DALZIEL'S ILLUSTRATED ARABIAN NIGHTS.* TEE Arabian Nights is one of

the few books which supply a boundless field of collateral yet wholly independent study by the side of the mere amusement they afford. Read as a string of idle fictions, they still remain a perennial kaleidoscope and literary wonder of elementary human emotion. As in the kaleidoscope we see elementary colours thrown, as it were, at random together, not satisfying art, but producing astonish- ment, so in the Arabian Nights all the elementary emotions and colours of human nature follow one another in an apparently childlike cycle of innocence, credulity, and bewonderment, yet so as to baffle old and practised eyes in any attempt to unravel the secret of their juxtaposition and obtain the key to their sequence. As the wheel revolves, and fiction follows fiction, colour colour, we see dovelike gentleness and astounding cruelty, romantic courage and brazen craft, apparently unconscious folly and apparently unconscious wisdom, follow one another with the same arbitrary ease, the same rotatory gravity, the same absence of the slightest clue to the moving hand guiding the colours in their course, and but for the entertainment invariably afforded to the spectator, we had almost said, the same monotony of wonderful effect.

If we endeavour to overcome the dazing influence of the tales themselves, to look with a critical eye upon the sequence of the ideas, if we try to re-ascend by analysis and imagination to the springs of authorship, and to reconstruct the society out of which the stories grew, we pass abrtfptly into another world of thought, and tumble at the entrance into a sea of speculation. It seems no solution of the problem to suppose that the stories were in the origin designedly composed to amuse children. If the Boy's Own Book under the same name were the only relic of our civilization three thousand. years hence, the doubt whether it was written for children or not would only complicate, not sim- plify the problem of the re-construction out of that book of the civilization which gave birth to it. Any floating knowledge Englishmen have of contemporary Asiatic life does not seem to throw much light upon the re-construction of the society out of which the Arabian Nights grew. Nor need this appear strange. The original of the Arabian Nights is probably separated by quite as wide an interval from modern Asiatic life as Homer from modern Greekdom. We know infinitely more about the modern Greeks than we do about the modern Orientals, at all events we understand them infinitely better, for they stand on the same plane of civilization, that is to say, within the same focus of ideas as ourselves. All we know of modern Greek life does not

• Daisiers Illustrated Arabian Nights' Entertainments. The text revised and emen- dated throughout by B. W. Duleken, Ph.D. One hundred illustrations, by J. E. Millais. B.A., A. B. Houghton, Thomas Dalziel, J. D. Watson, John Tennlel, G. J. Plage& Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. London: Ward and Look.

of itself throw any light on the authorship of Homer, or on the state of society out of which the Homeric poems sprang.

Yet the literary filiation from Homer downwards through ancient Greek literature to modern times is perhaps the most luminous instance of literary filiation on record, and there is perhaps nothing to compare with it in history except the filiation (we are here speaking of the literary and social relation) of the Bible to modern European thought.

Nor does any knowledge we may have of contemporary Asiatic life seem to afford more than the most general help. In the first place, the complexity of the existing Asiatic life is immense. In the next place, it is surprising how few Englishmen, even after a long and intimate acquaintance with Oriental life, ever seem to have penetrated beyond the mere outward shell and busk of the Oriental character. But it is precisely the relation of the inner idea of a people to the external evolutions of that idea in literary monuments which it would be interesting to recover, and which it is impossible to recover without penetrating from the circum- ference of a nation's perspective to its centre. Mr. Lane indeed tells us in his learned work on the Arabian Nights that the Arab sheikhs about Cairo delight in theArabian Nights, and are minutely familiar with them, and that they are excellent commentators with regard to the manners and customs and religious allusions, —mostly, it would seem, Mohammedan,—contained in them. But what does not appear is in what light the Arabian Nights affect the modern Arab reader? Is it as Homer affected the contempo- raries of Homer, or the contemporaries of Pericles, or the con- temporaries of Lucian ? Is it as Chaucer, for instance, affected Englishmen of the days of Chaucer, or of the days of Eliza- beth, or of our own day ? This is clearly a necessary inquiry before we can apply contemporary Oriental life and feeling, supposing us to understand it, as a key to the exposition of the Arabian Nights. But this is only a preliminary. We our- selves•know well enough what impression Chaucer's works make upon us. Yet, instead of abandoning ourselves to the random impression created upon us by their lazy perusal, an impression compounded of our own modern ideas flavoured by his antique language, if we set to work in earnest to reconstruct the real temper, and feeling, and thought, the internal civilization of his day upon which his poetry blossomed as a natural and necessary fruit, how difficult the task is, even for us looking straight baok in the line of our own familiar growth!

Again, if we look at the question of the authorship it will make a difference whether the stories were written by one man or more, in one generation or several, whether they are fictions properly so called and purely imaginative, or fictions founded on a substratum of fact, and that fact contemporary or traditional. If we put the Orlando Furioso, the Gierusalemme Liberate, Robinson Crusoe, and Boccaccio's tales together, and hand them down as the sole relics of our civilization to posterity, what would they make of them ? Five thousand years hence suppose any of these books to be discussed by a foreign nation of say highly civilized blacks, civilized as highly, or more highly, in some different way (for the forms of civilization are apparently endless, teste Egypt, China, Japan) than we now are. Suppose them even more wary, more critical, more scientific, indefinitely more ardent in the pursuit of truth, yet even with the humblest spirit of honest and faithful inquiry, it seems almost impossible that they could get over the preliminary difficulty of their ignorance whether the author, whoever he was, invented his story, and if he invented how much he invented, where fiction began and truth ended. How could they, except with knowledge which we can withdifficulty conceive, say, " This which reads so simply is a bitter sarcasm, that which is so vehemently told is pure imagination ; that, again, is plain fact, and this, playful irony founded upon twenty different threads of thought."

Apply, again, the same canon to Gulliver's Travels. How inno- cently grave and infinitely childlike are the most poisonous sarcasms, how simple and matter-of-fact is the narrative, how candid and truthful to all appearance is the narrative of the most monstrous fictions, the art rising just in the proportion of the apparent truth and candour, and who could unravel all these elements looking at them out of a different civilization ?

Upon this principle it is that the Arabian Nights are a per- petual source of speculative wonder. No book ever took posses- sion of the world without, so to speak, an antecedent national pedigree of overwhelming literary power and force ? No savage could have written Robinson Crusoe. All the bitterness of a nation's lifetime is in Gulliver's Travels, and it took the concen- trated literary energy of antecedent centuries to inspire Swift with the very candour and transparency of his livid animosity. A whole antecedent phase of civilization came to a head in Cer- vantes' Don Quixote. The loves and hatreds, the myriad thoughts of centuries of bitterness, and suffering, and joy, and ridicule, and passion, and contempt, are all condensed in the production of that book. And is it conceivable that the Arabian Nights with all their apparently elemental simplicity are nothing more than an assemblage of mere childish fictions, with no other meaning of any kind than the surface of each line conveys ? To us this supposition is simply inconceivable. If, however, we are asked what do you conceive they really mean, we confess our simple ignorance. We read them with wonder and helpless specula- tion.

As an illustration, however, of what we mean, consider this passage taken at random from Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver is vindicating the reputation of the Lilliputian lady whose coach and six he was in the habit of lifting upon his table :— " am here obliged,' says he, to vindicate the reputation of an ex- cellent lady, who was an innocent sufferer upon my account. The treasurer took a fancy to be jealous of his wife, from the malice of some evil tongues, who informed him that her grace had taken a violent affection for my person, and the Court scandal ran for some time that she once came privately to my lodging. This I solemnly declare to be a most infamous falsehood, without any grounds further than that her Grace was pleased to treat me with all innocent marks of freedom and friendship. I own she came often to my house, but always publicly, • nor ever without three more in the coach, who were usually her sister, and young daughter, and some particular acquaintance. But this was common to many other ladies of the Court. And I will appeal to my servants round whether they at any time saw a coach at my door with- out their knowing what persons were in it. On those occasions when a servant had given me notice my custom was to go immediately to the door, and after paying my respects to take up the coach and two horses very carefully in my hands (for if there were six horses the postilion always unharnessed four) and place them on a table, where I had fixed a moveable rim quite round of five inches high, to prevent accidents, and I have often had four coaches and horses at once on my table full of company, while I sat in my chair leaning my face towards them, and while I was engaged with one set the coachmen would gently drive the others round my table. I have passed many an afternoon very agreeably in these conversations. But I defy the treasurer or his two informers. I will name them, and let them make the best of it,"

sc., &c.

Five thousand years hence what will the best scholar nursed in a different civilization make of this passage beyond the bare sequence of physical ideas? How will he unravel the fun, the irony, the bitter ridicule, poured by the bitterest of Tory pamphle- teers upon the, in his eyes, most contemptible of contemptible Lilliputians,—Whig princelings and hop-o'-my-thumbs in their relations with what he considered really great men, himself among the number ? Here is a passage taken equally at random from the Arabian Nights. The tailor is telling a story about the chattering barber: " Think what a situation was mine! What could I do with so cruel a tormentor ? Give him three pieces of gold,' said I to the slave who managed the expenses of my house, and send him away, that I may be rid of him; I will not be shaved to-day.'—' My master,' cried the barber, at hearing this, ' what am I to understand by these words ? It was not I who came to seek you, it was you who ordered me to come, and that being the case, I swear by the faith of a Mussulman I will not quit your house till I have shaved you. If you do not know my value it is no fault of mine. Your late honoured father was more just to my merits. Each time when he sent for me to bleed him he used to make me sit down by his side, and then it was delightful to hear the clever talk with which I entertained him."

And so on.

It so happens that in this story the comedy of boredom, let us say, is distinctly marked. But behind the simple, ele- mentary, obvious comedy, who can tell all the intricate by- play of highly allusive and irrecoverable sarcasm which exists ? In the passage quoted from Swift there is on the surface a gentle vein of almost childlike comedy. Beneath this slender film there is Swift himself, wallowing—wallowing is the word—in all the viru- lence and passion of his age and time. To us the superficial glaze is still transparent. What will it be five thousand years hence? Butler's Eludibras already requires elaborate study, and many an antiquarian who piques himself on his penetration may time upon time be a hundred miles from the true mark of the author.

To return to Mr. Dalziel's new edition of the Arabian Nights, we lately had occasion to remark upon the very great merit of the illustrations. They are gems in their kind, real works of art, con- taining an immense amount of thought, care, imagination, and wonderfully in harmony with the spirit of the tales themselves. They are in conception and expression mellow, childlike with- out being childish, surely one of the best features of good

art, and totally free from the affectation of young sentiment. They have the best characteristics of the modern English realism,

without any of its modern conventionalities, nor have they any of the conventionality of the late euphuistic school of English engraving, which reached its height in the hackneyed Oriental album. It is not too much to say that Mr. Dalziel's Arabian Nights constitute a new phase in the art of illustration. But having said this, we must repeat our criticism, that the predomi- nant fault, throughout the earlier part of the volume especially, is a certain monotony of mechanical effect from the rough contrast of white and black which impairs the delicacy of the result. The defect wears away, however, towards the end of the volume. Thus in the illustration of the lady showing Alnaschar the hidden treasure there is not a trace of this, and a more exquisitely beau- tiful female figure in every detail, the firmness and delicacy of the bust, the ripe and nervous beauty of the arm, the beauty of the foot, the grace and modest gentleness of the whole, we never remember to have seen. It is drawn by Mr. Tenniel. Many of the plates are evident copies from nature. Two will strike almost every one. One is a likeness of Mr. Leighton the artist, wrapped in adora- tion of a lovely Jewess playing on the guitar. It is drawn by Mr. Thomas Dalziel, and the plate is called " The Concert at the Palace of Schemselnihar." The other, also by Mr. Dalziel, is a photogra- phic likeness of the Baroness Alphonse de Rothschild in her girl- hood. In the plate " Prince Amgiad and the Wicked Lady" the expression of female wickedness is well-defined, a dry, cold, haughty, yet flaming and resplendent wickedness, as of a stalac- tite of cruelty lit up by the blaze of a volcano. Did Mr. Tenniel imagine the woman, or does he know her ?