"I was merely an arrow in the air, Which falls back, finding no refuge there."
3. The laus duplex or 'two-sided panegyric' (al-madḥ al-muwajjah), which may be compared to a garment having two surfaces of different colours but of equal beauty, as in the following verse addressed to Sayfu ’l-Dawla:—
"Were all the lives thou hast ta'en possessed by thee, Immortal thou and blest the world would be!"
Here Sayfu ’l-Dawla is doubly eulogised by the mention of his triumphs over his enemies as well as of the joy which all his friends felt in the continuance of his life and fortune.
4. His manner of extolling his royal patron as though he were speaking to a friend and comrade, whereby he raises himself from the position of an ordinary encomiast to the same level with kings.
5. His division of ideas into parallel sentences:—
"We were in gladness, the Greeks in fear, The land in bustle, the sea in confusion."
From this summary of Tha‘álibí's criticism the reader will easily perceive that the chief merits of poetry were then considered to lie in elegant expression, subtle combination of words, fanciful imagery, witty conceits, and a striking use of rhetorical figures. Such, indeed, are the views which prevail to this day throughout the whole Muḥammadan world, and it is unreasonable to denounce them as false simply because they do not square with ours. Who shall decide when nations disagree? If Englishmen rightly claim to be the best judges of Shakespeare, and Italians of Dante, the almost unanimous verdict of Mutanabbí's countrymen is surely not less authoritative—a verdict which places him at the head of all the poets born or made in Islam. And although the peculiar excellences indicated by Tha‘álibí do not appeal to us, there are few poets that leave so distinct an impression of greatness. One might call Mutanabbí the Victor Hugo of the East, for he has the grand style whether he soars to sublimity or sinks to fustian. In the masculine vigour of his verse, in the sweep and splendour of his rhetoric, in the luxuriance and reckless audacity of his imagination we recognise qualities which inspired the oft-quoted lines of the elegist:—
"Him did his mighty soul supply With regal pomp and majesty. A Prophet by his diction known; But in the ideas, all must own, His miracles were clearly shown."[576]
One feature of Mutanabbí's poetry that is praised by Tha‘álibí should not be left unnoticed, namely, his fondness for sententious moralising on topics connected with human life; wherefore Reiske has compared him to Euripides. He is allowed to be a master of that proverbial philosophy in which Orientals delight and which is characteristic of the modern school beginning with Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya, though some of the ancients had already cultivated it with success (cf. the verses of Zuhayr, p. 118 supra). The following examples are among those cited by Bohlen (op. cit., p. 86 sqq.):—