The Voluptuous Salammbô! With a Cast of Thousands!

 

 

poster for Grieco's The Loves of Salammbo (1960) 

     Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) resembles nothing so much as a ‘fifties Biblical or Classical epic, amounting to the verbal equivalent of a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacular with a cast of thousands, exotic sets and costumes, and a good share of sex and violence [1].  Just as such films focused on characters dressed in elaborate and strange apparel set in scenes of faraway times and places, Flaubert’s historical novel offers the reader exceedingly detailed descriptions of exotic clothing, jewelry, and even cosmetics.  Like a Cecil B. DeMille feature, Salammbô alternates warfare and torture with erotic excitement and love-longing, so as never to lack some appeal to the back-brain. 

     The author’s habitual obsession with precise concrete delineation of every scene, his famous pursuit of le mot juste, here is combined with the prodigious research with which he prepared to write the novel.  The reader of Salammbô, even with a good knowledge of French, might likely be slowed by the vocabulary for military units, maneuvers, siege engines, and the like.  (Latin scholars may recall a similar demand on readers of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.)  This fact, as well as the occurrence of numerous out-of-the-way terms for gems, fabrics, and the like, can make the text difficult.  Footnotes would often help.  One suspects that Flaubert was loathe to waste a single fact from his notes, as though the use of many obsolete, foreign, or otherwise out-of-the-way words would strengthen the substance, gravitas, and beauty in his story.

     After Madame Bovary, which had been meant as an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal with verisimilitude as its chief value, but which brought the author an obscenity trial (at which he was acquitted), he chose to direct his gaze to the past.  Just as Hedy Lamarr could be sexy in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), under the protection of the story’s antiquity and, in that case, Biblical authority, Salammbô can fascinate men in the novel with less danger of legal action.  Such exotic women had been popular in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as well as in visual art.  Though putatively representing antiquity the rather languid view of the past seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings or those by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or John William Waterhouse has more of a scent of nineteenth century Romanticism and, ultimately, Decadence than their medieval and classical models.  Artists who depicted Flaubert’s own invention, Salammbô herself, included Victor Prové (1893), Alphonse Mucha (1896), Desiré Maurice Ferrary (1899), and Henri Adrien Tanoux (1921) [2].

     While erotic elements are surely critically important for the book’s popularity, violence, just as in the movies, runs a close second.  To some the most boring stretches of Flaubert’s narration, battle sequences stretch on for page after page with few single combats and a great many compilations of nations of mercenaries, units of various sorts, slingers, archers, cavalry and the like, as though the book might be used to train officers in strategy.  But while such large-scale violence might at times be tiresome, the periodic massacres of prisoners and the recurring scenes of torture and mutilation are more disturbing.  In fact both violence and steaming sexuality are more nakedly presented in than in Bovary, but in the later novel a wash of ancient history makes the sensational more acceptable.

     Though aesthetic value is unprovable, Flaubert’s reputation as a stylist, reinforced very likely by the reader’s own experience, is sufficient to suggest that each passage is cunningly crafted to accomplish its effects.  The cinematic parallel would be, perhaps, the mature Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible in which every frame is artfully composed, a standard that few would suggest DeMille ever even sought to achieve.  The attention here is not to the actual complexity of a work of art, but the maker’s level of intention.  Whereas Flaubert was hoping to do something new and to  compose a novel of lasting value, based on its formal qualities alone, most Hollywood filmmakers seek to adhere to convention and have little ambition more far=reaching than to sell tickets upon the picture’s release. 

     Virtually all critics would agree that Flaubert’s prose is beautiful, and their expositions of this point are readily available.  In many passages the rhythm of Flaubert’s hypnotic periodic phrasing and the melodious sound of his descriptions is foregrounded even if a passage contains little specific information, like this.

 

     They were not Libyans from the area of Carthage who had long made up the third army, but rather nomads from the plateau of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derné, some from Phazzana and Marmarique.  They had gone over the desert drinking from brackish wells amid the bones of camels.  The Zuaèces, adorned with ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ, Garamantes, veiled with black masks, arrived on their painted mounts, others were riding asses, onagers, zebras, and buffalo.  Some among them pulled the rood of their boat-shaped with their families and their idols.  There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the water of their hot springs, Atarantians who curse the sun, Troglodytes who inter their dead laughing under tree branches, and the hideous Ausians who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachides, who eat lice, and the Gysantes, painted with vermilion, who eat monkeys. [3]

 

     Surely there is meant to be something incantatory in this list of place names.  The exotic customs, none of which, of course, play any role in the plot, far from reinforcing the historic verisimilitude, are curiosities, reminiscent of the dog-headed men in Pliny or the immense aspidochelone of the Physiologus.  Whether or not the reader is susceptible to Flaubert’s calculated cadences, the list of nationalities, all of which are likely unknown to the reader, in fact makes the narration not more “real,” but considerably more fanciful.  Still Flaubert’s self-consciously meticulous style is undeniable, but here its appeal is based neither on authenticity nor on painting an imaginable picture, but rather on the appeal of the unfamiliar and the charm of sound alone, as in  magic formulae. 

     The other characteristic that most fundamentally marks the contrast between Salammbô and a spectacular Hollywood epic is more objectively demonstrable.  Mid-twentieth century American movies made for a mass audience will present an unambiguous moral universe, with clearly demarcated heroes and villains and a strong tendency toward retributive justice.  The audience is cheering for one side because it is represented as fundamentally right whereas its opponents are not.  There is no room for doubt. 

     In Salammbô on the other hand, while the reader identifies with the heroine emotionally, there seems little to choose between the rulers of Carthage and their barbarian mercenaries.  Each side is engaged in corrupt power struggles [4].  The motivation that stands apart is the erotic bond between Matho and Salammbô.  Even there Matho's passion seems a weakness, contributing to the great fighter’s downfall, and Salammbô’s death at the end makes her a pathetic rather than an admirable character.  The reader is impressed with the power of these portraits, but has no wish to emulate them. 

     This pose of thematic indifference, a reluctance to delineate moral judgements or other conclusions about lived experience, is axiomatic in Flaubert’s realism.  To impose value judgements would be for him to compromise the representation of reality itself.  As Flaubert put it “stupidity consists of wanting to come to conclusions” [5].  For him true realism must be, like science, objective. 

     Far from  accidental, this distinction illustrates one of the principal characteristics distinguishing popular from “high art,” called in various contexts elite, courtly, or learned.  Every imagined portrayal of reality satisfies some reader expectations while challenging or twisting others.  Works consumed by a mass audience, both tribal or folk art without a known creator and modern commercial productions like movies, television shows, and potboilers, tend to confirm consumers’ anticipations and artistic conventions, while those with a smaller yet more sophisticated readership will more often deny expected ideas and point out problems, contradictions, and  mysteries.  The former serves the social function of confirming and perpetuating group values and customs, whereas the latter opens the way for change and allows for uncertainty. 

     Thus Salammbô may be read, just as a DeMille epic would be viewed, for its more sensational elements of sex and violence; it may be considered for its success in creating a world of the past through the accumulation of detail, or it may be contemplated simply as an aesthetic object, a series of melodious sentences. 

 

 

1.  A number of films have, in fact, been based on Flaubert’s novel, including Arturo Ambrosio’s Salammbo (1911), Domenico Gaido’s Salambo (1914), Réda Ait’s Salambo (1916), Pierre Marodon’s  Salammbô (1925), Sergio Grieco’s The Loves of Salammbô (1960), and Jacques Perconte’s Salammbô (2022).  The predominance of early titles and the fact that all the cinematic versions were made in Europe suggests that the reputation of Flaubert’ novel lingered into the twentieth century.  There are in addition operas by y Modest Mussorgsky, (1865, unfinished), Ernest Reyer (1890), and Philippe Fénelon (1992).  More recently Barney B. Johnson composed an opera-ballet on the theme.

2.  An exhibition in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rouen in 2021 collected many such works for an exhibit called "Salammbô: Fureurs! Passion! Éléphants!"  The costumes described in the novel are said to have influenced French fashion, particularly the use of veils, cloaks, and mantles.  In an odd legacy of the book the area, today a part of Tunis, called Le Kram in 1921 changed it s name to Salammbo after the discovery there of Carthaginian archaeological remains.

3.  Ce n'étaient pas les Libyens des environs de Carthage; depuis longtemps ils composaient la troisième armée; mais les nomades du plateau de Barca, les bandits du cap Phiscus et du promontoire de Derné, ceux du Phazzana et de la Marmarique. Ils avaient traversé le désert en buvant aux puits saumâtres maçonnés avec des ossements de chameau; les Zuaèces, couverts de plumes d'autruche, étaient venus sur des quadriges; les Garamantes, masqués d'un voile noir, assis en arrière sur leurs cavales peintes; d'autres sur des ânes, sur des onagres, sur des zèbres, sur des buffles; et quelques-uns traînaient, avec leurs familles et leurs idoles, le toit de leur cabane en forme de chaloupe. Il y avait des Ammoniens aux membres ridés par l'eau chaude des fontaines; des Atarantes, qui maudissent le soleil; des Troglodytes, qui enterrent en riant leurs morts sous des branches d'arbre; et les hideux Auséens, qui mangent des sauterelles; les Achyrmachides, qui mangent des poux, et les Gysantes, peints de vermillon, qui mangent des singes. (From Chapter 12)

4.  Some characters are more attractive than others.  Spendius, for instance, the former slave, is depicted as more venal than either Matho or Hamilcar.  Yet these distinctions do not guide the narrative or shape a definitive theme. 

5.  Letter to Louis Bouilhet of September 4,1850.  “L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure.”  Later in the letter the sentiment is repeated: “Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.”

Wharton’s Morocco and the Conundrums of Travel

                                        Delacroix The Sultan of Morocco

References are to the Century Publishing/Hippocrene edition of 1984.  Page references are in parentheses; numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     People are sometimes curiously self-conscious about being tourists.  In the days before cell  phones, I myself never liked to stroll through foreign squares with a camera around my neck.  Even looking around a new city in the United States, the visitor often strives to “fit in” and pass for a local.  The reason for this wish is not immediately obvious.  After all, the locals are merely going about their quotidian routines, while traveler, like an aristocrat, is not working and has expended money and time in pursuit of pleasure alone (and a little new knowledge can be as pleasurable as a new French sauce).  If anything, one might think the outsider could claim superior prestige.  An additional complication has arisen in recent times with those who criticize some aspects of interest in other societies as psychologically colonialist, “cultural appropriation” [1],  or simply serving the interests of the observer more than a true understanding of the other. 

     Yet since Herodotus’ time, it has been recognized that the traveler is likely to experience benefits more substantial than a view of Mont Blanc or the glow of Gothic stained glass.  The cliché declaring travel to be broadening might be rephrased by saying that the sight of foreign lands provides a kind of heightened awareness of alternatives, a sort of inversion of Dubois’ double consciousness in which the observer is privileged rather than oppressed.  Yet this gain is by no means regularly clear and straightforward.  Very often people project onto the “other” their own psychic contents: medieval monks stewing about how lusty women were or American minstrelsy making comic theater of the oppression of slavery.  Very often such judgements are intuitive and mingle justification of the writer’s own practices with genuine new insights adopted from other points of view. 

     A rhetorical vocabulary has developed in travel writing that embodies a view of the exotic scene not as another equally valid way of being human, but as simultaneously real and unreal, familiar and strange, understood and mysterious.  Edith Wharton’s In Morocco is in many ways an excellent book [2].  Wharton had toured the country in 1917 as the particular guest of the country’s Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, allowing her chauffeured rides and introduction to the traditional rulers.  She describes Morocco as having long been self-isolating after the manner of Japan with very few outsiders allowed to enter.  She obtained rare permission to visit harems and antiquities like the Saadian tombs, moving in a milieu that still included numerous absolute rulers surrounded by slaves and courtesans. 

     She provides ample information about the country’s history and circumstances including pages recording Gen. Lyautey’s achievements and an essay on Moroccan architecture [3].  Yet her skill is less in historical or political analysis than in description.  After one such detailed passage noting the sights before her eyes, the donkeys and camels, the mourners at a funeral, and an old “philosopher” smoking kif, she reflects on the character of her own vision.

 

One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound castles by colder shores of the same ocean.  This is what Moghreb must have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, of Hansa merchants devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary, and the long caravans bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.  (32)

 

     Though she is in fact in Africa, she acknowledges that her view is subjective and may owe as much to her imagination as to the local scene.  Not only does she suggest the strangeness of life in Rabat by conceding that her view is that of an outsider, she feels motivated to make it stranger yet by referring it to centuries gone by.  After using the now-romantic term Barbary, she concludes the passage with a lovely evocation of something she has not actually seen at all.  (While she did witness camel transport, she was unlikely to have seen apes or gold in their cargoes.)  Thus her reportage is at once precise and specific and oneiric.

     This sort of conceit is woven throughout Wharton’s account.  What she sees before her eyes she regularly describes as unreal.  Morocco is “fantastic” (the word recurs five times in the course of her account), a “dream” (nine passages), where one may witness “wonders” (ten times).  The visitor feels she is living in a work of fiction, an “Oriental fable” (62).   The whole country for her was wrapped in “a blessed air of unreality” such that  “the scene became merely symbolical” (54).  Everything is visible only as though through a foggy “haze” (30) where the very light “gives a foretaste of mirage,” “magic becomes real,” and “the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates” (44) [4].  In an oddly tangled figure of speech, she says that “If one lose one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a djinn.” (28)  Here, in a strange reversal, the modernity to which the writer is accustomed becomes the fabulous carpet which, when removed, reveals a timeless land beneath.

     Its timelessness comes, however, at a cost.  Morocco to Wharton is moribund and static.  “The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end, it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread.” (121)  The Moroccans practice “supine indifference” that “lets everything crumble back to clay” (77).  They do nothing to maintain their own antiquities and holy places (33) resulting in  ”catastrophic desolation” (64), but, then, “nothing endures in Islam”  (72).  Thus “long animosity against the intruder has ended up by destroying her own life” (37) and  the palace of Moulay Ismael has devolved into “a carcass for his carcass” (70).  Modern Moroccan architecture is a tasteless imitation of Europe (35).

     Her belief in the timelessness and “stagnant domesticity” (152) of North African culture has political implications.  She admired Resident General Lyautey and described herself as a “rabid imperialist” [4].  To her “General Lyautey has twice saved Morocco from destruction” (161) and the general influence of French colonialism is wholly beneficent. 

    Not all tourists, of course, are conscious imperialists.  Yet today even those who explicitly praise another country’s way of life may be accused of “cultural appropriation,” a sin the boundaries of which are far from clear.  Someone from Omaha who relishes an hour enjoying an espresso and cognac at Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain is more likely to be admired for cosmopolitanism than to be criticized for trying to be French.  Ralph T. H. Griffith served in  the British colonial service, yet most would feel that his translation of the Vedas constituted a service to the Indian people and not a theft.       

     Even the most outlandish examples of cultural appropriation seem to be in origin naïve tributes rather than acts of oppression.  Liberals at least can agree that it is unseemly for high school teams to be called Braves, Chiefs, or even Redskins, but what is one to make of the fact that nearly a hundred thousand Germans are members of Indianerclubs?  Members dress as Native Americans and hold pow-wows at which they dance and enact ceremonies, all the while professing great admiration for the people they mimic [5].  While such hobbyists may be accused of racial stereotyping, they are innocent of racist contempt.  In the same way some Americans purchase tattoos of Chinese characters which neither the customer nor the artist can read, sometimes with amusing results.  Yet the reason people wish to have their bodies ornamented with Asian-ness is surely that they associate that part of the world with wisdom and beauty.  Are we to make any distinction between Griffith’s despicable portrayal of Blacks in Birth of a Nation and Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer?  The theme, after all, of the first, was the defense of slavery and the Confederacy while the second centered on Jakie Rabinowitz’ love of Black music, a love that estranges him from his own culture and family. 

     Inevitably less aware of the nuances of art and customs than a native, the tourist’s appreciation is always based on only partial knowledge.  An outsider’s enthusiasm (or criticism) may be less a reaction to the other than to the visitor’s own.  The Cubists imitated aspects of African art without any attempt to understand it in context and the Imagist poets wrote lyrics based on Chinese models they were, for the most part, unable to read.  Yet the European art that resulted is accepted as beautiful as well as innovative, even if the artist knew little of genuine Yoruba or Tang conventions.  What applies to the reception of art surely may be said as well of the tourist’s view of another society.

     Wharton seems to have taken great pleasure in her Moroccan tour.  If her rhetoric indicates that she is far from an objective camera simply recording facts, that does no more than concede her inescapable limitation.  The reader may turn to anthropologists and historians for information about the country.  If one reads a novelist’s account, it is surely for a different reason. 

     To the art critic what matters about an attitude is what comes of it.  I recently saw the 1939 film of the D’Oyly Carte Company doing The Mikado.  It was an altogether delightful performance; the wardrobes and makeup usually clever, the singing and dancing all first-rate, though it was assuredly not Japan at all, nor was it in fact pretending to be.  The action takes place in a completely fanciful and rather silly realm the ruler of which has a Japanese title, probably as fanciful to most Victorian Englishmen as names like Pooh-Bah and Yum-Yum.  If the costumer consulted authentic Far Eastern fashions at all, it was merely as a starting point from which his fancy might fly.  In the end we have a fine entertainment.  Likewise, if some Dusseldorfer plumber enjoys daubing his face with war paint on weekends, I would be more likely to envy his ability to have fun than to object.

     I recall when I first set foot on Moroccan soil over fifty years ago and was utterly bedazzled.  That first day I may have had less understanding of Moroccan ways than I had gained after a few months there, but my initial ignorance allowed me a measure of wonder as valuable, I think, as knowledge.  We have a fine book by Edith Wharton.  It is about Morocco, but unashamedly expressing Euro-centric notions.  Nonetheless the book is filled with fascinating descriptions, memorable phrases, and curious anecdotes with which one might while away an afternoon.  What more could one ask? 

  

 

1.  The term’s first use according to the OED was in 1945 in an essay on Orientalism by Arthur E. Christy.  The same phenomenon was discussed as "cultural colonialism" in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies (for instance, by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith).  Both phrases imply criticism, an improper and very likely misunderstood use of another’s culture.

2..  The book was completed in 1919 and published in 1920.  Wharton had been living in France and in 1914 had visited Algeria and Tunisia.

3.  She is said to have written the book under contract while in urgent need of income.  Perhaps some of this information was simply padding to meet a publisher’s desires. 

3.  Letter to Sara Norton, March 12, 1901. 

4.  Similar expressions include “cities of ancient mystery” (23), a “vision” (71) as though preserved by “some powerful enchanter” with “a wave of his wand” (73).  The observer has a  “dream-feeling” (77) as though walking into the Arabian Nights (36).  Morocco is to her “fantastic” (58), a “marvel” (61) full of “wonders” (62).  The entire country is for her a “dream” (127) in which “twilight adds to the mystery” (82-3).x

5.  The expression Indianertümelei has been coined on the model of Deutschtümelei (a chauvinistic exaggerated preference for things German).  Such groups have a considerable history.  The first “cowboy club” (which included “Indian” participants) was founded in Munich in 1913.  This phenomenon is neither confined to those outside America nor to the ignorant.  In his great study of the Iroquois Lewis Henry Morgan mythologizes them by likening them to Homeric Greeks and in recent years sweat lodges and the like have become the vogue among some New Agers.

A Victorian in Arabia Deserta

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Citations refer to the admirable Dover edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta.

 

     I was visiting a friend in the lovely, spacious house on Cape Cod he and his siblings had inherited.  A summer place, it had little changed over the decades.  On its shelves were a number of well-chosen books, many on literature, the arts, and history, reflecting the taste of an educated middle-brow generation before my own.  These included quite a few of the slip-cased Heritage Press editions, more modest versions of the Limited Editions Club volumes, yet aiming to enhance their classic contents with art and design.  I took down an unfamiliar title -- Charles M. Doughty’s 1888 Travels In Arabia Deserta.  Having fancied I had done a bit of wandering in Muslim lands myself, I opened it and saw at a glance that the author used a peculiar archaic English, described in T. E. Lwrence’s introduction as “a style which has apparently neither father nor son.”  His sentences followed patterns that seemed to be at times Elizabethan, and at times simply idiosyncratic.  I began to read and realized at once that I had embarked on something of a journey myself. 

     The book is a monument, amounting to nearly fourteen hundred pages including an excellent index and an essential glossary.   Very much a travel journal, of the heroic Victorian variety, the book meticulously records Doughty’s experiences during two years of trekking in what is today Saudi Arabia.  The illiterate Bedouins think he must be doing magic when he reads or writes, and they must have thought him a dedicated wonder-worker as he set down the occurrences of daily life in the desert, so commonplace to the nomads, so extraordinary to Doughty and his readers.

     He begins as part of a grand haj procession (though as an admitted Christian, he cannot enter Mecca), a vast and highly organized multi-ethnic pilgrimage which makes a dramatic opening to his story.  His second volume ends unceremoniously with his reporting to the British Consulate in Jedda.  Though several times detained in towns, he spends most of the time between simply living in the desert with nomadic people.  He becomes progressively weaker and sicker due to the rigors of his travels.  He makes a show of serving archaeological knowledge by copying old inscriptions in obscure language which he could not himself read such as Nabataean, but this pursuit seems an afterthought.  He brings some medical supplies and gets a reputation as a doctor among the locals, but this activity, too, seems more prudential than benevolent.  What he really wished to do was to experience the life of the “Aarab,” as he calls the wandering desert tribes. 

     These were no caravans carrying merchandise across the sands, but rather subsistence pastoralists who lived primarily on the milk of their camels (some has sheep and goats as well) and on oasis dates.  They had an extremely frugal regime in which Doughty fully participated.  Often neither they nor their beasts could eat through the course of a long day’s march, and sometimes the evening meal was scant when it did arrive. 

    Though the region was still largely unknown, a number of travelers’ accounts preceded Doughty’s [1].  Orientalism had enjoyed a vogue since the eighteenth century and European interest in both real and fictional Arabs was high.  Doughty’s book, with its grittiness and often pedestrian progress, has the highest verisimilitude.  Every reader will feel that he is sketching directly from life. 

     Life in the desert was bare subsistence for even those Doughty calls the “sheykly” class.  They drink sometimes water “thick and ill-smelling in the wet sand, and putrefying with rotten fibres of plants and urea of the nomads’ cattle.” [2] Often  at day’s end the people would say, “’To-day we have not loosed the spittle (their word for breaking the fast).”  [3]  They are in “almost incessant famine” [4].   “Languor of hunger, the desert disease, was in all the tents. ‘Mâana lôn, We have nothing left,’ said the people, one to another.” [5] 

     With scarcely enough to fill their bellies daily, the people upon whom he depends for hospitality never see a physician.  Doughty brought a medical kit and sometimes acts as a hakim, administering drugs and vaccinations, though his patients would sometimes prefer a magic amulet as treatment. [6]  Their scientific naivete is unsurprising, as they have only the foggiest view of the world outside, having no experience of any environment other than their own.  Even Amm Mohammed, a man of some experience with whom Doughty stayed in Kheybar, has the notion that England must be subject to the great Ottoman Sultan.  [7]  Doughty’s mere appearance as an inexplicable white man could excite “a sort of panic terror” among people who take him to be a sáhar or warlock “come to bewitch their village.” [8]

     Often Doughty’s surname seems a sprechende Name as, apart from the constant hazard of armed raids, he is repeatedly threatened with a violent death simply because he, unlike some earlier travelers, readily declares that he is a Christian.  Apart from the specific danger, reiterated often enough to become annoying, but doubtless fresh in its menace with every occurrence for the kafir. 

     Furthermore, outside of towns little law existed apart from tradition and violent robberies as well as organized raids or ghrazzus (of which the Arab nomads seem as fond as the Sioux had been in the American plains).  Such forays were so accepted in their society that Doughty relates one case in which the adjudicating sheiks ruled that the animals must be returned, with the exception of a share which the raiders could retain so that “the turbulent young men” who had stolen them might “be appeased, with somewhat for their pains, and that for an end of strife.” [9]

     The Bedouins are befuddled by Doughty’s presence.  The reader may share some of their wonder at his willful embrace of their arduous life with its hunger, illness, and danger.   His own explanation that his “life might add something of lasting worth to the European geography” [10] is insufficient to support the hardships he endured and afterward the labor of composition.  Though much of what Doughty describes concerns the quotidian details of the peoples’ lives, his prose is never pedestrian, but is rather lit from within by a sense of wonder, a strange beauty.

     His usage was eccentric, but not wholly idiosyncratic.  During his own time and shortly after William Barnes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and Basil Bunting were among campaigners for a “purification” of the language, most importantly by using words with Germanic roots. [11]  His influence is evident in later admirers such as the avant-gardist Laura Riding and the novelist Henry Green for whom he is “a master of the language, the Genius Doughty,” though “he might be writing in Latin.” [12]  Long after he had left Saudi Arabia, Doughty maintained his interest in tinkering with English. 

     His six-volume national epic The Dawn in Britain (1906) strives to use a pre-Shakespearean vocabulary.  His chamber drama The Cliff (1909) which anticipates WWI by imagining a German attack on Britain features among its dramatis personae a “divine shining One from heaven,” a company of “light elves,” “a little deformed maiden,” and the ghosts of napoleon and Joan of Arc.  A sample of his verse might suggest why the play was never performed. 

 

I may not rest, as I wor wont of sleep;

So a wimble bores my brain, of busy thought:

Wherefore, what though ’t be chill for an old wight,

I’ve left them ruckling mother sheep; to pace

Awhile here to and forth, longs the sea-cliff.

 

     Doughty’s own relish for verbal display is evident not only in his own mannered sentences, but also in his appreciation for the artful speeches of his hosts.  He devotes several pages to conveying Abdullah’s loquacious reminiscences during coffee parties.  [13]  a lengthy dynastic history of the dynasty of Ibn Rashid which is surely drawn from oral accounts takes far longer.  [14]  He describes illiterate poets whose poetic rhetoric is nearly unintelligible to him yet who receive the “adulation” of listeners, though to him it is “stern and horrid” and notes that every shepherd boy could sing traditional songs.  [15]   Indeed, he says “the nomads, at leisure and lively minds, have little other than this study to be eloquent.  Their utterance is short and with emphasis.  There is a perspicuous propriety in their speech, with quick significance.”  He catalogues the Arabs’ verbal conventions, noting that “Every tribe has a use, loghra, and neighbors are ever childers of their neighbours’ tongue.”  [16] 

          Reactions to Doughty’s style, assuredly not to everyone’s taste, are likely to be extreme.  To some his language is merely affected, while others are captivated.  A few examples of Doughty’s locutions will suffice – more are available on every page.  The reader is likely to long recall, both for style and content, vignettes such as his description of a few camp hangers-on.  “Forlorn person’s will join themselves to some sheyk’s menzil, and there was with u an aged widow, in wretchedness, who played the mother to her dead daughter’s fatherless children, a son so deformed that like a beast he crept upon the sand [ya Latif, oh happy sight!’ said this most poor and desolate grandam, with religious irony, in her patient sighing] – and an elf-haired girl wonderfully foul-looking.  Boothless, they led their lives under the skies of God, the boy was naked as he came into the desert world.” [17]  A single line may sound proverbial.  “The Arabian sky, seldom clear, weeps as the weeping of hypocrites.”  [18]  At his best, Doughty achieves lyrical sublimity.  “The silent air burning about us, we endure breathless till the assr: lingering day draws down to the sun-setting; the herdsmen, weary of the sun, come again with the cattle, to taste in their menzils the first sweetness of mirth and repose.  – The day is done, and there rises the nightly freshness of this purest mountain air: and then to the cheerful song and the cup of the common fire.  The moon rises ruddy from that solemn obscurity of jebel like a mighty beacon: -- and the morrow will be as this day, days deadly drowned in the sun of the summer wilderness.”  [19]

     If the mighty tones of that rhetoric, so like a church organ, occur only occasionally, it is likely because such moments are likewise rare, and in that a part of their loveliness consists.  Doughty never finds reason to slow his flow of words.  As even the passages quoted above testify, he routinely uses a considerable lexicon of Arabic words, giving the reader an enhanced illusion of participating in the life of the encampments.  (Fortunately, he includes a useful combined glossary and index of over a hundred pages for reference.)  He includes lists of little possible interest: tribes, colloquial expressions [20], horses names [21] or brands [22], the ”thirty fendies [a kindred and natural division in a tribe] of ‘Ateyba” [23], or a collection of inscriptions translated into French [24].

     For me the rewards of trekking through Doughty’s ponderous volumes are of three sorts.  He provides new detail about the Arabian nomads, enlarging the reader’s notion of what it means to be human, and his exposition is all the more dramatic since desert life is always so close to the bone, in this case for the visitor no less than for the natives.  His style, for those receptive to it, is like a strange tide which may ebb and rise but which never loses its mysterious charm.  Surely writing in his journal sustained Doughty through many a difficult day and, for the reader as well, the play of symbols, the turns of syntax, and the author’s unpredictable lexicon prove an unfailing source of entertainment.

     Just as for less eccentric writers, though, the central motive for reading Doughty is to understand his vision.  He is repeatedly asked by his hosts why he is there, in a demanding and dangerous environment, and he has little to say in response.   He has a good many of the prejudices of his day, and he never hesitates to call the Bedouins ignorant and, if they are Wahaby, fanatic.  Indeed, he is willing to refer even to ordinary Muslims as captured  by “the dreadful harpy of their religion [25].  Though he never conceals the fact that he is a Christian, he remains prudent enough to confide only to his notebook that Mohammed is “the barbaric prophet of Mecca” and his religion a “solemn fools’ paradise.” [26]  He casually tosses off remarks  such as “these gracious Orientals are always graceless short-comers at the last” [27]  They have only “a barbarous, fox-like understanding” [28].  Yet he chose to live intimately among them for an extended period of time. 

     Somehow, in spite of his Victorian patriotism, I imagine Doughty would have been very nearly equally acerbic in his observation of his fellow Britons.  The people of the desert had for him one advantage, but that sufficed to motivate him (and his readers to follow).  The Arabs are living in an environment so harsh that they have always their eyes on the essentials.  Undistracted by media, consuming only the commodities they themselves wrest from a stingy land, their life has a purity and grandeur rarely discernable in a modern city. 

     For all the sameness of his days, some moments are epiphanies.  When a sudden storm bursts over the sand, “I said to Thaifullah,’God sends his blessing again upon the earth.’”  “How good! seemed to me, how peaceable!  this little plot of the nomad earth under the dripping curtains of a worsted booth, in comparison of Hâyil town.” [29]  “Bare of all things of which there is no need, they days of our mortality are so easy and become a long quiescence!  Such is the nomad life, a long holiday, wedded to a divine simplicity, but with this often long tolerance of hunger in the khála.” [30]

     Surely, this is why Doughty traveled Arabia and this is why those of us who are less willing to undergo the rigors he apparently embraced can appreciate reading his account of his experiences.  For all his suffering, he seems to have found a sort of Eden, not in a garden, but in the wilderness. 

 

 

1.  Captain George Forster Sadlier traversed the Arabian Peninsula in the early nineteenth century, though his Diary of a Journey Across Arabia from El Khatif in the Persian Gulf to Yanbu in the Red Sea, During the Year 1819 was not published until 1866.  Johann Ludwig Burckhardt’s Travels in Arabia came out in 1829.  Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) relates the author’s experiences in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and in 1857 Richard Burton published his three-volume Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah including his visit to the holy cities while disguised as a Muslim.  (Though his story made him something of a celebrity, Burton was not the first European to enter Mecca, having been preceded by a good many others, including Ludovico di Varthema whose Itinerario de Ludouico de Varthema Bolognese was published in 1510.)  In 1865 William Gifford Palgrave’s Personal Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-1863) appeared.  Georg August Wallin wrote Notes Taken During a Journey Though Part of Northern Arabia in 1848 (1851) and Narrative of a Journeys From Cairo to Medina and Mecca by Suez, Arabia, Tawila, Al-Jauf, Jubbe, Hail and Nejd, in 1845 (1854). 

2.  I, 284.

3. “’To-day we have not loosed the spittle (their word for breaking the fast).”  (I, 489)  They are in “almost incessant famine”  “Languor of hunger, the desert disease, was in all the tents. ‘Mâana lôn, We have nothing left,’ said the people, one to another.”) 

4.  I, 500.

5.  I, 520.

6.  I, 197.

7.  II, 182.

8.  II,108

9.  I, 396.

10.  I, 469.

11.  In this they resembled the official policies of France, Iceland, and Israel. 

12.  “Apologia” in Surviving: the Uncollected Writings of Henry Green “master of the language, Focus on his style as an expression of personality   “his style is mannered, but he is too great a man to be hidden beneath it.”  In Rational Meaning: a New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson make much of Doughty’s style for reason, they say, “not literary, but linguistic.”

13.  II, 148.

14.  II, 30ff. 

15.  I, 306.

16.  I, 307.

17.  I,263.

18.  I, 351

19.  I, 368.

20.  I, 307.

21.  II, 253.

22.  I, 166.

23.  II, 456.

24.  I, 224-229.

25.  I, 95.

26.  I, 253.

27.  I,125.

28.  I, 142.

29.  II, 83.

30.  I, 490.

Kleist’s Zoroaster

Gebet des Zoroaster (Heinrich von Kleist, 1810)

Prayer of Zoroaster

(From an Indian manuscript, discovered by a traveler in the ruins of Palmyra)

O God, my father in heaven! You have given to humanity a free, marvelous, and abundant life. Powers of endless sorts, divine and animal, play together in his breast, enough to make him king over the earth. Nevertheless, overcome by unseen spirits, he lies for some astonishing and incomprehensible reason in chains and fetters. Misled by error, he abandons the highest and sets off toward wretchedness and nihilism, stricken with blindness. Yet, he likes himself in his condition; and, if the people of earlier times had never been and the holy songs that tell of it had vanished, we would have no idea of what peaks, o lord!, one may look about. Now and then you allow the scales to fall from the eyes of one of your sons that he whom you have chosen may glimpse the foolishness and error of his kind. You prepare him with the quiver of speech so that he, fearless and loving, may go among them with arrows, some sharp, some gentle, with which to wake them from the fabulous somnolence in which they lie. I, too, o lord, in your wisdom you have chosen, though unworthy for this work, and I can only follow orders. Penetrate me head to foot with the feeling of misery to which this age has sunken and with insight into all wretchedness, half-measures, deceit, and hypocrisy that are the consequences. Steel me with the ready strength to draw the bow of judgement and to choose the arrow with prudence and discernment, such that I encounter each individual appropriately: to cast down the fame of the transitory and incurable, to frighten the vicious and warn the erring, to tease the fools with the mere sound far over their heads. And teach me to weave a wreath with which I might crown in my own way those who please you. More than anything, o lord, may love awaken for you without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.



Zoroaster in German Romanticism


     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Gebet des Zoroaster” (“Zoroaster’s Prayer”) was published as the lead article in the first issue of his extraordinary short-lived daily periodical the Berliner Abendblätter. Almost a manifesto, it suggests the passion and ambition he brought to the first newspaper of Berlin. More broadly, it provides a succinct statement of Kleist’s Romantic sensibility. Zoroaster himself, the Persian prophet, has virtually nothing to do with Kleist’s cri de coeur and serves primarily as the poet’s mouthpiece, yet the choice of persona is nonetheless significant.
     The rise in trade and the assertion of imperial domination by European powers stimulated the vogue for chinoiserie in decorative arts and design. European writers in the eighteenth century, like more recent science fiction writers, used the perspective of the Other to provide new and critical perspectives on their own societies. [4] Among the many examples are Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Voltaire’s Zadig subtitled Histoire Orientale (1747), and Beckford’s Vathek, first published as An Arabian Tale (1786).
     Apart from profit, fashion and social criticism, Asia also drew the attention of philosophers, including many who were dissatisfied with the Enlightenment faith in reason. In Germany and France such writers as Hamann and Herder have in recent years been considered to constitute a Counter-Enlightenment movement, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term. Only at the end of the eighteenth century were Europeans able to begin reading translations of major non-Christian works of spirituality, some by Christian missionaries interested in effectively combating the idolatry of the heathens, but others by Europeans who found profound wisdom in the East. [5]
     Interest in Zoroaster himself was surprisingly widespread. Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an opera Zoroastre (1749). Guillaume Alexandre de Méhégan published a similarly titled novel in 1751 (claiming to be a translation from the "Chaldaean") in which Zoroaster was a wise ruler. Johann Friedrich Kleuker translated Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1771 French version of the Avesta into German in 1776 as Zend-Avesta, Zoroasters Lebendiges Wort. Voltaire not only made his Zadig a Zoroastrian, he also wrote the article “Zoroastre” (based in part on Thomas Hyde’s life of Zoroaster) in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) in which he declares Zoroaster “the first of men after Confucius.” [6] Yet Voltaire also reacted against the supernatural and mythic stories of the prophet concluding “One cannot read two pages of the abominable rubbish attributed to this Zoroaster without pitying human nature.” [7]
     Writers who valorized emotion and imagination joined Voltaire in his criticism of the sociopolitical order, but some found his rational Deism spiritually wanting. Many sought wisdom in the unconscious, the child, the uneducated, the “primitive,” and the exotic. Such privileging did not begin with Rousseau nor did it end with nineteenth century realism. Yeats’ use of elements of Theosophical lore, Isherwood’s of Vedanta, and Ginsberg’s of Buddhism are likewise examples of Western literary appropriation of Asian cultural materials, with varying mixtures of the traditional and the novel. Blake revered the “ancient Poets” without specifying any in particular because their position in the childhood of humanity was enough to lend them authority. With the same Romantic bias some Americans think that the practices of native people must exemplify a mysterious greater wisdom.
     The praying persona has only the name of Zoroaster, which served Kleist as an empty tablet on which to write what he wished, but his use of the “Oriental” name entailed a weighty load of association. Like Blake in England, he seeks to restore a sense of the divine lost in the Enlightenment. His own crisis of faith is associated by most critics with his reading of Kant which led him to conclude that “dass hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist” (“truth is not to be found here below”). [2]
     Zoroaster’s name allowed Kleist, not to convey information about the ancient prophet or his followers, but to express himself. By claiming to produce a translation of a non-Christian document, he might address the divine as he chose without danger of rebuke from the pious. He could fiercely denounce his own society with less worry about the censors.
     “Zoroaster’s Prayer” is driven by a passion which clearly is that of its author, though generalized and conventionalized. Inspired by what can only be called faith, it opens with an address to God the Father, and proceeds to enthusiastic praise of humans as kings of the earth, given marvelous powers. Though Zoroastrianism is a radically dualistic vision like the later Manichaeism, the origin of suffering and wickedness is here unspecified except as the result of error to which people have become habituated, even perversely attached. Correction can come according to the prayer, not through reasoning, but through a sort of grace that grants rhetorical skills to prophets who are chosen by God, the “quiver of speech,” “bow of judgement,” and well-chosen convincing “arrows” of argument. The speaker concludes by extolling love “without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your [God’s] empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.” [3] The speaker s recommends the specifically non-rational values of faith and love, though he is rather foggy about the basis and the character of that belief, there is no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the spirit of the age.
     German Romantics sought in a variety of ways to register dissatisfaction with rationalism as a sufficient means of investigating the world. The Schlegel brothers did important philological work on Asian texts and linguistic study while seeking the novelty of a non-European perspective as well as founding the house organ of German Romanticism the Athenaeum in 1798. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck praised medieval and Renaissance art over that of their own day primarily for its perceived greater emotion. Herder and Schelling expounded a Naturphilosophie based in the subjective, while to Scheleiermacher religion was “essentially an intuition or a feeling.” [8] Like Novalis whose “blue flower” represented a novel and similarly vague sort of mysticism, Kleist spoke for a revolution in sensibility in which Asian spirituality played an oppositional role recognizable to those who recall the popularity over a period of years of books like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Black Elk Speaks (1932), the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes I Ching (1950), and the Coleman Barks version of Rumi (We Are Three 1987 and a great many more publications since). Zoroaster might repeat his prayer today with little loss of relevance. He would surely find readers sufficiently Romantic still in the twenty-first century to feel its resonance. After all, others both before and since Heinrich von Kleist have declared with him that “all you need is love.”




1. Berliner Abendblätter, 1stes Blatt., den 1sten October 1810. The journal not only took an unusually independent political stance under censorship, it published Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano , Wilhelm Grimm , and Friedrich Schleiermacher among others as well as informed articles on scientific developments. It lasted only six months; eight months after the journal’s demise, Kleist killed himself.

2. Letter to Wilhelmine March 22, 1801. A substantial discussion of the philosophic influences is available in D. F. S. Scott, “Heinrich von Kleist's Kant Crisis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 474-484. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3716801?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents

3. One might have thought that God’s empire already extended through all space and time.

4. See Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. Robert Savage), Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia.

5. To give only two examples Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron, who translated the Avesta in 1771 after long study with Parsi scholars and divines and Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). Blake did a painting of Wilkins and the pandits on the occasion of the Gita’s publication; it is unfortunately lost.

6. “Zoroastre était le premier des hommes après Confucius.”

7. “On ne peut lire deux pages de l’abominable fatras attribué à ce Zoroastre sans avoir pitié de la nature humaine.”

8. In his Addresses on Religion 1799. The German title is significant: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Lectures to the Sophisticated among its Despisers).

Irving's Soft Romanticism

My copy of Tales of the Alhambra is, as I note at the outset, an odd edition, published by Editorial Padre Suarez of Granada and unlikely to be available to anyone else. The page numbers in parentheses are thus likely to be of little use. In order to allow the reader to locate the passages I cite, I have therefore appended a list of the chapters from which each quotation is taken.


     I have just been reading Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra out loud with my wife. Our copy is, fittingly, I think, not a scholarly Library of America volume, but an undated octavo souvenir edition printed in Granada at least eighty years ago which includes many engravings which look as though they were quite old when the book was printed. It fits neatly into a pocket, and its ideas slide as easily into the mind. The author prefers to soothe rather than to disturb his reader. Irving shares with Hawthorne and Cooper the early development of specifically American writing, but Irving’s tone is altogether different from either of his fellow-countrymen. Whereas Hawthorne brooded on colonial history with a consciousness haunted by self-doubt and intimations of guilt, and Cooper spun tales of the frontier recast into morality plays like the later ones of the Old West, Irving provided considerably lighter fare. Just as his best-known works, the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” made blithe entertainments spinning out the amusing if inconsequential lives of New York’s earlier inhabitants, his Tales of the Alhambra does much the same for both the Moors and Christians of Spain.
     Part of the Romantic program, of course, was the celebration of the ethnic and the regional, and there can be no doubt of Irving’s contribution to the development of national consciousness. Yet his work contrasts with Byron’s titanic anti-heroes, Wordsworth’s nature enthusiasms, Coleridge’s transcendental flights, and Keats’ almost painful aestheticism. He is perhaps closest to Scott’s rummaging in his country’s history for narrative, but, though Scott’s novels always turn out well with a satisfying round of retributive justice, this happens only after what seem genuine bumps and obstacles along the way. Irving is dedicated to writing that raises no dangerous or uncomfortable issue and explores no dark corners of human nature. Even pathos evaporates under his warm benevolent gaze; his greatest seriousness is likely to take the form of sentiment.
     Irving’s tone is fixed at the outset. In his dedication to David Wilkie he says they had been impressed as fellow travelers with the persistence of Islamic influence in Spain, and his friend urged him to “write something that should illustrate those peculiarities, something in the Haroun Alraschid styles, [sic] that should have a dash of that Arabian spice which pervades everything in Spain.” Further, he inscribes his volume of “arabesque sketches” to his friend “as a memorial of the pleasant scenes we have witnessed together in that land of adventure.” (13) As the Abbasid al-Rashid ruled in Baghdad (and Raqqa) far from Andalusia which had been conquered for the Ummayad dynasty by the Berber Tariq ibn Ziyad, the reference must be understood as a broad, unfocused reference to Islam in general. The blurring is significant. For Irving that entire tradition -- cultural, spiritual, and military -- is reduced to a dash of spice to awaken the flagging relish of his reader or to an exotic decorative motif, in fact, an arabesque. Doubtless he would have treated Indian or Chinese culture in just the same way.
     Apart from the lure of the exotic, the book is animated by a mild if enthusiastic devotion to romantic love. Thus, after describing the Hall of the Two Sisters, Irving does not allow his account of its rich ornamentation to stand alone. He goes on, “It is impossible to contemplate this once favourite abode of Oriental manners without feeling the early association of Arabian romance, and almost expecting to see the white arm of some mysterious princess beckoning from the balcony or some dark eye sparkling through the lattice. (47)
     Similar foggy fantasies regularly reappear. For instance, in the Court of the Lions “it needs but a slight exertion of the fancy to picture some pensive beauty of the harem, loitering in these secluded haunts of Oriental luxury.” (88) We are not far from the nineteenth century paintings of odalisques by Ingres and others.
     In this aesthetic the very vagueness of these sirens constitutes a good portion of their charm. The allure of such undifferentiated heroines provides the impetus for such narrations as that of Ahmed al Kamel or the three beautiful princesses. Love generally triumphs and, if it does not, one can breathe a heart-felt if pleasant sigh and proceed to the next attraction on the agenda. Though he actually lived for a time in the Alhambra, Irving remains a true package-tour visitor, satisfied with curiosities and a marvel or two without looking very deeply into history, art, or human psychology.
     Through the rose-colored glasses of the tourist “everything here appears calculated to inspire kind and happy feelings, for everything is delicate and beautiful. “ (88) The unfocused fuzziness of these adjectives is deliberate. Irving’s rhetoric is altogether conventional and most easily digestible with hardly an original turn. He is a comfortable author providing a very modest but also reliable positive sensation. The psychologists tell us that a similar dependable reward causes people to turn in idle moments to television or Facebook.
     Yet the values are consistently and distinctly Romantic. Rather than the orderly garden, Irving appreciates the belated, almost post-apocalyptic wildness of a scene of departed grandeur. “In the present instance the effect was heightened by the wild and lonely nature of the place. We were on the naked and broken summit of the haunted Mountain of the Sun, where ruined tanks and cisterns and the mouldering foundations of extensive buildings spoke of former populousness, but where all was now silent and desolate.” (123)
     As a tourist, he enjoys the temporary novelty of the scenes he visits while never doubting the superiority of his own culture. On his way the “sturdy Biscayan lad” he has hired as guide strikes him as “vain-glorious” (23), though he is “faithful, cheery, kind-hearted.” His condescending attitude is explicit in his naming the man Sancho after Don Quixote’s sidekick.
     The same attitude recurs when he hires the “son of the Alhambra” Mateo Jimenez. His “valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire” (a partially submerged reference to Cervantes), a tout of the sort familiar to everyone who travels in poorer countries, represents his stance toward the country as a whole. He finds this “alert and officious wight” (64) “”at times an amusing companion; he is simple-minded and of infinite good humour with the loquacity and gossip of a village barber.” (65) Jimenez is diminished in just the same way the entire country, its history, and the human emotions of love and aggression are here declawed, tamed and rendered fit to divert the reader.
     The volume ends with one of the most conventional of travelogue motifs, the setting sun, as the writer notes “thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams.” (354) Yet such a conclusion is a cliché because it is satisfying in a mild but reliable way. Even as dream, Irving’s portrait of Spain has nothing of the haunting power of many actual dreams; it is rather a easeful reverie, a recreation. The book is a breezy pleasure, and any pleasure is valuable and worth preserving. Thus we read Irving for one of the most important though little honored reasons for art: to pass the time.


Chapter list for cited quotations
13 dedication
47 “Interior of the Alhambra”
88 ”The Court of Lions”
123 “A Ramble Among the Hills”
23 “The Journey”
64 “The Household”
65 “The Household”
354 “The Author’s Farewell to Granada”