The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume XVI Part 21

Hard upon these "revelations" came the Eliza Armstrong case whereby the editor of the "s.e.xual Gazette" stultified thoroughly and effectually his own a.s.sertions; and proved most satisfactorily, to the injury of his own person, that the easiest thing in the world is notably difficult and pa.s.sing dangerous. An accomplice, unable to procure a "maiden" for immoral purposes after boasting her ability as a procuress, proceeded to kidnap one for the especial benefit of righteous Mr. Stead. Consequently, he found himself in the dock together with five other accused, male and female; and the verdict, condemning the archplotter to three months and the a.s.sistants to lesser terms of imprisonment for abduction and indecent a.s.sault, was hailed with universal applause. The delinquent had the fanatical and unscrupulous support, with purse and influence, of the National Vigilance a.s.sociation, a troop of busybodies captained by licensed blackmailers who of late years have made England their unhappy hunting-ground.[FN#446] Despite, however, the "Stead Defence Fund" liberally supplied by Methody; despite the criminal's Pecksniffan tone, his self-glorification of the part he had taken, his effronte boast of pure and lofty motives and his pa.s.sionate enthusiasm for s.e.xual morality, the trial emphasised the fact that no individual may break the law of the land in order that good may come therefrom. It also proved most convincingly the utter baselessness of the sweeping indictment against the morality of England and especially of London--a charge which "undoubtedly had an enormous influence for harm at home and cruelly prejudiced the country abroad." In the words of Mr. Vaughan of the Bow Street Police Court (September 7, '85) the Pall Mall's "Sensational articles had certainly given unlimited pain and sorrow to many good people at home and had greatly lowered the English nation in the estimation of foreigners." In a sequel to the Eliza Armstrong case Mr. Justice Manisty, when summing up, severely condemned the "shocking exhibition that took place in the London streets by the publication of statements containing horrible details, and he trusted that those who were responsible for the administration of the law would take care that such outrage should not be permitted again." So pure and pious Mr. Stead found time for reflection during the secluded three-months life of a "first-cla.s.s misdemeanant" in "happy Holywell," and did not bring out his intended articles denouncing London as the head- quarters of a certain sin named from Sodom.

About mid-September, when Mr. Stead still lay in durance vile, a sub-editor Mr. Morley (Jun.) applied to me for an interview which I did not refuse. It was by no means satisfactory except to provide his paper with "copy." I found him labouring hard to place me "in the same box" with his martyred princ.i.p.al and to represent my volume ("a book of archaic delights") as a greater outrage on public decency than the two-penny pamphlet. This, as said the London Figaro (September 19, '85), is a "monstrous and absurd comparison." It became evident to me, during the first visit, that I was to play the part of Mr. Pickwick between two rival races of editors, the p.o.r.nologists and the anti- p.o.r.nologists, and, having no stomach for such sport, I declined the role. In reply to a question about critics my remark to the interviewer was, "I have taken much interest in what the cla.s.sics call Skiomachia and I shall allow Anonymus and Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also treat with scornful silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent prospect, a landscape adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art, can only see in a field corner here and there a little heap of muck. 'You must have been looking for it, Madam!' said, or is said to have said, st.u.r.dy old Doctor Samuel Johnson."

Moreover Mr. Morley's style of reporting "interviews" was somewhat too advanced and American--that is, too personal, too sensation-mongering and too nauseously familiar--to suit my taste, and I would have none other of them.

Hereupon being unable to make more copy out of the case the Pall Mall Gazette let loose at me a German Jew pennyliner, who signs himself Sigma. This pauvre diable delivered himself of two articles, "Pantagruelism or p.o.r.nography?"

(September 14, '85) and "The Ethics of the Dirt" (September 19, '85), wherein with matchless front of bra.s.s he talks of the "unsullied British breakfast-table," so pleasantly provided with pepper by his immaculate editor.

And since that time the Pall Mall Gazette has never ceased to practice at my expense its old trade, falsehood and calumny, and the right of private judgment, sentence and execution. In hopes that his splenetic and vindictive fiction might bear fruit, at one time the Pall Mall Gazette has "heard that the work was to be withdrawn from circulation" (when it never circulated).

Then, "it was resolved by the authorities to request Captain Burton not to issue the third volume and to prosecute him if he takes no notice of the invitation;" and, finally, "Government has at last determined to put down Captain Burton with a strong hand." All about as true as the political articles which the Pall Mall Gazette indites with such heroic contempt for truth, candour and honesty. One cannot but apply to the "Gutter Gazette" the words of the Rev. Edward Irving:--"I mean by the British Inquisition that court whose ministers and agents carry on their operations in secret; who drag every man's most private affairs before the sight of thousands and seek to mangle and destroy his life, trying him without a witness, condemning him without a hearing, nor suffering him to speak for himself, intermeddling in things of which they have no knowledge and cannot on any principle have a jurisdiction * * * I mean the ignorant, unprincipled, unhallowed spirit of criticism, which in this Protestant country is producing as foul effects against truth, and by as dishonest means as ever did the Inquisition of Rome"

(p. 5 "Preliminary Discourse to Ben Ezra," etc.).

Of course men were not wanting to answer the malevolent insipidities of the Pall Mall Gazette, and to note the difference between newspaper articles duly pamphleted and distributed to the disgust of all decency, and the translation of an Arabian limited in issue and intended only for the few select. Nor could they fail to observe that black balling The Nights and admitting the "revelations" was a desperate straining at the proverbial gnat and swallowing the camel. My readers will hardly thank me for dwelling upon this point yet I cannot refrain from quoting certain of the protests:--

Sir,

To the Editor of the "PALL MALL GAZETTE."

Your correspondent "Sigma" has forgotten the considerable number of "students"

who will buy Captain Burton's translation as the only literal one, needing it to help them in what has become necessary to many--a masterly knowledge of Egyptian Arabic. The so-called "Arabian Nights" are about the only written half-way house between the literary Arabic and the colloquial Arabic, both of which they need, and need introductions too. I venture to say that its largest use will be as a grown-up school-book and that it is not coa.r.s.er than the cla.s.sics in which we soak all our boys' minds at school.

ANGLO EGYPTIAN September 14th, 1885.

And the Freethinker's answer (Oct. 25, '85) to these repeated and malicious a.s.saults is as follows:--

Here is a fine ill.u.s.tration of Mr. Stead's Pecksniffian peculiarities. Captain Burton, a gentleman and a scholar whose boots Mr. Stead is not fit to black, is again hauled over the coals for the hundredth time about his new translation of the Arabian Nights, which is so "p.o.r.nographic" that the price of the first volume has actually risen from a pound to twenty-five shillings.

Further down, in the very same column, the P.M.G. gloats proudly over the fact that thirty-five shillings have been given for a single copy of its own twopennyworth of s.m.u.t.

The last characteristic touch which I shall take the trouble to notice is the following gem of September 16, '87:--

I was talking to an American novelist the other day, and he a.s.sured me that the Custom-house authorities on "the other side" seized all copies of Sir Richard Burton's "Nights" that came into their hands, and retained them as indecent publications. Burned them, I hope he meant, and so, I fear, will all holders of this notorious publication, for prices will advance, and Sir Richard will chuckle to think that indecency is a much better protection than international copyright.

Truly the pen is a two-edged tool, often turned by the fool against his own soul. So an honest author "chuckles" when his subscribers have lost their copies because this will enhance the value of his book! I ask, Can anything be better proven than the vileness of a man who is ever suspecting and looking for vileness in his fellow-men? Again, the a.s.sertion that the Custom-house authorities in the United States had seized my copies is a Pall-Mallian fiction pure and simple, and the "s.e.xual Gazette" must have known this fact right well. In consequence of a complaint lodged by the local Society for the Suppression of Vice, the officials of the Custom-house, New York, began by impounding the first volumes of the Villon Version; but presently, as a literary friend informs me (February 10, '88), "the new translations of The Nights have been fully permitted entry at the Custom-house and are delivered on the payment of 25% duty." To my copies admittance was never refused.

Mr. Stead left his prison-doors noisily declaring that the rest of his life should be "devoted to Christian chivalry"--whatever that majestic dictum may mean. As regards his subsequent journalistic career I can observe only that it has been unfortunate as inconsequent. He took up the defence, abusing the Home Secretary after foulest fashion of the card-blooded murderer Lipski, with the result that his protege was hanged after plenary confession and the Editor had not the manliness to apologise. He espoused the cause of free speech in Ireland with the result that most of the orators were doomed to the infirmaries connected with the local gaols. True to his principle made penal by the older and wiser law of libel, that is of applying individual and irresponsible judgment to, and pa.s.sing final and unappealable sentence upon, the conduct of private individuals and of public men, he raged and inveighed with all the fury of outraged (and interested) virtue against Colonel Hughes-Hallett with the consequence of seating that M.P. more firmly than before. He took up the question of free public meeting in England with the result that a number of deludeds (including Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P.) found their way to prison, which the "Christian chevalier" had apparently contracted to supply with inmates. But there is more to say concerning the vaunted morality of this immoral paper.--Eheu! quantum mutatus from the old decent days when, under Mr. Frederic Greenwood, it was indeed "written by gentlemen for gentlemen" (and ladies).

A journal which, like the Pall Mall Gazette, affects preferably and persistently s.e.xual subjects and themes rubric, works more active and permanent damage to public morals than books and papers which are frankly gross and indecent. The latter, so far as the world of letters knows them, are read either for their wit and underlying wisdom (e.g. Rabelais and Swift), for their historical significance (Petronius Arbiter) or for their anthropological interest as the Alf Laylah. But the public print which deals, however primly and decently, piously and unctuously, with s.e.xual and inter-s.e.xual relations, usually held to be of the Alekta or taboo'd subjects, is the real perverter of conduct, the polluter of mental purity, the corrupter-general of society.

Amongst savages and barbarians the comparatively unrestrained intercourse between men and women relieves the brain through the body; the mind and memory have scant reason, physical or mental, to dwell fondly upon visions amatory and venereal, to live in a "rustle of (imaginary) copulation." On the other hand the utterly artificial life of civilization, which debauches even the monkeys in "the Zoo," and which expands the period proper for the reproductory process from the vernal season into the whole twelvemonth, leaves to the many, whose lot is celibacy, no bodily want save one and that in a host of cases either unattainable or procurable only by difficulty and danger. Hence the prodigious amount of mental excitement and material impurity which is found wherever civilization extends, in maid, matron, and widow, save and except those solely who allay it by some counteragent --religion, pride, or physical frigidity. How many a woman in "Society," when stricken by insanity or puerperal fever, breaks out into language that would shame the slums and which makes the hearers marvel where she could have learned such vocabulary. How many an old maid held to be cold as virgin snow, how many a matron upon whose fairest fame not a breath of scandal has blown, how many a widow who proudly claims the t.i.tle univira, must relieve their pent-up feelings by what may be called mental prost.i.tution. So I would term the dear delights of s.e.xual converse and that sub-erotic literature, the phthisical "French novel," whose sole merit is "suggestiveness," taking the place of Oriental morosa voluptas and of the unnatural practices--Tribadism and so forth, still rare, we believe, in England. How many hypocrites of either s.e.x, who would turn away disgusted from the outspoken Tom Jones or the Sentimental Voyager, revel in and dwell fondly upon the sly romance or "study" of character whose profligacy is masked and therefore the more perilous. And a paper like the (modern) Pall Mall Gazette which deliberately pimps and panders to this latent sense and state of aphrodisiac excitement, is as much the more infamous than the loose book as hypocrisy is more hateful than vice and prevarication is more ign.o.ble than a lie. And when such vile system is professionally practiced under the disguise and in the holy names of Religion and Morality, the effect is loathsome as that spectacle sometimes seen in the East of a wrinkled old eunuch garbed in woman's nautchdress ogling with painted eyes and waving and wriggling like a young Bayadere.

There is much virtue in a nickname: at all events it shows the direction whither the aura popularis sets. The organ of Christian Chivalry is now universally known to Society as "The Gutter Gazette;" to the public as "The Purity-Severity Paper," and the "Organ of the Social Pruriency Society," and to its colleagues of the Press as "The Dirt Squirt." In the United States fulsomely to slander a man is "to Pall Mall Gazette him:" "Just like your Pall Mall Gazette," said an American to me when describing a disreputable print "over the water." And Mr. Stead, now self-const.i.tuted coryphaeus of the Reptile Press in Great Britain, has apparently still to learn that lying and slandering are neither Christian nor chivalrous.

The diminutive Echo of those days (October 13 and 14, '85) followed suit of the Pall Mall Gazette and caught lightly the sounds as they fell from the non-melliferous lips of the charmer who failed to charm wisely. The precious article begins by informing me that I am "always eager after the sensational,"

and that on this occasion I "cater for the prurient curiosity of the wealthy few," such being his synonym for "readiness to learn." And it ends with the following comical colophon:--"Captain Burton may possibly imitate himself(?) and challenge us(!) to mortal combat for this expression of opinion. If so, the writer of these lines will imitate himself(?) and take no notice of such an epistle." The poor scribe suggests the proverbial "Miss Baxter, who refused a man before he axed her." And what weapon could I use, composing-stick or dung-fork, upon an anonymous correspondent of the hawkers' and newsboys'

"Hecker," the favourite ha'porth of East London? So I left him to the tender mercies of Gaiety (October 14, '84):--

The Echo is just a bit wild, Its "par." is indeed a hard hitter: In fact, it has not drawn it mild 'Tis a matter of "Burton and bitter."

I rejoice to subjoin that the Echo has now (1888) made a name for decent and sensible writing, having abandoned the "blatant" department to the Star (see, for the nonsense about a non-existent Alderman Waterlow, its issue of September 6, '88).

In the opinions of the Press will be found a selection from half a century of laudatory notices to which the few curious touching such matters will turn, while those who misjudged my work are duly acknowledged in this paper. Amongst friends I would specify without invidious distinction, The Bat (September 29, '85), who on this occasion and sundry others st.u.r.dily defended me, showing himself a bird of "light and leading." To the St. James's Gazette (September 12, '85), the Whitehall Review (September 17), the Home News (September 18), and the Nottingham Journal (September 19), I am also indebted for most appreciative and intelligent notices. My cordial thanks are likewise due to the Editor and especially to "Our London Correspondent" of the Lincoln Gazette (October 10 and October 17, '85, not to notice sundry minor articles): the articles will be reprinted almost entire because they have expressed my meaning as though it came from my own mouth. I have quoted Mr. J. Addington Symonds in extenso: if England now possesses a writer who can deliver an authoritative judgment on literary style it is this litterateur. Of the journals which profess letters The Academy has ever been my friend and I have still the honour of corresponding with it: we are called "faddists" probably from our "fad" of signing our articles and thus enabling the criticised to criticise the critic.

I now turn to another of my unfriends, amongst whom is and long has been

The "Sat.u.r.day Review,"

This ancient dodderer, who has seen better days, deigned favour me with six notices (January 2 and March 27, '86; April 30, June 4, August 14, '87, and July 21, '88), of which No. i., dealing with my first and second volumes, is written after the facile American fashion, making the book review itself; that is, supply to the writer all the knowledge and familiarity with the subject which he parades before an incurious and easily gullible public. This especial form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the cla.s.sical English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the critic's noddle or note book.

The Saturnine article opens characteristically.

Abroad we English have the character of being the most prudish of nations; we are celebrated as having Bowdlerized for our babes and sucklings even the immortal William Shakespeare; but we shall infallibly lose this our character should the Kamashastra Society flourish. Captain Burton has long been known as a bold explorer; his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, disguised in the dress and taking on him the manners and customs of a True Believer, was a marvel of audacity; but perhaps he may be held now to have surpa.s.sed himself, for he has been bold enough to lay before his countrymen a literal and unexcised translation of The Arabian Nights.

The writer is kind enough to pat me upon the back for "picturesque and fluent English" and to confess that I have successfully imitated the rhyming cadence of the original. But The Sat.u.r.day would not be The Sat.u.r.day without carping criticism, wrong-headedness and the culte of the common-place, together with absolute and unworthy cruelty to weaker vessels. The reviewer denounces as "too conceited to be pa.s.sed over without comment" the good old English "whenas" (for when, vol. ii. 130), the common ballad-terms "a plump of spearmen" (ii. 190) and a "red cent" (i. 321), the only literal rendering of "Fals ahmar" which serves to show the ancient and n.o.ble pedigree of a slang term supposed to be modern and American. Moreover this Satan even condemns fiercely the sin of supplying him with "useful knowledge." The important note (ii. 45) upon the normal English misp.r.o.nunciation of the J in Jerusalem, Jesus, Jehovah, a corruption whose origin and history are unknown to so many, and which was, doubtless, a surprise to this Son of King "We," is d.a.m.ned as "uninteresting to the reader of the Arabian Nights." En revanche, three mistakes of mine ("p. 43" for "p. 45" in vol. ii., index; "King Zahr Shah" for "King Suleyman Shah," ii. 285, and the careless confusion of the Caliphs Al-Muntasir and Al- Mustansir, ii. 817, note i.) were corrected and I have duly acknowledged the correction. No. i. article ends with Saturnine geniality and utterly ignoring a bye-word touching dwellers in gla.s.s houses:--

Finally, we mark with regret that Captain Burton should find no more courteous terms to apply to the useful work of a painstaking clergyman than those where in his note he alludes to "Missionary Porter's miserable Handbook."

As Mr. Missionary Porter has never ceased to malign me, even in his last Edition of Murray's "miserable Handbook," a cento of Hibernian blunders and hashed Bible, I have every reason to lui rendre la pareille.

The second article (March 27, '86), treating of vol. iii., opens with one of those plagiaristic common-places, so dear to the soul of The Sat.u.r.day, in its staid and stale old age as in its sprightly youth. "There is particularly one commodity which all men, therein n.o.bly disregarding their differences of creed and country, are of a mind that it is better to give than to receive. That commodity is good advice. We note further that the liberality with which this is everywhere offered is only to be equalled (he means 'to be equalled only') by the n.i.g.g.ard reception at most times accorded to the munificent donation; in fact the very goodness of advice given apparently militates against its due appreciation in (by?) the recipient." The critic then proceeds to fit his ipse dixit upon my case. The sense of the sentiment is the reverse of new: we find in The Spectator (No. dxii.), "There is nothing we receive with so much reluctance as good advice," etc., but Mr. Spectator writes good English and his plagiarist does not. Nor is the dictum true. We authors who have studied a subject for years, are, I am convinced, ready enough to learn, but we justly object to sink our opinions and our judgment in those of a counsellor who has only "crammed" for his article. Moreover, we must be sure that he can fairly lay claim to the three requisites of an adviser--capacity to advise rightly, honesty to advise truly, and courtesy to advise decently. Now the Sat.u.r.day Review has neither this, that, nor the other qualification. Indeed his words read like subtle and lurking irony by the light of those phenomenal and portentous vagaries which ever and anon illuminate his opaque pages. What correctness can we expect from a journal whose tomahawk-man, when scalping the corpse of Matthew Arnold, deliberately applies the term "sonnet" to some thirty lines in heroic couplets? His confusion of Dr. Jenner, Vaccinator, with Sir William Jenner, the President of the R. C. of Physicians, is one which pa.s.ses all comprehension. And what shall we say of this t.i.tle to pose as an Aristarchus (November 4th, '82)? "Then Jonathan Scott, LL.D. Oxon, a.s.sures the world that he intended to re-translate the Tales given by Galland(!) but he found Galland so adequate on the whole (!!) that he gave up the idea and now reprints Galland with etchings by M. Lalauze, giving a French view of Arab life. Why Jonathan Scott, LL.D., should have thought to better Galland while Mr. Lane's version is in existence, and has just been reprinted, it is impossible to say." In these wondrous words Jonathan Scott's editio princeps with engravings from pictures by Smirke and printed by Longmans in 1811 is confounded with the imperfect reprint by Messieurs Nimmo and Bain, in 1883; the ill.u.s.trations being borrowed from M. Adolphe Lalauze, a French artist (nat. 1838), a master of eaux fortes, who had studied in Northern Africa and who maroccanized the mise-en-scene of "The Nights" with a marvellous contrast of white and negro nudities. And such is the Solomon who fantastically complains that I have disdained to be enlightened by his "modest suggestions."

Au reste the article is not bad simply because it borrows--again Americanice--all its matter from my book. At the tail-end, however comes the normal sting: I am guilty of not explaining "Wuzu" (lesser ablution), "Ghusl"

(greater ablution), and "Zakat" (legal alms which const.i.tute a poor-rate), proving that the writer never read vol. iii. He confidently suggests replacing "Cafilah," "by the better known word Caravan," as if it were my speciality (as it is his) to hunt-out commonplaces: he grumbles about "interrogation-points a l'Espagnole upside down"(?) which still satisfies me as an excellent subst.i.tute to distinguish the common Q(uestion) from A(nswer) and he seriously congratulates me upon my discovering a typographical error on the fly- leaf.

No. iii. (August 14, '86, handling vols. vi., vii. and viii.) is free from the opening pretensions and absurdities of No. ii. and it is made tolerably safe by the familiar action of scissors and paste. But--desinit in piscem--it ends fishily; and we find, after saturnine fashion, in cauda venenum. It scolds me for telling the English public what it even now ignores, the properest way of cooking meat (a propos of kababs) and it "trembles to receive vols. ix. and x.

for truly (from a literary point of view, of course, we mean) there seems nothing of which the translator might not be capable"--capable de tout, as said Voltaire of Habbakuk and another agnostic Frenchman of the Prophet Zerubbabel. This was indeed high praise considering the Sat.u.r.day's sympathy with and affection for the dead level, for the average man; but as an augury of ill it was a brutum fulmen. No. iv. (August 30, '87) was, strange to say, in tone almost civil and ended with a touch simulating approval:--

"The labours of a quarter of a century," writes the translator in L'Envoi, "are now brought to a close, and certainly no one could have been found better suited by education and taste to the task of translating the 'Nights' than is the accomplished author of the 'Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.' His summing up of the contents and character of 'The Thousand and One Nights' in the Terminal Essay is a masterpiece of careful a.n.a.lysis and we cannot do better than conclude our notice with a paragraph that resumes with wonderful effect the boundless imagination and variety of the picture that is conjured up before our eyes:--

"Viewed as a tout ensemble in full and complete form, they are a drama of Eastern life and a Dance of Death made sublime by faith and the highest emotions, by the certainty of expiation and the fulness of atoning equity, where virtue is victorious, vice is vanquished and the ways of Allah are justified to man. They are a panorama which remains kenspeckle upon the mental retina. They form a phantasmagoria in which archangels and angels, devils and goblins, men of air, of fire, of water, naturally mingle with men of earth, where flying horses and talking fishes are utterly realistic, where King and Prince must meet fishermen and pauper, lamia and cannibal, where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-n.o.bs with the thief.... The work is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture, gorgeous palaces and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadly words, gardens fairer than those of the Hesperid; seas dashing with clashing billows upon enchanted mountains, valleys of the Shadow of Death, air-voyages and promenades in the abysses of the ocean, the duello, the battle, and the siege, the wooing of maidens and the marriage rite. All the splendour and squalor, the beauty and baseness the glamour and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and the baseness, of Oriental life are here."

And now, after the Sat.u.r.day Review has condescended severely and sententiously to bepreach me, I must be permitted a trifling return in kind. As is declared by the French an objectionable people which prefers la gloire to "duty," and even places "honour" before "honesty," the calling of the Fourth Estate is un sacerdoce, an Apostolate: it is a high and holy mission whose ends are the diffusion of Truth and Knowledge and the suppression of Ignorance and Falsehood. "Sacrilege," with this profession, means the breaking of its two great commandments and all sins of commission and omission suggested and prompted by vain love of fame, by sordid self-esteem or by ign.o.ble rancour.

What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to "counteract the immorality of The Times," adds to normal journalistic follies, offences and mistakes an utter absence of literary honour, systematic misrepresentation, malignity and absolute ruffianism? Let those who hold such language exaggerated glance at my piece justicative, the Sat.u.r.day's article (June 28, '88) upon Mr. Hitchman's "Biography of Sir Richard Burton." No denizen of Grub Street in the coa.r.s.e old day of British mob-savagery could have produced a more d.a.m.ning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique, private and personal. The "Sat.u.r.day Reviler"--there is, I repeat, much virtue in a soubriquet--has grown only somewhat feebler, not kindlier, not more sympathetic since the clever author of "In Her Majesty's Keeping" styled this Magister Morum "the benignant and judicious foster-parent of literature"; and since Darwin wrote of it (ii. 260) "One cannot expect fairness in a reviewer;"

nor has it even taken to heart what my friend Swinburne declared (anent its issue of December 15, '83) "clumsy and shallow sn.o.bbery can do no harm." Like other things waxing obsolete it has served, I hasten to confess, a special purpose in the world of letters. It has lived through a generation of thirty years in the glorification of the mediocrities and in pandering to the impish taint of poor human nature, the ungenerous pa.s.sions of those who abhor the novel, the original, the surprising, the startling, and who are only too glad to witness and to a.s.sist in the Procrustes' process of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and lengthening out thoughts and ideas and diction that rise or strive to rise above the normal and vulgar plane. This virtual descendant of the ancestral Satirist, after long serving as a sp.a.w.ning-ground to envy, hatred and malice, now enters upon the decline of an unworthy old age. Since the death of its proprietor, Mr. Beresford-Hope, it has been steadily going down hill as is proved by its circulation, once 15,000, and now something nearer 5,000 than 10,000. It has become a poor shadow of its former self--preserving the pa.s.sive ill- will but lacking the power of active malevolence--when journalists were often compelled to decline correspondence upon its misjudgments and to close to complainants their columns which otherwise would have been engrossed by just and reasonable protestations. The "young lions" of its prime (too often behanged with a calf-skin on their recreant limbs) are down among the dead and the jackal-pack which has now taken up the howling could no longer have caused Thackeray to fear or can excite the righteous disgust of that votary of "fair-play" --Mr. John Bright.

And now, before addressing myself to another Reviewer, I would be allowed a few words upon two purely personal subjects; the style chosen for my translation and my knowledge of the Arabian language and literature.

I need hardly waste time to point out what all men discern more or less distinctly, how important are diction and expression in all works of fancy and fiction and how both branches, poetic and prosaic, delight in beauty adorned and allow in such matters the extreme of liberty. A long study of Galland and Torrens, Lane and Payne, convinced me that none of these translators, albeit each could claim his special merit, has succeeded in preserving the local colouring of the original. The Frenchman had gallicised and popularised the general tone and tenor to such extent that even the vulgar English versions have ever failed to throw off the French flavour. Torrens attempted literalism laudably and courageously enough; but his execution was of the roughest, the nude verbatim; nor did his familiarity with Arabic, or rather with Egyptian, suffice him for the task. Lane, of whom I have already spoken, and of whom I shall presently be driven by his imprudent relatives and interested friends to say more, affected the latinised English of the period flat and dull, turgid and vapid as that of Sale's Koran; and his style proved the most insufficient and inadequate attire in which an Oriental romance of the Middle Ages could be arrayed. Payne was perfectly satisfactory to all cultivated tastes but he designedly converted a romantic into a cla.s.sical work: none ignores its high merits regarded merely as strong and vital English, but it lacks one thing needful--the multiform variety of The Nights. The original Arabic text which in the first thirteen tales (Terminal Essay, p. 78) must date from before the xiiith century at the latest (since Galland's MS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale has been a.s.signed to the early xivth) is highly composite: it does not disdain local terms, bye-words and allusions (some obsolete now and forgotten), and it borrows indiscriminately from Persian (e.g. Shahbandar), from Turkish (as Khatun) and from Sanscrit (for instance Brahman). As its equivalent, in vocabulary I could devise only a somewhat archaical English whose old-fashioned and sub-antique flavour would contrast with our modern and everyday speech, admitting at times even Latin and French terms, such as res scibilis and citrouille. The mixture startled the critics and carpers to whom its object had not been explained; but my conviction still remains that it represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian.

And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and unnoticed by reviewers. The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin (the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) are instruments admirably fitted for their purpose: crystal-clear, they never divert even a bittock of the reader's brain from the all-important sense underlying the sound-symbols. But in works of imagination mar. wants a treatment totally different, a style which, by all or any means, little mattering what they be, can avoid the imminent deadly risk of languor and monotony and which adds to fluency the allurement of variety, of surprise and even of disappointment, when a musical discord is demanded.

Again, my estimate of a translator's office has never been of the low level generally a.s.signed to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the habit of englishing every important or interesting work published on the continent of Europe. We cannot expect at this period of our literature overmuch from a man who, as Messieurs Vizetelly a.s.sure their clientele, must produce a version for a poor 20. But at his best the traducteur, while perfectly reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, works upon two lines. His prime and primary object is an honest and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense nor abating aught of its peculiar cachet whilst he labours his best to please and edify his readers. He has, however, or should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can profitably lend something to and borrow somewhat from its neighbours, near or far, an epithet, a metaphor, a turn of phrase, a naive idiom and the translator of original mind will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother tongue with alien and novel ornaments, which will justly be accounted barbarisms until formally adopted and naturalised. Such are the "peoples" of Kossuth and the useful "lengthy," an American revival of a good old English term. Nor will my modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his ba.n.a.l brotherhood the interesting and often startling phases of his foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with its commonplace English equivalent--thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do. It is needless to quote instances concerning this phase of "Bathos:" they abound in every occidental translation of every Oriental work, especially the French, such as Baron de Slane's honest and conscientious "Ibn Khaldun." It was this grand ideal of a translator's duty that made Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary poet, write of his English brother bard.--

"Grand Translateur, n.o.ble Geoffroy Chaucier."

Here,

"The firste finder of our faire language"

is styled a "Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in conduct and a great Translator," which apparent anti-climax has scandalised not a little inditers of "Lives" and "Memoirs." The t.i.tle is given simply because Chaucer translated (using the best and highest sense of the term) into his English tongue and its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and ideas of his foreign models--the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccacao.

That my attempts to reproduce the form and features of the original and thee my manner of writing is well adapted to the matter appears from the consensus of the "Notices" presently to be quoted. Mr. J. Addington Symonds p.r.o.nounces the version to be executed with "peculiar literary vigour." Mr. Swinburne is complimentary, and even the Sat.u.r.day deigns to declare "Captain Burton is certainly felicitous in the manner in which he has englished the picturesque lines of the original." But le style est de l'homme; and this is a matter upon which any and every educated man who writes honestly will form and express and retain his own opinion: there are not a few who loathe "Pickwick," and who cannot relish Vanity Fair. So the Edinburgh Review No. 335 (pp. 174, 181), concerning which more anon, p.r.o.nounces my work to be "a jumble of the vulgarest slang of all nations;" also "an unreadable compound of archaeology and 'slang,' abounding in Americanisms, and full of an affected reaching after obsolete or foreign words and phrases;" and finally shows the a.s.surance to a.s.sert "Captain Burton has produced a version which is neither Arabic nor English, but which has at least the merit of being beautifully unreadable" (p.

182).