Читать книгу A Literary History of the Arabs - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson - Страница 12

"When there appeared a poet in a family of the Arabs, the other tribes round about would gather together to that family and wish them joy of their good luck. Feasts would be got ready, the women of the tribe would join together in bands, playing upon lutes, as they were wont to do at bridals, and the men and boys would congratulate one another; for a poet was a defence to the honour of them all, a weapon to ward off insult from their good name, and a means of perpetuating their glorious deeds and of establishing their fame for ever. And they used not to wish one another joy but for three things—the birth of a boy, the coming to light of a poet, and the foaling of a noble mare."139

As far as extant literature is concerned—and at this time there was only a spoken literature, which was preserved by oral tradition, and first committed to writing long afterwards—the Jáhiliyya or Pre-islamic Age covers scarcely more than a century, from about 500 a.d., when the oldest poems of which we have any record were composed, to the year of Muḥammad's Flight to Medína (622 a.d.), which is the starting-point of a new era in Arabian history. The influence of these hundred and twenty years was great and lasting. PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY72 They saw the rise and incipient decline of a poetry which most Arabic-speaking Moslems have always regarded as a model of unapproachable excellence; a poetry rooted in the life of the people, that insensibly moulded their minds and fixed their character and made them morally and spiritually a nation long before Muḥammad welded the various conflicting groups into a single organism, animated, for some time at least, by a common purpose. In those days poetry was no luxury for the cultured few, but the sole medium of literary expression. Every tribe had its poets, who freely uttered what they felt and thought. Their unwritten words "flew across the desert faster than arrows," and came home to the hearts and bosoms of all who heard them. Thus in the midst of outward strife and disintegration a unifying principle was at work. Poetry gave life and currency to an ideal of Arabian virtue (muruwwa), which, though based on tribal community of blood and insisting that only ties of blood were sacred, nevertheless became an invisible bond between diverse clans, and formed, whether consciously or not, the basis of a national community of sentiment.

In the following pages I propose to trace the origins of Origins of Arabian PoetryArabian poetry, to describe its form, contents, and general features, to give some account of the most celebrated Pre-islamic poets and collections of Pre-islamic verse, and finally to show in what manner it was preserved and handed down.

By the ancient Arabs the poet (shá‘ir, plural shu‘ará), as his name implies, was held to be a person endowed with supernatural knowledge, a wizard in league with spirits (jinn) or satans (shayáṭín) and dependent on them for the magical powers which he displayed. This view of his personality, as well as the influential position which he occupied, are curiously indicated by the story of a certain youth who was refused the hand of his beloved on the ground that he was neither a poet THE POET AS A WIZARD73 nor a soothsayer nor a water-diviner.140 The idea of poetry as an art was developed afterwards; the pagan shá‘ir is the oracle of his tribe, their guide in peace and their champion in war. It was to him they turned for counsel when they sought new pastures, only at his word would they pitch or strike their 'houses of hair,' and when the tired and thirsty wanderers found a well and drank of its water and washed themselves, led by him they may have raised their voices together and sung, like Israel—

"Spring up, O well, sing ye unto it."141

Besides fountain-songs, war-songs, and hymns to idols, other kinds of poetry must have existed in the earliest times—e.g., the love-song and the dirge. The powers of the shá‘ir, however, were chiefly exhibited in Satire (hijá), which in the Satire. oldest known form "introduces and accompanies the tribal feud, and is an element of war just as important as the actual fighting."142 The menaces which he hurled against the foe were believed to be inevitably fatal. His rhymes, often compared to arrows, had all the effect of a solemn curse spoken by a divinely inspired prophet or priest,143 and their pronunciation was attended with peculiar ceremonies of a symbolic character, such as anointing the hair on one side of the head, letting the mantle hang down loosely, and wearing only one sandal.144 Satire retained something of these ominous associations at a much later period when the magic utterance of the shá‘ir had long given place to the lampoon PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY74 by which the poet reviles his enemies and holds them up to shame.

The obscure beginnings of Arabian poetry, presided over by the magician and his familiar spirits, have left not a Saj‘. rack behind in the shape of literature, but the task of reconstruction is comparatively easy where we are dealing with a people so conservative and tenacious of antiquity as the Arabs. Thus it may be taken for certain that the oldest form of poetical speech in Arabia was rhyme without metre (Saj‘), or, as we should say, 'rhymed prose,' although the fact of Muḥammad's adversaries calling him a poet because he used it in the Koran shows the light in which it was regarded even after the invention and elaboration of metre. Later on, as we shall see, Saj‘ became a merely rhetorical ornament, the distinguishing mark of all eloquence whether spoken or written, but originally it had a deeper, almost religious, significance as the special form adopted by poets, soothsayers, and the like in their supernatural revelations and for conveying to the vulgar every kind of mysterious and esoteric lore.

Out of Saj‘ was evolved the most ancient of the Arabian metres, which is known by the name of Rajaz.145 This is an irregular iambic metre usually consisting of four Rajaz. or six—an Arab would write 'two or three'—feet to the line; and it is a peculiarity of Rajaz, marking its affinity to Saj‘, that all the lines rhyme with each other, whereas in the more artificial metres only the opening verse146 ARABIAN METRES75 is doubly rhymed. A further characteristic of Rajaz is that it should be uttered extempore, a few verses at a time—commonly verses expressing some personal feeling, emotion, or experience, like those of the aged warrior Durayd b. Zayd b. Nahd when he lay dying:—

"The house of death147 is builded for Durayd to-day. Could Time be worn out, sure had I worn Time away. No single foe but I had faced and brought to bay. The spoils I gathered in, how excellent were they! The women that I loved, how fine was their array!"148

Here would have been the proper place to give an account of the principal Arabian metres—the 'Perfect' (Kámil), the 'Ample' (Wáfir) the 'Long' (Ṭawíl), the Other metres. 'Wide' (Basiṭ), the 'Light' (Khafíf), and several more—but in order to save valuable space I must content myself with referring the reader to the extremely lucid treatment of this subject by Sir Charles Lyall in the Introduction to his Ancient Arabian Poetry, pp. xlv-lii. All the metres are quantitative, as in Greek and Latin. Their names and laws were unknown to the Pre-islamic bards: the rules of prosody were first deduced from the ancient poems and systematised by the grammarian, Khalíl b. Ahmad († 791 a.d.), to whom the idea is said to have occurred as he watched a coppersmith beating time on the anvil with his hammer.

We have now to consider the form and matter of the oldest extant poems in the Arabic language. Between these highly The oldest extant poems. developed productions and the rude doggerel of Saj‘ or Rajaz there lies an interval, the length of which it is impossible even to conjecture. The first poets are already consummate masters of the craft. "The number and complexity of the measures which they use, their established laws of quantity and rhyme, and the uniform PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY76 manner in which they introduce the subject of their poems,149 notwithstanding the distance which often separated one composer from another, all point to a long previous study and cultivation of the art of expression and the capacities of their language, a study of which no record now remains."150

It is not improbable that the dawn of the Golden Age of Arabian Poetry coincided with the first decade of the sixth Their date. century after Christ. About that time the War of Basús, the chronicle of which has preserved a considerable amount of contemporary verse, was in full blaze; and the first Arabian ode was composed, according to tradition, by Muhalhil b. Rabí‘a the Taghlibite on the death of his brother, the chieftain Kulayb, which caused war to break out between Bakr and Taghlib. At any rate, during the next hundred years in almost every part of the peninsula we meet with a brilliant succession of singers, all using the same poetical dialect and strictly adhering to the same rules of composition. The fashion which they set maintained itself virtually unaltered down to the end of the Umayyad period (750 a.d.), and though challenged by some daring spirits under the ‘Abbásid Caliphate, speedily reasserted its supremacy, which at the present day is almost as absolute as ever.

This fashion centres in the Qaṣída,151 or Ode, the only form, or rather the only finished type of poetry that existed THE QAṢÍDA OR ODE77 in what, for want of a better word, may be called the classical period of Arabic literature. The verses (abyát, singular bayt) of which it is built vary in number, but are seldom The Qaṣída. less than twenty-five or more than a hundred; and the arrangement of the rhymes is such that, while the two halves of the first verse rhyme together, the same rhyme is repeated once in the second, third, and every following verse to the end of the poem. Blank-verse is alien to the Arabs, who regard rhyme not as a pleasing ornament or a "troublesome bondage," but as a vital organ of poetry. The rhymes are usually feminine, e.g., sakhíná, tulíná, muhíná; mukhlidí, yadí, ‘uwwadí; rijámuhá, silámuhá, ḥarámuhá. To surmount the difficulties of the monorhyme demands great technical skill even in a language of which the peculiar formation renders the supply of rhymes extraordinarily abundant. The longest of the Mu‘allaqát, the so-called 'Long Poems,' is considerably shorter than Gray's Elegy. An Arabian Homer or Chaucer must have condescended to prose. With respect to metre the poet may choose any except Rajaz, which is deemed beneath the dignity of the Ode, but his liberty does not extend either to the choice of subjects or to the method of handling them: on the contrary, the course of his ideas is determined by rigid conventions which he durst not overstep.