Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/564

Rh 5.38 M O A L L A K A T the rhapsodist to the critic and scholar. Now, when we consider that more than a century in some cases two centuries elapsed before the poems were fixed by literary men, we must be prepared to find that they have not retained their original form unaltered. The most favour able opinion of the rhapsodists would require us to make allowance for occasional mistakes ; expressions would be interchanged, the order of verses disarranged, passages omitted, and probably portions of different poems pieced together. The loose structure of the ancient poems ren dered them peculiarly liable to corruptions of this kind. But the fact is that Hammad in particular dealt in the most arbitrary fashion with the enormous quantity of poetry which he professed to know thoroughly. He is even charged with falsifications of all sorts in this depart ment. Of others, again and notably of the great philolo gist Khalaf, &quot;the Red&quot; it is credibly reported that they used their intimate knowledge of the style and language of the ancients to pass off whole poems of their own making as the productions of earlier authors. The worst anticipations are only too completely confirmed by an examination of such pieces as are still preserved, as is shown most conclusively in Ahlwardt s Bemerkunyen,&YQ&&y cited. The seven Mo allakAt are indeed free from the sus picion of forgery, but even in them verses are frequently transposed ; in all there are lacunae ; and probably all contain verses which do not belong to them. Some of them have more than one introduction. This is the case even with the poem of e Amr, although, as the finest pane gyric of his very powerful tribe, it must have had a wide circulation. The true introduction begins at v. 9 ; before that we find another which certainly does not belong to this poem, and can hardly be the work of the same poet. Amr lived in the desert regions near the lower Euphrates, under the Persian dominion ; whereas the author of v. 8 boasts of his carousals in several parts of Roman Syria, and in v. 1 he speaks of drinking wine from a place in Northern Syria. It is evident that all attempts to restore the original order, to fill up blanks, or to remove interpola tions, can only be carried to a certain degree of probability at the best ; there must always be a large subjective ele ment in judgments on points of the kind. Still less can we hope to discover and rectify the minor changes, in single expressions or grammatical forms, which, the text may have undergone before it was fixed in writing. It may be re marked in this connexion that where any ancient song has been transmitted through two different grammatical schools it generally appears in two considerably divergent forms, each having been taken down from the lips of a separate rawl. Of secondary importance are the errors due to later copyists. Considerable as these often are, we are, at least in many cases, better able to correct them. Even the masters of old Arabian poetry do not exhibit such characteristic differences in their general manner and style as to leave in the mind a clear idea of their indivi duality. A few distinct poetic types emerge, but the great majority of these poets present a somewhat monotonous aspect to the Western scholar, who indeed can at best have but a very imperfect feeling for nuances of style in this field. But if we are thus unable to isolate the various constituent parts of this poetical literature, and pass a critical opinion on each, we do get from this literature, as a whole, what is of far greater importance than an esthetic estimate of this or that particular poet, viz. a poetic picture of the whole life and activity of that remarkable people which, amid the endless agitation and endless sameness of its existence, and in an extremely inhospitable region, was preparing one of the mightiest revolutions in the history of the world. This collective impression is hardly impaired by the involuntary alterations made by the rawis ; nor is it greatly distorted by the forgers of the 2d century of Islam, who were thoroughly familiar with the spirit and style of antiquity, and seldom did violence to them. The critics of the 2d and 3d centuries A.H. unani mously ranked the poets of the heathen period above those of Islam ; and in that verdict we must concur. The older Moslem poets were for the most part mere Epigoni, content, for better or worse, to borrow the style of their pagan predecessors. It is only natural, therefore, that the seven best poems should have been selected from the pro ductions of heathenism. But how these particular seven came to be fixed upon, it is difficult to decide. It is remarkable that people who knew thousands of such poems should have agreed as to the superiority of five, and only differed about two. No doubt the selection was greatly influenced by the widely-established reputation of certain poets, like Amraalkais, Zohair, and Tarafa ; while in other cases single poems, such as that of Amr, stood in high repute for special reasons. Still, even we, with a much narrower range of selection, should hardly pick out these seven as the finest. In all probability our choice would not light on a single one of them. The truth is, our aesthetic ideal is essentially different from that of those old litterateurs. And, while we may certainly consider our own taste, formed on the model of the Greeks and the best of the moderns, to be on the whole purer than theirs, we must not forget that they had the advantage of perfect knowledge of the language and the subject-matter, and could thus perceive a multitude of beautiful and delicate touches, which we either miss entirely or realize with labo rious effort. The world of the old Arabian poet lay at an infinite remove from ours. His mental horizon was narrow ; but within that horizon every minute detail was seized and designated with precision. Among the nomads, for example, the smallest point of the horse or camel that the eye can see has its importance ; the language has pre cise and generally understood words for them all, where ours has only technical terms. It is the same with all the physical properties of the animal its paces, etc. Thus, when a poet faithfully described the exterior and the deportment of his camel, that was to his hearers and the same is true of later critics a genuine pleasure, because the description conveyed to them a definite pictorial im pression. But Ave do not understand the details of the picture; or, when at best with all the resources of tradition and natural history we have gained some tolerable compre hension of them, the whole still leaves us indifferent. A camel to us is simply not a poetical object ; and even a horse ceases to be aesthetically interesting except perhaps to a sportsman when one is asked to go over his points in detail. For this reason we are apt to find a great part of Tarafa s Mo allaka, and many parts of the poems of Amraalkais, viewed as poetry, distasteful rather than interesting. More attractive are the descriptions of the life and habits of wild animals in the desert, such as the wild ass and some species of antelope, which the poets are fond of introducing (see, e.g., the Mo allaka of Labid). There are also many vivid sketches from nature to be met with, nature, of course, as seen in the very monotonous Arabian landscape. Monotony, indeed, is a predominant characteristic of this poetry. When one first reads poems where the bard begins by shedding tears over the scarcely perceptible traces of the dwelling of his beloved in years gone by, one s sympathy is aroused. But when poem after poem is found to commence with the same scene, and pos sibly with almost the same words, the emotion is somewhat damped. No doubt such occurrences must really have been very common in the nomad life ; nevertheless the suspicion becomes at last irresistible that for the most part all this is pure fiction. Nor can we be sure that the