Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/407

373 of Nuzhet ez Zeman before Sherkan , of Wird Khan before his father and the pietistic exercitations of Dhat ed Dewahi and her damsels before Omar ben Ennuman , in which the slightest thread of story serves as an excuse for the display of the heterogeneous “learning” (as the Arabs understood the word) of the author and for endless dissertations upon all things human and divine and sundry others. This class of story, though undeniably curious from the student’s point of view, has little or no interest for the general reader, who will probably be inclined to agree with De Sacy that, if, in a certain light, edifying, it is “rien moins qu’amusant.”

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night is the extreme simplicity of its style. Nothing can be more unlike the idea of barbaric splendour, of excessive and heterogeneous ornament, that we are accustomed to associate with the name, than the majority of the tales that compose the collection. The life described in it is mainly that of the people, those Arabs so essentially brave, sober, hospitable and kindly, almost hysterically sensitive to emotions of love and pity, as well as to artistic impressions, yet susceptible of being roused to strange excesses of ferocity and brutality, to be soon followed by bitter and unavailing repentance—a people whom extreme sensibility of the nervous tissue inclines to excess of sensuous enjoyment, yet who are capable of enduring without a murmur the severest hardships and of suffering patiently the most cruel vicissitudes of fortune, without other complaint