I am known to the night, the wild, and the steed,
To the guest, and the sword, to the paper and reed[FN#29]?
The poet, in reply, lay down to sleep on Tigris bank, in a place haunted by thieves, and, disdaining flight, lost his life during the hours of darkness.
It is the existence of this chivalry among the Children of Antar which makes the society of Badawin (damned saints, perchance, and honourable villains,) so delightful to the traveller who[,] like the late Haji Wali (Dr. Wallin), understands and is understood by them. Nothing more naïve than his lamentations at finding himself in the loathsome company of Persians, or among Arab townspeople, whose filthy and cowardly minds he contrasts with the high and chivalrous spirit of the true Sons of the Desert. Your guide will protect you with blade and spear, even against his kindred, and he expects you to do the same for him. You may give a man the lie, but you must lose no time in baring your sword. If involved in dispute with overwhelming numbers, you address some elder, Dakhil-ak ya Shaykh!(I am) thy protected, O Sir,and he will espouse your quarrel with greater heat and energy, indeed, than if it were his own.[FN#30] But why multiply instances?
The language of love and war and all excitement is poetry, and here, again, the Badawi excels. Travellers complain that the wild men have ceased to sing. This is true if poet be limited to a few authors whose existence
[p.98] everywhere depends upon the accidents of patronage or political occurrences. A far stronger evidence of poetic feeling is afforded by the phraseology of the Arab, and the highly imaginative turn of his commonest expressions. Destitute of the poetic taste, as we define it, he certainly is: as in the Milesian, wit and fancy, vivacity and passion, are too strong for reason and judgment, the reins which guide Apollos car.[FN#31] And although the Badawin no longer boast a Labid or a Maysunah, yet they are passionately fond of their ancient bards.[FN#32] A man skilful in reading Al-Mutanabbi and the suspended Poems would be received by them with the honours paid by civilisation to the travelling millionaire.[FN#33] And their elders have a goodly store of ancient and modern war songs, legends, and love ditties which all enjoy.
[p.99]I cannot well explain the effect of Arab poetry to one who has not visited the Desert.[FN#34] Apart from the pomp of words, and the music of the sound,[FN#35] there is a dreaminess of idea and a haze thrown over the object, infinitely attractive, but indescribable. Description,
[p.100] indeed, would rob the song of indistinctness, its essence. To borrow a simile from a sister art; the Arab poet sets before the mental eye, the dim grand outlines of picture,which must be filled up by the reader, guided only by a few glorious touches, powerfully standing out, and by the sentiment which the scene is intended to express;whereas, we Europeans and moderns, by stippling and minute touches, produce a miniature on a large scale so objective as to exhaust rather than to arouse reflection. As the poet is a creator, the Arabs is poetry, the Europeans versical description. [FN#36] The language, like a faithful wife, following the mind and giving birth to its offspring, and free from that luggage of particles which clogs our modern tongues, leaves a mysterious vagueness between the relation of word to word, which materially assists the sentiment, not the sense, of the poem. When verbs and nouns have, each one, many different significations, only the radical or general idea suggests itself.[FN#37] Rich and varied synonyms, illustrating the finest shades of meaning, are artfully used; now scattered to startle us by distinctness, now to form as it were a star about which dimly seen satellites revolve. And, to cut short a disquisition
[p.101] which might be prolonged indefinitely, there is in the Semitic dialect a copiousness of rhyme which leaves the poet almost unfettered to choose the desired expression.[FN#38] Hence it is that a stranger speaking Arabic becomes poetical as naturally as he would be witty in French and philosophic in German. Truly spake Mohammed al-Damiri, Wisdom hath alighted upon three thingsthe brain of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs.
The name of Haramibrigandis still honourable among the Hijazi Badawin. Slain in raid or foray, a man is said to die Ghandur, or a brave. He, on the other hand, who is lucky enough, as we should express it, to die in his bed, is called Fatis (carrion, the corps creve of the Klephts); his weeping mother will exclaim, O that my son had perished of a cut throat! and her attendant crones will suggest, with deference, that such evil came of the will of Allah. It is told of the Lahabah, a sept of the Auf near Rabigh, that a girl will refuse even her cousin unless, in the absence of other opportunities, he plunder some article from the Hajj Caravan in front of the Pashas links. Detected twenty years ago, the delinquent would have been impaled; now he escapes with a rib-roasting. Fear of the blood-feud, and the certainty of a shut road to future travellers, prevent the Turks proceeding to extremes. They conceal their weakness by pretending that [p.102] the Sultan hesitates to wage a war of extermination with the thieves of the Holy Land.
It is easy to understand this respect for brigands. Whoso revolts against society requires an iron mind in an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies. Thus, in all imaginative countries, the brigand is a hero; even the assassin who shoots his victim from behind a hedge appeals to the fancy in Tipperary or on the Abruzzian hills. Romance invests his loneliness with grandeur; if he have a wife or a friends wife, romance becomes doubly romantic, and a tithe of the superfluity robbed from the rich and bestowed upon the poor will win to Gasparoni the hearts of a people. The true Badawi style of plundering, with its numerous niceties of honour and gentlemanly manners, gives the robber a consciousness of moral rectitude. Strip off that coat, O certain person! and that turband, exclaims the highwayman, they are wanted by the daughter of my paternal uncle (wife). You will (of course, if necessary) lend ready ear to an order thus politely attributed to the wants of the fair sex. If you will add a few obliging expressions to the bundle, and offer Latro a cup of coffee and a pipe, you will talk half your toilette back to your own person; and if you can quote a little poetry, you will part the best of friends, leaving perhaps only a pair of sandals behind you. But should you hesitate, Latro, lamenting the painful necessity, touches up your back with the heel of his spear. If this hint suffice not, he will make things plain by the lances point, and when blood shows, the tiger-part of humanity appears. Between Badawin, to be tamely plundered, especially of the mare,[FN#39] is a lasting disgrace; a man of