E V Lucas

A Boswell of Baghdad E V Lucas

A curious and very entertaining work lies before me, or, to be more accurate, ramparts me, for it is in four ponderous volumes, capable, each, even in less powerful hands than those ofthe Great Lexicographer, of felling a bookseller. At these volumes I have been sipping, beelike, at odd times for some years, and I now propose to yield some of the honey-theseason having become timely, since the great majority of the heroes of its thousands ofpages hail from Baghdad; and Baghdad, after all its wonderful and intact Oriental past, is today under Britain's thumb. The title of the book is Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary, translated from the Arabicby Bn Mac Guckin de Slane, and printed in Paris for the Oriental Translation Fund of GreatBritain and Ireland, 1842-71, some centuries after it was written, for its author was deadbefore Edward II ascended the English throne. Who would expect Sir Sidney Lee to havehad so remote an exemplar?Remote not only in time but in distance. For although we may go to the East for religionsand systems of philosophy that were old and proved worthy centuries before Hellenism orChristianity, yet we do not usually find there models for our works of reference. Hardlydoes Rome give us those. But there is an orderliness and thoroughness about IbnKhallikan's methods which the Dictionary of National Biography does not exceed. ThePersian may be more lenient to floridity ("No flowers, by request," was, it will beremembered, the first English editor's motto), but in his desire to leave out no one whoought to be in and to do justice to his inclusions he is beyond praise. The modernity of the ancients is continually surprising us. It is one of the phenomena towhich we are never quite inured (and could we be so we should perhaps merely substitutethe antiquity of the moderns as a new source of wonder), but towards such inuring IbnKhallikan should certainly help, since he was eminently a gossip, and in order to get humannature's fidelity to the type-no matter where found, whether æons ago or to-day, whetherin savage lands or, as we say, civilized-brought home to us, it is to the gossips that wemust resort: to the Pepyses and Boswells rather than to the Goethes and Platos; to the littlerecorders rather than the great thinkers. The small traits tell.