“Virtues that may gild thy name;
And their faults if thou wouldst scan,
Know thy failings are the same.”
The recognition in animals of most human qualities in a distinct though it may be a limited form underlies all Eastern animal-lore and gives it a force and a reality even when it deals with extravagant fancies. There is a broad difference between the power of feeling for animals and the power of feeling with them. The same difference moulds the sentiments of man to man: nine men in ten can feel for their fellow-humans, but scarcely one man in ten can feel with them. They even know it, and they say ungrammatically, “I feel the greatest sympathy for so and so.” An instance of true mitempfindung, of insight into the very soul of a creature, exists in an Arabian poem by Lebid, who was one of the most interesting figures of the period in which the destinies of the Arab race were cast. He was the glory of the Arabs, not only on account of his faultless verse, but also because of his noble character. It is told of him that whenever an east wind blew, he provided a feast for the poor. Himself a pre-Islamic theist, he hailed the Prophet as the inspired enunciator of the creed he had held imperfectly and in private. All his poems were composed in the “Ignorance”; on being asked for a poem after his conversion at ninety years of age, he copied out a chapter of the Koran, and said, “God has given me this in exchange for poesy.” I do not think this meant that he despised the poet’s art, but that now, when he could no longer exercise it, he had what was still more precious.
The passage in question is one of several which show Lebid’s surprisingly close acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of wild animals. It is one of those elaborate similes which were the pride of Arabian poets, who often preferred to take comparisons already in use than to invent new ones. Wherever literature became a living entertainment, something of this kind happened: witness the borrowings from the Classics by the poets of the Renaissance; people liked to recognise familiar ideas in a new dress. Lebid’s similes have been turned and re-turned by other poets, but none approached the art and truth he infused into them. I am indebted to Sir Charles Lyall for the following version, which is not included in his volume of splendid translations of early Arabian poetry. The subject of the passage is the grief of a wild cow that has lost her calf:—
“Flat-nosed is she—she has lost her calf and ceases not to roam
About the marge of the sand meadows and cry
For her youngling, just weaned, white, whose limbs have been torn
By the ash-grey hunting wolves who lack not for food.
They came upon it while she knew not, and dealt her a deadly woe: