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 Apollo’s 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 Arab’s is poetry, the European’s 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.

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