One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  “Non est sanctior quod laudaris:

  Non est vilior si vituperaris.”

  “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.

  My reply to the arch-impostor, who

  Spreads the light wings of saffron and of blue,

  will perforce be somewhat detailed: it is necessary to answer paragraph by paragraph, and the greater part of the thirty-three pages refers more or less directly to myself. To begin with the beginning, it caused me and many others some surprise to see the “Thousand Nights and a Night” expelled the initial list of thirteen items, as if it were held unfit for mention. Cet article est principalement une diatribe contre l’ouorage de Sir Richard Burton et dans le libre cet ouvrage n’est même pas mentionné’, writes my French friend. This proceeding was a fair specimen of “that impartiality which every reviewer is supposed to possess.” But the ignoble “little dodge” presently suggested itself. The preliminary excursus (p.168) concerning the “Mille et Une Nuits (read Nuit) an audacious fraud, though not
the less the best story book in the world,” affords us a useful measure of the writer’s competence in the matter of audacity and ill-judgment. The honest and single-minded Galland is here (let us believe through that pure ignorance which haply may hope for “fool’s pardon”) grossly and unjustly vilified; and, by way of making bad worse, we are assured () that the Frenchman “brought the Arabic manuscript from Syria” — an infact which is surprising to the most superficial student. “Galland was a born story teller, in the good and the bad sense” (), is a silly sneer of the true Lane-Poolean type. The critic then compares most unadvisedly () a passage in Galland (De Sacy edit. vol. i. 414) with the same in Mr. Payne’s (i. 260) by way of proving the “extraordinary liberties which the worthy Frenchman permitted himself to take with the Arabic”: had he troubled himself to collate my version (i. 290-291), which is made fuller by the Breslau Edit. (ii. 190), he would have found that the Frenchman, as was his wont, abridged rather than amplified;448 although, when the original permitted exact translation, he could be literal enough. And what doubt, may I enquire, can we have concerning “The Sleeper Awakened” (Lane, ii. 351-376), or, as I call it, “The Sleeper and the waker” (Suppl. vol.i.1-29), when it occurs in a host of MSS., not to mention the collection of tales which Prof. Habicht converted into the Arabian Nights by breaking the text into a thousand and one sections (Bresl. Edit. iv. 134-189, Nights cclxxii. ccxci.). The reckless assertions that “the whole” of the last fourteen (Gallandian) tales have nothing whatever to do with “The Nights” (); and that of the histories of Zayn al-Asnám and Aladdin, “it is abundantly certain that they belong to no manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights” (), have been notably stultified by M. Hermann Zotenberg’s purchase of two volumes containing both these bones of long and vain contention. See Foreword to my Suppl. vol. iii. pp. viii.-xi., and Mr. W. F. Kirby’s interesting notice of M. Zotenberg’s epoch-making booklet (vol. vi. ).

  “The first English edition was published (pace Lowndes) within eight years of Galland’s” () states a mere error. The second part of Galland (6 vols. 12 mo) was not issued till 1717, or two years after the translator’s death. Of the English editio princeps the critic tells nothing, nor indeed has anyone as yet been able to tell us aught. Of the dishonouring assertion (again let us hope made in simple ignorance) concerning “Cazotte’s barefaced forgery” (), thus slandering the memory of Jacques Cazotte, one of the most upright and virtuous of men who ever graced the ranks of literature, I have disposed in the Foreword to my Supplemental vol. vi. “This edition (Scott’s) was tastefully reprinted by Messrs. Nimmo and Bain in four volumes in 1883” (). But why is the reader not warned that the eaux fortes are by Lalauze (see suprà, ), 19 in number, and taken from the 21 illustrations in MM. Jouaust’s edit. of Galland with preface by J. Janin? Why also did the critic not inform us that Scott’s sixth volume, the only original part of the work, was wilfully omitted? This paragraph ends with mentioning the labours of Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, concerning whom we are afterwards told () for the first time that he “was brilliant and laborious.” Hard-working, yes! brilliant, by no means!

  We now come to the glorification of the “Uncle and Master,” concerning whom I can only say that Lane’s bitterest enemy (if the amiable Orientalist ever had any unfriend) could not have done him more discredit than this foolish friend. “His classical(!) translation was at once recognised as an altogether new departure” (), and “it was written in such a manner that the Oriental tone of The Nights should be reflected in the English” (ibid.). “It aims at reproducing in some degree the literary flavour of the original” (p 173). “The style of Lane’s translation is an old-fashioned somewhat Biblical language” () and “it is precisely this antiquated ring” (of the imperfect and mutilated “Boulak edition,” unwisely preferred by the translator) “that Lane has succeeded in preserving” “The measured and finished language Lane chose for his version is eminently fitted to represent the rhythmical tongue of the Arab” (Memoir, p. xxvii.). “The translation itself is distinguished by its singular accuracy and by the marvellous way in which the Oriental tone and colour are retained “ (ibid.). The writer has taken scant trouble to read me when he asserts that the Bulak edit was my text, and I may refer him, for his own advantage, to my Foreword (vol. i. p. xvii.), which he has wilfully ignored by stating unfact. I hasten to plead guilty before the charge of “really misunderstanding the design of Lane’s style” (). Much must be pardoned to the panegyrist, the encomiast; but the idea of mentioning in the same sentence with Biblical English, the noblest and most perfect specimen of our prose, the stiff and bald, the vapid and turgid manner of the Orientalist who “commences” and “concludes” — never begins and ends, who never uses a short word if he can find a long word, who systematically rejects terse and idiomatic Anglo-Saxon when a Latinism is to be employed and whose pompous stilted periods are the very triumph of the “Deadly-lively”! By arts precisely similar the learned George Sale made the Koran, that pure and unstudied inspiration of Arabian eloquence, dull as a law document, and left the field clear for the Rev. Mr. Rodwell. I attempted to excuse the style-laches of Lane by noticing the lack of study in English linguistic which distinguished the latter part of the xviiith and the first half of the xixth centuries, when men disdaining the grammar of their own tongue, learned it from Latin and Greek; when not a few styled Shakespeare “silly-billy,” and when Lamb the essayist, wrote, “I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness.” But the reviewer will have none of my palliative process, he is surprised at my “posing as a judge of prose style,” being “acquainted with my quaint perversions of the English language” () and, when combating my sweeping assertion that “our prose” (especially the prose of schoolmasters and professors, of savans and Orientalists) “was perhaps the worst in Europe,” he triumphantly quotes half a dozen great exceptions whose eminence goes far to prove the rule.

  As regards Lane’s unjustifiable excisions the candid writer tells us everything but the truth. As I have before noted (vol. ix. 304), the main reason was simply that the publisher, who was by no means a business man, found the work outgrowing his limits and insisted upon its coming to an untimely and, alas! a tailless end. This is perhaps the principal cause for ignoring the longer histories, like King Omar bin al-Nu’umán (occupying 371 pages in my vols. ii. and iii.); Abú Hasan and his slave-girl Tawaddud (p, vol. v. 189-245), the Queen of the Serpents with the episodes of Bulukiyá and of Jánshah (pp.98, vol. v. 298-396); The Rogueries of Dalilah the Crafty and the Adventures of Mercury Ali (p, vol. vii. 144-209). The Tale of Harun al-Rashid and Abu Hasan of Oman (p, vol. ix. 188-207) is certainly not omitted by dictations of delicacy, nor is it true of the parts omitted in general that “none could be purified without being destroyed.” As my French friend remarks, “Few parts are so plain-spoken as the introduction, le cadre de l’ouvrage, yet M. Lane was not deterred by such situation.” And lastly we have, amongst the uncalledfor excisions, King Jali’ad of Hind, etc. (p, vol. ix. 32-134). The sum represents a grand total of 701 pages, while not a few of the notes are filled with unimportant fabliaux and apologues.

  But the critic has been grandly deceptive, either designedly or of ignorance prepense in his arithmetic. “There are over four hundred of these (anecdotes, fables, and stories) in the complete text, and Lane has not translated more than two hundred” (). * * * “Adding the omitted anecdotes to the omitted tales, it appears that Lane left out about a third of the whore ‘Nights,’ and of that third at least three-fourths was incompatible with a popular edition. When Mr. Payne and Captain Burton boast of presenting the public ‘with three times as much matter as any other version,’ they perhaps mean a third as much again” (). * * * “Captain Burton records his opinion that Lane has ‘omitted half and by far the more characteristic half of the Arabian Nights,’ but Captain Burton has a talent for exaggeration, and for ‘characteristic’ we should reed ‘unclear.’
It is natural that he should make the most of such omissions, since they form the raison d’être of his own translation; but he has widely overshot the mark, and the public may rest assured that the tales omitted from the standard version (proh pudor!) are of very slight importance in comparison with the tales included in it” ().

  What a mass of false statement!

  Let us now exchange fiction for fact. Lane’s three volumes contain a total, deducting 15 for index, of p (viz. 618 + 643 + 734); while each (full) page of text averages 38 lines and of notes (in smaller type) 48. The text with a number of illustrations represents a total of p (viz. 441 + 449 + 595). Mr. Payne’s nine volumes contain a sum of p, mostly without breaks, to the 1485 of the “Standard edition.” In my version the sum of pages, each numbering 41 lines, is 3156, or 1163 more than Lane’s total and 2671 more than his text.