Eastern Dreams (19 page)

Today, it is accepted that Romanticism was affected greatly by both Gothicism and Enlightenment orientalism. The Gothic tale, with its moody, melancholy atmospheres, and the oriental story, set in sunny, timeless landscapes, helped push western literature toward a greater emotionalism. The deliberate dreaminess of oriental romance abounds in the deep, sometimes sinister emotion associated with eastern life and found extensively within the stories of the
Arabian Nights
. Beginning with the mock-oriental tale and developing in sensual pre-Romantic works like
Vathek
, artists of any medium came to revel in expressing a spectrum of emotional sentiments—usually, the more severe, the better.

By the time a distinct Romanticism emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the influence of the
Nights
on European arts had become subtle and diffuse—light scattered through a prism—via the fashion for oriental styles and the popular vogue for eastern stories. With more Persian and Arabic literature appearing
in translation, the
Arabian Nights
no longer held the same influential sway as in previous decades. Henceforth the work was only one of a number of sources providing exotic inspiration, even as the general impact of orientalism on western culture contributed to a penchant for foreign settings and supernatural themes.

Regardless, many Romantic figures do pay tribute to the influence of the
Nights
and its vision of an enchanted Orient, from William Wordsworth's nostalgic recollection of a precious childhood treasure, “
a little yellow canvas-covered book / A slender abstract of the Arabian Tales,” to Thomas de Quincey's drug-fuelled visions of a world where he kissed Nile crocodiles and assembled tropical flora and fauna in the vastness of the Far East. Few, however, can better match the impact of both the
Arabian Nights
and the concept of an eastern “otherness” than three of Romanticism's premier figures: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe.

Among the literary Romantics who found solace and inspiration in
The Thousand and One Nights
and similar works, the writings of Coleridge, Byron and Poe are indivisible from the idea of the East as a place of alien fascination. Each writer's work is strewn with elements taken from the
Nights
, the mock-oriental tale or the simple attractiveness of eastern vistas, but each uses this influence for their individual purposes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetical heart bears the deep impact of an imaginary Orient, the outgrowth of a dreamy nature that saw him drawn like a magnet to such works as the
Arabian Nights
and related pastiches like James Ridley's 1764
Tales of the Genii
.

Coleridge claimed to have first read the
Arabian Nights
at the age of six, which, even given a tendency toward exaggeration, still indicates the extent of his precocity. Unlike most who read the
work, however, Coleridge believed he detected a sinister quality to the tales, which he found disquieting. In addition to its glamour, it seemed the world depicted in the
Nights
had the added capacity for inspiring feelings of terror and grief; to Coleridge, this was a domain where unfettered emotions were not liberating, but all-consuming and therefore dangerous.

As a child, Coleridge wrote that the
Arabian Nights
“
made so deep an impression on me that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark—and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I use to watch the window, in which the books lay….” In the daytime, the young Coleridge sat by a sun-kissed wall of his room and read the
Nights
obsessively until his schoolteacher father decided they were having an ill effect and burned them to cure his daydreaming son of such mania.

A destructive act that came much too late. From his earliest reading “
of Faery Tales, and Genii etc.,” Coleridge came to the conclusion that his “mind had been habituated
to the Vast
—and I never regarded my senses … as the criteria of my belief.” For Coleridge, the oriental world of the
Nights
was a mélange of wonder and fright—a place of grand and lengthy journeys taking the pilgrim into unknown vistas that might devour him. Travel tales abound in the West too, but it was the East, realm of fascination and terror, that presented Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a threatening aspect tied to those issues of fate and retribution displayed so prominently in his poetry.

Drug addiction didn't help, as at least part of Coleridge's attitude was exacerbated by his famous addiction to opium. The increasing use of Chinese opium in Europe during this time, mixed with the idea of the East as an exotic wonderland, gave rise to an astonishing array of orientalized dreams and hallucinations on the part of users, of which those of Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey are among the most famous.

The images in Coleridge's recorded opium jags as well as his poetry brim with reflections born of Europe's imaginary Orient, allied with the threatening element he detected in the
Arabian Nights
. In one drug-dream, a ghoulish eastern woman, so dark of complexion that she merges into blackness, tries to pluck out one of Coleridge's eyeballs. Supernatural spirits akin to invisible genies torment the Ancient Mariner while he is on a Sindbad-like voyage in unfrequented southern seas. And Kubla Khan's stately pleasure-dome of Xanadu is at once grand and ominous in its remote strangeness—a place perhaps too far from home, a land too alien in conception.

This coded fear was not repulsion, for after childhood, Coleridge remained steeped in the
Nights
, keeping a copy with him while a student in London and referring to the work many times in his letters and notebooks. Queried about the Ancient Mariner's killing of the albatross that precipitates tragedy, Coleridge compared the act to the merchant in the first
Arabian Nights
story cycle who invokes a genie's wrath by accidentally killing the demon's invisible child. In the same poem, a supernatural vessel's ghastly “Life-in-Death” figure—a woman described as white as a leper—functions as a kind of photographic negative of the eastern woman who tried to seize Coleridge's eyeball in his drug-dream; herself based partly, it seems, on a character in one
Arabian Nights
story.

Coleridge may have found the Orient a threatening realm of wonder laced with terror, but for George Gordon, Lord Byron, its world meant freedom in the most absolute sense of the word. Although Byron disliked being associated with the Romantics (seeing himself more in the tradition of the Augustan poets), eastern settings and references pepper his works to such an extent that orientalism
may be considered the major literary influence of his life. Where Romantic orientalism goes, Byron is sure to follow.

Partly raised in Aberdeen, Byron first encountered the eastern world in Scotland through the books that would have a heavy impact on his life and work, forever linking his name with foreign landscapes. Before leaving grammar school, he noted that his reading had come to encompass “
Lady M.W. Montague …
History of the Turks
, the
Arabian Nights
, all travels, or histories, or books upon the East I could meet with … before I was
ten years old
.” These works, Byron believed, “
had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant, and gave … the oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry.”

From this list, it can be seen that the
Nights
was only one of a series of works firing the young poet's imagination with dreams of faraway places and peoples. But at another juncture, Byron notes that after the Bible, he read the
Arabian Nights
first of all books, and must have liked its tales well enough to be able to recall some of them at will. Once, outdoors with some school friends in Aberdeen, a driving rainstorm forced them to take shelter in the back-kitchen of a draper's shop, where they waited out the weather with Byron regaling his companions by reciting stories from the
Nights
by heart.

No major Romantic poet was more influenced by the notion that the East was a place of free and frank expression. The
Arabian Nights
was among his earliest exposures to this idea, but there were many others, notably
Vathek
, which he admired enormously, remarking “
For correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations [of the
Nights
].”

At twenty-one, Byron embarked on one of the most famous of all Romantic journeys. Having raised a little money, he and a friend left England for a two-year tour through the Mediterranean,
ending at Constantinople. This celebrated excursion came about partly because the Napoleonic Wars had altered the usual Grand Tour of France, Germany and Italy, forcing Byron's party to venture first to Portugal and Spain, then to Greece and Turkey, but it was also prompted by Byron's own yearning to see eastern landscapes for himself. Only lack of funds prevented him from continuing to Egypt, India and perhaps other eastern lands.

He loved every moment of it, especially Greece and Albania, both then under Ottoman rule and their civilization daubed over with the colours of Islam. They seemed, if not the actual Orient, then at least a mysterious gateway to the East. On his return, Byron published what is arguably
the
epic Romantic poem,
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
, making his reputation literally overnight. In future years, he would write four poetical works dealing with eastern themes, what he called his “Turkish Tales”—“The Giaour,” “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Corsair” and “The Siege of Corinth”—and employed oriental imagery in many other works, including his masterpiece,
Don Juan
.

In this last work, Byron pays tribute to his childhood reading by playfully inserting the
Arabian Nights
' figures of the Hunchback, Sindbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sidi Numan in a gathering, where they join in the celebrations at Don Juan and Haidee's common-law union. This sly evocation of “
stories from the Persian” is a nod toward the universal familiarity of the
Nights
in Europe—introducing the East through its characters—as well, perhaps, as a foreshadowing of Juan's adventures in Constantinople, where he is soon to be taken as a galley-slave.

Byron's association with eastern vistas continued throughout his life. He had his portrait painted in a gorgeous Albanian costume he brought back from his Mediterranean tour and sometimes talked of settling permanently in the Levant to study languages and literature. When scandal over an affair with his half-sister Augusta
overtook him, Byron left England in a kind of protracted repetition of his earlier journey toward Asia. After sojourns in Switzerland and Italy, he succumbed at age thirty-six to fever and poor medical care after joining the Greek struggle for independence from the Turks—effectively dying in an oriental war.

It may be too much to say that Byron's destiny was predicated by his boyhood reading in Aberdeen, but the lure of the East as a refuge for outcasts, as he felt himself to be, remained one of the few constants in a thoroughly unsettled life. Through such works as the
Arabian Nights, Vathek
and others depicting the Orient of his mind, Byron developed one of the most original voices in Romantic literature, establishing forever the idea of the East as a setting where the individual is not shrunk into insignificance by their vast surroundings, but is enlarged by an epic self-awareness:

Oh! That the Desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.