Читать книгу The Bakhtyār Nāma. A Persian Romance онлайн

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When this work was first published in England it seems to have made its way very rapidly into public favour; and Weber, in his Introduction to the Tales of the East, relates, as follows, a singular instance of the effects they produced soon after their first appearance: “Sir James Stewart, Lord Advocate for Scotland, having one Saturday evening found his daughters employed in reading the volumes, he seized them, with a rebuke for spending the evening before the Sabbath in such worldly amusements; but the grave advocate himself became a prey to the fascination of these tales, being found on the morning of the Sabbath itself employed upon their perusal, from which he had not risen during the whole night!” The popularity of the Arabian Nights is due, no doubt, to the peculiar charm of its descriptions of scenes and incidents which the reader is well aware could only exist and occur in the imagination; but we like to be taken away from our hard, matter-of-fact surroundings—away into a world where, if we cannot ourselves become endowed with supernatural powers, at least we may summon mighty spirits to do our will, to transport us whither we please, to bring us in an instant the choicest fruits from the most distant regions, to construct for us palaces of gold and silver, and precious gems, to supply us with dainties in dishes made of single diamonds and rubies. In this very outraging of probability, and even possibility, lies the strange fascination which some of these Tales exercise over the reader’s mind. He surrenders his judgment to the author, and such is the force of the spell, that even when it has been partly removed by closing the book, he will gravely ask himself: “And why may not such things be?” It has been justly observed by Lord Bacon, that, “as the active world is inferior to the rational soul, so Fiction gives to mankind what History denies, and in some measure satisfies the mind with shadows when it cannot enjoy the substance.”