The Sun.
London, England, 1856-01-08 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

THE NEW AUTHOR.
The Shaving of ,Shagpat : an, Arabian Entertain-
ment. By George Meredith. Chapman and

Since the " Vatliele of William Beckford, we

.have had no such oriental story as this " Shaving
of Shagpat" by George Meredith. It is a produc-
tion the merits of which are collectively something
to our mind quite extraordinary. We speak thus,
moreover, of the remarkable work under notice with
the strictest impartiality and without one particle
of exaggeration. In Mr. Meredith—now that we
have read his very curious volume—we at once re-

cognise a writer Of real genius, of a genius large,
true, and original. As such we most cordially hail
his appearance. As such wo heartily accord to him
the meed, whatever it may be worth, of our un-
affected and unstinted admiration. Henceforth lie
takes high rank among our chosen favourites by
right of his most remartrable powers ai a humorist,
and by reason also of liis prolific and splendid

imagination.
It we are not strangely mistaken, there appeared
some four or five seasoas back a small volume of
" Poems" by the same author, the author of this
" Arabian Entertainment." Pretty and graceful

verses for the most part—and nothing more—ac-
cording to our remembrance of them. During the
interval which has since then elapsed, the intellec-
tual capacities of Mr. Meredith have manifestly
not been lying dormant ; rather be it said, judging
of them by this novel attestation of their general
development, they have been all the while expand-
ing, and maturing, and multiplying. Insomuch
that the little green IGnio has already ripened into
this goodly red octave—a handful of fugitive
stanzas yielding place to the present gorgeous ad-
denda to the grand old. masterpiece of " The Ara-
bian Nights Entertainments." For as such we are
disposed to regard " The Shaving of Shagpat," as
here related after the genuine oriental fashion
by the lips of our young literary necroman-
cer. Mr. Meredith claims for his book

and judiciously claims for it, the merit of originality.
For, candidly be it said, at the first blush, it is a
merit not easily recognisable as belonging of right
to the narrative—so marvellously true to the style
and manner imitated (that of the oriental story-
tellers) is every turn and phrase, we had almost
said every idiomatic metaphor and expletive in this
(accurately so-termed) " Arabian Entertainment."
Examined, however, with auy degree of critical
sagacity, the originality of the work is altogether
unmistakeable. "The Shaving of Shagpat" could

never, surely, by any reader endowed with the smal-
lest modicum of acumen be seriously mistaken for
a single moment for a mere translation. Its pre-
vailing sparkle, whether in conception or in treat-
ment, is proof positive of its originality through-
out. It may be regarded by those who list, as a
satiric allegory, having reference to a cer-
tain hairy freak peculiar to our own generation.
It will be perused by others, however, as by our-
selves, without regard to any hidden significance
in the incidents recounted but solely with an eye
to the luxurious enjoyment of the writer's abound-
ing drollery, and of the deft and wondrous play of
his quaint, adroit, delicate, erratic, puck-like
imagination. 'lt must be fairly acknowledged by
us, nevertheless, that we cannot, for an instant,
consider our author to have, in any respect what-
ever, done justice to himself in the preamble, or
exordium, or preface, or whatever it may be called,
of his entertainment. His fancy scarcely warms
into life until we arrive at the fourth instalment ;
until we are listening, in fact, to the ingenious and
most ludicrous definition given of the punishment
wreaked by Shahpesh, the Persian, upon Khipil,
the Builder ; until we have passed, in short,
through the elaborate records of " The Th wackings"
and of " The Betrothal," and even be it added
through the strange, wild story recounted of
" Blianavar the Beautiful." Yet as elucidative of
the subsequent and more enthralling " mysteries"
of the volume, these same introductory chapters
have their intrinsic worth doubtless, if only in the
way, perhaps, of mere prefatory explanation. As,
fcr example, may be recognised where it is observA
long afterwards in reference to the somewhat
tedious and until then unaccountable record of
the " Thwackings," that the hero of the tale escapes
the peril of oblivion through the redeeming aid of
their vivid and ineradicable rememberance,—illus-
, trative of the poet's recommendation :

" If thou wouldst fix remembrance—thwack !
'Tie that oblivion controls,
I care not it it be on the back
Or on the soles."
Accordingly, as Achilles was soused in the saving
waters of the Styx, so Mr. Meredith's hero gets
soundly thwacked by way of an agreeable prelimi-
nary, to the end that the said thwackings may
prove in due season the most effectual of preser-
vatives !
IShagpat, it should he observed at once, is not so
much the hero of the story as the victim of its
crowning incident—the veritable hero being no
other, iu truth, than Shibli Bagarag, nephew of the
renowned Baba Mustapha, chief barber of the Shah
of Persia. Shibli Bagarag, himself a barber like
his loquacious old parrot of au uncle, is the youth
predestined by the readers of the stars for the ulti-
mate "Shaving of Shagpat," an achievement of
preternatural difficulty, and one the glory of which
is recognised from the first as altogether beyond
tke reach of adequate celebration. The difficulty
is soon perceived to lie in a single hair on the head
of Shagpat the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi,
the son of Shullum—otherwise known as Shagpat,
the clothier of the city of Shagpat. The hairiest
man in all the world--" a miracle of hairiness,
with hair as he had been muzzled with it, and his
head as it were a berry in a huge bush by reason
of it." In this tremendous bramble-bush of hairi-
ness howbeit there is one hair, as we have hinted,
the arch-difficulty to the hand of the barber-hero
Shibli Bagarag. A hair not to be shorn by any
earthly implement—the Hair of Fortune, otherwise
known as the Identical,or still more solemnly, in-
deed, as the Identical. of Identicais ! With a
view to the severing of which said Identical, as'
well as the rest of the umbrageous hairs
upon the head of Shagpat, the clothier, Shibli
Bagarag goes through all those complicated and
miraculous series of adventures making the
marvel of the enthralling narrative of this same
wonderful Arabian 'Entertainment. /Wonder-
ful it is in truth, we repeat, both by reason
of its prodigal display of the humorous and its as-
tonishing evidence of the creative power of its
author's imagination. Exquisite is the agile play
of the imaginative faculty revealed, for example,
in the description here given of " The Well of Pa-
ravid"—a drop of the waters from which dropped
upon anything animate or inanimate rendered it
on the instant vocal—upon a rock, upon a foun-
tain, upon a basin, a soapbowl, and barber's
tackle, upon the marble floor of a palace, upon a
spike of lavender ! Marvellous a:lain in its way
is the vivifying imagination revealed by the author
of " The Shaving of Shagpat"—in "The Talking
Hawk," in " The Horse Garraveen," in " The Lily
of the Enchanted Sea," in the "Palace of Aklis,"
in "The Wiles of Rabesqurat." jlt is the imagina-
tion of a poet that conjures all these wonders into
being as it is the genial fancy of a humorist
that guides the pencil in the limning of
that ludicrous portrait, for instance, of .Noorka
bin Noorka, as she first appears before us under a
witoh disguise as "a woman, old, wrinkled, a very
crone, with but room for the drawing of a thread
between her nose and her chin . . . her joints sharp
as the hind legs of a grasshopper !" A humorist,
too, and none other, a humorist with an infinite
and subtle appreciation of the humorous, telling us
how, in the thwacking of Shibli Bagarag, " the
thong took an airing before it descended upon him
—coming down on him with the hiss as it were a
serpent, and with a smack as it were the mouth of
satisfaction 1" Relating how, when the King looked
amazed, "he made a point of his eyebrows"—
when the Seven Sons of Aklis were tickled " they
laughed so that their chins wore uppermost"—when
Kadza, the spouse of Shagpat, was startled into a
swoon she became " limp, after the well-remem-
bered manner of the amiable Migge of " Barnaby
Rudge." /A humorist of very delightful facetious-
ness Mr. Meredith., proves himself to be, indeed,
repeatedly throughout the shifting scenes of this
astonishing phantasmagoria of portraits, portraits
some of them surprisingly bizarre, grotesque, and
ludicrous. As where he paints Abarak, the hunch-
back, with his legs bowed as though he had
a moon between them ; or, again, where he
depicts that goblin ape of Aklis, who " sat
down and crossed his legs, and made a study of
Shibli Bagarag as of a sovereign that held forth a
deceiving bargain"--theold monkey,whoafterwards
" arose with a puzzled look, half scornful, and
made for the door slowly, turning his head between-
whiles as he went, and scratching his lower limbs
with the acute reflectiveness of age and extreme
caution"—own brother, as we should conjecture
him to be, of the Singe Caporal of M. Paul de
Kook, the ape in " La Jolie Fille
to du
urne Faubourg,"
44 /e dos--
who, in a moment of difficulty,
pot tant /a main gauche a son derriere, qu'a/ gratte
avec une sorte de fareur." Sappier examples, how-
ever, of Mr. Meredith's remarkable powers as a
humorist may yet be culled abundantly from other
pages of his Arabian Entertainment. As, for in-
stance, where the hero-barber, beholding Shagpat
" arrogant in hairiness" can scarcely resist lather-
ing him to the eyes and upwards, and assaulting
him with his tackle of office—the chronicler writing
" now long gazing on Shagpat awoke in Shibli
Bagarag a fierce desire to shave him, and it was
scarce in his power to restrain himself from flying
at the clothier." Better still that exquisitely ri-