Part 15 (1/2)

Arabic poetry then is probably richer in love ecstasy than that of any nation. This is due to the fact that they are both a sensuous and at the same time deeply religious people. They were strongly emotional, extremely vindictive and extremely hospitable. They recorded their emotions unabashed. They had the navete of the child and cried out their slightest pain; they weep and bemoan constantly. Antar, one of the poets of the _Muallaqat_ and the hero of the romance bearing his name, is more of a child than Achilles. He is always sobbing and weeping copiously; he is the prototype of the medieval knight who wept and declaimed because of absence of his mistress, a feature of romance which Cervantes ably ridiculed in _Don Quixote_.

Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, was one of the first to point out the Arabic influence on chivalry and romanticism. The battle as to the extent of Arabic influence has been waged ever since, with, I believe, the victory to the Arabs. FitzMaurice Kelly, the historian of Spanish Literature, emphasizing the Hebrew influence, has resented the statement of the great Arabic influence, but Robert Briffault in _The Making of Humanity_ has proved that this influence has been underestimated rather than exaggerated.

The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both s.e.xes--women also were freer than in Post-islamic times--gave rise to romantic love.

Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or chivalrous phase, fas.h.i.+onable. True, this note existed very sparingly among the Greeks and Romans in Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic note was singularly absent from European literature in the early medieval ages. Men loved then as they did before and after, but the personal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme for poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. Critics now admit that intense love poetry of the Troubadours appearing like an oasis in the barren literature of the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs, the rhymes as well as the themes being taken from the east. The troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and these two groups remain among the best composers of love poetry Europe has had.

The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly two centuries.[214:A]

The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence.

Cervantes attributed his _Don Quixote_ to a Moorish author because the Moors wrote so many romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic spirit. Wyatt and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry.

Similarly the Spanish _Cid_ shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic invasion of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effectively pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry than Sismondi in his history of the literature of the South of Europe. He begins the work with, after the introduction, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he especially recognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the chivalric att.i.tude towards women came from the Arabs. The most sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great influence of Mohammedan influence upon Europe is in Samuel P. Scott's _History of the Moorish Empire in Spain_.

It is said that even the French poem, the _Chanson de Roland_, shows Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.

We recognize that there is an invisible thread that binds together love poems so remotely separated by time and place as those of the medieval Persians, Arabs and Troubadours, and the modern English poets.

The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe, especially in a few in his _West Eastern Divan_, influenced by his studies of Oriental literature during the Napoleonic wars. He used his own experiences with eastern names, but he never failed to produce literature of ecstasy. The Oriental romance also exerted an influence on Beckford, Landor, Southey, Byron and Moore. Even Tennyson got the idea of _Locksley Hall_ from reading Sir William Jones's prose translation of the _Muallaqat_; Browning adopted an Arabian metre in his _Abt Vogler_; George Meredith's _The Shaving of s.h.a.gpat_ was written to emulate the _Arabian Nights_.

The Arabs excelled also in the elegy. Among the most famous elegies in Arabic poetry are those of Khansa, a Pre-islamic poetess, on the murder of her two brothers. There is an account of her by Thomas C. Chenery, in the notes to his translation of Hariri's _a.s.semblies_ V. 1, pp. 387-391.

In fact the elegy is more common among early Pre-islamic poetry than the love poem. The Orientals, particularly the medieval Hebrews, were always distinguished in this kind of poetry. One of the best, certainly the best in Turkish poetry, is the elegy by Baqui on the great Sultan Suleiman I, translated by E. J. W. Gibb in _Ottoman Poetry_.

The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was originally, as to-day, a personal cry, an outburst of emotion due to repression. The cry of grief for the dead in battle; that is the note in all early literature, Occidental and Oriental.

The poem among the Arabs and Hebrews had also a definite utilitarian purpose. In early times satire was one of the chief forms under which lyric poetry appeared. The poet was employed to combat the enemy and his curses against them were supposed to be effective. He was a soothsayer, a prophet, a magician. He voiced not only the communistic feeling of the tribes, but his personal emotions. Even down to our day the public demands that the poet write poems against the enemy in time of war.

Goethe was criticized for refusing to write against the French, for example, but he explained later to Eckermann that he had no hatred towards the French. In all wars there have been poets who have written against the enemy, but usually this kind of poetry has been of an inferior order. It finds its own tomb in a poem like the famous _Hymn of Hate_ by Lissauer in the late world war.

Nothing in literature ill.u.s.trates more the belief in the magical power of poetry than the chapters in the _Book of Numbers_ dealing with the effort of the Moabite King Balak to get Balaam to curse the children of Israel. Balak believed that these curses would help him defeat the Hebrews. But instead Balaam blessed them, unwillingly, saying that he could but utter the words G.o.d put in his mouth, for the inspiration of the poet came to him always from hidden forces. He reached to ecstasy every time he spoke.

Arabic poetry then deals in intricate forms conveying ecstasy, with all the stock themes of poetry, but especially with love.

The similarities between Biblical Hebrew poetry and Pre-islamic Arabic poetry have been touched upon by Dr. George A. Smith in his _The Early Poetry of Israel_ and by Thomas Chenery in his excellent introduction to his translation of Hariri's _a.s.semblies_. Partic.i.p.ators in various military events themselves composed the poems in which they told of their exploits, as you may note by comparing the _Muallaqat_ with the songs of Miriam and Deborah. There was the same interest in nature as you may see by comparing descriptions from the _Psalms_ and _Job_ to that of the thunderstorm by Imru'ul Qays in the _Muallaqat_. The poetry of both nations was often nomadic, the product of the influences of the desert. Both nations recorded personal emotions, springing from tribal events.

There was also the same tendency in both nations to utter ecstatically sententious and moral sayings. Though only one poem in the _Muallaqat_, that by Zuhayr, really moralizes, the later Arabic poets always loved to give vent to reflections, proverbs, words of wisdom. Two of the best Arabic poems of the kind are the improvisations of the vagabond Abu Zayd in the 11th and 50th a.s.sembly of Hariri's _a.s.semblies_. Two finer poems which moralize without losing their poetic quality can scarcely be found in Arabic literature. Most of the reflective poetry of those two pessimistic, skeptic poets Abu l'Atahiya and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are of this kind. The ecstatic potentiality in reflection is seen in _Job_, _Proverbs_ and _Ecclesiastes_.

The chief phase of Pre-islamic poetry that will not appeal to us is in the great body of martial verse where love of robbery and bloodshed, cruelty, revenge and hatred are fostered. The Bedouins gave us a transcript of their life. They dwelt in their vices with frankness, but they tried to make virtues out of them. We cannot blame them for not having our ideals of peace and it is also doubtful if cruelties in their warfare were greater than those in our own day.

The poets before Islam sang about revenge and fighting in a way that even nauseates us. The martial spirit in the _Romance of Antar_ has made it less popular with us than _The Arabian Nights_, for the former work is an account of the fighting Arabs of the desert, and the latter deals largely with the merchant Arabs of the city. Even the great and beautiful _Song of Vengeance_ by the Arab Robin Hood, Ta abbata Sharran, of which we have a second hand translation by Goethe, and fine verse versions by R. A. Nicholson, _Literary History of the Arabs_ (pp.

98-100), and by Charles J. Lyall on pages 48-49 of _Arabic Poetry_, is very cruel.

Pre-islamic poetry reeks too much with the ecstasy of delight to shed blood, in which tendency it of course differs little from the early poetry of other nations. However, the remarkable thing is that the hearts of these warriors possessed so many fine feelings. One of the n.o.blest descriptions of woman is by a companion of the brigand Sharran, from the _Mufaddaliyyat_, a translation of which appears on pages 81-82 of Lyall's volume.

The Arabian poetry which has been most frequently translated and written about in English is Pre-islamic poetry. In especial, the _Muallaqat_, or the seven so-called suspended poems, has been translated several times.

Sir William Jones made the first translation in prose in the eighteenth century. In modern times we have had several translations, one by Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. There has been considerable support for the critical view that these poems represent the highest achievement of Arabic poetry, both among Arabs themselves and Aryan critics. Imru'ul Qays, who flourished in the sixth century A.D., is the most famous of the poets in the collection, and is regarded by many as the greatest Arabian poet. R. A. Nicholson and Clement Huart have given accounts of the _Muallaqat_ in their histories of Arabic Literature. Professor Mackail has published in his Oxford Lectures an essay on these odes and D. Noldeke has given us a full study of them in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. I shall not therefore dwell on them except to say that they were collected in the eighth century by Hammad, and that most of these poems deal with warriors rather than lovers, though they contain love laments.

Nicholson and others regard the Abbasid period as the great era of Arabic poets. This period extended from the accession of Saffah in 749 to the destruction of Bagdad by the Mongols in 1258. Abu Nuwas, Abu 'l Atahiya, Mutanabbi and Abu 'l Ala al Maarri are recognized by Nicholson as the G.o.ds of Arabian poetry, and we in our smug inordinate satisfaction with Aryan poetry, have not even translated or paid attention to them. Abu Nuwas, who flourished in the early part of the ninth century, sang of love and wine and led a riotous and immoral life, and is familiar to the reader of the _Arabian Nights_ as the jester of Harun al Ras.h.i.+d. His _Divan_ is to be found in German but not in English. Many consider him the greatest of the Arabian poets. Abu 'l Atahiya is a pessimist and philosophical poet thinker. He was imprisoned by Harun for having ceased writing love poetry because he was hopelessly in love with a slave girl. He described common emotions and used simple language instead of far-fetched conceits. Mutanabbi in the tenth century was the most famous of all the Arabian poets, but he is criticized by many for his rhetoric and ornament. He is the master of the grand style.

Then we have in the next century the great Abu 'l Ala al Maarri, who has been called the predecessor of Omar Khayyam. Bauerlein and Rihani have translated some of his verses into English, and Bauerlein has also devoted a little volume to him in _The Wisdom of the East_ series. Abu 'l Ala is the most modern of the Arabian poets. He was a freethinker and a pessimist and his _Luzumiyyat_ reads like a work of one of our rational poets. It attacks all religion including Islam. His letters have been translated into English by Professor Margoliouth.[218:A]

I have already several times mentioned the most famous Arabic work next to the Koran, the _Maqamat_ or _a.s.semblies_, by Hariri (1054-1122). The tales have been called immoral, but Abu Zayd interests us as Gil Blas does. The work written in rhymed prose is most fascinating reading.

There is a complete translation of this by T. Chenery and F. Steinga.s.s, 1867-1898.

The _Arabian Nights_ is the best known Arabic production to English speaking people and is full of poetry, not only in the interspersed verses, but in the stories themselves.