Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
"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-nobs 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 Saturday 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 ignoble 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 pièce justicative, the Saturday's article
(June 28, '88) upon Mr. Hitchman's "Biography of Sir Richard Burton." No
denizen of Grub Street in the coarse old day of British mob-savagery could
have produced a more damning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified
scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique,
private and personal. The "Saturday 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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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