THE EVERLASTING NIGHTS

No one has any business with the Arabian Nights who objects to bulk in literature. It is a curious thing which may be noticed by all literary critics, that literature is the only thing in which bulk is considered a defect. The truth is, of course, that size is an element of value in literature. If the quality be really ascertained, the amount, even if indefinitely increased, becomes a merit. A man would as soon think of saying that the field was over-crowded with flowers, that the sky had a surplus population of stars, as of saying that there were too many good stories. The Arabian Nights is a collection of extraordinarily good stories, and while the modern aesthetic critic will probably find the book too long, the person with a taste for literature will find it too short. Surely the greatest compliment we can pay to it or any other book is to find it too short. This defect is the highest of all possible perfections.

Now length in the case of the Arabian Nights is not a mere material accident; it is one of the essential qualities, one of the essential virtues of the book. A short Arabian Nights is as unthinkable as a neat wilderness or a snug cathedral. The whole plan of the book is one vast conspiracy to entrap the reader into a condition of everlasting attention. By a supreme stroke of genius the compiler expressed this in the primary framework and outline. He made the teller of the stories a person inspired to prolong the stories infinitely by the devouring desire of life. It made the wish for an everlasting story one with the wish for an everlasting earthly existence. He made Scheherezade suddenly paralyze the tyrant when the sword was uplifted by a vision of all the stories that re mained to be told in the world. She lured him into the golden and enchanted chamber of the first story and then the work was done. He could not get away from the puzzling and alluring sequence of that chain of tales, that endless series of delightful mantraps. Rooms within rooms opened their tempting and tantalizing doors, stories within stories promised a complicated and even confusing pleasure. The tyrant can sway kingdoms, and command multitudes, but he cannot discover exactly what happened to a fabulous prince or princess unless he asks for it. He has to wait, almost to fawn upon a wretched slave for the fag-end of an old tale. Never in any other book, perhaps, has such a splendid tribute been offered to the pride and omnipotence of art.

This is the real idea behind the Arabian Nights. The richness which first strikes the imagination in reading it is a mere symbol. The richness of gold, silver and jewels is a mere figure and representation of that which is the essential idea, the deep and enduring richness of life. The preciousness of emerald and amethyst and sandalwood is only the parable and expression of the preciousness of stones, dust, and dogs running in the streets. In the Arabian Nights everything has a story to tell. Three men come together; one is leading a gazelle, another a dog, another a mule. But the gazelle is an enchanted human being, the dog is a transformed brother, the mule is a man in unhuman shape. There is no traveller so dusty and commonplace that he may not have stories to tell of the terrible continents that lie upon the borderland of the world. There is no beggar so bent and abject that he may not have possession of a talisman which gives him power over the palaces and temples of princes. The possibilities of life are not to be counted. That is the profoundly practical moral buried in the Arabian Nights.

In our early Biblical lessons we were told that the Eastern teacher sat down to teach. There are not, perhaps, many points of resemblance between two such products of Oriental literature as The Book of Job and the Arabian Nights. But there is this in common between them, that we feel that both must have been narrated by somebody who was sitting down, while Ulysses the typical Greek, was toiling with oar and rudder to discover new isles and peninsulas, job, the typical Jew, was reviewing the whole of heaven and earth while sitting on a dust-heap. Similarly, the Sultan of the Indies heard the tales of the four quarters of the earth while sitting on a cushion. The essential point, the essential lesson of these Oriental literatures is the clear and most moral lesson of idleness. Idleness is not a vice; in the old Chaucerian form of `idlesse' it is a pleasure, and almost a virtue. Its true name is leisure. It is not a trifling with unimportant things, but a vision of all the innumerable important things in the universe which are in themselves even more important than bread and cheese.

Here again, therefore, we come near to one of the essential ideas which give their perennial charm to the Arabian Nights. It is the idea that idleness is not an empty thing. Idleness can be, and should be a particularly full thing, rich as it is in the Arabian Nights with invaluable jewels and incalculable stories. Idleness, or leisure, as the Eastern chronicler would probably prefer to call it, is indeed our opportunity of seeing the vision of all things, our rural audience for hearing, as the Sultan of the Indies heard them, the stories of all created things. In that hour, if we know how to use it, the tree tells its story to us, the stone in the road recites its memoirs, the lamppost and the paling expatiate on their autobiographies. For as the most hideous nightmare in the world is an empty leisure, so the most enduring pleasure is a full leisure. We can defend ourselves, even on the Day of Judgment, if our work has been useless, with pleas of opportunity, competition and fulness of days.

AESOP'S FABLES

Aesop EMBODIES an epigram not uncommon in human history; his fame is all the more deserved because he never deserved it. The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots of uncommon sense, that characterize all the Fables, belong not to him but to humanity. In the earliest human history, whatever is authentic is universal; and whatever is universal is anonymous. In such cases there is always some central man who had first the trouble of collecting these stories, and afterwards the fame of creating them. He had the fame; and, on the whole, he earned the fame. There must have been something great and human, something of the human future and the human past, in such a man; even if he only used it to rob the past or deceive the future. The story of Arthur may have been really connected with the most fighting Christianity of falling Rome or with the most heathen traditions hidden in the hills of Wales. But the word `Mappe' or `Malory' will always mean King Arthur; even though we find older and better origins than the Mabinogian; or write later and worse versions than the `Idylls of the King.' The nursery fairy-tales may have come out of Asia with the Indo-European race, now fortunately extinct; they may have been invented by some fine French lady or gentlemen like Perrault: they may possibly even be what they profess to be. But we shall always call the best selection of such tales, `Grimm's Tales'; simply because it is the best collection.

The historical Aesop, in so far as he was historical, would seem to have been a Phrygian slave, or at least one not to be specially and symbolically adorned with the Phrygian cap of liberty. He lived, if he did live, about the sixth century before Christ, in the time of that Croesus whose story we love and suspect like everything else in Herodotus. There are also stories of deformity of feature and a ready ribaldry of tongue; stories which (as the celebrated Cardinal said) explain, though they do not excuse, his having been hurled over a high precipice at Delphi. It is for those who read the Fables to judge whether he was really thrown over the cliff for being ugly and offensive, or rather for being highly moral and correct. But there is no kind of doubt that the general legend of him may justly rank him with a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons; the race of the great philosophic slaves. Aesop may have been a fiction like Uncle Remus; he was also, like Uncle Remus, a fact. It is a fact that slaves in the old world could be worshipped like Aesop, or loved like Uncle Remus. It is odd to note that both the great slaves told their best stories about beasts and birds.

But whatever be fairly due to Aesop, the human tradition called Fables is not due to him. This had gone on long before any sarcastic freedman from Phrygia had or had not been flung off a precipice; this has remained long after. It is to our advantage, indeed, to realize the distinction; because it makes Aesop more obviously effective than any other fabulist. Grimm's Tales, glorious as they are, were collected by two German students; at least we know more about them than we know about a Phrygian slave. The truth is, of course, that Aesop's Fables are not Aesop's fables, any more than Grimm's Fairy-Tales were ever Grimm's fairy-tales. But the fable and the fairy-tale are things utterly distinct. There are many elements of difference; but the plainest is plain enough. There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy-tale without them.

Aesop, or Babrius (or whatever his name was), understood that, for a fable, all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march on, as the pawn in chess must march on. The fable must not allow for the crooked captures of the pawn; it must not allow for what Balzac called "the revolt of a sheep." The fairy-tale, on the other hand, absolutely revolves on the pivot of human personality. If no hero were there to fight the dragons, we should not even know that they were dragons. If no adventurer were cast on the undiscovered islandit would remain undiscovered. If the miller's third son does not find the enchanted garden where the seven princesses stand white and frozen why then, they will remain white and frozen and enchanted. If there is no personal prince to find the Sleeping Beauty she will simply sleep. Fables repose upon quite the opposite idea: that' everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself. The wolf will be always selfish; the fox will be always foxy. Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great people have combined. Men do not, I think, love; beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not Aesop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot be anything but themselves; it is their tragedy that they could not lose their souls.

This is the immortal justification of the Fable; that we; could not teach the plainest truths so simply without turning men into chessmen. We cannot talk of such simple things without using animals that do not talk at all. Suppose, for a moment, that you turn the wolf into a selfish baron, or the fox into a foxy diplomatist, you will at once remember that even barons are human, you will be unable to forget that even diplomatists are men. You will always be looking for that accidental good humour that should go with the brutality of any brutal man; for that allowance for all delicate things, including virtue, that should exist in any good diplomatist. Once put a thing on two legs instead of four and pluck it of feathers and you cannot help asking for a human being, either heroic, as in the fairy-tales, or unheroic, as in the modern novels.

But by using animals in this austere and arbitrary style as they are used on the shields of heraldry or the hieroglyphics of the ancients, men have really succeeded in handing down those tremendous truths that are called truisms. If the chivalric lion be red and rampant, it is rigidly red and rampant; if the sacred ibis stands anywhere on one leg, it stands on one leg for ever. In this language, like a large animal alphabet, are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men. As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow, so man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths. That a flowing stream cannot befoul its own fountain, and that any one who says it does is a tyrant and a liar; that a mouse is too weak to fight a lion, but too strong for the cords that can hold a lion; that a fox who gets most out of a flat dish may easily get least out of a deep dish; that the crow whom the gods forbid to sing, the gods nevertheless provide with cheese; that when the goat insults from a mountain-top it is not the goat that insults, but the mountain; all these are deep truths deeply graven on the rocks wherever men have passed. It matters nothing how old they are, or how new; they are the alphabet of humanity, which like so many forms of primitive picture-writing employs any living symbol in preference to man. These ancient and universal tales are all of animals; as the latest discoveries in the oldest prehistoric caverns are all of animals. Man, in his simpler stories, always felt that he himself was something too mysterious to be drawn. But the legend he carved under these cruder symbols was everywhere the same; and whether fables began with Aesop or began with Adam, whether they were German and medieval as Reynard the Fox, or as French and Renaissance as La Fontaine, the upshot is everywhere essentially the same; that pride goes before a fall; and that there is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks by any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable; but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything.

BOTH SIDES OF THE LOOKING-GLASS

WE ALL say comparisons are odious, and I wonder whether any of us know why. In the abstract, comparison is only a way of testing degrees and qualities, like the zoologist who thought it an exact and exhaustive description of a giraffe to say that "he is taller than an elephant, but not so thick". There is nothing in this to indicate any odiumto suggest that he was cruel to wild elephants or unduly spoiled and petted his giraffes. But when we pass from nature to human nature, comparison does always sound like a depreciation. I think the reason is this: that for some cause, possibly original sin, we have a very weak supply of words of praise as compared with our rich and varied output of terms of abuse. We can call the unpleasant scholar or intellectual a pedant or a prig, but we have no special word for the pleasant sort of scholar or intellectual. We can call the wrong sort of society person a snob, but we have no special name for the right sort of society person. Thus we are driven to the ghastly necessity, for instance, of calling our friends `nice'. Fancy calling Dr. Johnson `nice', and Fox `nice', and Nelson `nice'. It does not present very vivid or varied portraits.

I have been reading, side by side, two books about men who were both `nice', and whose books were `nice'. They were the two great nineteenth-century tellers of tales to children. They were also as flatly contrary to each other at every point as two men could be, but if I go beyond calling them both `nice' and try to compare them or say what they were like, it will quite certainly sound as though I were praising one and blaming the other. This is simply because we cannot vary praise as we vary blame. One of these men was Charles Dodgson, commonly known as Lewis Carroll, a don at Oxford and a very Victorian English clergyman, the other was Hans Christian Andersen, a queer, cranky and visionary Danish peasant, and the author of immortal tales.

When I say that Lewis Carroll was very Victorian, that will sound like a reproach, though it ought to be a compliment as well as a reproachonly it is so much more difficult to find words to fit what was good in Victorian England than what was bad in it. If I say that Dodgson the don was conventional or comfortable or respectable, compared with Andersen the peasant, those words will sound like unfriendly words, but only because there are no friendly words to express the really friendly things that often do go along with conventions and comforts.

It is abominably stupid to call the Victorian Age merely conventional and comfortable, and to forget the fact that it produced a new kind of poetry which was supremely wild and supremely innocent. It was the poetry of pure nonsense, which has never been known in the world before and may never be known again. Lewis Carroll was not the only example: Edward Lear, I think, was a better one; and I would put in a word for the `Katawampus' and other stories of judge Parry, that children loved at least as much. Lewis Carroll's letters to children prove that not only did he love children, but that children loved him; nevertheless I believe his intellectual attacks were directed to adults. Everything in Lewis Carroll is part of what he called the Game of Logic; it is very Victorian, by the way, to think of logic as a game. The Victorians had to invent a sort of impossible paradise in which to indulge in good logic: for all serious things they preferred bad logic. This is not paradoxical, or at any rate, it was they who made the paradox. Macaulay and Bagehot and all their teachers taught them that the British Constitution ought to be illogicalthey called it being practical. Read the great Reform Bill and then read Alice in Wonderlandyou will be struck by the resemblance of Alice in Wonderland. They had to go to fairyland to be logical. Thus I suspect that the very best of Lewis Carroll was not written by a man for children, but by a don for dons. The most brilliant strokes are not only mathematical, but mature. Ten lectures against the heresy of mere Relativity could be based on that one perfect sentence, "I have seen hills compared with which that would be a valley."

But it may be questioned whether the little girls he wrote for were tortured by relativist scepticism. And, in a way, this is part of the glory of Lewis Carroll. He was not only teaching children to stand on their heads; but he was also teaching dons to stand on their heads. It is a good test of a head to stand on it. When the Victorians wanted a holiday, they made one, a real intellectual holiday. They did create a world which, to me at least, is still a sort of strange home, a secret holiday, a world in which monsters, terrifying in other fairy-tales, were turned into pets. Nothing will deprive them of the glory of it. It was nonsense for nonsense's sake. If we ask where this magic mirror was found the answer is that it was found among very padded Victorian furniture: in other words, it was due to the historical accident by which Dodgson and Oxford and England were, at that moment, very comfortable and secure. They knew there would be no fighting, except the party system, in which Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle, the battle being much less obvious than the agreement. They knew their England could not see invasion or revolution; they knew it was growing richer by commerce; they did not realize that agriculture was dying, possibly because it was already dead; they had no peasants.

They found their flat contrary in that other great lover of children, whose story is told admirably in The Life of Hans Christian Andersen by Signe Toksvig. Hans Andersen was himself a peasant, and came of what is still a country of peasants. In a thousand ways, Hans Andersen represented the exact opposite of the sheltered don in his cushioned Victorian drawing-room. Hans was open to all the winds that blew, like a peasant on his fields, like a peasant on the European battlefields. He grew up anyhow, full of a sort of pathetic and greedy ambition, such as dons at Oxford do not show. He had experienced all realities, including his own weakness and his own desires. He did a hundred things, idiotic things, which Mr. Dodgson would have found unthinkable; but because he was a peasant he had his compensations. He remained in touch with the enormous tradition of the earth in the matter of mystery and glamourhe did not have to make a new and rather artificial sort of fairy-tale out of triangles and syllogisms.

Hans Andersen was not only an uncle loved by children, he was a child. He was one of those great children of our Christian past who have had the Divine favour which is called arrested development. His faults were the faults of a childand very annoying faults they were. Why do aged men after reading this book, love Hans Andersen? I answer, because the most lovable thing in the world is humility. Now Hans Andersen had a vast vanity, which was founded on humility. I know that modern psychologists have called the combination an inferiority complexbut there is always an element of humility in the man who does not conceal his vanity.

Nobody ever made it so naked and shameless as poor Hans Andersen. But my intention here is only to stir such thoughts as are aroused by those contrasted types, neither of which, I hope, will ever be forgotten as nursery classics. Both had many imitators, I hope I shall not be misunder stood if I say that Hans Andersen was perhaps even greater, because he was himself an imitator. That great peasant, that great poet in prose, had the peasant quality which the Victorians had lostthe old mystical feeling about the ordinary materials of life. Hans Andersen would have found more on this side of the looking-glass than Alice found on the other. Beyond are fantastic mathematical projections; but why go through the looking-glass when all the rest of the furniture, all the chairs and tables, can be animated by elves?

My comparisons are becoming odious. It is because there is no variation in verbal praise. Differentation sounds like depreciation. Which is better; to have distilled from the dense commercial solidity of the modern world a wild new wine or honey of intellectual nonsense, or to have enlarged that large and magnificent accumulation of popular imagination in the past, and to have made again, with an original note, the great fairy-tale that is really a folk-tale? I only know that if you try to deprive me of either of them, there will be a row.