CHAPTER III.
PERSONAL CLAN POETRY.
§ 36. If we mean by "personal" poetry such laments for the individual's growing age and regrets for his fleeting youth as appear to have been common in the songs of the Greek lyrical poets who represented an age of aristocratic individualism, if we mean the poetical expression of that individualising spirit which dwells with a kind of sad pleasure upon personal recollections of youth and the contrast of the ideal future of self with its real past, and which fondly dallies with reminiscences of times, and places, and persons, and things never again to be seen in the golden dream-light of vanished childhood-then we must admit that the poetry of the clan cannot be called "personal." The life-view of the clan, like that of the lyric Greek, is indeed confined to earth, but its strong feelings of unity with kindred leave no place for such personal regrets, and look forward to the prolonged existence of the group not as a mere substitute for individual immortality (for of that ambition the clan knows little), but as the only kind of life worthy of enthusiastic contemplation. Poets of clan life, or deeply imbued with the spirit of clan life, know not the Greek melancholy of individual decay nor the modern melancholy of individual hopes unsatisfied—the latter far more frequently the result of limitless personal ambitions than of any such spiritual cause as Mr. Browning seems inclined to assign it. Like Ezekiel picturing the ideal future of Israel under the figure of national clanship, the true clan poet socialises everything he touches. He knows nothing of personal introspection. His theme is not self, but the group of kinsmen to which he belongs; if he sing of any hero, the whole body of clansmen share the eulogy; in short, his poetical pictures are rather of men in groups than of individuals. We must not, therefore, expect "personal" poetry in the modern sense from the clan.
But neither must we suppose that the clan age knows no personal poetry of its own, or that such poetry is less real than ours because it is conceived from a totally different standpoint. Sentiments and emotions are not, indeed, conceived as the peculiar property of the individual; they are projected outwards like visible threads uniting the clansmen in a common objective existence. But they possess on this very account a peculiar vividness which the poetry of individual reflection fails to reach. There is an intensity in clan affections, in clan hatreds, which, compared with the passions of individualised life, stands out like the figures in relief on the Arc de Triomphe contrasted with the flat surface of a painting;
"Sibb aefre ne maeg
Wiht onwendan þám þe wel þenceð."[1]
It is only by remembering this objectiveness of early personality and the social conditions it denotes that we shall solve an apparent paradox in the development of civilisation and literature. The barbarians, says M. Guizot, introduced into the modern world the sentiment of personal independence and the devotion of man to man. The progress of society, says Sir Henry Maine, has been from communal restraint to personal freedom. Both of these apparently conflicting statements are true. The personal independence of which M. Guizot speaks is the communal equality of fellow-clansmen, an independence which each possesses not because he is a man but because he is a clansman, an independence which, far from implying any "offhangingness" from the group, simply results from the union of the individual with his group. On the other hand, the personal independence in which Sir Henry Maine sees the latest outcome of a slow and fitful evolution is one which (to apply an expression of Savigny) draws a circle round each individual as distinct from his group and the government of his group, an independence which sets him apart from every tie of kinship in an isolation which primitive socialism would have contemplated and treated as a terrible calamity—the isolation of the clanless and the lordless man.
§ 37. Over and above the choral song-dances of the clan, over and above communal hymns of all descriptions, we shall therefore be prepared to find some sort of personal poetry in clan life. Moreover, it need not surprise us if such poetry should give the clearest insight into clan sentiments, for it is evidently in the relation of the clansman to his group that such sentiments are most distinctly expressed. Self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of the clan, uncompromising vengeance for the blood of slaughtered kinsfolk, justice in the distribution of the common property, faithfulness in the discharge of funeral obsequies—these and such as these are the ideal characteristics of the clansman; and clearly they may be best illustrated where conditions of climate and soil have allowed the largest personal freedom compatible with a vigorous clan life. Such conditions may be found among the Arabs of the burning deserts. The Arab, on his horse or camel, shifting from spot to spot, cannot feel or express the impersonality of clan feelings with the intensity peculiar to settled village communities. In the early poetry of the Arab clans we shall accordingly find some of the best specimens of that personal expression of the clansman's feelings which we seek to illustrate.
Marzûki, in the preface of his Commentary on the Mufaddalian Poems (so called from their collector, Al Mufaddal, who made the anthology about the year 160 of the Hejîra), tells us that a great deal of early Arab poetry owed its origin to tribal wars. "I have been told," says the Arab authority,[2] "that Ali ben Mahdi, the Kisrawite, reported that in Attâïf there were both poetry and reciters, but not in abundance. For poetry increased only during the wars between the tribes, such as happened among the Ausites and Kasragites, and in the engagements and expeditions which were continually going on. Among the Kuraishites poetry was rare, for there were no inveterate animosities among them." The passage reminds us of our Border Ballads; but the presence of genuine clan sentiments, such as those of Blood-revenge, in the early Arab poems carries us far nearer the beginnings of literature than Chevy Chace. Some examples of this Arab poetry we shall now offer from the Hamâseh, or "Valour," an anthology so called because the first chapter contains verses on valour and manly behaviour. Collected about the year 220 of the Hejîra by Abu Tammâm, this anthology contains many short pieces of verse and fragments selected from complete odes. The collection is distributed into ten chapters, the first of which takes up nearly half the work. The Arabic text, accompanied by a commentary of Tabrizi, Latin translation and notes, was published by Freytag at Bonn in 1851.
Perhaps the best specimen of the poetry of Blood-revenge to be found in any literature is a poem of this Hamâseh assigned to Taʾabbata Sherrâ, but attributed on better grounds to his sister's son, and believed to refer to the vengeance taken by the nephew on his uncle's slayers. Mr. C. J. Lyall, who has attempted to translate the poem into a metre resembling the Arab in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1877, would find its author in Khalaf el-Ahmar, a famous imitator of old Arab poetry. But when we remember that early Arab poems were regarded as partially the property of the poet's clan, we cannot treat the authorship of these poems as a profitable inquiry. So far as Mr. Lyall's effort to express the Arab metres in English is concerned, we can only regard it as a brilliant failure. Even if the English language permitted exactly the same metres as the Arabic—which was not to be expected and is not the case—the repetition of the same rime throughout an entire poem, a repetition which Mr. Lyall has not attempted except in a few very short poems translated in the same journal for 1881, would be fatal to such well-intended efforts. No moderniser of the Chansons de Geste could try to reproduce in modern French the medieval monorimes with any hope of success; and in English the attempt to transplant the Arab monorimes in any poem longer than a few lines must only result in a comic repetition of sounds so far as the attempt is even practicable. Since, therefore, the very structure of the English language prevents imitation of the most striking characteristic of early Arab poetry in point of form, why should we with Mr. Lyall seek to retain the Arab measures wâfir, tawîl, and the rest? These measures are scanned by feet, as in the Greek and Latin systems, and from the length of the Arab lines are often much more opposed to the English than hexameter, elegiac, or alcæic. In fact, the attempt to exactly reproduce Arab forms of poetry in English is based on a mistaken view of poetical form as something which has no necessary connection with the structure of languages. We shall, therefore, offer the following poem in a metre not unfamiliar to English ears, yet not very widely removed from the Arabic measure if the reader bears in mind that two lines of the English will generally correspond to one in the Arabic. Goethe, in his West-Oestlicher Divan, translated the poem into German from the Latin of Schultens, and though the effort to reproduce the Arab metre would have been much easier in German than in English, he has made no attempt of the kind.
Lies a man whose blood drips vengeance.
He has left the burden to me,
And I lightly lift and bear it—
Heritage of bloodshed for me,
Fearless son of his own sister—
One whose grip none loses lightly,
One whose downcast eyes are dripping
Poison like the hooded asp.
Ah! the fearful tale has reached us,
Saddest tale that ever sped!
One whose friend none dared belittle
Tyrant Fate has severed from us;
Sunshine he in wintry season;
When the dog-star burned, a shadow;
Lean he was, but not from lacking,
Open-handed, open-hearted;
Where he journeyed, where he halted,
Wariness and he were banded;
When he gave, a rushing rain-flood;
When he sprang, a mighty lion;
Black his hair among his kindred
Flowed, and trailed his robe of peace;[3]
But in war a thin-flanked wolf-whelp;
So he savoured gall and honey,
One or other all men tasted;
Fear he rode without companion
Save his deep-notched blade of Yemen.
Many warriors when the night fell
Journeyed on until the dawning,
Halted keen of eye and sword-blade,
Sword-blades flashing like the lightning;
They were tasting sips of slumber,
They were nodding—thou appearest
And they scatter at thy face!
Vengeance we have wreaked upon them,
None escaped us but a few;
And if Hudheyl broke his sword-blade
Many notches Hudheyl won!
Oft on rugged rocks he made them
Kneel where hoofs are worn with running,
Oft at dawn he fell upon them,
Slaughtered, plundered, and despoiled.
Valiant, never tired by evil,
One whose sword drinks deep the first draught,
Deep again the blood of foemen,
Hudheyl has been burned by me.
Wine no longer is forbidden,
Hard the toil that made it lawful!
Reach me, Sawâd son of ʿAmru,
Reach the cup—my strength is wearied
With the winning of revenge.
Drink to Hudheyl we have given
From the dregs of Death's own goblet—
Shame, dishonour, and disgrace.
Over Hudheyl laugh hyenas,
Grin the wolves beside their corpses,
And the vultures, treading on them,
Flap their wings, too gorged to fly."
The poem will summon up recollections of the Coronach over Duncan in the Lady of the Lake, and the deed of vengeance in Cadyow Castle. But the pale cheek, glaring eyeballs, and bloody hands of Bothwellhaugh, as he springs from his horse and dashes his carbine to the ground, are melodramatic compared with the consuming passion of revenge in the terrible Arab fresh from that cleft of rocks below Salʿ and the sight of his slaughtered kinsman, and glancing from his downcast eyes the poisoned glance of the hooded asp. We have here no "spectre gliding by," as in the Scotch tale, to watch the winning of revenge. The heart and hand of the Arab are remembered, his blood is to be avenged, but his spirit haunts not the rocks any more than that of his dead camel. The heritage of blood is a material burden which must be taken up and borne; it is no ghost-voice crying from the grave. All this is in keeping with the clan spirit which turns away from the shadow-world of kinsmen, where punishment or reward are yet unknown, to the sphere of the dead man's achievements and the very real work of revenge. For the murdered Arab is only the central figure of a group; around and behind him move his avenging kin, and even the virtues he possesses are rather those of a kinsman than of an individual in our modern conceptions of character.
In Burckhardt's Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys[4] occurs a passage which, as fully describing this communal nature of Arab Blood-revenge, deserves to be here quoted; it will show how widely the personal vengeance of a Bothwellhaugh is socially separated from the feelings of clan duty. "It is a received law among the Arabs that whoever sheds the blood of a man owes blood on that account to the family of the slain person; the law is sanctioned by the Qurʾân, which says, 'Whoever shall be unjustly slain, we have given to his heir the power of demanding satisfaction.' The Arabs, however, do not strictly observe the command of their holy volume; they claim the blood not only from the actual homicide but from all his relations, and it is these claims which constitute the right of Thâr, or Blood-revenge. … This rests within the Khomse, or fifth generation, those having a right to avenge whose fourth lineal ascendant is at the same time the fourth lineal ascendant of the person slain; and, on the other hand, only those male kindred of the homicide are liable to pay with their own blood for the blood shed whose fourth lineal ascendant is at the same time the fourth lineal ascendant of the homicide.[5] … The right of Thâr is never lost; it descends on both sides to the latest generations. It depends upon the next relation of the slain person to accept the price of blood. If he will not agree to the offered price of blood, the homicide and all his relations who are comprised within the Khomse take refuge with some tribe where the arm of vengeance cannot reach them. … A sacred custom allows the fugitives three days and four hours, during which no pursuit after them is made. These exiles are styled djelâwy, and some of them are found in almost every camp. The djelâwys remain in exile till their friends have effected a reconciliation, and prevailed on the nearest relations of the slain to accept the price of blood. Families of djelâwys are known to have been fugitives from one tribe to another (according as these became friendly or hostile to their original tribe) for more than fifty years."
§ 38. It is not difficult to collect examples of Blood-revenge inspiring the early poetry of the Arabs. Thus another poem of the Hamâseh begins—
"Surely shall I wash the blood-stain
With my sword away,
Ay, whatever fate of Allâh
Come across my way!"[6]
In another poem of the same anthology an ideal warrior is described as
"A man who girdeth night on;
Seldom cometh sleep for him; his greatest care
Is vengeance and to break the ranks right on."[7]
"Vengeance have I taken fully
For my father and forefather,
Nor in aught betrayed the household
Which my shoulders must sustain."[8]
This prominence of communal sentiment should prevent us from picturing the chiefs of an Arab clan as corresponding to the knights of medieval Europe. The Arab's sense of honour has been compared with the feelings of medieval chivalry; Antar has been called the Bayard of Pagan Arabia; and the Arabs of the days of Ignorance (that is, before the Prophet's birth) have been described as the forerunners of our Western chivalry. In all this there is but a grain of truth. No doubt the Arabs in Spain and during the Crusades often supplied models of chivalrous deportment to European knights. But, in the first place, the old clan feelings of the Arabs underwent great changes during the Mohammedan conquests, and under the military organisation such conquests required. Feelings of honour resembling those of the German gefolge towards their military chief were developed and tended more and more to take the place of clan ties. Moreover, without some such loosening of these ties, without some such expansion of Arab sentiments as these conquering hosts brought about, it is hard to see how the common creed of Islâm could have subdued the tribal antipathies with which it had a long and troublesome contest. But these poems of Blood-revenge display feelings of duty and honour altogether older than the chivalry of Christian knight or Moslem soldier, just in this, that clan kinship—not military service, or nationality, or universal religion—is still the bond of social union. In fact, it was military combination for purposes of conquest which almost everywhere broke down the old communal organisations, created distinctions of rank and property before which the clansmen often have sunk into serfs, and ultimately displaced sentiments of kinship by mere ties of local contiguity and self-interest.
The communal character of Arab honour is therefore to be carefully distinguished from any bonds of military service; and the poetry of Blood-revenge illustrates the distinction more accurately perhaps than any other. To another and final example of such poetry we accordingly turn—the Moʾallaqah of Zuheyr. This poem has been excellently translated by Mr. C. J. Lyall,[9] and wherever the exact words are offered we shall avail ourselves of Mr. Lyall's translation in the following sketch of its contents:—The pasture-lands which the tribesmen leave at the end of spring are deserted, and over the camping ground of Umm Aufa's tents—those "black lines that speak no word in the stony plains"—roam "the large-eyed kine, and the deer pass to and fro." Umm Aufa was the poet's wife, whom one day in an angry mood he had divorced; since then he had repented and prayed her to return, but she would not. Here where her tents had stood he stands and gazes—twenty years have passed since last he saw the spot—hard was it to find again "the black stones in order ranged in the place where the pot was set, and the trench,[10] like a cistern's root, with its sides unbroken still."
Then the poet turns to the praises of the makers of peace for the clans of ʿAbs and Dubyân, and swears, "by the Holy House which worshippers circle round," the Kaʿbeh, that the work of peacemaking is good. "Busily wrought they for peace when the kin had been rent in twain, and its friendship sunk in blood. Ye healed ʿAbs' and Dubyân's breach when the twain were well-nigh spent, and between them the deadly perfume of Menshim[11] was working hate. Ye said, 'If we set our hands to Peace, base it broad and firm by the giving of gifts and fair words of friendship, all will be well.' … The wounds of the kindred were healed with hundreds of camels good; he paid them forth, troop by troop, who had no part in the crime. Kin paid them forth to kin as a debt due from friend to friend, and they spilt not between them as much as a cupper's cupful of blood."
Then the tribes are exhorted to keep faithfully their pact of peace. "Ho! carry my message true to the tribesmen together leagued and Dubyân—Have ye sworn all that ye took upon you to swear? War is not aught but what ye know well and have tasted oft; not of her are the tales ye tell a doubtful or idle thing. … She will grind you as grist of the mill that falls on the skin beneath; year by year her womb conceive, and the fruit thereof shall be twins." After this reference to the deadly nature of tribal feud the poet tells the deed of Hoseyn, son of Damdam, how he slew his foe while the kins were making peace. "Yea, verily good is the kin and unmeet the deed of wrong Hoseyn, son of Damdam, wrought against them, a murder foul! He hid deep within his heart his bloody intent, nor told to any his purpose till the moment to do was come. … So he slew; no alarm he raised where the tents stood peacefully, though there in their midst the Vulture-mother[12] had entered in to dwell with a lion fierce, a bulwark for men in fight, a lion with angry mane upbristled, sharp tooth and claw, fearless; when one wrongs him, he sets him to Vengeance straight, unfaltering; when no wrong lights on him, 'tis he that wrongs."
So the wars break out afresh and more blood is spilled, and the Gheydh clan, though themselves without blame, pay from their herds. They pastured their camels athirst, until, when the time was ripe, they drove them to pools all cloven with weapons and plashed with blood. … But their lances—by thy life—were guilty of none that fell; Nehîk's son died not by them; nor had they in Naufal's death part or share, nor by their hands did Wahab lie slain, nor by them fell el-Mukhazzem's son. Yet for each of these that died did they pay the price of blood—good camels unblemished that climb in a row by the upland road to where dwells a kin of great heart, whose word is enough to shield whom they shelter when peril comes in a night of fierce strife and storm; yea, noble are they! The seeker of Vengeance gains not from them the blood of his foe." The poem terminates with reflections on life and conduct, in the manner of the Hebrew mâshâl, or proverbial maxim; the poet has seen the Dooms "trample men, as a blind beast;" and the fellowship of the clan is the only safeguard.
"Who gathers not friends by help in many a case of need
is torn by the blind beast's teeth or trodden beneath its foot. …
And he who is lord of wealth, and niggardly with his hand
alone is left by his kin; naught have they for him but blame. …
Who seeks far away from his kin for housing takes foe for friend."
Blood-revenge in various forms of early song is easily discovered by any wanderer in the uplands of early literature. Even long after he has descended to homes of poetry in which a note of clan sentiment is rarely heard, he may be startled by the old sound among the streets of cities like an echo from the life of the wild woods, the desert, the haunts of the barbarous communes. Such are the words which suddenly voice the spirit of Blood-revenge in the speech of Ajax[13]—
"Ay, for a murdered brother or son have we taken the wehrgeld;
So in his commune stayeth the murderer, much having paid down;
So the avenger's passion is soothed by the gift of the wehrgeld."
And among the Christian associations of Beowulf the same feelings of old clanship break out in a curious mixture of the spiritual and material;
"Spake the son of Eegtheow,
'Clearly was our dread encounter,
Higelac, a time of strife,
On the plain where Grendel harried
Sige-Scyldings sick of life.
All their griefs have I avengèd
So that Grendel's kindred may
Ne'er on earth, however long-lived,
Boast about that twilight-fray.'"[14]
§ 39. Closely allied in spirit to these poems of Blood-revenge are the death-songs of clansmen; here, again, there is scope for the expression of such personal feelings as do not conflict with clan duties. Among the many examples of such poems we shall select two, which, as coming from the most distant parts of the world, and belonging to widely different conditions of climate and race, may be aptly compared—the death-song of the Arab ʿAbd Yaghûth,[15] and that of the famous Ragnar Lodbrok thrown by Ella into a dungeon full of vipers.
The song of Lodbrok partly sketches the hero's past victories, and partly describes the sentiments with which he meets his death; it is only with the latter part that we are at present concerned. The chant of death is put dramatically enough into the dying hero's mouth, and would no doubt have been wonderfully effective as delivered by the Scald. Some of the concluding stanzas may be here quoted as illustrating the spirit of the poem.
"Ay, we have struck with the sword!
Each of us follows his fate;
None can escape the Nornes.[16]
But never had I believed
That Ella should take my life
When, to sate the falcons of blood,
We launched our ships on the waves,
And far in the Scottish gulfs
Gave to the wolves their prey.
"Ay, we have struck with the sword!
Ever I joy as I think
How tables are ready for feasting
In the hall of Balder's father;[17]
Soon shall we drink of the beer
From the branching, bending horns.
In Fiölner's[18] splendid palace
No hero groans for death;
Nor ever with cries of anguish
Shall I reach the hall of Vidrer.[18]
"Ay, we have struck with the sword!
The latest moment comes;
The raging serpents tear me;
In my heart the viper coils.
Soon shall the dart of Vidrer[18]
In Ella's heart be buried.
My sons shall rage for their father's death,
Warriors brave they shall never rest."
Ah! all Asloga's[19]sons would fight to the death if they only knew their father's tortures. Has he not fought battles, fifty and one, "by the messenger-arrow announced"? "But the Ases come to call me—my death is not for weeping. Yea, would I die! The Dises, Odin's messengers, invite me to the Heroes' Hall. Gladly I go to drink on a throne by the Ases' side;
'The hours of my life are finished—
I die with a smile on my lips!'"
The sensual pleasures of Lodbrok's rude paradise are perhaps the most striking thought in these lines. Like the future blessedness of the Egyptian,[20] Lodbrok's paradise is merely the best of his earthly good things, which in the cold regions of the North are scant and coarse enough. But though there is no thought of future life as a moral sanction, though personality has not yet passed beyond a sense of animal pains and pleasures, Lodbrok's song sets the person of the chief in the front and thrusts the kinsmen well into the background; and we could readily imagine the Heroes' Hall developed into the privileged paradise of the chiefs, while the body of the kinsmen, like the common herd in Mexico, remained in some dreary realm of Mictlan. Whether it was that clanship lost much of its communal spirit during the expeditions of the sea-robbers, devotion to the chief taking theplace of kinship ties, or that Northern conditions of soil and climate never permitted the same closeness of clan co-operation and sentiments as the sunny lands of the South, Lodbrok's song is pitched in a more personal key than most early Arab poems. Ideas of fate and revenge, common enough in Arab poetry, are thus personalised. Moreover, in the Arab death-song the idea of future happiness is conspicuously absent. ʿAbd Yaghûth knows nothing of a heroes' paradise; his face is turned not to the shadow-world of the clan which he is about to enter, but to the comrades who drank with him in Nejrân "who shall never see him more;" even now he would gladly purchase life from the Blood-avengers with all his wealth; but, alas, it is no use, he must "hear no more the voice of the herdsmen who shout for their camels in the distant grazing-grounds."
ʿAbd Yaghûth has been taken captive, and ʿIsmeh son of Ubehr of Teym has carried him to his home, where the captive is about to be slain in revenge for the death of en-Noʿmân son of Jessâs, the leader of Temîm. Then said he, "O ye sons of Teym, let me die as befits one noble." "And how wouldst thou die?" asked ʿIsmeh. "Give me wine to drink and let me sing my death-song." "So be it," said ʿIsmeh, and plied him with wine and cut one of his veins. Then, as his life ebbed, and ʿIsmeh's two sons standing by began to upbraid him, this was the death-song of ʿAbd Yaghûth: "Upbraid me not, ye twain! Shame is it enough for me to be as I am: no gain in upbraiding to you or me. Know ye not that in reproach there is little that profits men? It was not my wont to blame my brother when I was free. O rider, if thou lightest on those men who drank with me in Nejrân aforetime, say, 'Ye shall never see him more!'—Abû Kerib and those twin el-Eyhem, the twain of them, and Qeys of el-Yemen who dwells in the uplands of Hadramaut. May God requite with shame my people for el-Kulâb—those of them of pure race, and the others born of slaves! Had it been my will there had borne me far away from their horse a swift mare, behind whom the black steeds flag in a slackening throng: but it was my will to shield the men of your fathers' house, and the spears all missed the man who stood as his fellows' shield. The matron of ʿAbd-Shems laughed as she saw me led in bonds, as though she had seen before no captive of el-Yemen; but one knows—Muleykeh my wife—that time was when I stood forth a lion in fight, whether men bore against me or I led on. I said to them when they bound my tongue with a leathern thong—'O kinsmen of Teym, I pray you, leave me my tongue yet free! O kinsmen of Teym, ye hold me fast: treat me gently then; the brother ye lost was not the equal in place of me. And, if ye must slay me, let me die at least as a lord; and if ye will let me go, take in ransom all my wealth.' | Is it truth, ye servants of God—I shall hear no more the voice of herdsmen who shout for their camels in the distant grazing-grounds? | Yea, many a beast did I slay and many a camel urge | to her swiftest, and journey steadfast where no man dared to go; | and ofttimes I slew for my fellows my camel at the feast and ofttimes I rent my robe in twain for two singing girls, | and ofttimes withstood a host like locusts that swept on me | with my hand alone when all the lances on me were turned. | Now am I as though I never had mounted a noble steed, or called to my horsemen—Charge! give our footmen breathing space!' | or bought the full skin of wine for much gold, or shouted loud | to my comrades stout—'Heap high the blaze of our beacon fire!'"[21]
§ 40. But, beside the songs which have come down to us reeking of bloodshed, we have early Arab poems in which the personal character of the clansman is less violently expressed. Thus in the Moʿallaqah of Lebid the poet draws a picture of the clansman's generosity which reminds us of Antar, but is again to be distinguished from medieval chivalry by its communal rather than personal spirit; it is, in fact, the generosity of a group rather than that of an individual, of a brotherhood of kinsmen alike noble and not of an isolated knight. The lines occur after a graphic description of the camel (to which we may elsewhere refer), and have been rendered as follows by Mr. Lyall in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1877. "There sought refuge by my tent-ropes, every wretched one clad in scanty rags and wasted like the camel by his master's grave. And they fill brimful with meat, when the winds are blowing shrill, great bowls of broth in which their fatherless ones come to drink. Verily we of ʿÂmir, when the tribes are met together, there wants not of us a chief to lead in the doing of a noble deed, or a divider to portion out to the tribe its due, or a prince to give less or more as he deems right and good in his headship; or a generous man who helps men with his bounty freehanded, a gainer of all good gifts and one who takes them by force. For he comes of a stock to whom their fathers laid down the way—and every people has its own way and its leader therein."
It is interesting to contrast this picture of the open-handed Bedouin with another Semitic poem, in which, however, the desert is in the background and city life in the front. Ibn Khaldoun tells us that "writing in towns reaches a degree of beauty greater or less in proportion to the progress men have made in civilisation; so we see that the nomads for the most part can neither read nor write." This difference between the culture of the towns—purchased by division of labour and new distinctions of property and rank—and the rude freedom of the desert was deeply experienced by the Hebrews; their ideal life was clearly that of the pastoral tribe, the Hebrew state of nature so vividly symbolised by the preference of Abel the shepherd over Cain the tiller of the soil, and indirectly expressed in the curse of labour; but agricultural villages with their periodic allotments of land, and towns or larger villages with their elders (zeqênîm), are the foremost figures in the practical life of Israel. So, when we turn to the Book of Job, the most Arab of Hebrew poems, we find that we have passed from the associations of the desert to those of the city, and that feelings of communal generosity have been largely lost in the transition to that settled life in which the higgling of the market (to use Adam Smith's phrase) must soon come to be based on individual self-interest. "When I leave the gate of the citadel (gereth) in the open space I set my seat; grey-beards rose and stood; princes stayed their words and placed their hands upon their mouths; the voices of the nobles ceased and their tongues clave to the roofs of their mouths." Here in the settled community, with its social grades dependent largely on the possession of wealth, its trading spirit and competitions in miniature, the bettering of the outcasts is not an act of Bedouin generosity, but the rise of upstarts whose early poverty may be cast in their teeth as a disgrace. "Now they of fewer days laugh against me, whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs of my flock.—Ay, what use to me was the strength of their hands? Age lay dead upon them. Lean for want and hunger they were gnawing in the desert, yesternight in waste and ruin; they were cutters of orachs by the bushes, with the roots of juniper for food. They are driven from among us (shouts are raised against them as against the to settle in the horrid beds of torrents, caverns in the earth, and crags. They bray like hungry asses in the bushes, under nettles are they clanned[22] together. Sons of folly, sons without a name too, they are too afflicted to live. But now am I become their song of satire, ay, to them have I become a byword."[23]
Thus in the city old ties of kinship and the generous feelings of the desert were to be spoiled by that huckstering spirit of the market to which the Bedouin has ever shown the contempt of Cyrus. Action from self-interest, the very gospel of townsmen, was of all things most distasteful to clan character, for the true clansman is always ready to sacrifice self for communal interests, even where he believes the conduct of his kinsmen to be ill advised. An excellent example of such self-sacrifice is to be found in a poem of the Hamâseh attributed to Dureyd, son of es-Simmeh.[24] The poet has warned both Ârid and the men who went Ârid's way; he has said, "Think, even now two thousand are on your track;" yet his warning goes unheeded. "But when they would hearken not, I followed their road, though I knew well they were fools and that I walked not in Wisdom's way—For am I not one of Ghaziyyeh? And if they err, I err with my house; and if Ghaziyyeh go right, so I. I read them my rede one day beneath where the sandhills fail; the morrow at noon they saw my counsel as I had seen." For a shout arises, a voice, "The horsemen have slain a warrior!" "Is it Abdallah?" cries the poet, and springs to the warrior's side. "The spears had riddled his body through, as a weaver on outstretched web plies deftly the sharp-toothed comb;" and his champion, whose counsel was yesterday set aside, now stands "as a camel with fear in her heart, and thinks is her youngling slain."
This readiness to share foreseen disaster with the clan, even where personal forethought might have averted it, is an expression of communal sympathy curiously contrasting with the personal lyric for which our modern literatures have made such wide room. The Arab knows the folly of his clansmen, but he will die by their collective folly rather than live by his individual wisdom; and so the poem goes on, "I fought as a man who gives his life for his brother's life, who knows that his time is short, that Death's doom above him hangs. But, know ye if Abdallah be gone and his place a void; no weakling unsure of hand, no holder-back was he!"
But it would be a mistake to suppose that early Arab poetry contains no indications of personal quarrels with the clan, that the clansman's self-sacrificing devotion was never weakened by any sense of injustice experienced at the hands of his kindred. Lest the reader should carry away any such mistaken impression, we shall here offer one more specimen from the Hamâseh which will illustrate the conflict of personal with communal action; and it is worth noticing how the subject of the dispute is the defence of personal property by the clansman's kindred.
Certain men of the Benû Sheybân had fallen upon the herds of Qureyt, son of Uneyf, of the Bel-ʿAmbar, and carried off thirty of his camels. So he asked for help of his kin the Bel-ʿAmbar, but they helped him not. Then he betook himself to the men of Mâzin; and a company of these went forth with him and drove away a hundred camels of the herds of Sheybân, and gave them to him and guarded him until he came to his tribe. Upon this incident the following poem, which is the first of the Hamâseh, was composed.
"Had I been a son of Mâzin,
Never had my herds been ta'en
By the sons of Dhuhl of Sheylân,
Sons of children of the dust.
Straightway to my help had risen
Kinsmen of a heavy hand,
Smiters good when help is needed
And the feeble bend to blows;
Men, when evil bares before them
Gaping jaws of hindmost teeth,
Gay to rush upon and meet him,
Joined in bands or e'en alone.
When a brother in his trouble
Tells the story of his wrong,
They are not the men to question
And to ask for proofs of truth.
But my people, though their numbers
Be not small, are good for naught
'Gainst whatever evil cometh
Howsoever light it be;
They are men who with forgiveness
Meet the wrong their foes have done,
Men who meet the deeds of evil
Kind of heart and full of love!
Just as though the Lord created
Them among the sons of men,
Them alone, to fear before Him
And beside them no man else.
Would I had instead for clansmen
Kinsmen who, when forth they ride,
Swiftly strike their blows and hardly,
Or on horse or camel borne!"
§ 41. This peculiar objectiveness of personality in clan life will enable us to see in their true light certain characteristics of early poetry which have been constantly misinterpreted by the sentiments or philosophy of modern life. "Poetry," says Victor Hugo in his famous preface to Cromwell,[25] has three ages, each of which corresponds to an epoch of society—the ode, the epic, the drama. Primitive ages are lyrical, ancient times are epical, modern are dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic celebrates history, the drama paints life. The character of the first is naïveté, of the second simplicity, of the third truth. The rhapsodists mark the transition from lyric to epic poets just as the romancers mark that from epic to dramatic. With the second epoch historians appear; chroniclers and critics with the third. The personages of the ode are colossal—Adam, Cain, Noah; those of the epics are giants—Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of the drama are men—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello. The life of the ode is ideal, that of the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this triple poetry springs from three grand sources—the Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects of thought at different eras of man and society. Here are its three faces—youth, manhood, old age. Examine a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse, and you will always reach the same fact—the lyric poets before the epic, the epic before the dramatic." Nor is this all. The supposed law of literary progress extends beyond the domain of social and individual humanity, and the same triple aspect of progress may be observed in the magnificent phenomena of physical nature. "It might be consistent to add that everything in Nature and in life assumes these three phrases of progress—the lyric, the epic, the dramatic—since everything has its birth, its action, and its death. If it were not absurd to intermingle relations fancied by the imagination with strict deductions of reason, a poet might say that sunrise, for example, is a hymn, noonday a brilliant epic, sunset a sombre drama in which day and night, life and death, struggle for the mastery."
All this is something more than that abuse of words—"lyric," "epic," "dramatic"—below which there lurks so often an abuse of reasoning; it is something more than an imaginative will-o'-the-wisp mistaken for the steady light of science; it is nothing less than an inversion of the true order in which the personality of man has been developed. Just as Rousseau's ideal state of nature dissolves into a dream as soon as we recognise the fact that communal groups of kinsmen, not free individuals, are the starting-points of social progress, so the poetic fancies of Victor Hugo disappear into dream-land at the touch of historical facts which prove the "colossal" individualism of his "primitive" ages to be a myth. Hugo, in fact, seems to waver between two theories alike unhistorical. Partially he seems to retain the Platonic fancy that personal character is not essentially different in different stages of social evolution, that the range of social life within which the individual acts and thinks does not profoundly affect his character, and that consequently "lyric" means the same bundle of facts and ideas for the clan, the city, the nation, the world-empire. Partially, on the other hand, he seems inclined to adopt the old religious and poetic theory of human degradation from a race of gods and heroes, as if individual character (and physique, no doubt) at first "colossal" had gradually sunk into the more moderate dimensions of a giant—the Titans reduced to Nimrods, let us suppose—and finally narrowed down into the average stature and age of men as we find them. But the main source of Victor Hugo's brilliant errors is the same as that of Rousseau's fallacies—the assumption of individual freedom, objective and subjective, under social conditions which by their communal narrowness of thought and sympathy and action, their communal restraints on personal independence by innumerable chains of custom, prevented any but the weakest and most material sense of personality. Hugo's theory of "lyric," "epic," "dramatic" progression is, from one standpoint, not unlike Carlyle's Hero-worship; and neither Hugo nor Carlyle seems to have discovered the profound differences which separate the merely objective and animal personality of primitive groups from the subjective depths of highly developed individualism. As for Hugo's fancy that the critical terms "epic," "dramatic," "lyric," may be viewed apart from the conditions under which they arose as marks of literary distinctions universally discoverable, it would be easy to show that the meanings of these words changed in the social history of Greece itself, the country of their origin, and that, far from being marks of universal ideas common to every literature, their meanings have continually altered in the mouths of the European peoples and critics who have used them. But it rather concerns our present purpose to observe the unhistorical criticism which overlooks the profoundly significant facts that neither the individualism of the "lyric" author nor that of the human character he celebrates, in truth few of the personal feelings of the modern "lyric," are possible in the really primitive conditions of social life which Victor Hugo and many in his company are accustomed to label "lyrical." The "lyric" of modern life sees all things, expresses all things, in the thoughts and feelings of a personal being connected, indeed, with far wider circles of kinship than it entered into the heart of primitive man to conceive, but only connected by vague ties of infinite and incomprehensible destiny. The so-called "lyric" of early life sees all things, expresses all things in the thoughts and feelings of little groups narrowly exclusive in their ties of common obligation, but feeling the reality of such ties with a force which now can scarcely be conceived. How, then, it may be asked, have such misrepresentations of the spirit of early literature become so common in our European criticism?
We have previously alluded to certain causes of such misrepresentation. In our modern European life individual character has so long occupied the foreground, so strongly have individualised passion and sentiment become associated with literary art and criticism either distinctively our own or inherited from Athens and Rome, that only very recently and under the influence of a new uprising of corporate life have we cared to remember that personality in primitive is very different from personality in civilized communities. Moreover, we have been long content to regard the beginnings of literature as socially ascending little farther than the feudal castle, and for the most part dependent upon the rise of monarchical courts or of polished city commonwealths such as those of Greece and Italy. To penetrate beyond such forms of social life, to reach conceptions of personality quite different from those which the lord's castle, the city, or the court have produced, to even explain survivals from the earlier types of social and individual life in these later organisations, has been up to the present the tentative work of a few scholars who have scarcely affected popular views of literature at all. Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult even for scholars possessing a thoroughly historical turn of mind to grasp facts so subtle in their nature as the historical changes of human personality. One illustration will suffice to show the difficulty with which even profoundly historical minds have reached the conception of types of personality dependent on the changing forms of social organisation.
Montesquieu, in his Essay on Taste, left unfinished at his death, saw clearly enough the importance of the senses as sources of our ideas of the beautiful neglected by Platonic idealists. Deriding such idealism as converting internal perceptions into real and positive qualities, he observed how different our emotions and feelings would have been had we possessed one organ of sense more or less, or if, possessing the same number of senses, our sight or hearing had been greatly different in their powers. Other species of poetry and eloquence would have arisen; the plans of architects would have introduced fewer ornaments and more uniformity had our sight been more feeble and confused; and had our sense of hearing been constituted like that of many other animals, most of our musical instruments would have required a different construction or modulation. "Hence, the perfection of the arts consisting in their presenting to us their respective objects in such a manner as will render them as agreeable and striking as possible, a different constitution of our nature from the present would necessarily require a change in the present state of the arts adapted to the change which that new constitution would occasion in the means of enjoyment." Had Montesquieu paused to ask what he intended by "our nature," he might have found that the "nature" of which he spoke was a certain average humanity, a certain type of character which by no means results from the mere possession of the human senses. He would have found that this type is largely the outcome of peculiar social conditions; indeed, he himself admits—without making much use of the admission—that, beside the senses and intellect, "those impressions and prejudices which are the result of certain institutions, customs, and habits" have moulded our ideas of taste. Nay, more, he would have discovered that even the senses themselves, sight and hearing for example, possessed a far higher degree of average acuteness, though an inferior degree of aesthetic discrimination, among American Indian clansmen of the prairies than in the average Frenchman or Englishman of his day. Finally, if he had compared together the music of France and China, or the languages of these countries as indices to average discrimination of sounds, he would also have discovered that the type of humanity he had in view was only one among many diverse types, and that his statical view of human sensations and their effects on the arts would require to be supplemented by dynamical views of human development, and the effects of different social systems on music, sculpture, architecture, painting, literature.
If one of the very founders of historical science experienced such difficulty in rising above the associations of personality to which he had been himself accustomed, we need not be surprised that few have yet grasped the historical fact that types of personality have come into being and disappeared with different stages of social evolution. But neither should we allow the imperfect philosophy of a Montesquieu or the poetic fancies of a Victor Hugo to stand between us and the light.
§ 42. Had space permitted, we might here pause to trace the rise of those social conditions which permitted an epic poetry of personal prowess and kingly descent. We might show that such conditions are to be found in the decadence of communal life before the growth of personal property and personal rank. It is when the head men of the clan have assumed the privileges of hereditary chiefs, and come to stand alone in the golden sunset of a divine ancestry once common to the entire group, when the mass of clansmen have sunk into simple freemen or even serfs, and the chief's men stand apart from the common folk as their lord's comitatus, that both the choral and the personal poetry of the clan give way to the songs of the chief's hall. Perhaps one of the earliest shapes of heroic poetry was the genealogical poem, familiar to students of Celtic literature, blending the communal personality of the clan with the individual heroism of the chief, and drawing no clear distinction between his exploits and those of the kinsmen in general. Old songs of eponymous clan-ancestors would meet such beginnings of epic poetry half-way, and the glory of the clan's ideal parentage would be easily transferred to the personal ancestry of the chief. It has even been proposed to find the roots of epic poetry in hymns of ancestor-worship similar to those of the Shih King. It has been suggested that the oldest epic poems were little else than hymns extolling the deeds of the dead at the celebration of ancestral sacrifices; and wherever ancestral worship has possessed such influence as in China, we may be sure that there was little scope for an epic of any description save through sentiments of such worship. But without laying undue stress on the fact that the Chinese, so far as their literature is at present known to European scholars, possess nothing which can be said to resemble an epic poem, and even admitting that ancestral worship of great families may have contributed something to epic poetry, we must remember that heroic poetry derives its main inspiration from individualised life. Wherever physical and social conditions have allowed the clan or family to maintain their strength, we need not expect such poetry. Hence its absence in early Rome as in China; and if it be replied that India, with its caste-system and village communes, offers us specimens of the epic, we may reply that the Rámáyana and Mahábhárata are rather stories of the gods than celebrations of human heroism, and that their very tissue is the handiwork of a priestly caste.
But space we have not to enter the lists of epic criticism in which so many belted knights of the pen have fought and fallen. We prefer to leave our Homeric battle of the books in the hands of specialists, merely observing that up to the present the wordy war has savoured rather too much of the modern study and blotting-pad, and rather too little of early social life in Greece. If our laborious German scholars would only devote a little spare time to the comparison of the social conditions under which the poetry of heroism has flourished in different countries and ages, we might know more about the beginnings of the epic than we are likely to learn from any number of textual emendations and verbal skirmishings.
It would have been part of our treatment of the epic to have traced or attempted to trace the changes through which the makers of literature passed in the social transition from communal to personal life; for the rise of personal authorship is one of the main literary effects of the decadence of clan life. So long as dance and music and mimicry form as integral parts of the literary performance as the words said or sung, property in song is almost inconceivable; and, long after priestly castes had commenced to create a kind of religious literature of hymns and legal ordinances belonging to the sacerdotal oligarchy, the conception of personal property in literature seems to have remained practically unknown. To examples of communal authorship and apparent survivals from it we have previously referred; and, if space permitted, we might have treated the universal prevalence of verse in early literature as closely connected with this communal song-making, or might have watched the gradual rise of prose as accompanying the development of personal freedom, and aided by that invention before which assonance and rime and metre ceased to perform the practical function of supporting the memory, and became ornaments of art—writing. But neither the changes in the status of early song-makers[26] nor the progress of literary forms from verse to prose can here receive more than a passing notice. We prefer to devote the space at our command to a brief outline of the aspect which physical nature assumes under the eyes of clansmen.
Footnotes edit
- ↑ "Naught can alter ties of kinship
In the man who thinks aright."(Beowulf, 2600–1.) - ↑ The words are translated from a Berlin manuscript by Professor Kosegarten, in the introduction to his edition of the Huzailiau Poems.
- ↑ In peace the Arabs allowed their izár, or waistwrapper, to trail on the ground; in war it was girt tightly about their loins—a practice of the desert reminding us of the Roman "girding up his gown."
- ↑ Vol. i. p. 149.
- ↑ Cf. Exod. xx. 5, "Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me (ʾal shilléshîm ve-ʾal ribbéʾim).
- ↑ Ham., p. 355.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 405. "To gird on night" is an Arab phrase for "daring the dangers of the night."
- ↑ Ham., pp. 487–497.
- ↑ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1878.
- ↑ Dug round the tent to receive the rain.
- ↑ Said to refer to an Arab custom of plunging hands into a bowl of perfume when swearing to fight to the death. Hence, "to bray the perfume of Menshim" (said to have been a seller of perfume in Mekkeh) became a proverbial expression for deadly strife.
- ↑ Death.
- ↑ Iliad, ix. 632 sqq.
- ↑ Beowulf, 2005 sqq.
- ↑ Aghâni, xv. 75.
- ↑ The Parcæ of the North.
- ↑ Balder was the second son of Odin.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Names of Odin.
- ↑ Wife of Ragnar.
- ↑ "The blessed is represented as enjoying an existence similar to that which he had led upon earth. He has the use of all his limbs, he eats and drinks and satisfies every one of his physical wants exactly as in his former life. His bread is made of the corn of Pe, a famous town of Egypt, and the beer he drinks is made from the red corn of the Nile. The flesh of cattle and fowl is given to him, and refreshing waters are poured out to him under the boughs of sycamores which shade him from the heat. The cool breezes of the north wind breathe upon him. … Fields also are allotted to him in the lands of Aarru and Hotep, and he cultivates them" (Hibbert Lectures for 1879, p. 180). If, as M. le Page Renouf here adds, "it is characteristic of an industrious and agricultural population that part of the bliss of a future state should consist in such operations as ploughing and hoeing, sowing and reaping, rowing on the canals and collecting the harvests," the Hebrew Sheól, or gathering-place of the clans, and the Scandinavian Warriors' Hall, or paradise of the chiefs, are no less interesting reflections of social conditions in ideas of a future life.
- ↑ In order to convey some idea of the Arab metre (tawil, second form) Mr. Lyall's version is here retained, his lines being also marked in the latter part of the poem.
- ↑ Yesuppâchu; this use of sâphach should be compared with shaphach, from which mishpâchah, the familiar Hebrew expression for "clan," is derived.
- ↑ Job xxx. 1–10.
- ↑ Ham., pp. 377–380. For Mr. Lyall's translation in full, sec Jour. As. Soc. of Bengal, 1881.
- ↑ p. 18.
- ↑ Such changes in status were due to a great variety of causes. Thus, the introduction of writing reduced the value which recitation, with or without musical accompaniment, had possessed in days when this invention was either unknown or little used. (Cf. Renan, on the Kasída, Hist. des langues Sémitiques, p. 359, edit. 1878.) Another influence powerfully affecting the status of early song-makers is the growth of central government. By a statute of the thirty-ninth year of Elizabeth, for example, "minstrels wandering abroad" are included among "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars"; so low had the early song-maker of England sunk in the Elizabethan centralisation of force and culture. (Cf. Percy, Essay on Ancient English Minstrels, prefixed to his Reliques, vol. i.)