdotes related by the learned Brahman, Vishnu
Sharmá, for the benefit of his pupils the sons of an Indian Rajah.
The Hindu original has been adapted and translated into a number
of languages; Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac, Greek and Latin, Persian
and Turkish, under a host of names.[237] Voltaire[238] wisely remarks
of this venerable production:—Quand on fait réflexion que presque
toute la terre a été enfatuée de pareils contes, et qu’ils ont fait
l’éducation du genre humain, on trouve les fables de Pilpay, de
Lokman,[239] d’Ésope, bien raisonables. But methinks the sage of
Ferney might have said far more. These fables speak with the large
utterance of early man; they have also their own especial beauty—
the charms of well-preserved and time-honoured old age. There is in
their wisdom a perfume of the past, homely and ancient-fashioned
like a whiff of pot pourri, wondrous soothing withal to olfactories
agitated by the patchoulis and jockey clubs of modern pretenders
and petit-maîtres, with their grey young heads and pert intelligence,
the motto of whose ignorance is “Connu!” Were a dose of its
antique, mature experience adhibited to the Western before he visits
the East, those few who could digest it might escape the normal lot
of being twisted round the fingers of every rogue they meet from
Dragoman to Rajah. And a quotation from them tells at once: it
shows the quoter to be a man of education, not a “Jangalí,” a sylvan
or savage, as the Anglo-Indian official is habitually termed by his
more civilised “fellow-subject.”
The main difference between the classical apologue and the fable in
The Nights is that while Æsop and Gabrias write laconic tales with a
single event and a simple moral, the Arabian fables are often “long-
continued novelle involving a variety of events, each characterised
by some social or political aspect, forming a narrative highly
interesting in itself, often exhibiting the most exquisite moral, and
yet preserving, with rare ingenuity, the peculiar characteristics of the
actors.”[240] And the distinction between the ancient and the
mediæval apologue, including the modern which, since “Reineke
Fuchs,” is mainly German, appears equally pronounced. The latter is
humorous enough and rich in the wit which results from superficial
incongruity; but it ignores the deep underlying bond which connects
man with beast. Again, the main secret of its success is the strain of
pungent satire, especially in the Renardine Cycle, which the people
could apply to all unpopular “lordes and prelates, gostly and worldly.”
Our Recueil contains two distinct sets of apologues.[241] The first (vol.
iii.) consists of eleven, alternating with five anecdotes (Nights cxlvi.-
cliii.), following the lengthy and knightly romance of King Omar bin
al Nu’man and followed by the melancholy love tale of Ali bin Bakkár.
The second series in vol. ix., consisting of eight fables, not including
ten anecdotes (Nights cmi.-cmxxiv.), is injected into the romance of
King Jali’ad and Shimas mentioned by Al-Mas’udi as independent of
The Nights. In both places the Beast-fables are introduced with
some art and add variety to the subject-matter, obviating monotony
—the deadly sin of such works—and giving repose to the hearer or
reader after a climax of excitement such as the murder of the
Wazirs. And even these are not allowed to pall upon the mental
palate, being mingled with anecdotes and short tales, such as the
Hermits (iii. 125), with biographical or literary episodes, acroamata,
table-talk and analects where humorous Rabelaisian anecdote finds
a place; in fact the fabliau or novella. This style of composition may
be as ancient as the apologues. We know that it dates as far back as
Rameses III., from the history of the Two Brothers in the Orbigny
papyrus,[242] the prototype of Yusuf and Zulaykha, the Koranic
Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. It is told with a charming naïveté and
such sharp touches of local colour as, “Come, let us make merry an
hour and lie together! Let down thy hair!”
Some of the apologues in The Nights are pointless enough, rien
moins qu’amusants; but in the best specimens, such as the Wolf and
the Fox[243] (the wicked man and the wily man), both characters are
carefully kept distinct and neither action nor dialogue ever flags.
Again The Flea and the Mouse (iii. 151), of a type familiar to
students of the Pilpay cycle, must strike the home-reader as
peculiarly quaint.
Next in date to the Apologue comes the Fairy Tale proper, where the
natural universe is supplemented by one of purely imaginative
existence. “As the active world is inferior to the rational soul,” says
Bacon with his normal sound sense, “so Fiction gives to Mankind
what History denies and in some measure satisfies the Mind with
Shadows when it cannot enjoy the Substance. And as real History
gives us not the success of things according to the deserts of vice
and virtue, Fiction corrects it and presents us with the fates and
fortunes of persons rewarded and punished according to merit.” But
I would say still more. History paints or attempts to paint life as it is,
a mighty maze with or without a plan: Fiction shows or would show
us life as it should be, wisely ordered and laid down on fixed lines.
Thus Fiction is not the mere handmaid of History: she has a
household of her own and she claims to be the triumph of Art which,
as Goëthe remarked, is “Art because it is not Nature.” Fancy, la folle
du logis, is “that kind and gentle portress who holds the gate of
Hope wide open, in opposition to Reason, the surly and scrupulous
guard.”[244] As Palmerin of England says and says well, “For that the
report of noble deeds doth urge the courageous mind to equal those
who bear most commendation of their approved valiancy; this is the
fair fruit of Imagination and of ancient histories.” And, last but not
least, the faculty of Fancy takes count of the cravings of man’s
nature for the marvellous, the impossible, and of his higher
aspirations for the Ideal, the Perfect: she realises the wild dreams
and visions of his generous youth and portrays for him a portion of
that “other and better world,” with whose expectation he would
console his age.
The imaginative varnish of The Nights serves admirably as a foil to
the absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being
carried away from trivial and common-place characters, scenes and
incidents; from the matter of fact surroundings of a work-a-day
world, a life of eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting
and loving, into a society and a mise-en-scène which we suspect can
exist and which we know does not. Every man at some turn or term
of his life has longed for supernatural powers and a glimpse of
Wonderland. Here he is in the midst of it. Here he sees mighty spirits
summoned to work the human mite’s will, however whimsical, who
can transport him in an eye-twinkling whithersoever he wishes; who
can ruin cities and build palaces of gold and silver, gems and
jacinths; who can serve up delicate viands and delicious drinks in
priceless chargers and impossible cups and bring the choicest fruits
from farthest Orient: here he finds magas and magicians who can
make kings of his friends, slay armies of his foes and bring any
number of beloveds to his arms. And from this outraging probability
and outstripping possibility arises not a little of that strange
fascination exercised for nearly two centuries upon the life and
literature of Europe by The Nights, even in their mutilated and
garbled form. The reader surrenders himself to the spell, feeling
almost inclined to enquire “And why may it not be true?”[245] His
brain is dazed and dazzled by the splendours which flash before it,
by the sudden procession of Jinns and Jinniyahs, demons and fairies,
some hideous, others preternaturally beautiful; by good wizards and
evil sorcerers, whose powers are unlimited for weal and for woe; by
mermen and mermaids, flying horses, talking animals, and reasoning
elephants; by magic rings and their slaves and by talismanic couches
which rival the carpet of Solomon. Hence, as one remarks, these
Fairy Tales have pleased and still continue to please almost all ages,
all ranks and all different capacities.
Dr. Hawkesworth[246] observes that these Fairy Tales find favour
“because even their machinery, wild and wonderful as it is, has its
laws; and the magicians and enchanters perform nothing but what
was naturally to be expected from such beings, after we had once
granted them existence.” Mr. Heron “rather supposes the very
contrary is the truth of the fact. It is surely the strangeness, the
unknown nature, the anomalous character of the supernatural
agents here employed, that makes them to operate so powerfully on
our hopes, fears, curiosities, sympathies, and, in short, on all the
feelings of our hearts. We see men and women, who possess
qualities to recommend them to our favour, subjected to the
influence of beings, whose good or ill will, power or weakness,
attention or neglect, are regulated by motives and circumstances
which we cannot comprehend: and hence, we naturally tremble for
their fate, with the same anxious concern, as we should for a friend
wandering, in a dark night, amidst torrents and precipices; or
preparing to land on a strange island, while he knew not whether he
should be received, on the shore, by cannibals waiting to tear him
piecemeal, and devour him, or by gentle beings, disposed to cherish
him with fond hospitality.” Both writers have expressed themselves
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