139.  Final Summing up.

To sum up finally:  (1) Both translations are complete, they are the only complete translations in English, and the world owes a deep debt of gratitude to both Payne and Burton.

(2) According to Arabists, Payne’s Translation is the more accurate of the two.[FN#491]

(3) Burton’s translation is largely a paraphrase of Payne’s.

(4) Persons who are in love with the beauty of restraint as regards ornament, and hold to the doctrine which Flaubert so well understood and practised, and Pater so persistently preached will consider Payne’s translation incomparably the finer.

(5) Burton’s translation is for those who, caring nothing for this doctrine, revel in rococo work, a style flamboyant at all costs, and in lawless splendours; and do not mind running against expressions that are far too blunt for the majority of people.

(6) Payne’s rendering of the metrical portions is poetry; Burton’s scarcely verse.

(7) Burton’s Terminal Essay, with the exception of the pornographic sections, is largely indebted to Payne’s.

(8) The distinctive features of Burton’s work are his notes and the pornographic sections of his Terminal Essay—­the whole consisting of an amazing mass of esoteric learning, the result of a lifetime’s study.  Many of the notes have little, if any, connection with the text, and they really form an independent work.

Burton himself says:  “Mr. Payne’s admirable version appeals to the Orientalist and the Stylist, not to the many-headed; and mine to the anthropologist and student of Eastern manners and customs.”  Burton’s Arabian Nights has been well summed up as “a monument of knowledge and audacity."[FN#492]

Having finished his task Burton straightway commenced the translation of a number of other Arabic tales which he eventually published as Supplemental Nights[FN#493] in six volumes, the first two of which correspond with Mr. Payne’s three volumes entitled Tales from the Arabic.

140.  Mr. Swinburne on Burton.

Congratulations rained in on Burton from all quarters; but the letters that gave him most pleasure were those from Mr. Ernest A. Floyer and Mr. A. C. Swinburne, whose glowing sonnet: 

    “To Richard F. Burton
  On his Translation of the Arabian Nights”

is well known.  “Thanks to Burton’s hand,” exclaims the poet magnificently: 

  “All that glorious Orient glows
   Defiant of the dusk.  Our twilight land
   Trembles; but all the heaven is all one rose,
   Whence laughing love dissolves her frosts and snows.”

In his Poems and Ballads, 3rd Series, 1889, Mr. Swinburne pays yet another tribute to the genius of his friend.  Its dedication runs:—­ “Inscribed to Richard F. Burton.  In redemption of an old pledge and in recognition of a friendship which I must always count among the highest honours of my life.”