A curious and very entertaining work lies before me, or, to be more
accurate, ramparts me, for it is in four ponderous volumes, capable,
each, even in less powerful hands than those of the Great Lexicographer,
of felling a bookseller. At these volumes I have been sipping, beelike,
at odd times for some years, and I now propose to yield some of the
honey--the season having become timely, since the great majority of the
heroes of its thousands of pages hail from Baghdad; and Baghdad, after
all its wonderful and intact Oriental past, is to-day under Britain's
thumb.
The title of the book is _Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary_,
translated from the Arabic by Bn Mac Guckin de Slane, and printed in
Paris for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland,
1842-71, some centuries after it was written, for its author was dead
before Edward II ascended the English throne. Who would expect Sir
Sidney Lee to have had so remote an exemplar?
Remote not only in time but in distance. For although we may go to the
East for religions and systems of philosophy that were old and proved
worthy centuries before Hellenism or Christianity, yet we do not usually
find there models for our works of reference. Hardly does Rome give us
those. But there is an orderliness and thoroughness about Ibn
Khallikan's methods which the _Dictionary of National Biography_ does
not exceed. The Persian may be more lenient to floridity ("No flowers,
by request," was, it will be remembered, the first English editor's
motto), but in his desire to leave out no one who ought to be in and to
do justice to his inclusions he is beyond praise.
The modernity of the ancients is continually surprising us. It is one of
the phenomena to which we are never quite inured (and could we be so we
should perhaps merely substitute the antiquity of the moderns as a new
source of wonder), but towards such inuring Ibn Khallikan should
certainly help, since he was eminently a gossip, and in order to get
human nature's fidelity to the type--no matter where found, whether æons
ago or to-day, whether in savage lands or, as we say, civilized--brought
home to us, it is to the gossips that we must resort: to the Pepyses and
Boswells rather than to the Goethes and Platos; to the little recorders
rather than the great thinkers. The small traits tell.
Ibn Khallikan's Dictionary is as interesting as it is, not because its
author had any remarkable instinct as a biographer, or any gift of
selection, but because if a man sets out to take account of everything,
much human nature and a little excellence are bound to creep in.
I do not pretend to have dug in these volumes with any great
seriousness. My object has been to extract what was odd and simple and
most characteristic, in short, what was most human, and there is enough
residuum for a horde of other miners. But I warn them that the dross is
considerable. Ibn Khallikan's leniency to trivialities is incorrigible,
and his pages are filled with pointless anecdotes, dull sayings, and
poetry whose only recommendation is its richness in the laboured
conceits that he loved. So much did he esteem them that were, say, all
English intellectual effort in every direction at his disposal to
descant upon, his favourite genius would probably be John Lyly.
But although most of the poetry admired and quoted by Ibn Khallikan is
marked by affectation, now and then--but very rarely--it is beautifully
simple. Thus, in one of the poems of Ibn Zuhr, a learned Moslim teacher
and physician of Spain (1113-99), is expressed, with a tenderness and
charm that no modern or no Greek of the Anthology could exceed, the
ardent desire which he felt for the sight of his child, from whom he
happened to be separated: _I have a little one, a tender nestling, with
whom I have left my heart. I dwell far from him; how desolate I feel in
the absence of that little person and that little face. He longs for me,
and I long for him; for me he weeps, and I weep for him. Our
affectionate wishes are weary with passing from him to me, from me to
him._