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 luster to the entire piece. The too frequent use of embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Rashiq 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.
The Arabs then regarded poetry as ecstatic utterances emanating from the unconscious, embodying an idea, and produced with little ornament. This despite their belief that poetry must use the established forms of metre and figures. It is unfortunate that even to the present day these old forms are used, while Turkish literature has only very recently been emancipated from them. Even Arabian political articles are to-day written in rhymed prose. But as Chenery said, the history of rhymed prose is the history of Arabic literature. Rhyme is natural to the Arabic language, whereas it is really foreign to the English language.
If European civilization could free itself from the prejudices against Semitic and Asiatic culture, and if the universities, instead of studying minutely the barren medieval literature of Europe before the Renaissance, would give fuller courses in the poetry of the Arabs, Hebrews, Persians and Turks, the exchange would be salutary. The only Asiatic literature that Europe made an attempt to study was that of the Hindus, and, as has been suspected by many, this may have been done chiefly out of Aryan vanity, to show that the earliest culture was not Semitic but Aryan, and thus related to European culture. But the fact remains that the poetry of these four nations mentioned is far superior to that
of medieval Europe. The two nations who were not Semitic, the Persians and the Ottoman Turks, are almost wholly imbued with the Semitic spirit. Persian poetry grew out of Arabic poetry, just as Ottoman poetry developed from Persian poetry. There is nothing of the Tartar spirit at all in Ottoman poetry, as Gibb has pointed out.
That poetry is subjective, lyric, ecstatic, is best seen in Oriental poetry. It will repay the lover of literature to read such works as Browne's Literary History of Persia, Gibb's History of Ottoman Poetry, and Nicholson's Literary History of the Arabs. As for Post-biblical poetry of the Hebrews, so rich in patriotic and moral fervor, and in hymns and elegies, there are articles in the Jewish Encyclopedia, chapters in Graetz's History of the Jews and works on various phases of it by numerous writers.
To the Oriental, poetry is ecstasy first and last, and this is all the more remarkable since their poetry is so much more ornate, artificial, figurative, and patterned than European poetry. It is sensuous, passionate but not "simple." Its chief inferiority to European poetry, however, springs from its lack in intellectual profundity, and its severance (except in the Prophets of the Bible) from problems of social justice.