Chapter II: 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 and 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]

The 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 the 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 these 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 _Squier’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 to 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 of 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 inaugurated 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. Merchants, 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 the 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 degrees. 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.

THE ORIENTAL TALE IN ENGLAND