burton--1001-nights--sample

indecencies and “vain and amatorious” phrase jostling the finest and
highest views of life and character, shown in the kaleidoscopic shiftings
of the marvellous picture with many a “rich truth in a tale’s pretence;”
pointed by a rough dry humour which compares well with “wut;” the
alternations of strength and weakness, of pathos and bathos, of the
boldest poetry (the diction of Job) and the baldest prose (the Egyptian
of to-day); the contact of religion and morality with the orgies of
African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter — at times taking away the
reader’s breath — and, finally, the whole dominated everywhere by that
marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein the spiritual and the supernatural
are as common as the material and the natural; it is this contrast, I say,
which forms the chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most
striking originality and which makes it a perfect expositor of the
medieval Moslem mind.
Explanatory notes did not enter into Mr. Payne’s plan. They do
with mine: * I can hardly imagine The Nights being read to any profit
by men of the West without commentary. My annotations avoid only
one subject, parallels of European folk-lore and fabliaux which, however
interesting, would overswell the bulk of a book whose speciality is
anthropology. The accidents of my life, it may be said without undue
presumption, my long dealings with Arabs and other Mahommedans,
and my familiarity not only with their idiom but with their turn of
thought, and with that racial individuality which baffles description,
have given me certain advantages over the average student, however
deeply he may have studied. These volumes, moreover, afford me a
long sought opportunity of noticing practices and customs which
interest all mankind and which “Society” will not hear mentioned.
*
For this edition only a small portion of Burton’s notes was retained; see About this
Edition, p. 6.
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