Chapter II: Introduction (2)

In the language of religious mysticism, God is not only the Creator and Ruler of the world, he is also the Essentially Beautiful and the True Beloved. Love, of which the divine being is at once the source and the object, plays a large part in Sufi writings, a part which it is difficult, and sometimes unwise, to distinguish from an exaggerated expression of the human affections. Jami describes Pure Being, before it had been manifested in Creation, “singing of love unto itself in a wordless melody,”[11] and in the same strain Hafiz sings of “the Imperial Beauty which is for ever playing the game of love with itself.” Like the echo of a Greek voice falls Jami’s doctrine of human love: “Avert not thy face from an earthly beloved, since even this may serve to raise thee to the love of the True.” It is almost possible to read in the Persian poem the words of the wise Diotima to Socrates: “He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and has learnt to see the Beautiful in true order and succession, when he comes towards the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wonderful beauty, not growing or decaying, waxing or waning ... he who, under the influence of true love, rising upward from these things begins to see that beauty, is not far from the end.”

The Sufis had no difficulty in finding in the Koran texts in support of their teaching. When Mahommad exclaims, “There are times when neither cherubim nor prophet are equal unto me!” the Sufis declare that he alludes to moments of ecstatic union with God; and his account of the victory of Bedr—“Thou didst not slay them, but God slew them, and thou didst not shoot when thou didst shoot, but God shot”—they take as a proof of the Prophet’s belief in the essential oneness of God and man.[12] The whole book is twisted after this fashion into agreement with their views.

Beautiful and spiritual as some of these doctrines are, they can hardly be said to form an adequate guide to conduct. The Sufis, however, are regarded in the East as men leading a virtuous and pure life. Even the etymology of their name points to the same conclusion: Sufi comes from an Arabic word signifying wool, and indicates that they were accustomed to clothe themselves in simple woollen garments. They occupy in the East much the same position that Madame Guyon and the Jansenists occupied in the West, and they teach the same doctrine of quietism, which, while it lends to its followers the virtues of exaggerated submission, saps the root of a faith that is manifested in works. So far as the Sufis are striving earnestly after union with God, they are saved from the logical consequences of their doctrines: “Their ear is strained to catch the sounds of the lute, their eyes are fixed upon the cup, their bosoms are filled with the desire of this world and of the world to come.”[13] And in the same spirit Hafiz sings: “Though the wind of discord shake the two worlds, mine eyes are fixed upon the road from whence cometh my Friend.” The idealism of the Sufis led them to deny the morality of all actions, but they restricted the consequences of their principles to the adepts who had attained to perfect union with God, and even for them the moments of ecstasy are few. Most Sufis are good and religious men, holding it their duty to conform outwardly, and no discredit to use all artifices to conceal from the orthodox the beliefs which they cherish in their heart, but holding also that the practice of the Mahommadan religion, to the rites of which they have attached symbolic meanings, is the only way to the perfection to which they aspire. Nevertheless, Count Gobineau is of opinion that quietism is the great curse of the East. “The dominant characteristic of Sufiism,” he says, “is to unite by a weak chain of doctrine, ideas the significance of which is very different, so different that there is in reality but one connecting link between them, and that link is a quietism adapted to them all, a passive disposition of spirit which surrounds with a nimbus of inert sentiment all conceptions of God, of man, and of the universe. It is this quietism, and not Islam, which is the running sore of all Oriental countries.”

Unfortunately, as he points out, the conditions of Oriental life are such as to enforce rather than to control a disposition to mysticism. The poets found ready to their hand a mass of vague and beautiful thought eminently suited to imaginative treatment; whether they believed in it or not they used it, and thereby popularised it, delighting, as only an Oriental can, in the necessity of veiling it with exquisite symbolism, and throwing round it a cloud of charming phrases. These phrases caught and held the Oriental ear; and the Oriental mind is faithful to a formula once accepted. Moreover, when a man looked about him and saw the vicissitudes of mortal existence—nowhere more marked than in the East—how conqueror succeeded conqueror and empire empire, how the humble was exalted and the mighty thrown from his seat, how swift was the vengeance of God in sweeping pestilence and resistless famine, and how unsparing the forces of nature, he turned to a philosophy which taught that all earthly things were alike vain—virtue and patriotism and the love of wife and child, power and beauty and the bold part played in a hopeless fight; he remembered what he had learnt from poets and story-tellers—“Behold the world is as the shadow of a cloud and a dream of the night.”

How far the Divan of Hafiz can be said to embody these doctrines, each reader must decide for himself, and each will probably arrive at a different conclusion. Between the judgment of Jami, that Hafiz was undoubtedly an eminent Sufi, and that of Von Hammer, who, playing upon his names, declared that the Sun of the Faith gave but an uncertain light, and the Interpreter of Secrets interpreted only the language of pleasure—between these two there is a wide field for differences of opinion. For my part, I cannot agree entirely either with Jami or with Von Hammer. Partly, perhaps, owing to the wise guidance of Sheikh Mahmud Attar, partly to a natural freedom of spirit, Hafiz seems to me to rise above the narrow views of his co-religionists, and to look upon the world from a wider standpoint. The asceticism of Sufi and orthodox he alike condemns: “The ascetic is the serpent of the age!” he cries. I think it was not only to curry favour with a king that he welcomed the accession of Shah Shudja, nor was it only to disarm the criticism of stricter Mohammadans that he described himself as a weary seeker after wisdom, praying God to show him some guiding light by which he might direct his steps. Of the two conclusions that are commonly drawn from the statement that to-morrow we die, Hafiz accepted neither unmodified by the other. “Eat and drink,” seemed to him a poor solution of the mysterious purpose of human life, and an unsatisfactory sign-post to happiness; “the abode of pleasure,” he says, “was never reached except through pain.” On the other hand, he was equally unwilling to despise the good things of this world. “The Garden of Paradise may be pleasant, but forget not the shade of the willow-tree and the fair margin of the fruitful field.” “Now, now while the rose is with us, sing her praise; now, while we are here to listen, Minstrel, strike the lute! for the burden of all thy songs has been that the present is all too short, and already the unknown future is upon us.” He, too, would have us cut down far reaching hope to the limit of our little day, though he cherished in his heart a more or less elusive conviction that he should find the fire of love burning still, and with a purer flame, behind the veil which his eyes could not pierce.

Be that as it may, one who sings the cool rush of the wind of dawn, the scarlet cup of the tulip uplifted in solitary places, the fleeting shadows of the clouds, and the praise of gardens and fountains and fruitful fields, was not likely to forget that even if the world is no more than an intangible reflection of its Creator, the reflection of eternal beauty is in itself worthy to be admired. I wish I could believe that such innocent delights as these, and a wholehearted desire for truth, had been enough for our poet, but I have a shrewd suspicion that the Cup-bearer brought him a wine other than that of divine knowledge, and that his mistress is considerably more than an allegorical figure. How ever willing we may be to submit to the wise men of the East when they tell us that the revelry of the poems is always a spiritual exaltation, it must be admitted that the words of the poet carry a different conviction to Western ears. There is undoubtedly a note of sincerity in his praise of love and wine and boon-companionship, and I am inclined to think that Hafiz was one of those who, like Omar Khayyam, were wont to throw the garment of repentance annually into the fire of Spring. It must be remembered that the morality of his day was not that of our own, and that the manners of the East resemble but vaguely those of the West; and though as a religious teacher Hafiz would have been better advised if he had less frequently loosened the rein of his desires, I doubt whether his songs would have rung for us with the same passionate force. After all, the poems of St. Francis of Assisi are not much read nowadays. Nevertheless, the reader misses a sense of restraint both in the matter and in the manner of the Divan. To many Persians, Hafiz occupies the place that is filled by Shakespeare in the minds of many Englishmen. It may be a national prejudice, but I cannot bring myself to believe that the mental food supplied by the Oriental is as good as the other. But, then, our appetites are not the same.

The tendency in dealing with a mystical poet is to read into him so-called deeper meanings, even when the simple meaning is clear enough and sufficient in itself. Hafiz is one of those who has suffered from this process; it has removed him, in great measure, from the touch of human sympathies which are, when all is said and done, a poet’s true kingdom. Of a different age, a different race, and a different civilisation from ours, there are yet snatches in his songs of that melody of human life which is everywhere the same. When he cries, “My beloved is gone and I had not even bidden him farewell!” his words are as poignant now as they were five centuries ago, and they could gain nothing from a mystical interpretation. As simple and as touching is his lament for his son: “Alas! he found it easy to depart, but unto me he left the harder pilgrimage.” And for his wife: “Then said my heart, I will rest me in this city which is illumined by her presence; already her feet were bent upon a longer journey, but my poor heart knew it not.” Not Shakespeare himself has found a more passionate image for love than: “Open my grave when I am dead, and thou shalt see a cloud of smoke rising out from it; then shalt thou know that the fire still burns in my dead heart—yea, it has set my very winding-sheet alight.” Or: “If the scent of her hair were to blow across my dust when I had been dead a hundred years, my mouldering bones would rise and come dancing out of the tomb.” And he knows of what he writes when he says, “I have estimated the influence of Reason upon Love and found that it is like that of a raindrop upon the ocean, which makes one little mark upon the water’s face and disappears.” These are the utterances of a great poet, the imaginative interpreter of the heart of man; they are not of one age, or of another, but for all time. Fitz-Gerald knew it when he declared that Hafiz rang true. “Hafiz is the most Persian of the Persians,” he says. “He is the best representative of their character, whether his Saki and wine be real or mystical. Their religion and philosophy is soon seen through, and always seems to me cuckooed over like a borrowed thing, which people once having got do not know how to parade enough. To be sure their roses and nightingales are repeated often enough. But Hafiz and old Omar Khayyam ring like true metal.” The criticism and the praise seem to me both just and delicate.

To a certain extent it may be said that the Sufiism of Hafiz is partly due to the natural leaning of the Oriental poet towards a picturesque diction (for all poetry must, to satisfy Eastern readers, be couched in a veiled and enigmatic speech),[14] and has partly been read into the Divan by later ages. But this is not all. With Shah Shudja, I would accuse him of mixing up inextricably wine and love and Sufi teaching, and perhaps more besides. To some at least of the innumerable difficulties which assail every man who turns a thoughtful eye upon life and its conditions, Hafiz seems to have accepted the solution presented to him by Sufiism. He understood and sympathised with the bold heresy of Hallaj, “though fools whom God hath not uplifted know not the meaning of him who said, I am God.” Sometimes we find him enunciating one of the abstruser of the Sufi doctrines: “How shall I say that existence is mine when I have no knowledge of myself, or how that I exist not when mine eyes are fixed upon Him?”—a man, that is, can lay claim to no individual existence; all that he knows is that he is a part of the eternally existing. Or, again, he declares that his words are metaphorical, and should receive the full Sufi interpretation, as in the following couplet: “Boon companion, minstrel, and cup-bearer, all these are but names for Him; the image of water and clay (man) is an illusion upon the road of life.” But he handles Sufiism in a broad and noble manner, which links it on to the highest codes of morality accepted among the civilised races of mankind. “For all eternity the perfume of love comes not to him who has not swept with his cheek the dust from the tavern threshold”—“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Hafiz is saying in phraseology suited to the ears of those whom he addressed. “If thou desire the jewelled cup of ruby wine,” he continues (and it is of the hunger and thirst after wisdom that he speaks), “ah, many tears shall thine eyes thread upon thine eyelashes!” He did not forget that “the Sufi gold is not always without alloy,” and he was not one of those who believe that they have discovered the answer to all human demands when their own heart is satisfied. “Since thou canst never leave the palace of thyself,” he warns us, “how canst thou hope to reach the village of truth.” The song that filled his soul with gladness might strike on other ears to a different measure; and “where is the music to which both the drunk and the sober can dance?” He was, indeed, profoundly sceptical as to the infallibility of any creed, judging men not by the practice, but by the spirit that lay beneath it: “None shall die whose heart has lived with the life love breathed into it; but when the day of reckoning comes, I fancy that the Sheikh will find that he has gained as little by his abstinence as I by my feasting.”

Sufiism apart, an undercurrent of mysticism runs through the poems which it is impossible to explain away. If we should attempt to ignore it, many of the odes would have no meaning at all, and most of them would lose a good half of their interest. Take, for instance, such verses as the following: “Heart and soul are fixed upon the desire of the Beloved: this at least _is_, for if not, heart and soul are nought. Fate is that which comes to the brink without the heart’s blood; if not, all thy striving after the Garden of Paradise is nought. Throw thyself not at the foot of its sacred trees hoping for their shade; dost thou not see, oh cypress, that even these are nought unto thee?” Hafiz is engaged in that terrible weighing of possibilities which every man who thinks must know: “Surely the soul which is filled with the desire of God must have some quality which shall be stronger than death? But if this were not so ... then indeed the soul itself is nought. Surely Fate is like an empty bowl standing upon the edge of the river of life? But if the bowl had been already filled with blood ... then all your striving to reach the Garden of Paradise shall avail you nothing. For do you not see, you who dare to acknowledge the truth, that you cannot battle against an appointed Destiny, and however grateful may be the shade of the holy trees, they could afford you no protection.” Nor can I believe that it is an earthly love of whom he speaks when he says, “Since the Beloved has veiled his face, how comes it that his lovers are reciting his beauties? They can only tell what they imagine to be there.” We are all engaged in telling each other—only what we imagine to be there.

It is a curious coincidence (if it be nothing more) that at the time when mystical poetry was taking a recognised place in the literature of Persia and of India, it was also springing into existence in the West. The songs of the Troubadours were avowedly intended to convey a meaning deeper than that which lay upon the surface; the Romance of the Rose comes nearer than any other Western allegory to a full-fledged mysticism worthy of an Oriental poet. St. Francis addresses his Redeemer in terms not very different from those used by Hafiz to express his longing after divine wisdom, and the Beatrice, perhaps of the _Vita Nuova_, certainly of the Divine Comedy, is no less intangible than the allegorical mistress (when she is allegorical) of the Persian.

Hafiz and Dante, it is interesting to note, were almost contemporaries. At the time when Dante was climbing Can Grande’s weary stair, Hafiz was opening his eyes upon a yet more tumultuous world. Both were driven by the confusion around them to look for some solid platform on which to build a theory of existence, but Dante found it in that strenuous personal faith which is for ever impossible to minds of the temper of that of Hafiz. Moreover, the mysticism of Dante stands with its feet planted firmly upon the earth: man and his deeds might be fleeting, but they laid so strong a hold upon the poet’s imagination that he welded them into a stepping-stone to that which shall not pass away. His own life was spent in a ceaseless political activity; for all his visionary journeys through heaven and hell, Dante lived as keenly as any of his contemporaries. The fire still burns in the dead heart; the fierce and tender spirit, roused by turns to merciless condemnation and exquisite pity, still glows with a flame removed from mortal conditions, which the chill of death cannot extinguish as long as men shall read and understand. Through him his age lives. The people whom he had met, those of whom he had only heard, the smallest incidents of his time, the sum of all that it knew and of all that it believed, are struck out for ever, hard and sharp, in his vivid lines; and the fortunes of Florence, of one little town in a little corner of the world, loom to us, under the poet’s influence, as big and as tragic as they seemed to that most ardent of citizens. To Hafiz, on the contrary, modern instances have no value; contemporary history is too small an episode to occupy his thoughts. During his lifetime the city that he loved, perhaps as dearly as Dante loved Florence, was besieged and taken five or six times; it changed hands even more often. It was drenched with blood by one conqueror, filled with revelry by a second, and subjected to the hard rule of asceticism by a third. One after another Hafiz saw kings and princes rise into power and vanish “like snow upon the desert’s dusty face.” Pitiful tragedies, great rejoicings, the fall of kingdoms, and the clash of battle—all these he must have seen and heard. But what echo of them is there in his poems? Almost none. An occasional allusion which learned commentators refer to some political event; an exaggerated effusion in praise first of one king, then of another; the celebration of such and such a victory and of the prowess of such and such a royal general—just what any self-respecting court poet would feel it incumbent upon himself to write; and no more.

But some of us will feel that the apparent indifference of Hafiz lends to his philosophy a quality which that of Dante does not possess. The Italian is bound down within the limits of his own realism, his theory of the universe is essentially of his own age, and what to him was so acutely real is to many of us merely a beautiful or a terrible image. The picture that Hafiz drew represents a wider landscape, though the immediate foreground may not be so distinct. It is as if his mental eye, endowed with wonderful acuteness of vision, had penetrated into those provinces of thought which we of a later age were destined to inhabit. We can forgive him for leaving to us so indistinct a representation of his own time, and of the life of the individual in it, when we find him formulating ideas as profound as the warning that there is no musician to whose music both the drunk and the sober can dance.

Renan has put into a few luminous sentences his view of the mystical poets of India and Persia. “On sait que dans ces pays,” he says, “s’est développée une vaste littérature où l’amour divin et l’amour terrestre se croisent d’une façon souvent difficile à démêler. L’origine de ce singulier genre de poésie est une question qui n’est pas encore éclaircie. Dans beaucoup de cas les sens mystiques prêtés à certaines poésies érotiques persanes et hindoues n’ont pas plus de réalité que les allégories du Cantique des Cantiques. Pour Hafiz, par exemple, il semble bien que l’explication allégorique est le plus souvent un fruit de la fantaisie des commentateurs, ou des précautions que les admirateurs du poète étaient obligés de prendre pour sauver l’orthodoxie de leur auteur favori. Puis l’imagination étant montée sur ce thème, et les esprits étant faussés par une exégèse qui ne voulait voir partout qu’allégories, on en est venu à faire des poèmes réellement à double sens. Comme ceux de Djellaleddin Rumi, de Wali, &c.... Dans l’Inde et la Perse ce genre de poésie (érotico-mystique) est le fruit d’un extrème raffinement, d’une imagination vive et portée au quiétisme, d’un certain goût du mystère, et aussi, en Perse du moins, de l’hypocrisie imposée par le fanatisme musulman. C’est, en effet, comme réaction contre la sécheresse de l’Islamisme que le soufisme a fait fortune chez les musulmans non arabes. Il y faut voir une révolte de l’esprit arien contre l’effroyante simplicité de l’esprit sémitique, excluant par la rigueur de sa théologie toute devotion particulière, toute doctrine secrète, toute combinaison religieuse vivante et variée.”[15]

Those who have written poems “réellement à double sens” are careful to insist upon the mighty secrets that their words convey. “The things which wise men, who are sometimes called drunkards and sometimes seers,” says one of them, “wish to express by the words wine, cup and cup-bearer, musician, magian, and Christian girdle, are so many profound mysteries which sometimes they translate by an enigma and sometimes they reveal.” The symbols used by each writer are more or less the same; there is an accepted Sufi code with which the initiated are acquainted. “The nightingale, and none beside, knows the full worth of the rose,” sings Hafiz, “for many a one reads the leaf and understands not the meaning thereof.” But though we may not all be nightingales, we have some guide to the interpretation of the leaf. Many of the words in the Sufi dictionary have been expounded to the outer world. The tavern, for instance, is the place of instruction or worship, of which the tavern-keeper is the teacher or priest, and the wine the spirit of divine knowledge which is poured out for his disciples; the idol is God; beauty is the divine perfection; shining locks the expansion of his glory; down on the cheek denotes the cloud of spirits that encircles his throne; and a black mole is the point of indivisible unity. The catalogue might be continued to any extent; almost every word has a vague and somewhat shifting significance in the language of mysticism, which he who has a mind for such exercises may decipher if he choose.

Hafiz is rather the forerunner than the founder of this school of poets. It is equally unsatisfactory to give a completely mystical or a completely material interpretation to his songs. He wrote of the world as he found it. In his experience pleasure and religion were the two most important incentives to human action; he ignored neither the one nor the other. I am very conscious that my appreciation of the poet is that of the Western. Exactly on what grounds he is appreciated in the East it is difficult to determine, and what his compatriots make of his teaching it is perhaps impossible to understand. From our point of view, then, the sum of his philosophy seems to be, that though there is little of which we can be certain, that little must always be the object of all men’s desire; each of us will set out upon the search for it along a different road, and if none will find his road easy to follow, each may, if he be wise, discover compensations for his toil by the wayside. And for the rest, “Who knows the secret of the veil?” Like many a good and brave man before his time and since, I think he was content to “faintly trust the larger hope.”

FROM THE DIVAN OF HAFIZ

POEMS FROM THE
DIVAN OF HAFIZ