Stories from
The Arabian Nights
With Drawings by Edmund Dulac
Hodder and Stoughton
Publishers, London
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Scheherazadè, the heroine of the Thousand andOne Nights.
PREFACE
Scheherazadè, the heroine of the Thousand andone Nights, ranks among the great story-tellersof the world much as does Penelope among theweavers. Procrastination was the basis of herart; for though the task she accomplished wassplendid and memorable, it is rather in thequantity than the quality of her invention—inthe long spun-out performance of what couldhave been done far more shortly—that shebecomes a figure of dramatic interest. The ideawhich binds the stories together is greater andmore romantic than the stories themselves; andthough, both in the original and in translation,the diurnal interruption of their flow is more andmore taken for granted, we are never quite[Pg vi]robbed of the sense that it is Scheherazadè whois speaking—Scheherazadè, loquacious and self-possessed,sitting up in bed at the renewed callof dawn to save her neck for the round of anotherday. Here is a figure of romance worth a dozenof the prolix stories to which it has been madesponsor; and often we may have followed thefortunes of some shoddy hero and heroinechiefly to determine at what possible point ofinterest the narrator could have left hanging thatfrail thread on which for another twenty-fourhours her life was to depend.
Yes, the idea is delightful; and, with the fictionof Scheherazadè to colour them, the tales acquirea rank which they would not otherwise deserve;their prolixity is then the crowning point of theirart, their sententious truisms have a flavour ofironic wit, their repetitions become humorous,their trivialities a mark of light-hearted courage;even those deeper indiscretions, which Burton[Pg vii]has so faithfully recorded, seem then but a wiseadaptation of vile means to a noble end. And yetwe know that it is not so; for, as a matter offact, the "Arabian Nights Entertainment" is but amiscellany gathered from various sources, of variousdates, and passing down to us, even in itscollocated form, under widely differing versions.None but scholars can know how little of theunadulterated originals has come into our possession;and only those whose pious opinionsshut their eyes to obvious facts can object inprinciple to the simplification of a form which,from the point of view of mere story-telling, canso easily be bettered. Even the more accurate ofthe versions ordinarily available are