guest, in order to free him from dust of the highway and introduce
him worthily to my circle of friends. He will sing them songs of
quite peculiar beauty and voice thoughts of cryptic wisdom that
are pleasanter to listen to than those of the _blasé_ Solomon.” M.
Carrier exclaims joyously at the name: “A blessing upon thy pleasure,
dear inspired drunkard! Thy pleasure is fruit of freedom of the
spirit, of deep, noble feeling, of confidence in God whom he had
seen face to face. Unceasingly he praises spring, love, wine. He is
always offering gems in new settings, but he lacks the epic, the
organic. He is purely lyrist, one meant to attune, then harmonize
emotion. The zealots have written Hafiz down in the black book of
their disapproval. He advised them to pawn their priestly cowls for
wine. Silver and gold are to him negligible things in comparison with
freedom of soul. He desired greater, better things. And he found
them! He brought heaven down upon earth. In intoxication of the
spirit he found the flowing light of revelation. In wine he found
truth. This is the way to look at Hafiz. Not as a wine tippler after
the manner of Falstaff, but as wine’s high priest, crowned with
vine-leaves, and its singer.”
Among nations of today the influence of Hafiz has been greatest
in Germany, just as the English Byron’s influence was greatest in
Russia. And there it is interesting to note the effect upon Goethe.
He was an old man as years count, (He who was never old.), in the
early seventies, when he first read Hafiz. Straightway he wrote
memorable things of him: “That you can not end, that makes you
great.... Your song is like the whirling star-set sky, on and on,
the same.... And should the entire world perish and pass away, with
you, with you, Hafiz, I will emulously strive. Let Joy and Pain, the
twins, be yours and mine alone! To love, to live, to drink like you,
be that my pride!”
This from Goethe, the calm, olympic God! This from Goethe, who
believed in Greek standards of unemotional excellence! What was the
result? In Hafiz, Goethe found another youth. He bathed in the spring
of oriental love, life, was renewed and grew young. And he gave
us again a poet’s book of youth, fire, fancy, _Der West-Östlicher
Divan_. This book we owe to Hafiz! It has the fresh charm that
distinguishes the _Vita Nuova_. It has all that delights in books of
youth, without defects.
Goethe exclaimed with joy: “I will grow young! I will mingle with the
herds’ boys in the desert! I will refresh myself in the oasis, in the
waste places!”
Sometimes we are forced to think he borrowed from this Eastern poet.
But he did not try to conceal it. He was great enough to borrow
without bowed head. Hafiz’ meters and somewhat of his manner have
become naturalized in Germany, thanks to men like Platen, Rückert.
The Germans, too, have translated Hafiz better than other nations.
There we find him freest from foreign substance, clearer, less
_betrübt_.
Hafiz has the conversational freedom, fluency, which distinguish Tu
Fu, and which give his poems freshness. Sometimes they have effect
of brilliant improvisation, that promptitude of the moment, which
fastidious Watteau held to be the essential of art. He has primal
fire. His sunlight dazzles us. It is too strong for eyes accustomed
to dilutions, to tempered shadows. His roses are brilliant, richly
scented, and of the East; they are unlike pale, pastel tinted shadows
into which Eighteenth Century art conventionalized them. He had not
learned to like the mixing of light with shadow. He paints as Watteau
painted his _Italian Clown_, under direct hard light, straight
fronting us. We must learn to see with a painter’s trained eye the
modulations of white. He knew how to _harmonizer le blanc_. Watteau,
the lyric painter, is his kin in plastic art of the brush. He is
likewise his kin in scornful, contemptuous creation of beauty, and in
his scorn of things that perish. But it is not wise to write of one
art in terms of another.
Strong indeed must have been the personality that burst priestly
restraint six hundred years ago! And sure indeed was his realization
of self.
What capability for suffering! What a tender heart in the midst of
joy that is pagan! He was a tearful jester, a scornful, sardonic
romancer, a gentle, heroic reader of the riddle of life. In his
plaint there is perhaps something of Verlaine, of Villon. But nothing
of their manner. His grief never became the melancholy of a less
vigorous age. Always in it there was joy of the struggle, strength to
endure. A peculiar mental combination in truth; mediæval seriousness
from which thought of death is seldom absent, combined with the
reasoned blitheness of a Greek.
Hafiz was a jovial fellow with a host of friends. They played part in
his life, we gather from his poems. There we see the shadowy, unnamed
forms of a merry, talented company. Youths, handsome as Antinous of
old, but of whose name we have no slightest hint, lure us with charm
of mystery.
It would be interesting to know the youthful friends with whom he
jested, made merry. Like the Greeks, the Persians loved the beauty
of men in youth. They have written about them, as the Greeks wrote.
There are lines which are made more acceptable by changing the
personal pronoun to feminine gender.
In poetry today friendship is seldom celebrated. Nor more do we
find eloquence of denunciative wrath. Such elements of power, of
rebellion, belong to an earlier age, to the day when Cicero was
orating against Cataline, or when Firdusi was writing his splendid
satire to Sultan Mahmud. Our poetry, symbolically speaking, is what
autumn says to the rose. Hafiz’ poetry is what spring says to the
same immortal flower. And the difference is the difference between
things that live and things that die ... and rise not.
Many and varied qualities go to this lyric supremacy: the natural art
of Petofi, its characteristic lyric freedom, the golden fluency of
Puschkin; the pitiful sweetness of Catullus; the intellectual reach
of Rûmi, the mystic; the limpid racial charm of Mistral, all are
here, but made more direct, informed with fiercer fire.
Hafiz was last of the great ones. After him came imitation,
insincerity, mental decay. Dschami, who lived in the century after
Hafiz, writing of it says: “The new scholars have invented to be sure
verse and rhyme, but except bare verse and rhyme everything else
has vanished. No one troubles himself whether it contains phantasie,
truth, or falsehood. And yet Oh! Great God, how splendid is poetry!
How exalted, how dignified! Oh that I were a poet! Where is there an
art more splendid, that more mightily ensnares!” Dschami came after
the great ones. It has been wittily remarked of him that he possessed
all their qualities _except their originality_. Rückert says of
him: _Dschami hat nah daran gedichtet_, referring to the masters of
Persian poetry.
The heart of every Persian echoes to Hafiz, just as Germany, and
indeed Europe, has echoed to the music of Heine. It is interesting to
note in passing, that in 1814 a poet was born in Shiraz, Hussein Ali
Mirza, who has been accused of imitating Heine. We translate from an
orientalist: “... either the translator has _frisiert à la Europa_
too greatly, the new Iranian poet, Prince Hussein Ali, or else he has
read Heine. This kind of sentiment does not belong to the East.”
Heine and Hafiz were most alike perhaps in their consuming fear of
death. They were so vivid the thought of _not being_ was terrifying.
It is felt in whatever they wrote. It did not enervate them. It
inspired them to eloquence, to rebellion. In technical equipment the
poets stand shoulder to shoulder. In grace, in fanciful invention,
they were likewise equal. But the Hebrew and the Persian possessed
in greater degree the power of passion, anger, and the strength to
use them. Tu Fu was a lyric genius, of whom years of training made a
master. Yet it seems to us that none has made art so absolute a thing
as did Anacreon, in the days when his race were making models for
remaining time to copy. However, this is matter of temperament, which
helps render criticism uncertain.
There was an interesting superstition in the long ago regarding
the two older, Hafiz and Anacreon, to the effect that to read them
brought madness. Its origin is as deeply veiled in mystery as origin
of the wandering quatrains of Persia. But we recognize gladly a
tribute to power.
Both Hafiz and Heine, with Tu Fu, have that inexplainable quality
that touches the heart. They say the things we can not forget. But
there was an elfish caprice in Heine which Hafiz did not have,
just as there was a mystic yearning in the Persian the Hebrew did
not know. And in Tu Fu there were heights of lyric rapture none
have surpassed. They were not lonely geniuses, seeking solitude,
meditation. They lived in the whirl of life. They learned wisdom
of its sadness. Heine had the beauty-loving soul of an ancient
Greek, the restless pitiful heart of a modern, and the passionate
vengeance, the hate of the Hebrew. He realized in his life, in the
few years of health granted him, the fierce, furious ideals of
pleasure of Anacreon and Hafiz. He lived like a God. And he received
the punishment of a God, in a consuming Promethean fire of pain,
that crippled him, then burned up his life. Each lived in an age of
mental expansion, when minds were creative. The Paris of Heine was
the most brilliant age of that gay city by the Seine, when she best
deserved the proud appellation of _the step-mother of genius_. Poland
had fallen. Paris was filled with a crowd of brilliant Slav exiles.
It was the day, too, of Eugene Sue, Berlioz, George Sand, de Musset,
Dumas, Gautier, the Goncourt Brothers, Gavarni, Saint Beuve, Liszt,
Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Ary, Sheffer, Delacroix, Horace Vernet.
Mickiewicz was there, too, editing the fourth volume of his poetry.
And Julius Slowacki, and Count Krasinski. After the period of these
men had passed there was no more writing whose inspiration came from
deep conviction, and which was indifferent to gold and to the praise
of the world. Tu Fu lived at the time lyric verse reached its height
under art loving Emperors of Tang, and when one of the proudest
periods of plastic art was beginning, the Period of Sung Emperors.
Anacreon was borne on the crest of the wave that was sweeping on to
the sublime heights of Greek culture. And Hafiz, who wrote in _the
divine, high piping Pehlevi_ of old Omar, _the language of heroes_,
crowns the crest of the great age of Persian lyric poetry.
Anacreon is product of soft, sensuous Ionia, home of art and
song. Hafiz is product of the mystic imagination of India, of her
unreckoned centuries of culture and meditation, and the dominant
clear thinking wisdom of Persia. Tu Fu was the mental product of
three thousand years of intensive cultivation.
Heine is product of the prophetic fury and eloquence of Israel and
the grace of France. Heine and Hafiz had no little in common. They
are to be added to the list of inspired teachers who have come out of
Asia. Each was born into a received religion, but neither bore its
limitation nor its restraint. Each was receptively tolerant of the
religion of others, while having none of his own. Heine said proudly:
_I am the freest man since Goethe!_ Hafiz said equally proudly, in
his Rubaiyat: “Only he is happy who draws inspiration from all
things beautiful just so long as he shall be permitted to live!”
Heine loved the Orient. He longed for it. Heine has written a lyric
of a pine in the north girdled with snow and ice, dreaming of a palm
in the Orient. Like Gautier he dreamed of life under a bluer sky,
its splendor of light. He read and loved the poets of Persia, Hafiz,
Firdusi, Rûmi, Nizami. Schlegel was just telling the German world
of that day of the literary treasures of Asia. In Heine he found a
receptive listener. The oriental blood in his veins answered to call
of the Persian poets. He, too, was of the East.
At the same time both Heine and Hafiz are modern, because of their
free, their inquiring souls. No other writers have so eloquently
expressed grief at the vanity of life. The lyric poets of other races
and ages have not had their tragic fire, power of denunciation,
nor their philosophic depth. None have so rebelled against life’s
briefness, its inexorableness. None have so sounded hollowness of all
things human.
At the same time the mind of each has been rainbow-prismed with joy.
It is people of Asiatic blood who are capable of transitions from
grief to joy. The fog bound lands of Europe can not shelter such
chameleon-like changefulness.
The throb of warring ages in which they lived was in their blood.
It beat in their verses. It modeled their measures. They were
indebted to its storm, its stress for vivid vitality. And they were
indebted likewise for warmer blood. Great lyric poets must come
of impassioned, Asiatic races. Something hinders their European
brothers, binds their utterance. They can not make of their souls a
torch of joy to light a moment. They lack the passionate conviction
that makes them great.
Each was born upon crest of an age of transition that resembles the
one in which we live. A period that followed wars! Heine was born
the last year of the Great Century, 1799. He saw blind worship of
royal power, prerogative, give way to the modern spirit of freedom.
Hafiz was born at end of a period of religious intensity which gave
way during his life to a genial culture. Both felt the battling,
invigorating influences of two distinct ages, each of which was
strongly marked.
In Heine’s day art and letters reached highest development in Europe,
just as lyric verse did in Persia in the age of Hafiz. And again in
China, under Tang Emperors. After them came _le déluge_, which took
guise of a wide-spread dilettantism, form without matter. Both Heine
and Hafiz were pagans in that they clung to world of the senses;
but they were modern in their lack of calmness, their restlessness,
and in their dramatic dissatisfaction. Their hearts were lutes upon
which the winds of the world blew. And with them love and hate were
the destructive passions of an Asiatic race. Both were past masters
of the art of expression. They knew how to say much in little. They
could condense history or a romance into a quatrain, a couplet. Both
were great and fluent artists. And they fought in their own way as
best they could the battle of enlightenment of the human spirit. Each
hated cant, hypocrisy, cowardliness, and vain seeming. Each felt and
suffered the scorn, the hatred of his fellow men, then learned sadly
to know that he who wishes to accomplish anything whatsoever, or has
ideals of any kind to fight for, must know that the wings of his
spirit are strong.
Each clung pitifully while the world abused and reviled him, to the
only real thing he could find, to the only thing that gave pleasure,
that intoxicating world of the senses whose too frequent kiss, like
that of the Slavic Venus, brings death.
The Greek had the sanest view of this world’s life, the surest
sense of beauty. The Hebrew had such a pitiful thirst for love,
for something stable amid change, it stung him to desperation. The
Persian thought most deeply, most logically of the mystery of life.
The result of his thinking was, _We can not know. We can not know._
In expression each was an artist. And each was great because he was
sincere. _Palmam qui meruit ferat._
I read Horace first in an old university town in the north. Each
night as I walked home from lectures, autumn leaves were being
burned in fragrant piles, under long rows of trees that still were
faintly amber, faintly crimson. I came from the burned plains where
there were no trees. And at night over these same richly tree-shaded
streets, and over the broad lonely campus where dark pointed
evergreens grew, the Hunter’s Moon hung, large and lustrous.
Because of this, and likewise because of something in the nature of
the Roman poet, it has always seemed to me that Horace is read best
in the autumn. There is something in his mind that is native to the
season. He came from the ripe, mellow autumn of a rich, a prodigious
civilization that time was just beginning to touch with the shadows
of age. Quintillian takes pains to tell us old Latin writers were
stronger in genius than art. The opposite was true of Horace. With
him poetry was not inspiration. He did not know its self-forgetful
fury. Instead, it was one of the ornaments of a well-tempered life,
out of which he wished to procure as much comfort as he could. In his
verse there is nothing wonderful. At the same time it has an immortal
touch. He was not a great imaginative poet. He was not a gifted
dramatic poet. He seldom stirs the blood. But he has a smooth, even
excellence, a companionableness, a marvelous proportion of word to
thought. He is master of felicitous expression.
What was he to the Rome of his day? Was he what through accomplished
Latin lecturers and study, he has become to us? Was he great as an
artist? Or have years colored him, and the modern mind thrown over
him a romantic halo? Or do we find him charming because he opens a
door into the vanished world of Rome, where existed so many alluring
pictures of memory, which we have loved, then dumbly longed for? Did
he ripen with years? Did the smoke of time do for him what it did for
Sabine wine, sweeten, mellow? Are there poets read best centuries
after their day?
In him there is no restless modernity, no futile chasing of rainbows.
Yet this serene art could not picture our world. We can measure
changes which have come. It requires something tumultuous, less
smooth, equable; less definite in outline. The model is at fault
for sketchiness of written art, and a certain unsatisfactoriness as
regards presentation. The reproduction must be nervous, with harsh
lights, crude shadows. In the finished product absolutism is lacking.
There is something that is trivial, infinitesimal, that sees darkly.
Art has become uncertain. It no longer moves boldly. It has become
a thing of temperament, instead of mind. The art of the pagan world
was firmer. It approached life differently. Roman poets praise the
masculine sound of the Latin lyre.
The philosophy, the thinking, of that antique day was muscled. It
was sure, unwavering in line, as marbles. They had a firmer grasp
upon life, _the fact_. We find Horace firm amid the shifting present.
We can not find poetry so satisfying as his calm surveyal of things
as they are. The pagan’s philosophic view of the inevitable, the
nothingness which confronts man, tempered their natures. It made them
truer, fonder, more pitiful. Regret for loss by death was greater.
They lived like guests flower-crowned at a banquet, unseen above
whose head Fate shoots death’s arrows down. Therefore it was pleasant
to grasp hands, feel sympathy. Christianity has weakened friendship.
Strangely enough it has made us love each other less. Having God we
do not need man.
At times Horace is soberly meditative, but he is seldom sad with
haunting modern sadness. Perhaps blitheness was pagan sadness, too
deep for tears. He was not subject to blues, ill temper. A cultivated
pagan did not take these liberties with himself or others. Byronic
madness had not come. Reason still had power. Time was precious.
There was not a heaven in which to find it restored. We are misers
with dollars, in addition to being foolish egoists. They were wiser
misers with time, with its joy.
It is pleasant, occasionally, to dream back into this serene age, to
move, a little space, among calm, griefless white Wedgewood-figures
that have given over regret, that neither hope nor fear, yet whose
joy was tempered by clear consciousness of the end. No one can see
all things from the beginning. We must be satisfied with the day’s
vision.
Horace had a calm, disillusioned mind, without ideals. Life was too
short to grow vain things. Ideals were insistent, therefore bad
taste. The world was as it was. He could remake, change nothing. For
this reason he decided to be _the poet of things as they are_.
In the literatures of Greece and Rome there are no diseases of the
spirit. There is no questioning of the supreme facts of existence.
They are sane. They are models of right seeing. No energy is wasted
in rebellion. Their charm is not that of a wild, erratic view point
for the glorifying of self. A thing to be good had to be something
besides _new_. _L’art nouveau_ would have met disdain.
They are sane with nature’s unchanging sanity which we are losing.
They do not strain the mind to acrobatic seeing. Novelty was not
synonymous with quality. This body, this life, belong to earth where
they are placed. It is well not to tamper things that do not concern
us. Not without reason was the box of Pandora closed. Whenever we
open it, we find a new ill. Take things as they are. Be happy. It
is sad we can not make pagan sanity contagious as our questioning
restlessness.
In Horace there is no madness of the crusader, no fantastic gallantry
of knighthood. We are glad of their absence. Pagan literature is a
place of mental rehabilitation. To be _en rapport_ with a pagan of
Horace’s day it was necessary to enjoy with him. To be _en rapport_
with a modern it is necessary to weep with him. We play the _comédie
larmoyante_. Modern art cares for sensations. Heart-throbs are the
thing! It might take for its motto:—_Fac me tecum plangere_. Today it
is only the artist (whose soul is always pagan) who finds life good.
Anatole France says that without him (the artist) we might doubt the
fact.
Surely there is no one more fit to read in a garden, under the moon
of autumn, than city-bred Horace with his plea for rustic merriment.
He loved country life. He pictured it. They had in his day a fresher
feeling for simple things, a nymph-like nearness and affection;
delight in fresh grass, cool running water, young flowers with dew on
them. Simple things were precious enough to be mentioned on equality
with chosen guests to make happy a holiday. To the poet is given
clearer vision of such things. He is equipped by nature to take
pleasure in them. In addition, Latin races have had vivid sense of
_reality_. It is one source of their strength.
Horace loved the banks of Tiber, as Keats the green English
Thames-side, Hafiz, valley of the Roknabad, and Tu Fu his
bamboo-shaded rivers. Each has been emphatic in dislike of going
elsewhere. Each painted the home country he loved.
There are scenes among the poets, bits of landscape, more real, more
endeared to me than any I see in life. They are changeless. They
are superior to time. They give illusion of things that do not grow
old. By sympathetic folly I remain young with them. They are always
waiting for me untouched by the season. I know just where to find
them. After time has made me old, to go back to them, affects me
like going home. In fact, one of my ideals has been realized in the
changeless things of art.
How different were the adjectives which Horace applied to natural
objects from those we use! In them I can see the clear, unvexed mind
that observed. He seized description by a different corner. His
impressions were fresher, quicker. To him clouds were _steep_ clouds,
(_nubibus arduis_). He saw first the striking thing. For this reason
his descriptions give the sensation of looking at an etching, crisp,
sure, before repeated reproductions have blurred it. An advantage was
with him. He had the world before it became second-hand. He has shown
attractive scenes.