The weight of authority was against me but my plan compelled me to disregard it. The dilemma was simply either to use the Saj’a or to follow Mr. Payne’s method and “arrange the disjecta membra of the original in their natural order;” that is to remodel the text. Intending to produce a faithful copy of the Arabic, I was compelled to adopt the former and still hold it to be the better alternative. Moreover I question Mr. Payne’s dictum (ix. 383) that “the Seja-form is utterly foreign to the genius of English prose and that its preservation would be fatal to all vigour and harmony of style.” The English translator of Palmerin of England, Anthony Munday, attempted it in places with great success as I have before noted (vol. viii. [60]); and my late friend Edward Eastwick made artistic use of it in his Gulistan. Had I rejected the “Cadence of the cooing-dove” because un-English, I should have adopted the balanced periods of the Anglican marriage service[[432]] or the essentially English system of alliteration, requiring some such artful aid to distinguish from the vulgar recitative style the elevated and classical tirades in The Nights. My attempt has found with reviewers more favour than I expected; and a kindly critic writes of it, “These melodious fragments, these little eddies of song set like gems in the prose, have a charming effect on the ear. They come as dulcet surprises and mostly recur in highly-wrought situations, or they are used to convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in nature or art. Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really it arises from a profound study of the situation, as if the Tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the rhythmic strain.”
B.—The Verse.
The Shi’r or metrical part of The Nights is considerable, amounting to not less than ten thousand lines and these I could not but render in rhyme or rather in monorhyme. This portion has been a bugbear to translators. De Sacy noticed the difficulty of the task (p. [283]). Lane held the poetry untranslatable because abounding in the figure Tajnís, our paronomasia or paragram, of which there are seven distinct varieties,[[433]] not to speak of other rhetorical flourishes. He therefore omitted the greater part of the verse as tedious and, through the loss of measure and rhyme, “generally intolerable to the reader.” He proved his position by the bald literalism of the passages which he rendered in truly prosaic prose and succeeded in changing the facies and presentment of the work. For the Shi’r, like the Saj’a, is not introduced arbitrarily; and its unequal distribution throughout The Nights may be accounted for by rule of art. Some tales, like Omar bin al-Nu’man and Tawaddud, contain very little because the theme is historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and courtship, as that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to one-fifth of the whole. And this is true to nature. Love, as Addison said, makes even the mechanic (the British mechanic!) poetical, and Joe Hume of material memory once fought a duel about a fair object of dispute.
Before discussing the verse of The Nights it may be advisable to enlarge a little upon the prosody of the Arabs. We know nothing of the origin of their poetry, which is lost in the depths of antiquity, and the oldest bards of whom we have any remains belong to the famous epoch of the war Al-Basús, which would place them about A.D. 500. Moreover, when the Muse of Arabia first shows she is not only fully developed and mature, she has lost all her first youth, her beauté du diable, and she is assuming the characteristics of an age beyond “middle age.” No one can study the earliest poetry without perceiving that it results from the cultivation of centuries and that it has already assumed that artificial type and conventional process of treatment which presages inevitable decay. Its noblest period is included in the century preceding the Apostolate of Mohammed and the oldest of that epoch is the prince of Arab songsters, Imr al-Kays, “The Wandering King.” The Christian Fathers characteristically termed poetry Vinum Dæmonorum. The stricter Moslems called their bards “enemies of Allah;” and when the Prophet, who hated verse and could not even quote it correctly, was asked who was the best poet of the Peninsula he answered that the “Man of Al-Kays,” i.e. the worshipper of the Priapus-idol, would usher them all into Hell. Here he only echoed the general verdict of his countrymen who loved poetry and, as a rule, despised poets. The earliest complete pieces of any volume and substance saved from the wreck of old Arabic literature and familiar in our day are the seven Kasídahs (purpose-odes or tendence-elegies) which are popularly known as the Gilded or the Suspended Poems; and in all of these we find, with an elaboration of material and formal art which can go no further, a subject-matter of trite imagery and stock ideas which suggest a long ascending line of model ancestors and predecessors.
Scholars are agreed upon the fact that many of the earliest and best Arab poets were, as Mohammed boasted himself, unalphabetic[[434]] or rather could neither read nor write. They addressed the ear and the mind, not the eye. They “spoke verse,” learning it by rote and dictating it to the Ráwi, and this reciter again transmitted it to the musician whose pipe or zither accompanied the minstrel’s song. In fact the general practice of writing began only at the end of the first century after The Flight.
The rude and primitive measure of Arab song, upon which the most complicated system of metres subsequently arose, was called Al-Rajaz, literally “the trembling,” because it reminded the highly imaginative hearer of a pregnant she-camel’s weak and tottering steps. This was the carol of the camel-driver, the lover’s lay and the warrior’s chaunt of the heroic ages; and its simple, unconstrained flow adapted it well for extempore effusions. Its merits and demerits have been extensively discussed amongst Arab grammarians and many, noticing that it was not originally divided into hemistichs, make an essential difference between the Shá’ir who speaks poetry and the Rájiz who speaks Rajaz. It consisted, to describe it technically, of iambic dipodia (⏑ ‑ ⏑ ‑), the first three syllables being optionally long or short. It can generally be read like our iambs and, being familiar, is pleasant to the English ear. The dipodia are repeated either twice or thrice; in the former case Rajaz is held by some authorities, as Al-Akhfash (Sa’íd ibn Másadah), to be mere prose. Although Labíd and Antar composed in iambics, the first Kásídah or regular poem in Rajaz was by Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi temp. Mohammed: the Alfíyah-grammar of Ibn Málik is in Rajaz Muzdawij, the hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined to the couplet. Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and fifth Assemblies. So far Arabic metre is true to Nature: in impassioned speech the movement of language is iambic: we say “I will, I will,” not “I will.”
For many generations the Sons of the Desert were satisfied with Nature’s teaching; the fine perceptions and the nicely trained ear of the bard needing no aid from art. But in time came the inevitable prosodist under the formidable name of Abu Abd al-Rahmán al-Khalíl, i. Ahmad, i. Amrú, i. Tamím al-Faráhidi (of the Faráhid sept), al-Azdi (of the Azd clan), al-Yahmadi (of the Yahmad tribe), popularly known as Al-Khalíl ibn Ahmad al-Basri, of Bassorah, where he died æt. 68, scanning verses they say, in A.H. 170 (= 786–87). Ibn Khallikán relates (i. 493) on the authority of Hamzah al-Isfaháni how this “father of Arabic grammar and discoverer of the rules of prosody” invented the science as he walked past a coppersmith’s shop on hearing the strokes of a hammer upon a metal basin: “two objects devoid of any quality which could serve as a proof and an illustration of anything else than their own form and shape and incapable of leading to any other knowledge than that of their own nature.”[[435]] According to others he was passing through the Fullers’ Bazar at Basrah when his ear was struck by the Dak-dak (دق دق) and the Dakak-dakak (دقق دقق) of the workmen. In these two onomatopoetics we trace the expression which characterises the Arab tongue: all syllables are composed of consonant and vowel, the latter long or short as Bā and Bă; or of a vowelled consonant followed by a consonant as Bal, Bau (بو).
The grammarian, true to the traditions of his craft which looks for all poetry to the Badawi,[[436]] adopted for metrical details the language of the Desert. The distich, which amongst Arabs is looked upon as one line, he named “Bayt,” nighting-place, tent or house; and the hemistich Misrá’ah, the one leaf of a folding door. To this “scenic” simile all the parts of the verse were more or less adapted. The metres, our feet, were called “Arkán,” the stakes and stays of the tent; the syllables were “Usúl” or roots divided into three kinds: the first or “Sabab” (the tent-rope) is composed of two letters, a vowelled and a quiescent consonant as “Lam.”[[437]] The “Watad” or tent-peg of three letters is of two varieties; the Majmú’, or united, a foot in which the two first consonants are moved by vowels and the last is jazmated or made quiescent by apocope as “Lakad;” and the Mafrúk, or disunited, when the two moved consonants are separated by one jazmated, as “Kabla.” And lastly the “Fásilah” or intervening space, applied to the main pole of the tent, consists of four letters.
The metres were called Buhúr or “seas” (plur. of Bahr), also meaning the space within the tent-walls, the equivoque alluding to pearls and other treasures of the deep. Al-Khalil, the systematiser, found in general use only five Dáirah (circles, classes or groups of metre); and he characterised the harmonious and stately measures, all built upon the original Rajaz, as Al-Tawíl (the long)[[438]], Al-Kámil (the complete), Al-Wáfir (the copious), Al-Basít (the extended) and Al-Khafíf (the light).[[439]] These embrace all the Mu’allakát and the Hamásah, the great Anthology of Abú Tammám; but the crave for variety and the extension of foreign intercourse had multiplied wants and Al-Khalil deduced, from the original five Dáirah, fifteen, to which Al-Akhfash (ob. A.D. 830) added a sixteenth, Al-Khabab. The Persians extended the number to nineteen: the first four were peculiarly Arab; the fourteenth, the fifteenth and seventeenth peculiarly Persian and all the rest were Arab and Persian.[[440]]
Arabic metre so far resembles that of Greece and Rome that the value of syllables depends upon the “quantity” or position of their consonants, not upon accent as in English and the Neo-Latin tongues. Al-Khalil was doubtless familiar with the classic prosody of Europe but he rejected it as unsuited to the genius of Arabic and like a true Eastern Gelehrte he adopted a process devised by himself. Instead of scansion by pyrrhics and spondees, iambs and trochees, anapaests and similar simplifications he invented a system of weights (“wuzún”). Of these there are nine[[441]] memorial words used as quantitive signs, all built upon the root “fa’l” which has rendered such notable service to Arabic and Hebrew[[442]] grammar and varying from the simple “fa’ál,” in Persian “fa’úl,” (⏓ ‑) to the complicated “Mutafá’ilun” (⏑ ⏑ ‑ ⏑ ‑), anapaest + iamb. Thus the prosodist would scan the Shahnámeh of Firdausi as