Page:Stories from the Arabian nights - Houseman - Dulac.djvu/17

Preface with event, they are either incredibly careless or discreditably perfunctory. We have to reckon with them as the product of a race keenly alive to the value of colour and pictorial description, but a race whose constructive imagination was feeble and diffuse, lacking almost entirely that great essential for the development of art in its finer forms—the economy of means toward ends.

But because they contain, though at a low pressure, the expression of so much life, habit and custom, so many coloured and secluded interiors, so quaint a commingling of crowds, so brilliant and moving a pageantry of Eastern mediævalism, because of all these things the "Arabian Nights" will still retain their perennial charm. Those of us who read are all travellers; and never is our travelling sense so awakened perhaps, as when we dip into a book such as this where the incredible and the commonplace are so curiously blended, and where [xiii