The Thousand and One Nights

NOT long ago, a French scholar announced that he had discovered in the Louvre an Arabic manuscript of the tale of Aladdin, whereupon there was great rejoicing among Orientalists. This charming history had been under a cloud. Galland, indeed, had included it in his Contes Orientates, but since his day no one had seen it in the original, and there was doubt of its genuineness. The late Professor E. H. Palmer, he who met an untimely death at the hands of the Arabs, believed that it was not of Oriental origin, but a European re-hash of Eastern material; others reserved opinion. The question has been set at rest by the discovery of the manuscript, and the lovers of the story may enjoy it with the assurance that it is a genuine product of Arabian fancy.

It is less than two hundred years that the Nights have been known to Europe ; for a hundred years they have been a European classic, one of the few books that please all classes and ages. We owe our knowledge of them to the distinguished French Orientalist, Antoine Galland, who, coming as a poor boy to Paris, rose by his energy and talents to be antiquary to the king and member of the Académic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He had prepared himself for his translation by many years of study and of travel in the East. In 1704 appeared the first part of his Mille et Une Nuits, Contes Arabes traduits en Français; he was then fifty-eight years old. The work was to consist of four volumes, of which only three have come down to us. The first two include, according to the edition of De Sacy, printed at Paris in 1840, two hundred and thirty-four Nights (elsewhere the number is given as two hundred and sixtyfour) ; the third volume contains a number of stories in which there is no division of Nights. As this last group of tales differed somewhat in tone from the rest and were not found in the manuscripts known to scholars, it was surmised that Galland had picked them up from story-tellers in the East; but the discovery above mentioned gives probability to De Sacy’s opinion that he found them in the public libraries of Paris.

The popularity of the Contes was immediate and widespread. The novelty and freshness of the scenes, representing the extremes of Oriental splendor and squalor, the fancifulness and naïveté of the supernatural machinery, the variety and charm of sentiment, the delicacy of the humor, in a word the richness and mystery of the strange life thus revealed, made the book immensely attractive to the French public of that day. France had been nourished on the plays of Corneille and Racine, the discourses of Bossuet, and the skeptical philosophy of Bayle, with only Molière to express the humor of life; here were opened the doors of unlimited and delicious romance. All Paris was full of the wonderful stories ; it was a triumph resembling that achieved by the Waverley Novels. In his Biographie Universelle, Michaud (quoted by Burton) tells a story that illustrates the popularity of the Nights : In the first part of the work Galland always introduced the narration by the formula, " My dear sister, if you are not asleep, I beg you to relate one of those pleasant stories that you know.” Some young persons, tired of this dull repetition, went on a very cold night to Galland’s house, knocked at his door, and called him to the window, where he appeared in scant clothing. After a number of unimportant questions, during which he stood shivering, they said to him, “ Oh, M. Galland, if you are not asleep, tell us one of those beautiful stories that you know.” Galland took the hint, and suppressed the formula in the subsequent parts of the book. If the literal correctness of this story cannot he vouched for, it at any rate suggests that Galland in some way discovered that his standing phrase was thought to be a little ridiculous, and therefore dropped it.

No doubt the Contes owed their popularity in part to the pleasant modern French in which they were written. Galland did not attempt to reproduce the peculiarities of the Arabic prose style, nor did he use the Oriental modes of address. His instinct as translator led him to avoid whatever might seem barbarous to his generation. Public taste has changed since then ; we prefer to preserve the Oriental coloring of manner and style, partly on account of its novelty, partly from the historical feeling which delights in the precise presentation of old customs. In the beginning of the eighteenth century there was danger that people might be appalled by strange expressions ; at any rate, Golland’s gallicized Contes received universal applause. It seemed quite natural that the king should be addressed as " Sire ” and “ votre Majesté,” and that in speaking to one another people should say Monsieur ” and “ Madame,” that the young ladies should be " aimables ” and “ agréables ” and the men “ seigneurs ” and “cavaliers.” Everywhere the straightforward, matter-of-fact Arabic is transformed into fine French phrases. The translation bears somewhat the same relation to the original that Pope’s Iliad does to Homer ; and as Pope has introduced Homer to thousands of persons who would not have read a better translation, so Galland gave the Nights a position which a scientifically accurate rendering would certainly have failed to secure. The fame of the new work speedily spread outside of France. In a few years four editions of an English translation of Galland were published, and the stories became as popular in England as in France. It was, indeed, on these reproductions of the French that the English-speaking world depended for nearly a century, — perhaps we may say till the appearance of Lane’s independent translation in 1839. It is to Galland that we owe the spelling of some of the famous names in the Nights, as those of the two sisters Scheherazade and Dinarzade, which doubtless sound well enough in French, but in English, it is to be feared, become barbarous, and ought to be abandoned for the proper spellings, Shahrzad (“ the child of the city ”) and Dinarzad (" the child of the treasure ”) or Dunyazad (“ the child of the world”); the famous Calif of Bagdad we continue to write Haroun alRaschid (which I have heard pronounced " Raskeed " ) instead of Harun al-Rashid. But in spite of Galland’s modernisms and inaccuracies, his book had a genuine flavor of Oriental sentiment and adventure, and achieved a brilliant success ; it made the Nights a European classic.

The origin of The Thousand and One Nights is almost as difficult to trace as that of the Iliad or the Pentateuch. These are all, not products of single minds, but masses of literature, shaped anew from generation to generation ; the beginnings of them wrapped in obscurity, because there was no one to chronicle the first silent growths. The tales which make up the Arabian book are varied in character. There are fables, in which a moral or prudential lesson is expressed by beasts ; stories of everyday life, of commerce and travel, love and intrigue and adventure, in which the marvelous is more or less mingled; fanciful and wild fairy stories, in which loose rein is given to the imagination and the fancy, and the ordinary conditions of life are turned topsy-turvy; anecdotes of historical personages, and long quasi-historical stories of wars between Moslems and their enemies ; and theological narratives, in which a heroine, for example, undergoes an examination in Mohammedan dogmatics which would do honor to a modern theological seminary or examining board. Any reader would be inclined to judge that all this material has not come from the same stratum of culture or the same period of history ; the natural inference is that it lias grown by successive deposits, by a continued process of elaboration, and the question arises, Where and how did the process of growth begin ? On this point scholars are divided, some preferring India as the starting-place, others Persia, and still others some Moslem land, as Syria or Egypt. The first view is favored by Galland and Benfey; the second by Hammer-Purgstall and Burton and others ; and the third by De Sacy (who selects Syria) and Lane (who prefers Egypt). Instead of giving the arguments of these writers in chronological order, I will state the general considerations which, as it appears to me, may lead us to an approximate solution of the question.

In the first place, it seems clear that the body of the stories in their present form are Moslem and Arabian. The language is pure Arabic : not, indeed, of the classic type, not that of the Koran nor even of the great historians ; rather comparatively modern and popular, but still genuine Arabic. It contains a number of Persian words, but not more than it would naturally appropriate from its Persian-speaking neighbors, not more in number than the French words which many an English book of to-day contains. The style also is Arabian, sharply contrasted for the most part with the Persian ; possibly somewhat affected by Persian influence, yet far from that deliberate and persistent system of balanced short phrases which to the Western mind becomes sometimes positively irritating. The manners and customs of the Nights may many of them be found in the Arabic-speaking world of to-day. Lane’s notes to his translation are a treasure of sociological information, and a large part of his illustrations are derived from his own observation of life in Egypt. All domestic details, such as the construction of houses, customs of eating, sleeping, education of children, marriages, social intercourse; methods of commerce, the forms of shops and khans, habits of commercial travel, the organization of bazaars, modes of attracting customers ; the political organization, califs, sultans, kings, wazirs, judges, courts, officers of police, prisoners, laws of debtors and creditors ; regulations of religion, mosques, imams, prayers, ablutions, Koran-recitations, funerals, — all these are Moslem and Arabian. There is an accurate knowledge of the topography and life of Bagdad, Damascus, and Cairo. When the scene is laid in Cairo, one may now trace the fortunes of the personages by the streets and gates mentioned in the story. Even when the history deals with remote lands, as China and India, the narrator transfers thither his own Moslem customs ; for example, in the long and dramatic story of Kamar al-Zaman, which moves almost over the face of the globe, one is not conscious of change of social and religious conditions ; and so everywhere, unless indeed there be specially introduced a city of the fire-worshipers, which the writer’s historical sense forces him, of course, to represent as non-Moslem. The attitude of the Nights toward the Persian Zoroastrianism, or fire-worship, is noteworthy. The Magians are represented as fiends in human shape, mostly clever adventurers, adepts in diabolical arts and inspired by a fiendish hatred of Moslems, — a representation that we should refer more naturally to Arabian Moslems than to converted Persians ; it points to the period when the conflict between Islam and Zoroastrianism was still raging, and religious differences were magnified and distorted by political hate.

But while the material of the body of the Nights is thus Arabian, there are clear traces of Persian influence. The personages of the Introduction, which gives the framework of the tales, are Persian. The two kings, Shahryar and Shah Zaman, are Sassanian, and the wazir’s two daughters bear Persian names. Here again the manners are Moslem, but one naturally asks why a collection of Arabian stories should be attached to an adventure of Persian kings. If the tales had grown up originally on Arabic soil, one would expect the occasion to be Arabian; one naturally refers the Persian form of the Introduction to a well-established tradition which connected the Nights with the Persian land. It is no objection to this view that Persia is called by a name which signifies " outside, or barbarian land ; ” this would be the ordinary Arabic designation of the country, and the evidence of a tradition of Persian origin is not affected by the geographical term employed.

There is, however, much stronger proof of Persian origin in the existence of Persian material in the Nights. One of the most famous Eastern books of wisdom and of entertainment is Sindibad, or The Seven Wazirs, a Persian work which was probably in existence in the seventh century of our era, at the time of the Moslem conquest of Persia. The framework is simple: A young prince, who has been instructed in philosophy and religion by the sage Sindibad, is accused of a crime by a damsel of the court, and is defended by the seven wazirs. Accuser and defenders endeavor to move the king to severity or clemency by short stories which illustrate the dangers that beset monarchs and the wiles of women. The king oscillates daily between the two extremes: having heard a story from the damsel, he will put his son to death ; but after one of the wazirs has spoken, he inclines to mercy. So the round of stories goes on, until, at the end, the innocence of the prince is demonstrated, and the accuser is put to death. The book speedily made its way from Persia into other lands; it was translated into Arabic, Syriac, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish ; it appears in later Persian forms, and a good deal of its material is to be found in the Gesta Romanorum. The point of special interest for us, in this connection, is that the story of The Seven Wazirs is actually found in our edition of The Thousand and One Nights (Nights 578-606). The Introduction is the same as in our copies of the Sindibad book and a later form of the same work, known as the Bakhtyar book. It is unnecessary to mention the stories in detail. They are such as The Prince and the Gul (ghoul), The Lady in the Glass Case, and The Lion’s Track. One of them, called sometimes The Concealed Robe, and sometimes The Burnt Veil, is a current story in Cairo to-day, and is found in the collection of tales which Dr. Spitta took down from the mouths of the people of that city. Other stories also of the Nights are found in Sindibad ; its tale of The Four Liberators, for example, is identical in idea with the stories of The Enchanted Horse, and Prince Ahmad and Pari Banu. There can be no doubt, therefore, that a considerable mass of Persian material has been taken bodily into our present redaction of the Nights ; and when we combine this fact with the Persian form of the Introduction, it is a natural inference that the genesis of the book is Persian.

One might then suppose that the Arabs, having learned the art of this sort of literature from their neighbors, and continued to cultivate it, had in the course of time partly recast the borrowed material, and partly invented new material out of their own social conditions and experiences. No small support is lent to this view by the fact that the Arabs do not seem to have been originally narrators of stories. The earliest form of their literature known to us is that of short poems, in which the hero describes his own prowess. There is no prose piece earlier than the Koran, and Mohammed’s narratives are either borrowed from Jews and Christians, or are very curt renderings of popular traditions. There is no trace of fable or apologue. One great prose romance there is, the story of the great warriorpoet Antar ; but that is nothing but a string of adventures interspersed with poetry, and, moreover, belongs to a comparatively late period, when the Arabs were fully under Persian influence. An outburst of story-telling, therefore, would seem to come more naturally from foreign impulse than from national Arabic tendencies. We have direct testimony on this point, which, if it can be accepted as trustworthy, would seem to be decisive, — statements made in two Arabic historical works, and first brought to the attention of the learned world by Hammer-Purgstall. The first witness is the celebrated Masudi, who, in the beginning of the tenth century of our era, composed a famous encyclopædia of history, entitled Meadows of Gold. Speaking of collections of stories existing in his time, he expresses the opinion that they were the work of men who commended themselves to kings and people by their recitations. Such, he says, are the books which have been translated into Arabic from the Persian, Indian, and Greek, and he adds, “ Such is the book entitled Facetiæe, or The Thousand Tales, known to the public under the name of The Thousand and One Nights: it is the history of a king and his wazir, the wazir’s daughter and a slave-girl, named Shirzad and Dinarzad. Such also is the book of Sindibad.” This is explicit testimony to the existence of a book whose contents resemble those of our Nights, and under the same name; the only variation in the framework is that the second woman, instead of being the wazir’s daughter, is a slave-girl,— just such a variation as we might expect in a growing work. The difference of the titles, Thousand Tales and Thousand and One Nights, if indeed the figures can be relied on, is quite natural. It is doubtful whether the number of Nights was at first so great; in the course of time they may have reached the thousand, and the one may have been added to make assurance doubly sure.

The second witness is the Arabic bibliographical work called the Fihrist, or Index, composed in the latter part of the tenth century. In the section treating of tales and fanciful adventures, the author says that the old Persian kings were the first to collect fanciful stories and beast-fables and deposit them in libraries, and that these collections were added to by the Sassanian monarchs, the dynasty which was destroyed by the Moslem conquest. These Persian works, he adds, were translated into Arabic; then further enlarged, embellished, and imitated by the Arabs. As the first Persian work of this kind, our author cites the book of Facetiæ, mentioned above, and gives as the framework of the stories precisely that which we have in the Introduction to our Nights, except that Dinarzad is not sister, but nurse, to Shahrzad, the sultaness. He gives the number of Nights as one thousand, but the number of stories as less than two hundred ; finally he declares that he himself has often seen the book complete.

It must be confessed that the Fihrist’s account of the origin of the Arabian stories is very natural and plausible, and it agrees perfectly with what we know of the literary relations between the Arabs and the Persians of the eighth century. In the middle of that century the second Abbaside calif, AlMansur, caused many Greek, Syriac, and Persian works to be rendered into Arabic. It was a time of keen literary interest and activity. The Arabs had come from their long isolation in the desert with a robust appetite for learning. The califs of Damascus had begun the process of absorbing the contents of Greek and Syrian books, and the califs of Bagdad continued the work with the added zeal which sprang from their proximity to the great Persian civilization. The Arabs came into possession of the most eminent works of the Greeks, philosophical, mathematical, geographical, — Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. The sciences of grammar and Koran-exegesis were founded or organized ; the poems and legends of the old Arabian heroic period were collected, expounded, and imitated; the Persian Ibn al-Mokaffa translated into Arabic the famous Prince’s Manual, Kalila and Dimna, and the great Persian epic of Firdusi, the Shahnameh, or King’s Book. If there then existed a Persian collection of amusing stories, nothing would be more natural than that it should be translated into Arabic.

But there remains a further step to take. The Sindibad book, so closely connected with The Thousand and One Nights, stands, on the other hand, in close relation with some famous Indian books. Its opening chapters are substantially identical with those of the Panchatantra, a book of every-day wisdom, based on the instruction given to the three sons of a king ; and parts of this last work are again found in the Kalila and Dimna, which certainly came to the Arabs from the Persians, and to the Persians from the Indians. It would seem, therefore, that it was from India the Persians received their impulse in story-telling. In the present form of The Thousand and One Nights there are remains of that apologue and beaststory which are characteristic of the Hindu books ; for example, in the Introduction and in Nights 146-152. When we consider that this is a new apparition in Arabic literature, but comparatively old in India, and that the tradition speaks confidently of the passage of such books from India to Persia and from Persia to the Arabs, the natural inference is that we have in the Nights survivals of this old Hindu philosophy of life.

We may then represent to ourselves the history of the Arabian story-book somewhat as follows : For many centuries, beginning at a point not known to us, the Indians had been used to embody their ideas of true life-wisdom in beaststories and apologues, and these had in some cases been combined into a continuous narrative, the framework being often furnished by the education of a young prince. When the intercourse between Indians and Persians became closer, the latter obtained and translated these works, then expanded and imitated the stories, recasting them in accordance with their own customs and modes of thought. In this enlarged form, the tales coming to the Arabs were in like manner appropriated by them, but with further embellishments, so that the stories gradually assumed a purely Arab form. And we have also to suppose that the men of Arabia, transferred from the desert to city life, acquiring new tastes and experiences, developed a great capacity for the invention of stories, and out of very little material brought at last into being the rare collection that has come down to us.

The tales are of different dates, some probably going back to the time of AlRashid, in the latter part of the eighth century, and others falling as late as the sixteenth century. The book is thus an epic of story-telling ; chronicling the exploits of the Arabs in this sort of literature, growing and taking new coloring from generation to generation, — a kind of epitome of the national life, rounded off at last and finished by some hand or hands. The completion of the great body of the work may fall in the thirteenth century or the fourteenth, but additions continued to be made to it up to the sixteenth century. The recitation of stories did not, however, cease when this book was finished. In hundreds of coffee-houses in the East, people still gather to listen to the reciter, who from night to night carries on his interminable stories, which he has learned from other reciters, or from manuscripts the origin of which nobody knows, and to which he may make additions or embellishments, to be received from him by others, and after further changes to be at last perhaps published in a book as a new series of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. That much of the social coloring of the Nights is such as may be seen in Egypt to-day is doubtless true ; but Lane is not thereby justified in regarding the present form of the book as wholly or substantially Egyptian, for Eastern customs remain long unchanged, and what one now observes in a Cairo khan may have occurred a thousand years ago in a Bagdad bazaar. It was in many quarters of the Moslem world that the stories took their final shape, receiving local color here and there, and were gathered into collections of different extent in divers places. The time has not come to trace their history minutely, but the beginning has been made, and further research will no doubt bring to light new facts, and satisfy our curiosity more fully.

Fortunately our literary enjoyment of the Nights does not depend on our knowing their genealogy. Like all such literary organisms of slow growth, their beauties and treasures lie partly on the surface, partly deeper down. The adventure, magic, drollery, wit, and passion are easily recognizable ; the profounder social and religious sentiments must sometimes be searched for. The book is both the history of Moslem culture and the record of Moslem esprit in the palmy days of the Arabs in Asia ; it gives a truer as well as a more vivid picture of their life than all the ordinary histories combined. To learn what an Arab’s religion is to him, one must go, not to the Koran nor to the commentaries and theological treatises, but to the actual men and women of the tales, who are devout or superstitious, serious or scoffers, conscientious or perverse, very much as people in Christian lands show themselves to be, and are generally not without the art of making their religion accept and sanctify their desires ; yet in the main there is a simple, earnest religious faith, which is real, though it may not always stand the tests of life. Here we have the self-respecting courtesy of the Arab gentleman, the devotion of friendship, wiles and tricks, passion and treachery, soberness and silliness, nobility and meanness, the Arab individual independence standing beside the utterest political despotism, the high intellectual and social position assigned to women, — all the elements of life. The literary charm of the Nights is of course best felt in the original, where there are a thousand happy turns that cannot be precisely reproduced in an English translation. Still, from a really good translation one gets the literary substance, the color and timbre of the thought, and the English-speaking world may congratulate itself that it has the best of the European renderings. Lane, though some are inclined to ridicule his stiffness and formality, has given us a readable book, more uniformly grave and dignified than is necessary, with too little attention to the shadings of the style, yet on the whole a fair presentation of the original. There is also in the Nights, as is well known, besides the literary attraction, a great mass of material ready at hand for those who like to trace the genesis and distribution of folk stories. It may happen to one to read in the Nights some tale or anecdote that he once heard as a nursery rhyme, and one is sure to find in the Gesta, Boccaccio, and Chaucer some echo of the Arabian tales. I have already spoken of the way in which stories seem to have passed from India to Persia, Arabia, and Europe, and one might also suppose a movement in the opposite direction; but those who have read Mr. Andrew Lang on this subject need not be cautioned against rashness in drawing conclusions as to the relation between similar forms of fables and tales in different lands. Whether in the case of such stories there has been actual borrowing on one side, or independent origination in different places, or mutual influence and slow assimilation, — these questions can be answered by no general rule, but only by a careful study of the facts in each particular instance. I should like, if there were space in this article, to call up some of the personages of the Nights, and to follow their adventures of body and mind : the gracious and noble figure of the sultaness in the Introduction, who risks her life for the sake of her people; the sad Aziza, devoting her life with complete selfabandonment to secure the happiness of the man who repays her love with indifference and harshness ; the admirable slave-girl, Tawaddud, who, being a miracle of beauty, was able to state to the Calif Harun al-Rashid her accomplishments in the following terms: “O my lord, I am versed in syntax, poetry, jurisprudence, exegesis, and philosophy, and skilled in music and the knowledge of the divine ordinances, in arithmetic, geodesy, geometry, and the fables of the ancients; I know the Koran by heart, what parts of it were revealed at Medina and what at Mecca, and the holy traditions of the apostle’s sayings, both the certain and the doubtful; I have studied medicine, logic, rhetoric, composition, have learned many things by heart, am fond of poetry, and play the lute ; ” the revolting Queen Budur, the barber and his brothers, the famous court-jester Abu Nuwas, and a hundred others whom even to name would be too long. They are permanent figures in literature, the outcome of a peculiar combination of social and cultural conditions. The Arabs have preserved for us the gist of Indian and Persian folklore and practical wisdom in a setting of quaint and serious adventure, reflecting the most brilliant life of one of the most brilliant civilizations of the world, — a worthy and acceptable gift, for which we should offer them our heartfelt thanks.

C. H. Toy.