A closer approximation to our ideal may be found in a story related by
the Persian poet Saadi (358):
"There was a handsome and well-disposed young man, who
was embarked in a vessel with a lovely damsel: I have
read that, sailing on the mighty deep, they fell
together into a whirlpool: When the pilot came to offer
him assistance; God forbid that he should perish in
that distress; he was answering, from the midst of that
overwhelming vortex, Leave me and take the hand of my
beloved! The whole world admired him for this speech,
which, as he was expiring, he was heard to make; learn
not the tale of love from that faithless wretch who can
neglect his mistress when exposed to danger. In this
manner ended the lives of those lovers; listen to what
has happened, that you may understand; for Saadi knows
the ways and forms of courtship, as well as the Tazi,
or modern Arabic, is understood at Baghdad."
How did this Persian poet get such a correct and modern notion about
love into his head? Obviously not from his experiences and
observations at home, for the Persians, as the scholarly Dr. Polak
observes in his classical work on them (I., 206), do not know love in
our sense of the word. The love of which their poets sing has either a
symbolical or an entirely carnal meaning. Girls are married off
without any choice of their own at the early age of twelve or
thirteen; they are regarded as capital and sold for cash, and children
are often engaged in the cradle. When a Persian travels, he leaves his
wife at home and enters into a temporary marriage with other women in
the towns he visits. In rural districts if the traveller is a person
of rank, the mercenary peasants eagerly offer their daughters for such
"marriages." (Hellwald, 439.) Like the Greek poets the Persians show
their contempt for women by always speaking of boy-favorites when
their language rises above the coarsest sensuality. Public opinion
regarding Persian stories and poems has been led astray by the changes
of sex and the expurgations made freely by translators. Burton, whose
version of the _Thousand and One Nights_ was suppressed in England,
wrote _(F.F._, 36), that "about one-fifth is utterly unfit for
translation, and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare to
render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder."
Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea of
altruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love? Evidently from Europe by
way of Arabia. His own language indicates this--his suspicious boast
of his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strange
discovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic. Now it is
well known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had been
brought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and more
intimate. The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives in
chivalrous efforts to save the life or honor of maidens whom the enemy
endeavored to kidnap. The Arabs, on their part, were in close contact
with the European minds, and as they helped to originate the
chivalrous spirit in Europe, so they must have been in turn influenced
by the developments of the troubadour spirit which culminated in such
maxims as Montagnogout's declaration that "a true lover desires a
thousand times more the happiness of his beloved than his own." As
Saadi lived in the time of the troubadours--the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries--it was easy for him to get a knowledge of the European
"ways and forms of courtship." In Persia itself there was no courtship
or legitimate lovemaking, for the "lover" hardly ever had met his
bride before the wedding-day. Nevertheless, if we may believe William
Franklin,[35] a Persian woman might command a suitor to spend all day
in front of her house reciting verses in praise of her beauty; and
H.C. Trumbull naïvely cites, as evidence that Orientals love just as
we do, the following story:
"Morier tells ... of a large painting in a
pleasure-house in Shiraz, illustrative of the treatment
of a loyal lover by a heartless coquette, which is one
of the popular legends of Persia. Sheik Chenan, a
Persian of the true faith, and a man of learning and
consequence, fell in love with an Armenian lady of
great beauty who would not marry him unless he changed
his religion. To this he agreed. Still she would not
marry him unless he would drink wine. This scruple also
he yielded. She resisted still, unless he consented to
eat pork. With this also he complied. Still she was
coy, and refused to fulfil her engagement, unless he
would be contented to drive swine before her. Even this
condition he accepted. She then told him that she would
not have him at all, and laughed at him for his pains.
The picture represents the coquette at her window,
laughing at Sheik Chenan as he is driving his pigs
before her."
This story suggests and may have been invented in imitation of the
foolish and capricious tests to which mediaeval dames in Europe put
their quixotic knights. Few of these knights, as I have said elsewhere
_(R.L.P.B._, 100), "were so manly as the one in Schiller's ballad,
who, after fetching his lady's glove from the lion's den, threw it in
her face," to show how his feelings toward her had changed. If the
Persian in Trumbull's story had been manly and refined enough to be
capable of genuine love, his feelings toward a woman who could
wantonly subject him to such persistent insults and degradation, would
have turned into contempt. Ordinary sensual infatuation, on the other
hand, would be quite strong enough and unprincipled enough to lead a
man to sacrifice religion, honor, and self-respect, for a capricious
woman. This kind of self-sacrifice is not a test of true love, for it
is not altruistic. The sheik did not make his sacrifice to benefit the
woman he coveted, but to benefit himself, as he saw no other way of
gratifying his own selfish desires.[36]