Many readers will regret the absence from The Nights of that modesty
which distinguishes “Amadis de Gaul;” whose author when leaving a man
and a maid together says, “And nothing shall be here related; for these
and suchlike things which are conformable neither to good conscience nor
nature, man ought in reason lightly to pass over, holding them in slight
esteem as they deserve.” Nor have we less respect for Palmerin of
England who after a risqué scene declares, “Herein is no offence offered
to the wise by wanton speeches, or encouragement to the loose by
lascivious matter.” But these are not oriental ideas and we must e’en
take the Eastern as we find him. He still holds “Naturalia non sunt
turpia,” together with “Mundis omnia munda”; and, as Bacon assures us
the mixture of a lie doth add to pleasure, so the Arab enjoys the
startling and lively contrast of extreme virtue and horrible vice placed
in juxtaposition.
Those who have read through these ten volumes will agree with me that
the proportion of offensive matter bears a very small ratio to the mass
of the work. In an age saturated with cant and hypocrisy, here and there
a venal pen will mourn over the “Pornography” of The Nights, dwell upon
the “Ethics of Dirt” and the “Garbage of the Brothel;” and will lament
the “wanton dissemination (!) of ancient and filthy fiction.” This
self-constituted Censor morum reads Aristophanes and Plato, Horace and
Virgil, perhaps even Martial and Petronius, because “veiled in the
decent obscurity of a learned language;” he allows men Latinè loqui; but
he is scandalised at stumbling-blocks much less important in plain
English. To be consistent he must begin by bowdlerising not only the
classics, with which boys’ and youths’ minds and memories are soaked and
saturated at schools and colleges, but also Boccaccio and Chaucer,
Shakespeare and Rabelais; Burton, Sterne, Swift and a long list of works
which are yearly reprinted and republished without a word of protest.
Lastly, why does not this inconsistent puritan purge the Old Testament
of its allusions to human ordure and the pudenda; to carnal copulation
and impudent whoredom, to adultery and fornication, to onanism, sodomy
and bestiality? But this he will not do, the whited sepulchre! To the
interested critic of the _Edinburgh Review_ (No. 335 of July, 1886), I
return my warmest thanks for his direct and deliberate falsehoods:—lies
are one-legged and short-lived, and venom evaporates.[430] It appears to
me that when I show to such men, so “respectable” and so impure, a
landscape of magnificent prospects whose vistas are adorned with every
charm of nature and art, they point their unclean noses at a little heap
of muck here and there lying in a field-corner.
§ V
ON THE PROSE-RHYME AND THE POETRY OF THE NIGHTS.
A.—THE SAJ’A.
According to promise in my Foreword (p. xiv.), I here proceed to offer a
few observations concerning the Saj’a or rhymed prose and the Shi’r, or
measured sentence, that is, the verse of The Nights. The former has in
composition, metrical or unmetrical, three distinct forms. Saj’a
mutawázi (parallel), the most common, is when the ending words of
sentences agree in measure, assonance and final letter, in fact our full
rhyme: next is Saj’a mutarraf (the affluent), when the periods,
hemistichs or couplets end in words whose terminal letters correspond,
although differing in measure and number; and thirdly, Saj’a muwázanah
(equilibrium) is applied to the balance which affects words
corresponding in measure but differing in final letters.[431]
Al-Saj’a, the fine style or style fleuri, also termed Al-Badí’a, or
euphuism, is the basis of all Arabic euphony. The whole of the Koran is
written in it; and the same is the case with the Makámát of Al-Hariri
and the prime master-pieces of rhetorical composition: without it no
translation of the Holy Book can be satisfactory or final, and where it
is not the Assemblies become the prose of prose. Thus universally used
the assonance has necessarily been abused, and its excess has given rise
to the saying “Al-Saj’a faj’a”—prose rhyme’s a pest. English translators
have, unwisely I think, agreed in rejecting it, while Germans have not.
Mr. Preston assures us that “rhyming prose is extremely ungraceful in
English and introduces an air of flippancy”: this was certainly not the
case with Friedrich Rückert’s version of the great original, and I see
no reason why it should be so or become so in our tongue. Torrens (Pref.
p. vii.) declares that “the effect of the irregular sentence with the
iteration of a jingling rhyme is not pleasant in our language:” he
therefore systematically neglects it and gives his style the semblance
of being “scamped” with the object of saving study and trouble. Mr.
Payne (ix. 379) deems it an “excrescence born of the excessive
facilities for rhyme afforded by the language,” and of Eastern delight
in antithesis of all kinds whether of sound or of thought; and, aiming
elaborately at grace of style, he omits it wholly, even in the proverbs.
The weight of authority was against me but my plan compelled me to
disregard it. The dilemma was simply either to use the Saj’a or to
follow Mr. Payne’s method and “arrange the disjecta membra of the
original in their natural order;” that is to remodel the text. Intending
to produce a faithful copy of the Arabic, I was compelled to adopt the
former and still hold it to be the better alternative. Moreover I
question Mr. Payne’s dictum (ix. 383) that “the Seja-form is utterly
foreign to the genius of English prose and that its preservation would
be fatal to all vigour and harmony of style.” The English translator of
Palmerin of England, Anthony Munday, attempted it in places with great
success as I have before noted (vol. viii. 60); and my late friend
Edward Eastwick made artistic use of it in his Gulistan. Had I rejected
the “Cadence of the cooing-dove” because un-English, I should have
adopted the balanced periods of the Anglican marriage service[432] or
the essentially English system of alliteration, requiring some such
artful aid to distinguish from the vulgar recitative style the elevated
and classical tirades in The Nights. My attempt has found with reviewers
more favour than I expected; and a kindly critic writes of it, “These
melodious fragments, these little eddies of song set like gems in the
prose, have a charming effect on the ear. They come as dulcet surprises
and mostly recur in highly-wrought situations, or they are used to
convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in nature or art. Their
introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really it arises from a
profound study of the situation, as if the Tale-teller felt suddenly
compelled to break into the rhythmic strain.”
B.—THE VERSE.
The Shi’r or metrical part of The Nights is considerable, amounting to
not less than ten thousand lines and these I could not but render in
rhyme or rather in monorhyme. This portion has been a bugbear to
translators. De Sacy noticed the difficulty of the task (p. 283). Lane
held the poetry untranslatable because abounding in the figure Tajnís,
our paronomasia or paragram, of which there are seven distinct
varieties,[433] not to speak of other rhetorical flourishes. He
therefore omitted the greater part of the verse as tedious and, through
the loss of measure and rhyme, “generally intolerable to the reader.” He
proved his position by the bald literalism of the passages which he
rendered in truly prosaic prose and succeeded in changing the facies and
presentment of the work. For the Shi’r, like the Saj’a, is not
introduced arbitrarily; and its unequal distribution throughout The
Nights may be accounted for by rule of art. Some tales, like Omar bin
al-Nu’man and Tawaddud, contain very little because the theme is
historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and courtship, as
that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to one-fifth of the whole.
And this is true to nature. Love, as Addison said, makes even the
mechanic (the British mechanic!) poetical, and Joe Hume of material
memory once fought a duel about a fair object of dispute.
Before discussing the verse of The Nights it may be advisable to enlarge
a little upon the prosody of the Arabs. We know nothing of the origin of
their poetry, which is lost in the depths of antiquity, and the oldest
bards of whom we have any remains belong to the famous epoch of the war
Al-Basús, which would place them about A.D. 500. Moreover, when the Muse
of Arabia first shows she is not only fully developed and mature, she
has lost all her first youth, her beauté du diable, and she is assuming
the characteristics of an age beyond “middle age.” No one can study the
earliest poetry without perceiving that it results from the cultivation
of centuries and that it has already assumed that artificial type and
conventional process of treatment which presages inevitable decay. Its
noblest period is included in the century preceding the Apostolate of
Mohammed and the oldest of that epoch is the prince of Arab songsters,
Imr al-Kays, “The Wandering King.” The Christian Fathers
characteristically termed poetry Vinum Dæmonorum. The stricter Moslems
called their bards “enemies of Allah;” and when the Prophet, who hated
verse and could not even quote it correctly, was asked who was the best
poet of the Peninsula he answered that the “Man of Al-Kays,” _i.e._ the
worshipper of the Priapus-idol, would usher them all into Hell. Here he
only echoed the general verdict of his countrymen who loved poetry and,
as a rule, despised poets. The earliest complete pieces of any volume
and substance saved from the wreck of old Arabic literature and familiar
in our day are the seven Kasídahs (purpose-odes or tendence-elegies)
which are popularly known as the Gilded or the Suspended Poems; and in
all of these we find, with an elaboration of material and formal art
which can go no further, a subject-matter of trite imagery and stock
ideas which suggest a long ascending line of model ancestors and
predecessors.
Scholars are agreed upon the fact that many of the earliest and best
Arab poets were, as Mohammed boasted himself, unalphabetic[434] or
rather could neither read nor write. They addressed the ear and the
mind, not the eye. They “spoke verse,” learning it by rote and dictating
it to the Ráwi, and this reciter again transmitted it to the musician
whose pipe or zither accompanied the minstrel’s song. In fact the
general practice of writing began only at the end of the first century
after The Flight.
The rude and primitive measure of Arab song, upon which the most
complicated system of metres subsequently arose, was called Al-Rajaz,
literally “the trembling,” because it reminded the highly imaginative
hearer of a pregnant she-camel’s weak and tottering steps. This was the
carol of the camel-driver, the lover’s lay and the warrior’s chaunt of
the heroic ages; and its simple, unconstrained flow adapted it well for
extempore effusions. Its merits and demerits have been extensively
discussed amongst Arab grammarians and many, noticing that it was not
originally divided into hemistichs, make an essential difference between
the Shá’ir who speaks poetry and the Rájiz who speaks Rajaz. It
consisted, to describe it technically, of iambic dipodia (⏑ ‑ ⏑ ‑), the
first three syllables being optionally long or short. It can generally
be read like our iambs and, being familiar, is pleasant to the English
ear. The dipodia are repeated either twice or thrice; in the former case
Rajaz is held by some authorities, as Al-Akhfash (Sa’íd ibn Másadah), to
be mere prose. Although Labíd and Antar composed in iambics, the first
Kásídah or regular poem in Rajaz was by Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi temp.
Mohammed: the Alfíyah-grammar of Ibn Málik is in Rajaz Muzdawij, the
hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined to the couplet.
Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and fifth Assemblies. So far
Arabic metre is true to Nature: in impassioned speech the movement of
language is iambic: we say “I _will_, I _will_,” not “I will.”
For many generations the Sons of the Desert were satisfied with Nature’s
teaching; the fine perceptions and the nicely trained ear of the bard
needing no aid from art. But in time came the inevitable prosodist under
the formidable name of Abu Abd al-Rahmán al-Khalíl, i. Ahmad, i. Amrú,
i. Tamím al-Faráhidi (of the Faráhid sept), al-Azdi (of the Azd clan),
al-Yahmadi (of the Yahmad tribe), popularly known as Al-Khalíl ibn Ahmad
al-Basri, of Bassorah, where he died æt. 68, scanning verses they say,
in A.H. 170 (= 786–87). Ibn Khallikán relates (i. 493) on the authority
of Hamzah al-Isfaháni how this “father of Arabic grammar and discoverer
of the rules of prosody” invented the science as he walked past a
coppersmith’s shop on hearing the strokes of a hammer upon a metal
basin: “two objects devoid of any quality which could serve as a proof
and an illustration of anything else than their own form and shape and
incapable of leading to any other knowledge than that of their own
nature.”[435] According to others he was passing through the Fullers’
Bazar at Basrah when his ear was struck by the Dak-dak (دق دق) and the
Dakak-dakak (دقق دقق) of the workmen. In these two onomatopoetics we
trace the expression which characterises the Arab tongue: all syllables
are composed of consonant and vowel, the latter long or short as Bā and
Bă; or of a vowelled consonant followed by a consonant as Bal, Bau (بو).
The grammarian, true to the traditions of his craft which looks for all
poetry to the Badawi,[436] adopted for metrical details the language of
the Desert. The distich, which amongst Arabs is looked upon as one line,
he named “Bayt,” nighting-place, tent or house; and the hemistich
Misrá’ah, the one leaf of a folding door. To this “scenic” simile all
the parts of the verse were more or less adapted. The metres, our feet,
were called “Arkán,” the stakes and stays of the tent; the syllables
were “Usúl” or roots divided into three kinds: the first or “Sabab” (the
tent-rope) is composed of two letters, a vowelled and a quiescent
consonant as “Lam.”[437] The “Watad” or tent-peg of three letters is of
two varieties; the Majmú’, or united, a foot in which the two first
consonants are moved by vowels and the last is jazmated or made
quiescent by apocope as “Lakad;” and the Mafrúk, or disunited, when the
two moved consonants are separated by one jazmated, as “Kabla.” And
lastly the “Fásilah” or intervening space, applied to the main pole of
the tent, consists of four letters.
The metres were called Buhúr or “seas” (plur. of Bahr), also meaning the
space within the tent-walls, the equivoque alluding to pearls and other
treasures of the deep. Al-Khalil, the systematiser, found in general use
only five Dáirah (circles, classes or groups of metre); and he
characterised the harmonious and stately measures, all built upon the
original Rajaz, as Al-Tawíl (the long)[438], Al-Kámil (the complete),
Al-Wáfir (the copious), Al-Basít (the extended) and Al-Khafíf (the
light).[439] These embrace all the Mu’allakát and the Hamásah, the great
Anthology of Abú Tammám; but the crave for variety and the extension of
foreign intercourse had multiplied wants and Al-Khalil deduced, from the
original five Dáirah, fifteen, to which Al-Akhfash (ob. A.D. 830) added
a sixteenth, Al-Khabab. The Persians extended the number to nineteen:
the first four were peculiarly Arab; the fourteenth, the fifteenth and
seventeenth peculiarly Persian and all the rest were Arab and
Persian.[440]
Arabic metre so far resembles that of Greece and Rome that the value of
syllables depends upon the “quantity” or position of their consonants,
not upon accent as in English and the Neo-Latin tongues. Al-Khalil was
doubtless familiar with the classic prosody of Europe but he rejected it
as unsuited to the genius of Arabic and like a true Eastern Gelehrte he
adopted a process devised by himself. Instead of scansion by pyrrhics
and spondees, iambs and trochees, anapaests and similar simplifications
he invented a system of weights (“wuzún”). Of these there are nine[441]
memorial words used as quantitive signs, all built upon the root “fa’l”
which has rendered such notable service to Arabic and Hebrew[442]
grammar and varying from the simple “fa’ál,” in Persian “fa’úl,” (⏓ ‑)
to the complicated “Mutafá’ilun” (⏑ ⏑ ‑ ⏑ ‑), anapaest + iamb. Thus the
prosodist would scan the Shahnámeh of Firdausi as
Fa’úlun, fa’úlun, fa’úlun, fa’úl.
⏑ ‑ ‑ | ⏑ ‑ ‑ | ⏑ ‑ ‑ |⏒ ‑
These weights also show another peculiarity of Arabic verse. In English
we have few if any spondees: the Arabic contains about three longs to
one short; hence its gravity, stateliness and dignity. But these longs
again are peculiar, and sometimes strike the European ear as shorts,
thus adding a difficulty for those who would represent Oriental metres
by western feet, ictus and accent. German Arabists can register an
occasional success in such attempts: Englishmen none. My late friend
Professor Palmer of Cambridge tried the tour de force of dancing on one
leg instead of two and notably failed: Mr. Lyall also strove to imitate
Arabic metre and produced only prose bewitched.[443] Mr. Payne appears
to me to have wasted trouble in “observing the exterior form of the
stanza, the movement of the rhyme and (as far as possible) the identity
in number of the syllables composing the beits.” There is only one part
of his admirable version concerning which I have heard competent readers
complain; and that is the metrical, because here and there it sounds
strange to their ears.
I have already stated my conviction that there are two and only two ways
of translating Arabic poetry into English. One is to represent it by
good heroic or lyric verse as did Sir William Jones; the other is to
render it after French fashion, by measured and balanced Prose, the
little sister of Poetry. It is thus and thus only that we can preserve
the peculiar _cachet_ of the original. This old-world Oriental song is
spirit-stirring as a “blast of that dread horn,” albeit the words be
thin. It is heady as the “Golden Wine” of Libanus, to the tongue water
and brandy to the brain—the clean contrary of our nineteenth century
effusions. Technically speaking, it can be vehicled only by the verse of
the old English ballad or by the prose of the Book of Job. And Badawi
poetry is a perfect expositor of Badawi life, especially in the good and
gladsome old Pagan days ere Al-Islam, like the creed which it abolished,
overcast the minds of men with its dull grey pall of realistic
superstition. They combined to form a marvellous picture—those contrasts
of splendour and squalor amongst the sons of the sand. Under airs pure
as æther, golden and ultramarine above and melting over the horizon into
a diaphanous green which suggested a reflection of Kaf, that unseen
mountain-wall of emerald, the so-called Desert changed face twice a
year; now brown and dry as summer-dust; then green as Hope, beautified
with infinite verdure and broad sheetings of rain-water. The vernal and
autumnal shiftings of camp, disruptions of homesteads and partings of
kith and kin, friends and lovers, made the life many-sided as it was
vigorous and noble, the outcome of hardy frames, strong minds and
spirits breathing the very essence of liberty and independence. The day
began with the dawn-drink, “generous wine bought with shining ore,”
poured into the crystal goblet from the leather bottle swinging before
the cooling breeze. The rest was spent in the practice of weapons; in
the favourite arrow-game known as Al-Maysar, gambling which at least had
the merit of feeding the poor; in racing for which the Badawin had a
mania, and in the chase, the foray and the fray which formed the serious
business of his life. And how picturesque the hunting scenes; the
greyhound, like the mare, of purest blood; the falcon cast at francolin
and coney; the gazelle standing at gaze; the desert ass scudding over
the ground-waves; the wild cows or bovine antelopes browsing with their
calves and the ostrich-chickens flocking round the parent bird! The
Musámarah or night-talk round the camp-fire was enlivened by the
lute-girl and the gleeman, whom the austere Prophet described as “roving
distraught in every vale” and whose motto in Horatian vein was, “To-day
we shall drink, to-morrow be sober; wine this day, that day work.”
Regularly once a year, during the three peaceful months when war and
even blood revenge were held sacrilegious, the tribes met at Ukádh
(Ocaz) and other fairsteads, where they held high festival and the bards
strave in song and prided themselves upon doing honour to women and to
the successful warriors of their tribe. Brief, the object of Arab life
was to _be_—to be free, to be brave, to be wise; while the endeavours of
other peoples was and is to _have_—to have wealth, to have knowledge, to
have a name; and while moderns make their “epitome of life” to be, to do
and to _suffer_. Lastly the Arab’s end was honourable as his life was
stirring: few Badawin had the crowning misfortune of dying “the
straw-death.”
The poetical forms in The Nights are as follows:—The Misrá’ah or
hemistich is half the “Bayt” which, for want of a better word I have
rendered couplet: this, however, though formally separated in MSS. is
looked upon as one line, one verse; hence a word can be divided, the
former part pertaining to the first and the latter to the second moiety
of the distich. As the Arabs ignore blank verse, when we come upon a
rhymeless couplet we know that it is an extract from a longer
composition in monorhyme. The Kit’ah is a fragment, either an occasional
piece or more frequently a portion of a Ghazal (ode) or Kasídah (elegy),
other than the Matlá, the initial Bayt with rhyming distichs. The Ghazal
and Kasídah differ mainly in length: the former is popularly limited to
eighteen couplets: the latter begins at fifteen and is of indefinite
number. Both are built upon monorhyme, which appears twice in the first
couplet and ends all the others, _e.g._, aa + ba + ca, etc.; nor may the
same assonance be repeated, unless at least seven couplets intervene. In
the best poets, as in the old classic verse of France, the sense must be
completed in one couplet and not run on to a second; and, as the parts
cohere very loosely, separate quotation can generally be made without
injuring their proper effect. A favourite form is the Rubá’í or
quatrain, made familiar to English ears by Mr. Fitzgerald’s masterly
adaptation of Omar-i-Khayyám: the movement is generally aa + ba; but it
also appears as ab + cb, in which case it is a Kit’ah or fragment. The
Murabbá, tetrastichs or four-fold song, occurs once only in The Nights
(vol. i. 98); it is a succession of double Bayts or of four-lined
stanzas rhyming aa + bc + dc + ec: in strict form the first three
hemistichs rhyme with one another only, independently of the rest of the
poem, and the fourth with that of every other stanza, _e.g._, aa + ab +
cb + db. The Mukhammas, cinquains or pentastichs (Night cmlxiv.),
represents a stanza of two distichs and a hemistich in monorhyme, the
fifth line being the “bob” or burden: each succeeding stanza affects a
new rhyme, except in the fifth line, _e.g._, aaaab + ccccb + ddddb and
so forth. The Muwwál is a simple popular song in four to six lines;
specimens of it are given in the Egyptian grammar of my friend the late
Dr. Wilhelm Spitta.[444] The Muwashshah, or ornamented verse, has two
main divisions: one applies to our acrostics in which the initials form
a word or words; the other is a kind of Musaddas, or sex-tines, which
occurs once only in The Nights (cmlxxxvii.) It consists of three
couplets or six-line strophes: all the hemistichs of the first are in
monorhyme; in the second and following stanzas the three first
hemistichs take a new rhyme, but the fourth resumes the assonance of the
first set and is followed by the third couplet of No. 1, serving as bob
or refrain, _e.g._, aaaaaa + bbbaaa + cccaaa and so forth. It is the
most complicated of all the measures and is held to be of Morisco or
Hispano-Moorish origin.