THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

Copyright, 1909, by
Charles Scribner's Sons

Published October, 1909

PREFACE

Little excuse is needed, perhaps, for any fresh selection from thefamous "Tales of a Thousand and One Nights," provided it berepresentative enough, and worthy enough, to enlist a new army ofyouthful readers. Of the two hundred and sixty-four bewildering,unparalleled stories, the true lover can hardly spare one, yet theremust always be favourites, even among these. We have chosen some of themost delightful, in our opinion; some, too, that chanced to appealparticularly to the genius of the artist. If, enticed by our choice andthe beauty of the pictures, we manage to attract a few thousand moretrue lovers to the fountain-book, we shall have served our humble turn.The only real danger lies in neglecting it, in rearing a child who doesnot know it and has never fallen under its spell.

You remember Maimoune, in the story of Prince Camaralzaman, and what shesaid to Danhasch, the genie who had just arrived from the farthestlimits of China? "Be sure thou tellest me nothing but what is true or Ishall clip thy wings!" This is what the modern child sometimes says tothe genies of literature, and his own wings are too often clipped inconsequence.

"The Empire of the Fairies is no more.
Reason has banished them from ev'ry shore;
Steam has outstripped their dragons and their cars,
Gas has eclipsed their glow-worms and their stars."

Édouard Laboulaye says in his introduction to Nouveaux Contes Bleus:"Mothers who love your children, do not set them too soon to the studyof history; let them dream while they are young. Do not close the soulto the first breath of poetry. Nothing affrights me so much as thereasonable, practical child who believes in nothing that he cannottouch. These sages of ten years are, at twenty, dullards, or what isstill worse, egoists."

When a child has once read of Prince Agib, of Gulnare or Periezade,Sinbad or Codadad, in this or any other volume of its kind, the magicwill have been instilled into the blood, for the Oriental flavour in theArab tales is like nothing so much as magic. True enough they are a vaststorehouse of information concerning the manners and the customs, thespirit and the life of the Moslem East (and the youthful reader does nothave to study Lane's learned foot-notes to imbibe all this), but beyondand above the knowledge of history and geography thus gained, therecomes something finer and subtler as well as something more vital. Thescene is Indian, Egyptian, Arabian, Persian; but Bagdad and Balsora,Grand Cairo, the silver Tigris, and the blooming gardens of Damascus,though they can be found indeed on the map, live much more truly in thatenchanted realm that rises o'er "the foam of perilous seas in faerylands forlorn." What craft can sail those perilous seas like the bookthat has been called a great three-decker to carry tired people toIslands of the Blest? "The immortal fragment," says Sir Richard Burton,who perhaps knew the Arabian Nights as did no other European, "willnever be superseded in the infallible judgment of childhood. Themarvellous imaginative