96 SHORT PAPERS 



precise and widest information is undoubtedly due to the late Professor Socin in 

 his posthumous Diwan aus Centralarabien. Through this precious volume it 

 becomes abundantly clear that the poetry of Arabia of to-day is the same in all 

 essentials as the poetry of Arabia before Muhammad. From the sixth to the 

 twentieth century, the same stream has flowed, unchanging. The meters, the 

 forms, the ideas, the types, are all the same. 



But most significant of all in its bearing on the ballad problem is one outstand- 

 ing characteristic. The Arabian poet, like the Semite in general, knows nothing 

 but a strictly subjective art. He can sing only of his emotions; all has to pass 

 through the alembic of his feeling and be reproduced as it affected him. He can 

 tell no objective story, as one without, seeing and relating what he sees; he must 

 be in the action, and what he tells us of it is what has come to himself. Thus a 

 description of warriors in battle array is wrought for us out of his own pride or 

 fear at the spectacle. The surge and swing of a charge is pictured to us through 

 what he said to his soul when the shouting line rushed on. Nature, too, we know 

 only because the stars shone brightly on his desert path or mocked in their slow 

 march his sleepless eyes, or because the little spots of verdure and flashing pools 

 after rain were a joy to him and gave him thoughts such and such. 



A ballad, then, in our sense was impossible to him. He was not a " maker," a 

 iroiiiri) j, but a " feeler," a " knower," so aha'ir, the Arabic word for poet, means. 

 The event was little; the man who saw it, understood it, told what came to him 

 from it, was all. And so these Arabian songs were never anonymous. If the 

 name of the author by chance has been lost to tradition, there stands at the 

 head some formula, " There said a man of Taghlib," or " There said one un- 

 named." Some one must have said it, for it tells the emotion of some one. 

 Western ballads tell events, who tells them is of no moment. The ballad stands 

 as a record which might have been made equally well by any one who saw the 

 fact. And therefore the identity of the teller bears no stress. After he has sung 

 his song, another may take it and sing it with equal aesthetic right. The name of 

 that first singer, maker of it as he was, is lost, and the song is the inheritance 

 of the people. But for the Arab ode, that was, and is, flatly impossible. And it 

 cannot but raise the final question whether it is not rather in the objectivity of 

 our Western ballads than in their popular use or any hypothetical communal 

 origin that we are to find the clue to their anonymity. 



