Part 15 (2/2)

The _Romance of Antar_, from which I quoted a poem, is said to have been written by a poet and philologist in the reign of Harun al Ras.h.i.+d. The work is long and a few abridged volumes were translated into English by Terrick Hamilton in 1819 and 1820.

Then there is the great poet of Cordova, Ibn Zaydun of the eleventh century, whose love for the princess Wallada has made him celebrated.

Here is a beautiful love poem translated by Nicholson, _Literary History of the Arabs_, pp. 425-426:

To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here; The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear.

So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale, In pity of my grief it seems to fail.

The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls.

Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime, When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time, We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue, That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew.

Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep; They share my pa.s.sion and with me they weep.

Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright, Adding new l.u.s.tre to Aurora's light; And waked by morning beams, yet languid still, The rival lotus doth his perfume spill.

All stirs in me the memory of that fire Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire.

Had death come ere we parted, it had been The best of all days in the world, I ween; And this poor heart, where thou art every thing, Would not be fluttering now on pa.s.sion's wing.

Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly, Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee!

O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed A treasure! O thou dearest, queenliest!

Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete And ran an equal race with eager feet.

How true, how blameless was the love I bore, Thou hast forgotten; but I still adore!

Nor have I sounded the depth of Arabian poetry. Their greatest mystic poet was Umar Ibn ul Farid, who flourished between 1181 and 1235, and whose work is full of fervid and inspired poetry.

There is also Baha ad Din Zuhayr (d. 1258 A.D.), the love poet of Egypt, whose complete poems have been translated into English by Edward H.

Palmer.

One of the great products of Arabic culture was its work in literary criticism. While it is the fas.h.i.+on to-day to lay much stress on the Italian and English studies of Aristotle's _Poetics_ in the Renaissance and Elizabethan periods respectively, the Arabs were writing learnedly on poetry centuries before they read the _Poetics_. They made a specialty of the literature called the Adab, or belles lettres made up of criticism, quotation and rhetoric.

The criticism of poetry flourished among the Arabs in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. as a higher art than it did in the sixteenth century among the Italians and English. Unfortunately none of these works have been translated; there is not even a reference to their influence in Saintsbury's _History of Criticism in Europe_. The Arabs had so many poets even in Pre-islamic times in the sixth century that interest in preserving this poetry gave rise later to anthologists who made collections. These anthologists commented on the poetical work and compared it with that of later periods, and with that of their contemporaries.

Ibn Yunus in the early part of the tenth century translated Aristotle's _Poetics_ into Arabic and the Europeans learned of Aristotle's work from the Arabs several centuries later. But the best Arabic works on the art of poetry had, however, already been produced, presenting original ideas gleaned from the study of the great Arabian poets, and ill.u.s.trated by examples from them. The Arabic critics did not go to the Greek and Roman poems (which they considered cold besides their own) as did the Italians and English to study the nature of poetry. The Arabs studied Greek science, medicine, and philosophy, but not Greek poetry. Books on prosody and poetry appeared after the founding of the system of Arabic meters by Khalil b. Ahmad in the eighth century. There were also the two celebrated schools of grammarians at Basra and Kufa, soon to merge in the school of Bagdad. Never before had the art of poetry and criticism flourished so thrivingly and displayed a so generally high order as among the Arabs in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. A faint idea of the great number of Arabian grammarians, critics and poets may be gleaned by perusing the biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan, who flourished in the thirteenth century. This work, which contains only a partial list, has been compared to the _Life of Johnson_, by Boswell (Lucas called him a Bagdad Boswell), and to _Plutarch's Lives_.

While Europe was plunged in ignorance and barbarism, the great Arab poets and critics were achieving work that belongs to the best; but alas, the very names which rank so high among them are unknown to most people. We let them slumber in the difficult Arabic. We translate the Chinese and j.a.panese poems probably more out of faddish reasons than of a true love of their poetry, but we ignore the Arabians.

The Arab example contradicts the famous plat.i.tude that great epochs of creative literary work are not ages of literary criticism. It is just the reverse. Good criticism is never so conspicuous as in ages of poetry, for there is such interest in poetry as to provoke literary discussion, then more so than ever. The best criticism of poetry appeared in England in the great age of Wordsworth and Byron. The Arabic grammarians and anthologists began their work about the middle of the eighth century. Incredible stories are told of their feats of memory for verse, in the art of improvisation, in skill in manipulating the language. They regarded the letters of their alphabet as human beings, just as the Hebrew Cabbalists treated their alphabetical letters as angels.

To name even the most important of grammarians, anthologists, philologists, critics of Arabia, is to call a long list. Even historians, philosophers, scientists and theologians entered the field of poetic criticism. Every one quoted the poets, consequently poetry was bound up not only with criticism but with Arabic thought. One of the most quoted Arabic critics is Ibn Ras.h.i.+q, of the eleventh century, whose _Umda_ or _Pillar of the Art of Poetry_ is mentioned often by Ibn Khaldun, the historian. The latter also names four great Arabic writers of Adab, Ibn Qutayba's _Accomplishments of the Secretary_ (Ibn Qutayba's _Book of Poetry and Poets_ is more often cited by other writers than the _Accomplishments of the Secretary_), Jahiz's _Book of Eloquence and Exposition_, al Mubarrad's _Perfect_, all of the ninth century, and in Spain Abu Ali al Qali's _Curious Notions_, of the tenth century, whose _Book of Dictations_, however, is better known.

Among the writers on poetry in the manner of the Arabs was the Hebrew poet and critic, Moses Ibn Ezra, author of the _Conversations and Recollections_, which was the first study of the kind in Hebrew and the first criticism of the poetry of the Bible from an aesthetic point of view. Among Arab critics to whom he is indebted, besides the aforementioned Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Ras.h.i.+q, are the first book in Arabian _Poetics_ proper, by the Caliph, Ibn ul Mutazz, of the latter part of the ninth century, a work by Qudama, and _Ornaments of Conversation_, by Al Hatimi, both of the tenth century.

There are many other works that were well known and often cited in Arabic literary circles. I shall name only Tha'alibi (died 1037), whose _Solitaire of Time_ had many continuations by later critics, and the famous _Fihrist_ or _Index_ by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.

Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of Chaucer in the thirteenth century, devoted a number of chapters to poetry in the introduction to his famous history.

As a specimen of poetic criticism among the Arabs and as a corrective to the general impression that ornament and not ecstasy counted in Arabic poetry, I give the following English rendering from De Slane's French translation of Khaldun's _Prolegomena_:

One of the conditions imposed in the use of this art (of ornament) is that the embellishments appear in the piece quite naturally, without the author's labor in searching for them and without his being anxious about the effect that they should produce. If they present themselves naturally, there is nothing to object to them, for not being purposely introduced, they save the subject the fault of lapsing into barbarism; but when one imposes upon himself the task of painfully seeking these embellishments, he is led to neglect the principles which rule the combination of words, which are the foundation of the discourse; this injures the principles of clearness of expression and causes the distinctness and precision which ought to characterize the discourse, to disappear; nothing then remains but the embellishments. . . . Another condition which should be observed in regard to the science of ornaments is to make a rare use of it; that the poet apply it to two or three verses of a poem; that will suffice to give elegance and l.u.s.ter to the entire piece. The too frequent use of embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Ras.h.i.+q and others have said. . . . All that we pointed out shows that the artificial discourse (or style), when one writes it laboriously and as a task, is inferior in merit to the natural discourse, for one neglects thereby too many fundamental principles of the art of speaking well. I leave it to good taste to judge thereof.

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