SHORT PAPER 



PROFESSOR DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, of Hartford Theological Seminary, pre- 

 sented a paper to this Section on " The Poetry of Arabia and the Ballad Problem." 

 The speaker said in brief that the bearing of the poetry of Arabia on the ballad 

 problem has never received adequate, or possibly any, recognition. The Arabists 

 are few, indeed, who have passed beyond the philological and historical stages 

 to an aesthetic appreciation of the material of their labors. To most languages 

 a very few months' work will give an entrance, and the entrance once forced, the 

 garden of poetry lies open, but Arabic yields herself with no such lightness. Days 

 and nights must be spent on a grammar of bewildering subtilty, a vocabulary of 

 utter strangeness and overwhelming abundance, and a range of ideas which con- 

 ceal their common humanity behind veils of novel circumstance. 



The speaker dwelt upon the confusion which lay in the name Arabian, and on 

 the probability that the greater part of Arabic literature had been written by men 

 in whose veins was scarcely any drop of Arabian blood. The medieval monk in 

 Ireland who wrote in Latin was hardly less a Roman than some others of Central 

 Asia, North Africa, or Spain, who wrote as Arabs. After the raid of Muhammad 

 and his successors came the Mush'm Empire, in which after a century or two the 

 Arabs had little or no part. The official language of the Empire remained a kind 

 of Arabic, thanks to the Koran and the whole system of Islam, with its commonly 

 and erroneously called Arabian literature, philosophy, science, etc., coming from 

 a multitude of nationalities and sects, which made up Islam. Little attention 

 has been paid to Arabia in the true sense, and the literary ideals, forms, and 

 methods of the Arabian peninsula and race. To Arabia itself and to the Arab 

 people in its own home must the folk-lorist and student of literature turn, when 

 he would seek the true Arabian poetry. 



Of the beginnings of Arabian poetry we know nothing; they must lie with the 

 beginnings of the Arab race. The curtain rises with the appearance of Muhammad, 

 and from that point we can trace backward some hundred and fifty years. The 

 Arabs show themselves producing a poetry that is singularly popular in origin 

 and idea, highly developed and polished, and wonderfully rich. Grimm's ballad 

 formula, " Das Volk dichtet," holds most exactly of them, but in a different sense. 

 There is no anonymity, but there is a broad generality of authorship. Of great 

 poets the number was undoubtedly small, but the poetic gift was widely spread. 

 Our best commentaries on the old poems are the records of present-day wander- 

 ings. Further we have in it the strange phenomenon of a literature as perfectly 

 popular in origin and use as our ballads, which yet obeys rigid norms of meter, 

 rhyme, and form; clothes itself in language of fixed usage, of breadth and richness; 

 and has crystallized into narrow conventions of structure. It is true that it is not 

 literature in the precise sense. These verses were chanted and sung, stored in the 

 memory, and passed from lips to ears. Not till after the time of Muhammad, 

 when the need of interpreting the Koran and fixing the structure of classical 

 Arabic had arisen, were they finally reduced to written form. 



In the course of the last century the desert was opened again to Europe by stray 

 adventurers. In the fifties, Wallin brought back from his epoch-making journey 

 some poems which were published in the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental 

 Society (vols. v, vi). Later, Wetzstein, German Consul at Damascus, made col- 

 lections and lectured on contemporary Arabian poetry at the University of Berlin 

 in the winter of 1867-68 and thereafter. Count Landberg also made very extensive 

 collections, which, like those of Wetzstein, are still unpublished. But our most 



