THE ORIENTAL TALE IN ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

PREFACE

This essay is a study in eighteenth-century English literature. The author disclaims any knowledge of the oriental languages and attempts no discussion of the ultimate sources of those genuine oriental tales that appeared in English in the eighteenth century. Such a discussion is not the purpose of this study. The aim here is rather to give a clear and accurate description of a distinct component part of eighteenth-century English fiction in its relation to its French sources and to the general current of English thought. The oriental fiction that was not original in English came, almost without exception, from French imitations or translations of genuine oriental tales; hence, as a study in comparative literature, a consideration of the oriental tale in England during the eighteenth century possesses distinct interest. Moreover the presence of this oriental and pseudo-oriental fiction in England,—as in France,—and the mingled enthusiasm and disapproval with which in both countries it was greeted, testify to the strength of established classicism and to the advent of

viiithe new romantic spirit. The history of the oriental tale in England in the eighteenth century might be called an episode in the development of English Romanticism.

No general survey such as the present volume undertakes, has before been made. Certain chapters in Die Vorläufer der Modernen Novelle im 18ten Jahrhundert (1897), by Dr. Rudolph Fürst, approach most nearly to the present treatment and have given valuable suggestions; H. W. Weber’s Introduction to his Tales of the East (1812) contains useful data; M. Pierre Martino’s work, L’Orient dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (1906), came to hand after this essay was practically completed, but has proved of distinct value; and M. Victor Chauvin’s monumental Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes (1892–1905) is indispensable to any student of this subject. The Bibliography, Appendix B, II., pp. 294–306, of this volume gives the full titles of these and other books of reference to which I am indebted. None of these, however, gives anything except incidental or partial treatment of this subject. No attempt has hitherto been made to consider in a single survey all the oriental and pseudo-oriental fiction that appeared in England during the eighteenth century.

ixIt is a pleasure to take this opportunity of thanking the many friends whose assistance I have found invaluable. This book is the fruit of studies begun under the inspiration of Professor George Edward Woodberry,—an inspiration best appreciated by those students who had the rare privilege of hearing his lectures and receiving his illuminating and kindly criticism. To Dr. Frank W. Chandler, Professor of English in the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and formerly Instructor in Comparative Literature in Columbia University, I owe my first definite interest in the English Romantic Movement. To Dr. J. E. Spingarn, Adjunct-Professor of Comparative Literature, I am deeply indebted for friendly criticisms and counsel. To Professor Jefferson B. Fletcher, of the Department of Comparative Literature, I am especially grateful for constant assistance during the past year—assistance as generous as it was helpful; without it I could hardly have brought my work to completion. To many of my fellow-students at Columbia University I am under obligations: to Miss Mary Gertrude Cushing, now of the

Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Mount Holyoke College, for transcriptions made at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; to Mr. A. D. Compton, Instructor in xEnglish in the College of the City of New York, for notes on certain oriental tales; to Dr. John S. Harrison, of the English Department of Kenyon College, for assistance in research; to Mr. S. L. Wolff, Adjunct-Professor of English in the University of Tennessee, for a study of oriental allusions in the eighteenth-century periodicals; to Mr. Wolff and to Dr. S. M. Tucker, Professor of English in the Florida State College for Women, for valuable suggestions. I would acknowledge also the courtesies extended by the Librarians of the British Museum, by Mr. T. J. Kiernan of the Harvard University Library, and by the authorities of the Columbia University Library, especially Mr. Frederic W. Erb. For assistance in research at the British Museum I would thank my sister, Charlotte H. Conant; for similar work at Harvard and in the Boston Libraries, Miss Mary H. Buckingham. Miss Buckingham enriched my initial bibliography

by examining the entire Catalogue of Printed Books of the British Museum. Finally, to Dr. Duncan B. Macdonald and Dr. Edward Everett Hale I wish to express my appreciation of their kindness in lending me valuable books.

The Appendices to the present volume comprise Appendix A, Notes, chiefly concerning the indebtedness of Byron and others to the oriental xitales; and Appendix B, I., a Chronological Table, giving full titles of the oriental tales considered, and II., a Bibliography of the books of reference most useful in a study of this subject. Each book in Appendix B, I. and II., is numbered, and will be referred to in footnotes by number when it is unnecessary to cite the full title; e.g. in the footnote on p. 2, “Cf. App. B, I., No. 4, p. 269,” reference is made to the full title of the earliest known edition of the Arabian Nights, as given on p. 269. The date following the first mention of an oriental tale is, unless otherwise specified, the date of the first English edition, e.g. on p. 13, “1714” following “the Persian Tales or the Thousand and One Days.” Complete lists of the oriental tales by the eighteenth-century essayists will be found in App. B, I., e.g. No. 11, pp. 271, 272, Addison. Unknown essayists are grouped, e.g. No. 12, p. 272.

INTRODUCTION

In a study of the oriental tale in England in the eighteenth century, the high lights fall upon the Arabian Nights, Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, and Beckford’s Vathek. The present volume aims to depict clearly the interesting orientalizing tendency of which these apparently isolated works were the best manifestations—a tendency itself a part of the larger movement of English Romanticism. By “the oriental tale in England” I mean all the oriental and pseudo-oriental fiction—chiefly prose—that appeared in English, whether written originally in English or translated from the French. Much of the fiction I shall consider deserves distinctly to be called pseudo-oriental, Rasselas, for instance, and The Citizen of the World; on the other hand, much of it, such as the Arabian Nights and kindred literature, is genuinely oriental despite its eighteenth-century dress. By “oriental” I mean pertaining to or derived from “those countries, collectively, that begin with Islam on the eastern Mediterranean

xviand stretch through Asia,”[1] with—so far as this specific treatment of the subject goes—one notable exception, Palestine. To the Western mind to-day the Holy Land occupies, as Professor Pierre Martino has pointed out, a unique position somewhat apart from other oriental countries, a position which is of course due to the inherited traditions of Christianity.[2] In the eighteenth century this feeling was far more pronounced than it is in these days of modern scholarship; and therefore, from the eighteenth-century “oriental” literature under consideration we may legitimately exclude Hebrew literature and its imitations. “Oriental,” then, includes here what it included according to Galland, the first translator of the Arabian Nights into French: “Sous le nom d’Orientaux, je ne comprends pas seulement les Arabes et les Persans, mais encore les Turcs et les Tartares et presque tous les peuples de l’Asie jusqu’à la Chine, mahométans ou païens et idolâtres.”[3]

xviiThe scope of our subject in time is less readily defined; since, as in the case of most literary tendencies, both beginning and end were gradual and transitional. The prelude was sounded in the late seventeenth century by the first English translation of Marana’s satire, The Turkish Spy. Yet, broadly speaking, the period began between the years 1704 and 1712, with the first English version of the Arabian Nights, a book so different in character from any oriental fiction then known in England, and so far-reaching in influence, that it forms the natural point of departure. The period drew to a close with the advent of the more modern and scholarly translations of various works made directly from oriental languages, which influenced later the poetry of Southey, Moore, Byron, and others. For the approximate date we may take 1786. In that year was published Vathek,[4] the last notable oriental tale of the century, itself foreshadowing the coming work of scholars and poets. Only two years earlier Sir William Jones, the great orientalist, had given his inaugural lecture as

first president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Yet the date 1786 is approximate only; for in xviiithe sixties and seventies, some direct translations were made; and in the eighties and nineties oriental tales appeared, so similar in character to those of this period that they must logically be included. For the period as a whole, despite the transitional nature of the beginning and the end, has a distinctive character. It is obviously different from the period that followed. The latter, beginning with the direct translations by orientalists, has, from the days of Sir William Jones to those of Kipling, been characterized by an increasing knowledge of the Orient at first hand. By travel and residence in the East, by contact with Eastern peoples, as well as by study of oriental history, literature, and philosophy, Englishmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have learned to know more of the “inscrutable Orient” than their ancestors of the eighteenth century ever imagined possible.[5] This fact at once and radically differentiates

xixthese later centuries from the period we are to consider. A brief glance over the history of oriental fiction in England previous to the eighteenth century will make the distinction equally clear from that side.

Oriental fiction had been borne to England from an early period by various waves of influence. As far back as the eleventh century, fictitious descriptions of the marvels of India are found in Anglo-Saxon translations of legends concerning Alexander the Great. During the Middle Ages many Eastern stories drifted across Europe by way of Syria, Byzantium, Italy, and Spain. Merchants and travelers like Marco Polo, missionaries, pilgrims, and crusaders aided the oral transmission of this fiction; and scholars gave to Europe Latin translations of four great collections of genuine oriental tales: Sendebar; Kalila and Dimna, or The Fables of Bidpai; Disciplina Clericalis; and Barlaam and Josaphat. A definite, though not large, share in this treasure-trove fell to the lot of England and appeared in the form of metrical romances, apologues, legends, and tales of adventure. The fabliau of Dame Siriz, The Proces of the Sevyn Sages, Mandeville’s Voiage, Chaucer’s xxSquier’s Tale,—possibly several other Canterbury Tales,—are typical instances.

In the sixteenth century, that great period of translation, were published the first English editions of the Gesta Romanorum and of the Fables of Bidpai, the latter entitled The Morall Philosophie of Doni ... englished out of Italian by Thomas North ... (1570). During the reign of Elizabeth an entirely new line of intercourse between England and the East was established by the voyages of exploration, discovery, and commerce, characteristic of the Renaissance. Moreover, since the Fall of Constantinople (1453), the Turks had been an increasing menace to Europe. Their ascendancy culminated in the reign of Soliman the Magnificent (1520–1566), and their continual advance upon Christendom was checked only by their great defeat at the battle of Lepanto (1571). Throughout the century, as a natural result of these events and of the voyages referred to above, interest was aroused in oriental—especially Turkish—history and fiction. In Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, for instance, we find the stories Mahomet and Irene, and Sultan Solyman; in the drama such

plays as the Soliman and Perseda, usually ascribed xxito Kyd; Alaham, and Mustapha, by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke; and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. In Shakespeare’s plays, one incident, The Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, has been traced with a good deal of plausibility to Eastern fiction; otherwise, his works show no oriental elements of importance. “The farthest steep of India” as a part of Oberon’s fairy kingdom is possibly drawn from Lord Berners’s prose version of Huon of Bordeaux. That the scene of Antony and Cleopatra is partly in the East does not make it anything but a Roman play.

In the seventeenth century, interest in the Orient was shown by the works of travelers, historians, translators of French heroic romances, dramatists, and orientalists. Knolles’s famous Generall History of the Turks appeared in 1603, a result of the new interest in Turkey mentioned above, and itself a notable factor in extending that interest for years to come. Toward the middle of the century the pseudo-oriental heroic romances of Mlle. de Scudéry and others were translated and won great popularity. After the Restoration numerous heroic plays on similar subjects followed in rapid succession. A few xxiiof these heroic romances were reprinted in the eighteenth century and thus form one link between the fiction of the two periods. Another link is Sir Roger L’Estrange’s version of The Fables of Bidpai.[6] Still another is the Latin translation by Edward Pococke (1648–1727), son of the Oxford orientalist, of the Arabian philosophical romance Hai Ebn Yockdhan, which appeared first in English in the eighteenth century. Marana’s Turkish Spy has already been

mentioned as a late seventeenth-century prelude to the oriental tale of our period.

Such was the oriental fiction that had entered England previous to 1700, and had contributed to a more or less vague and general imaginative acquaintance with the Orient. The sudden advent of the Arabian Nights, full of the life, the colour, and the glamour of the East—even in the Gallicized version of Antoine Galland—naturally opened a new chapter in the history of oriental fiction in England.

The same had been true in France; in fact, the entire English movement echoed to a certain extent the similar French movement. That, also,—preluded by The Turkish Spy,—was xxiiiinaugurated by the Arabian Nights, first introduced into Europe by Galland in the famous translation just referred to. Meeting with instant and great—though not unanimous—favour, the Arabian Nights was followed at once by the equally popular translations by Pétis de la Croix, L’histoire de la Sultane de Perse et des Vizirs, Contes Turcs (1707), and Les Mille et un Jour [sic], Contes Persans (1710–1712). The time was ripe in France for this new literary material. At the beginning of the new century there were especial reasons for the welcome given to oriental stories and to Perrault’s fairy tales, the chief reason being a natural reaction from the dominant classicism of Boileau. From Fairy-land and the Far East two streams began to flow into the main current of French Romanticism. The romanticists of that day went wild over the fascinating tales of “merchants, cadis, slaves,

and calendars,” in a manner foreshadowing the nineteenth-century romanticists who enthusiastically welcomed Les Orientales.

Moreover, interest in the Orient had been growing throughout the seventeenth century in connection with the colonial and commercial expansion of France in the reign of Louis XIV. xxivMerchants, Jesuit missionaries, travelers, and ambassadors had returned with information and entertaining or tragic stories.[7] Galland and Pétis de la Croix, in their turn, found an enthusiastic reception.[8] Their collections were succeeded by a swarm of preposterous imitations, such as those of Gueullette, pretending also to be translated from oriental manuscripts and catering to the inordinate popular demand for things oriental. Fantastic elements from the fairy tales of Perrault and his successors were mingled with the extravagances of oriental stories, until the torrent of enthusiasm rapidly spent its force and left several new channels open to French fiction. Satire on both oriental tales and fairy stories inevitably appeared, and proved a sharp weapon in the hands of Hamilton, Caylus, and a score of others. Philosophical satirists like Montesquieu (Lettres Persanes, 1721)

found the oriental tale a convenient medium for scarcely veiled criticism of French society; and the versatile genius of Voltaire perceived xxvthe latent capabilities of this fiction as a vehicle for philosophy as well as for satire. The coarseness present in many oriental tales, even in Galland’s expurgated and Gallicized Arabian Nights, undoubtedly afforded to Crébillon fils, and others, a starting point for their numerous contes licencieux, which satirized the extravagance of the fairy stories and the oriental tales and ridiculed the moralizing tendency as well. The latter propensity was prominent in France toward the middle of the century, witness the numerous works of Marmontel, the founder of the so-called conte moral, or tale of manners and morals. Three of his tales are oriental in setting. Parody and the use of the genre as a vehicle for satire and didacticism assisted its decline.

In England the general development of the oriental tale was similar, partly because of the direct influence of numerous translations from the French and partly because of the presence of tendencies in England analogous to those in France. The propensity to moralize and to philosophize, the love of satire, and the incipient romantic spirit, were common to both countries, although present—as we shall see—in varying xxvidegrees. In England this fiction falls naturally into four groups,—imaginative, moralistic, philosophic, and satiric. The imaginative group, the earliest, and, at the beginning of the century, the most significant, diminished as the other groups increased in strength, but revived again near the end of our period in Beckford’s Vathek. The moralistic and philosophic groups are prominent in the periodical essays from Addison to Dr. Johnson. The philosophic group comprises besides Rasselas several translations from Voltaire’s contes philosophiques. The satiric group is chiefly exemplified by the pseudo-letters culminating,

in English, in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, and by Count Hamilton’s entertaining parodies. One work, indeed, belonging in the imaginative group, was influential throughout the whole period: the Arabian Nights—as numerous editions testify—was a permanent factor in the development of the oriental tale in England.

Chapters I., II., III., and IV. of this volume will be devoted to a description of the most important characteristics of these successive groups, and the final chapter will present a literary estimate of the genre as a whole.

CHAPTER I THE IMAGINATIVE GROUP

Of all the wide lands open to the wandering imagination none has a more perennial charm than the mysterious East. To that magical country the Arabian Nights, ever since its first appearance in English in the early years of the eighteenth century, has proved a favourite gateway, over which might well be inscribed:—