Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/283

Rh LITERATURE. vowels, irrespective of accent, but admitting caesura, elision, and every prosodiacal delicacy. Some are adapted to gay, some to serious topics : love, war, description, moral precepts, philosophical speculation, elegy, satire all find here their appropriate expression. The rhyme, which often involves not one but two syllables, is in every piece deter mined by that of the opening line. Alternate rhymes, choruses, and accentuated instead of quantitative metre, did not appear till later, and were imitated from extra- Arab models. Public re- Yearly, at the festival of Okad, the best masters of the citatioua. art used to meet for the purpose of reciting their com positions, and receiving the reward, not of applause only, but also of more tangible advantages. Eulogies of chiefs, rulers, and distinguished men, formed a considerable portion of the poetry of those days ; and a single ode or &quot; kaseedah,&quot; as it was called, has been known to be rewarded, according to the means or liberality of the person eulogised, with a hundred valuable camels, or several thousand gold pieces. Love and war had also their inevitable share in the domain of verse, and descriptions of manner and scenery occur, though rarely in comparison. Lastly, elegies some of them very touching in their deep and tender melancholy and didactic pieces, chiefly ethical, take rank among the most carefully finished productions of the early Arab muse. Meanwhile, the greater number of poets had each his special patron, whose generosity took charge of the remuneration that in our days is looked for from the press ; while a greater degree of publicity was given to a few chosen works of genius by the custom of suspending in some place of common resort (the Kaabeh, it is asserted) such pieces as in the yearly gatherings of Okad had obtained the highest palm of acknowledged excellence. Seven of these, known in Arab literature by the title of the Muallakat or &quot; Sus pended,&quot; as being emphatically the best of their kind, and all of them belonging to the Gth century, have become for succeeding ages the accepted and classical standards of Arab poetical composition. Prose Written prose up to the date of Mahomet s appearance literature, there was absolutely none ; and spoken eloquence, though always highly esteemed and diligently cultivated among the Arabs, had never been embodied in the permanence of writing. The irregular, half -rhythmical, half-rhyming sentences of the Koran were the first attempt in the direction of prose, which afterwards came into general use, and was applied to history, biography, philosophical treatises, romance, and every other description of subject. But prose never emancipated itself wholly from its original trammels of a misapplied cadence, to which was also too often added a redundant phraseology, the latter partly due to Persian literary influence ; this florid style being, how ever, with many authors varied by breaks, as it were, of writing as excessive in its plainness as the other in its ornamentation. Poetry. But if unsuccessful in prose, the Arabs were not so in poetry. This, even before the era of the prophet, had, as we have seen, attained no ordinary degree of excellence ; and it reached its highest point during the following century, under the Ommiade dynasty, when Omar Ebn Rabeeyah, of the tribe of Koreysh ; Jameel, of the Benoo Adhrah ; Jareer and Farazdak, both of Tameem ; and Noseyyeb, a negro by birth the first and second masters of erotic, the third and fourth of satirical, and the fifth of descriptive poetry with a cloud of lesser celebrities, lived and sang in the sunshine of the Damascene court. The 8th and 9th centuries, agitated by civil dissensions or oppressed by the tyranny of the Abbasides, were less favourable to the Muses, till the reaction of the Greek and Persian minds, with which the Arab spirit was now yearly brought into more intimate contact, gave rise to a new and 263 brilliant school, less true to the simplicity of nature or the purity of Arab diction, but richer in imagery and deeper in philosophic thought, illustrating, too, the transition from the objective to the subjective which has accompanied and half veiled decline in the literature of every nation, turn after turn. Abu-Tcman, of the tribe of Tai, known not as a poet only, but also as a critic and the compiler of the celebrated anthology, the Hamasa, the &quot; Golden Treasury &quot; of the Arabs, first came forward in this field. His suc cessor, the well-known Mutenebhc, is still esteemed by many the greatest of Arab poets ; in range of thought and polish of diction he certainly excels all besides. Later still, in the llth century, appeared Toghrai, who in his Lameyyah, the title of his principal piece, entered the lists against Shanfarah, the most brilliant of pre-Islamitic poets, and, it seems, furnished our own Tennyson with the model of his &quot; Locksley Hall ;&quot; while a little later, Ebn Faridh, iu Egypt, composed the mystico-erotic volume that has never in its kind been surpassed, or even equalled, by the poets of any land. With the decline of the Arab race, however, their muse Decline of drooped also, and for many centuries maintained but a literature, languishing existence, which in our own time has been galvanised rather than invigorated into a kind of revival by the modern literary schools of Beyrout, Damascus, Baghdad, and the Hejaz. In Nejd, Yemen, and Oman, rough poems on the primitive Arab model, besides others modulated with alternate rhymes, and in which accent takes the place of prosody, a species commonly called &quot;Nabtce &quot; or Naba- thean verse, are yet in vogue. The Hispano-Arab poets, mostly mere imitators, and in bad taste too, need not detain us here. Epic and dramatic poetry were never even attempted by the Arabs. Romance, analogous though not similar to the European Komancou novel, was always a favourite branch of Arab literature ; and in the Thousand and One Nights it obtained a world wide celebrity and success. The original of this enter taining work appears to have been composed in Baghdad about the llth century; another less popular but very spirited version is probably of Tunisian authorship, and somewhat later in date. The stories of Antarah, of the Benoo Hilal, of Mohalhcl, of Barakat, and countless others, belong to the same class of writings, though cast in more of a biographical form, not unlike that adopted by the great Defoe. Strictly objective in character, the Arab novel, though often a vivid portraiture of the outside of men and customs, has never portrayed, or attempted to portray, the inner workings of the human mind. With memoirs, biographies, collections of anecdotes, and Biography, the like, Arab literature is stored in excess, the bulk of such works being, as might be supposed, of somewhat superficial interest ; while not a few of them are, on the contrary, possessed of great merit and value. Thus the Book of Songs, or &quot; Kitab cl Aghanee,&quot; composed in the latter part of the 10th century by Abu-Faraj, of Ispahan, and containing, in twenty successive volumes, short but entertaining notices of all the principal Arab poets or singers, with specimens of their compositions, is, in addition to its speciality, a perfect treasure of the most varied information regarding the men and the times ; and the Life of Mahomet, by Abul-Fcda, of Aleppo, displays considerable critical acumen as well as narrative power. Nor should we forget the judiciously-selected biographies of Mahometan celebrities by Ebn Khallikan, in the 12th century, or those of Koteybah of an earlier date ; but of such compositions as these the Arab name is legion. History, however, proved from first to last an effort History, beyond Arab skill, which contented itself with the less intellectual task of multiplying chronicles to an almost unparalleled amount. In this the voluminous work of Ebu