The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume X Part 3

Preliminary

The reader who has reached this terminal stage will hardly require my a.s.surance that he has seen the mediaeval Arab at his best and, perhaps, at his worst. In glancing over the myriad pictures of this panorama, those who can discern the soul of goodness in things evil will note the true n.o.bility of the Moslem's mind in the Moyen Age, and the cleanliness of his life from cradle to grave. As a child he is devoted to his parents, fond of his comrades and respectful to his "pastors and masters," even schoolmasters. As a lad he prepares for manhood with a will and this training occupies him throughout youthtide: he is a gentleman in manners without awkwardness, vulgar astonishment or mauvaise-honte. As a man he is high-spirited and energetic, always ready to fight for his Sultan, his country and, especially, his Faith: courteous and affable, rarely failing in temperance of mind and self-respect, self-control and self-command: hospitable to the stranger, attached to his fellow citizens, submissive to superiors and kindly to inferiors--if such cla.s.ses exist: Eastern despotisms have arrived nearer the idea of equality and fraternity than any republic yet invented. As a friend he proves a model to the Damons and Pythiases: as a lover an exemplar to Don Quijote without the n.o.ble old Caballero's touch of eccentricity. As a knight he is the mirror of chivalry, doing battle for the weak and debelling the strong, while ever "defending the honour of women." As a husband his patriarchal position causes him to be loved and fondly loved by more than one wife: as a father affection for his children rules his life: he is domestic in the highest degree and he finds few pleasures beyond the bosom of his family. Lastly, his death is simple, pathetic end edifying as the life which led to it.

Considered in a higher phase, the mediaeval Moslem mind displays, like the ancient Egyptian, a most exalted moral idea, the deepest reverence for all things connected with his religion and a sublime conception of the Unity and Omnipotence of the Deity. Noteworthy too is a proud resignation to the decrees of Fate and Fortune (Kaza wa Kadar), of Destiny and Predestination--a feature which enn.o.bles the low aspect of Al-Islam even in these her days of comparative degeneration and local decay. Hence his moderation in prosperity, his fort.i.tude in adversity, his dignity, his perfect self-dominance and, lastly, his lofty quietism which sounds the true heroic ring.

This again is softened and tempered by a simple faith in the supremacy of Love over Fear, an unbounded humanity and charity for the poor and helpless: an unconditional forgiveness of the direst injuries ("which is the note of the n.o.ble"); a generosity and liberality which at times seem impossible and an enthusiasm for universal benevolence and beneficence which, exalting kindly deeds done to man above every form of holiness, const.i.tute the root and base of Oriental, nay, of all, courtesy. And the whole is crowned by pure trust and natural confidence in the progress and perfectability of human nature, which he exalts instead of degrading; this he holds to be the foundation stone of society and indeed the very purpose of its existence. His Pessimism resembles far more the optimism which the so-called Books of Moses borrowed from the Ancient Copt than the mournful and melancholy creed of the true Pessimist, as Solomon the Hebrew, the Indian Buddhist and the esoteric European imitators of Buddhism. He cannot but sigh when contemplating the sin and sorrow, the pathos and bathos of the world; and feel the pity of it, with its shifts and changes ending in nothingness, its scanty happiness and its copious misery. But his melancholy is expressed in--

"A voice divinely sweet, a voice no less Divinely sad."

Nor does he mourn as they mourn who have no hope: he has an absolute conviction in future compensation; and, meanwhile, his lively poetic impulse, the poetry of ideas, not of formal verse, and his radiant innate idealism breathe a soul into the merest matter of squalid work-a-day life and awaken the sweetest harmonies of Nature epitomised in Humanity.

Such was the Moslem at a time when "the dark clouds of ignorance and superst.i.tion hung so thick on the intellectual horizon of Europe as to exclude every ray of learning that darted from the East and when all that was polite or elegant in literature was cla.s.sed among the Studia Arab.u.m"[FN#126]

Nor is the shady side of the picture less notable. Our Arab at his worst is a mere barbarian who has not forgotten the savage. He is a model mixture of childishness and astuteness, of simplicity and cunning, concealing levity of mind under solemnity of aspect. His stolid instinctive conservatism grovels before the tyrant rule of routine, despite that turbulent and licentious independence which ever suggests revolt against the ruler: his mental torpidity, founded upon physical indolence, renders immediate action and all manner of exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance. His cra.s.s and self- satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ign.o.ble superst.i.tions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed beyond the pale of Al-Islam.

It must be confessed that these contrasts make a curious and interesting tout ensemble.

-- I THE ORIGIN OF THE NIGHTS.

A.--The Birth place.

Here occur the questions, Where and When was written and to Whom do we owe a prose-poem which, like the dramatic epos of Herodotus, has no equal?

I proceed to lay before the reader a proces-verbal of the sundry pleadings already in court as concisely as is compatible with intelligibility, furnishing him with references to original authorities and warning him that a fully-detailed account would fill a volume. Even my own reasons for decidedly taking one side and rejecting the other must be stated briefly. And before entering upon this subject I would distribute the prose-matter of our Recueil of Folk-lore under three heads

1. The Apologue or Beast-fable proper, a theme which may be of any age, as it is found in the hieroglyphs and in the cuneiforms.

2. The Fairy-tale, as for brevity we may term the stories based upon supernatural agency: this was a favourite with olden Persia; and Mohammed, most austere and puritanical of the "Prophets,"

strongly objected to it because preferred by the more sensible of his converts to the dry legends of the Talmud and the Koran, quite as fabulous without the halo and glamour of fancy.

3. The Histories and historical anecdotes, a.n.a.lects, and acroamata, in which the names, when not used achronistically by the editor or copier, give unerring data for the earliest date a quo and which, by the mode of treatment, suggest the latest.

Each of these const.i.tuents will require further notice when the subject-matter of the book is discussed. The metrical portion of The Nights may also be divided into three categories, viz.:--

1. The oldest and cla.s.sical poetry of the Arabs, e.g. the various quotations from the "Suspended Poems."

2. The mediaeval, beginning with the laureates of Al-Rashid's court, such as Al-Asma'i and Abu Nowas, and ending with Al-Hariri A.H. 446-516 = 1030-1100.

3. The modern quotations and the pieces de circonstance by the editors or copyists of the Compilation.[FN#127]

Upon the metrical portion also further notices must be offered at the end of this Essay.

In considering the uncle derivatur of The Nights we must carefully separate subject-matter from language-manner. The neglect of such essential difference has caused the remark, "It is not a little curious that the origin of a work which has been known to Europe and has been studied by many during nearly two centuries, should still be so mysterious, and that students have failed in all attempts to detect the secret." Hence also the chief authorities at once branched off into two directions. One held the work to be practically Persian: the other as persistently declared it to be purely Arab.

Professor Galland, in his Epistle Dedicatory to the Marquise d'O, daughter of his patron M. de Guillerague, showed his literary ac.u.men and unfailing sagacity by deriving The Nights from India via Persia; and held that they had been reduced to their present shape by an Auteur Arabe inconnu. This reference to India, also learnedly advocated by M. Langles, was inevitable in those days: it had not then been proved that India owed all her literature to far older civilisations and even that her alphabet the Nagari, erroneously called Devanagari, was derived through Ph?nicia and Himyar-land from Ancient Egypt. So Europe was contented to compare The Nights with the Fables of Pilpay for upwards of a century. At last the Pehlevi or old Iranian origin of the work found an able and strenuous advocate in Baron von Hammer-Purgstall [FN#128] who worthily continued what Galland had begun: although a most inexact writer, he was extensively read in Oriental history and poetry. His contention was that the book is an Arabisation of the Persian Hazar Afsanah or Thousand Tales and he proved his point.

Von Hammer began by summoning into Court the "Herodotus of the Arabs, (Ali Abu al-Hasan) Al-Mas'udi who, in A.H. 333 (=944) about one generation before the founding of Cairo, published at Ba.s.sorah the first edition of his far-famed Muruj al-Dahab wa Ma'adin al- Jauhar, Meads of Gold and Mines of Gems. The Styrian Orientalist[FN#129] quotes with sundry misprints[FN#130] an ampler version of a pa.s.sage in Chapter lxviii., which is abbreviated in the French translation of M. C. Barbier de Meynard.[FN#131]

"And, indeed, many men well acquainted with their (Arab) histories[FN#132] opine that the stories above mentioned and other trifles were strung together by men who commended themselves to the Kings by relating them, and who found favour with their contemporaries by committing them to memory and by reciting them.

Of such fashion[FN#133] is the fashion of the books which have come down to us translated from the Persian (Farasiyah), the Indian (Hindiyah),[FN#134] and the Graeco-Roman (Rumiyah)[FN#135]: we have noted the judgment which should be pa.s.sed upon compositions of this nature. Such is the book ent.i.tuled Hazar Afsanah or The Thousand Tales, which word in Arabic signifies Khurafah (Faceti?): it is known to the public under the name of ?[he Boot of a Thousand Nights and a Night, (Kitab Alf Laylah wa Laylah).[FN#136] This is an history of a King and his Wazir, the minister's daughter and a slave-girl (jariyah) who are named Shirzad (lion-born) and Dinar- zad (ducat-born).[FN#137] Such also is the Tale of Farzah,[FN#138]

(alii Firza), and Simas, containing details concerning the Kings and Wazirs of Hind: the Book of Al-Sindibad[FN#139] and others of a similar stamp."

Von Hammer adds, quoting chaps. cxvi. of Al-Mas'udi that Al-Mansur (second Abbaside A.H. 136-158 = 754-775, and grandfather of Al- Rashid) caused many translations of Greek and Latin, Syriac and Persian (Pehlevi) works to be made into Arabic, specifying the "Kalilah wa d.a.m.nah,"[FN#140] the Fables of Bidpai (Pilpay), the Logic of Aristotle, the Geography of Ptolemy and the Elements of Euclid. Hence he concludes "L'original des Mille et une Nuits * *

* selon toute vraisemblance, a ete traduit au temps du Khalife Mansur, c'est-a-dire trente ans avant le regne du Khalife Haroun al-Raschid, qui, par la suite, devait lui-meme jouer un si grand role dans ces histoires." He also notes that, about a century after Al-Mas'udi had mentioned the Hazar Afsanah, it was versified and probably remodelled by one "Rasti," the Takhallus or nom de plume of a bard at the Court of Mahmud, the Ghaznevite Sultan who, after a reign of thirty-three years, ob. A.D. 1030.[FN#141]

Von Hammer some twelve years afterwards (Journ. Asiat August, 1839) brought forward, in his "Note sur l'origine Persane des Mille et une Nuits," a second and an even more important witness: this was the famous Kitab al-Fihrist,[FN#142] or Index List of (Arabic) works, written (in A.H. 387 = 987) by Mohammed bin Is'hak al-Nadim (cup-companion or equerry), "popularly known as Ebou Yacoub el- Werrek."[FN#143] The following is an extract (p. 304) from the Eighth Discourse which consists of three arts (funun).[FN#144] "The first section on the history of the confabulatores nocturni (tellers of night tales) and the relaters of fanciful adventures, together with the names of books treating upon such subjects.

Mohammed ibn Is'hak saith: The first who indited themes of imagination and made books of them, consigning these works to the libraries, and who ordered some of them as though related by the tongues of brute beasts, were the palaeo-Persians (and the Kings of the First Dynasty). The Ashkanian Kings of the Third Dynasty appended others to them and they were augmented and amplified in the days of the Sa.s.sanides (the fourth and last royal house). The Arabs also translated them into Arabic, and the loquent and eloquent polished and embellished them and wrote others resembling them. The first work of such kind was ent.i.tuled ?The Book of Hazar Afsan,' signifying Alf Khurafah, the argument whereof was as follows. A King of their Kings was wont, when he wedded a woman and had lain one night with her, to slay her on the next morning.

Presently he espoused a damsel of the daughters of the Kings, Shahrazad[FN#145] hight, one endowed with intellect and erudition and, whenas she lay with him, she fell to telling him tales of fancy; moreover she used to connect the story at the end of the night with that which might induce the King to preserve her alive and to ask her of its ending on the next night until a thousand nights had pa.s.sed over her. Meanwhile he cohabited with her till she was blest by boon of child of him, when she acquainted him with the device she had wrought upon him; wherefore he admired her intelligence and inclined to her and preserved her life. That King had also a Kahramanah (nurse and duenna, not entremetteuse), hight Dinarzad (Dunyazad?), who aided the wife in this (artifice). It is also said that this book was composed for (or, by) Humai daughter of Bahman[FN#146] and in it were included other matters. Mohammed bin Is'hak adds: --And the truth is, Inshallah,[FN#147] that the first who solaced himself with hearing night-tales was Al-Iskandar (he of Macedon) and he had a number of men who used to relate to him imaginary stories and provoke him to laughter: he, however, designed not therein merely to please himself, but that he might thereby become the more cautious and alert. After him the Kings in like fashion made use of the book ent.i.tled ?Hazar Afsan.' It containeth a thousand nights, but less than two hundred night- stories, for a single history often occupied several nights. I have seen it complete sundry times; and it is, in truth, a corrupted book of cold tales."[FN#148]

A writer in The Athen?um,[FN#149] objecting to Lane's modern date for The Nights, adduces evidence to prove the greater antiquity of the work. (Abu al-Hasan) Ibn Sa'id (bin Musa al-Gharnati = of Granada) born in A.H. 615 = 1218 and ob. Tunis A.H. 685 = 1286, left his native city and arrived at Cairo in A.H. 639 = 1241. This Spanish poet and historian wrote Al-Muhalla bi al-Ash'ar (The Adorned with Verses), a Topography of Egypt and Africa, which is apparently now lost. In this he quotes from Al-Kurtubi, the Cordovan;[FN#150] and he in his turn is quoted by the Arab historian of Spain, Abu al-Abbas Ahmad bin Mohammed al Makkari, in the "Windwafts of Perfume from the Branches of Andalusia the Blooming"[FN#151] (A.D. 1628-29). Mr. Payne (x. 301) thus translates from Dr. Dozy's published text.

"Ibn Said (may G.o.d have mercy upon him!) sets forth in his book, El Muh.e.l.la bi-s-Shaar, quoting from El Curtubi the story of the building of the Houdej in the Garden of Cairo, the which was of the magnificent pleasaunces of the Fatimite Khalifs, the rare of ordinance and surpa.s.sing, to wit that the Khalif El Aamir bi-ahkam- illah[FN#152] let build it for a Bedouin woman, the love of whom had gotten the mastery of him, in the neighbourhood of the ?Chosen Garden'[FN#153] and used to resort often thereto and was slain as he went thither; and it ceased not to be a pleasuring-place for the Khalifs after him. The folk abound in stories of the Bedouin girl and Ibn Meyyah[FN#154] of the sons of her uncle (cousin?) and what hangs thereby of the mention of El-Aamir, so that the tales told of them on this account became like unto the story of El Bettal[FN#155] and the Thousand Nights and a Night and what resembleth them."

The same pa.s.sage from Ibn Sa'id, corresponding in three MSS., occurs in the famous Khitat[FN#156] attributed to Al-Makrizi (ob.

A.D. 1444) and was thus translated from a MS. in the British Museum by Mr. John Payne (ix. 303)

"The Khalif El-Aamir bi-ahkam-illah set apart, in the neighbourhood of the Chosen Garden, a place for his beloved the Bedouin maid (Aaliyah)[FN#157] which he named El Houdej. Quoth Ibn Said, in the book El-Muh.e.l.la bi-l-ashar, from the History of El Curtubi, concerning the traditions of the folk of the story of the Bedouin maid and Ibn Menah (Meyyah) of the sons of her uncle and what hangs thereby of the mention of the Khalif El Aamir bi-ahkam-illah, so that their traditions (or tales) upon the garden became like unto El Bettal[FN#158] and the Thousand Nights and what resembleth them."

This evidently means either that The Nights existed in the days of Al-'amir (xiith cent.) or that the author compared them with a work popular in his own age. Mr. Payne attaches much importance to the discrepancy of t.i.tles, which appears to me a minor detail. The change of names is easily explained. Amongst the Arabs, as amongst the wild Irish, there is divinity (the proverb says luck) in odd numbers and consequently the others are inauspicious. Hence as Sir Wm. Ouseley says (Travels ii. 21), the number Thousand and One is a favourite in the East (Olivier, Voyages vi. 385, Paris 1807), and quotes the Cistern of the "Thousand and One Columns" at Constantinople. Kaempfer (Am?n, Exot. p. 38) notes of the Takiyahs or Dervishes' convents and the Mazars or Santons' tombs near Koniah (Iconium), "Multa seges sepulchralium quae virorum ex omni aevo doctissimorum exuvias condunt, mille et unum recenset auctor Libri qui inscribitur Ha.s.saaer we jek mesaar (Hazar ve yek Mezar), i.e., mille et unum mausolea." A book, The Hazar o yek Ruz ( = 1001 Days), was composed in the mid-xviith century by the famous Dervaysh Mukhlis, Chief Sofi of Isfahan: it was translated into French by Petis de la Croix, with a preface by Cazotte, and was englished by Ambrose Phillips. Lastly, in India and throughout Asia where Indian influence extends, the number of cyphers not followed by a significant number is indefinite: for instance, to determine hundreds the Hindus affix the required figure to the end and for 100 write 101; for 1000, 1001. But the grand fact of the Hazar Afsanah is its being the archetype of The Nights, unquestionably proving that the Arab work borrows from the Persian bodily its cadre or frame-work, the princ.i.p.al characteristic; its exordium and its denouement, whilst the two heroines still bear the old Persic names.

Baron Silvestre de Sacy[FN#159]--clarum et venerabile nomen--is the chief authority for the Arab provenance of The Nights. Apparently founding his observations upon Galland,[FN#160] he is of opinion that the work, as now known, was originally composed in Syria[FN#161] and written in the vulgar dialect; that it was never completed by the author, whether he was prevented by death or by other cause; and that imitators endeavoured to finish the work by inserting romances which were already known but which formed no part of the original recueil, such as the Travels of Sindbad the Seaman, the Book of the Seven Wazirs and others. He accepts the Persian scheme and cadre of the work, but no more. He contends that no considerable body of prae-Mohammedan or non-Arabic fiction appears in the actual texts[FN#162]; and that all the tales, even those dealing with events localised in Persia, India, China and other infidel lands and dated from ante-islamitic ages mostly with the navest anachronism, confine themselves to depicting the people, manners and customs of Baghdad and Mosul, Damascus and Cairo, during the Abbaside epoch, and he makes a point of the whole being impregnated with the strongest and most zealous spirit of Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the popular or vulgar dialect, differing widely from the cla.s.sical and literary; that it contains many words in common modern use and that generally it suggests the decadence of Arabian literature. Of one tale he remarks:--The History of the loves of Camaralzaman and Budour, Princess of China, is no more Indian or Persian than the others.

The prince's father has Moslems for subjects, his mother is named Fatimah and when imprisoned he solaces himself with reading the Koran. The Genii who interpose in these adventures are, again, those who had dealings with Solomon. In fine, all that we here find of the City of the Magians, as well as of the fire-worshippers, suffices to show that one should not expect to discover in it anything save the production of a Moslem writer.

All this, with due deference to so high an authority, is very superficial. Granted, which n.o.body denies, that the archetypal Hazar Afsanah was translated from Persic into Arabic nearly a thousand years ago, it had ample time and verge enough to a.s.sume another and a foreign dress, the corpus however remaining untouched. Under the hands of a host of editors, scribes and copyists, who have no scruples anent changing words, names and dates, abridging descriptions and attaching their own decorations, the florid and rhetorical Persian would readily be converted into the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic. And what easier than to islamise the old Zoroasterism, to transform Ahriman into Iblis the Shaytan, Jan bin Jan into Father Adam, and the Divs and Peris of Kayomars and the olden Guebre Kings into the Jinns and Jinniyahs of Sulayman? Volumes are spoken by the fact that the Arab adapter did not venture to change the Persic names of the two heroines and of the royal brothers or to transfer the mise- en-scene any whither from Khorasan or outer Persia. Where the story has not been too much worked by the literato's pen, for instance the "Ten Wazirs" (in the Bresl. Edit. vi. I9I-343) which is the Guebre Bakhtiyar-namah, the names and incidents are old Iranian and with few exceptions distinctly Persian. And at times we can detect the process of transition, e.g. when the Mazin of Khorasan[FN#163]

of the Wortley Montagu MS. becomes the Hasan of Ba.s.sorah of the Turner Macan MS. (Mac. Edit.).

Evidently the learned Baron had not studied such works as the Tota- kahani or Parrot-chat which, notably translated by Nakhshabi from the Sanskrit Suka-Saptati,[FN#164] has now become as orthodoxically Moslem as The Nights. The old Hindu Rajah becomes Ahmad Sultan of Balkh, the Prince is Maymun and his wife Khujisteh. Another instance of such radical change is the later Syriac version of Kaliliah wa Dimnah,[FN#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 mediaeval 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 p.r.o.nounces The Nights to be of purely "Arab," that is, of Nilotic origin, his opinion is ent.i.tled to no more deference than his deriving the sub-African and negroid Fellah from Arabia, the land per excellentiam of pure and n.o.ble 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."[FN#166]

B.--The Date.