Читать книгу Short Stories Old and New - Various - Страница 33

[Setting. This story, like "Esther," takes place in Persia. The stories of "The Arabian Nights" as a whole probably originated in India, were modified and augmented by the Persians, and had the finishing touches put upon them by the Arabians. Bagdad on the Tigris is the city that figures most prominently in the stories, and the good caliph Haroun Al-Raschid (or Alraschid), who ruled from 786 to 809, A.D., is the monarch most often mentioned.

"A goodly place, a goodly time,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid."

However old the germs of the stories are, the form in which we have them hardly antedates the year 1450. The absence of all mention of coffee and tobacco precludes, at least, a date much later. They began to be translated into the languages of Europe during the reign of Queen Anne and, with the exception of the Old Testament, have been the chief orientalizing influence in modern literature. The setting of "Ali Baba" shows the four characteristics of all these Perso-Arabian tales: it has to do with town life, not country life; it presupposes one faith, the Mohammedan; it shows a fondness for magic; and it takes for granted an audience interested not in moral or ethical distinctions but in story-telling for story-telling's sake.

Plot. The plot of the short story as a distinct type of literature has been said to show a steady progress from the impossible through the improbable and probable to the inevitable. When we say of a story that the conclusion is inevitable we mean that, with the given background and characters, it could not have ended in any other way, just as, with a given multiplier and multiplicand, one product and only one is possible. This cannot be said of "Ali Baba," because the five parts are not linked together in a logical sequence as are the events in "The Gold-Bug," or by any controlling idea of reform such as we find in "A Christmas Carol," or by any underlying moral purpose like that which gives unity and dignity to "The Great Stone Face." These Perso-Arabian tales, in other words, are stories of random incident, loosely but charmingly told, with always the note of strangeness and unexpectedness. The incidents, however, reflect accurately the manners and customs of time and place. We do not believe that a door ever opened to the magic of mere words, but we do believe and cannot help believing that the author tells the truth when he writes of leather jars full of oil, of bands of mounted robbers, of a poor man who could support himself by hauling wood from the free-for-all forest, of slavery from which one might escape by notable fidelity, of funeral rites performed by the imaum and other ministers of the mosque, and of the unwillingness of an assassin to attempt the life of a man with whom he had just eaten salt. Fancy, it is true, mingles with fact in "The Arabian Nights," but it does not replace fact.

Characters. Morgiana is the leading character. She furnishes all the brains employed in the story. The narrator praises her "courage" twice, but she had more than courage. Fidelity, initiative, and resourcefulness must also be put among her assets. We can hardly imagine her as acting from Esther's high motive, but she lived up to the best standards of conduct that she knew. Whoever serves as a model for his own time may serve as a model for ours. Duties change, but duty remains.]