Shemsuddin Mahommad, better known by his poetical surname of Hafiz, was
born in Shiraz in the early part of the fourteenth century.[1] His
names, being interpreted, signify the Sun of the Faith, the
Praiseworthy, and One who can recite the Koran; he is further known to
his compatriots under the titles of the Tongue of the Hidden and the
Interpreter of Secrets. The better part of his life was spent in Shiraz,
and he died in that city towards the close of the century. The exact
date either of his birth or of his death is unknown. He fell upon
turbulent times. His delicate love-songs were chanted to the rude
accompaniment of the clash of arms, and his dreams must have been
interrupted often enough by the nip of famine in a beleaguered town, the
inrush of conquerors, and the flight of the defeated.
The history of Persia in the fourteenth century is exceedingly confused.
Beyond a succession of wars and turmoils, there is little to be learnt
concerning the political conditions under which Hafiz lived. Fifty years
before the birth of the poet, Hulagu, a grandson of the great Tartar
invader Chinghis Khan, had conquered Baghdad, putting to death the last
of the Abbaside Khalifs and extinguishing the direct line of the race
that had ruled over Persia since 750. For the next 200 years there is
indeed a branch of the family of Abbas living in Cairo, members of which
were set up as Khalifs by the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt; but they were
destitute of any real authority, and their position was that of
dependants in the Mamluk court.
The sons and grandsons of Hulagu succeeded him as lords of Persia and
Mesopotamia, paying a nominal allegiance to the Great Khan of the
Mongols in Cambalec or Pekin, but for all practical purposes
independent, and the different provinces of their empire were
administered by governors in their name. About the time of the birth of
Hafiz, that is to say in the beginning of the fourteenth century, a
certain Mahmud Shah Inju was governing the province of Fars, of which
Shiraz is the capital, in the name of Abu Said, the last of the direct
descendants of Hulagu. On the death of Mahmud Shah, Abu Said appointed
Sheikh Hussein ibn Juban to the governorship of Fars, a lucrative and
much-coveted post. Sheikh Hussein took the precaution of ordering the
three sons of Mahmud Shah to be seized and imprisoned; but while they
were passing through the streets of Shiraz in the hands of their
captors, their mother, who accompanied them, lifted her veil and made a
touching appeal to the people, calling upon them to remember the
benefits they had received from their late ruler, the father of the
three boys. Her words took instant effect; the inhabitants rose,
released her and her sons, and drove Sheikh Hussein into exile. He,
however, returned with an army supplied by Abu Said, and induced Shiraz
to submit again to his rule. In 1335, a year or two after these events,
Abu Said died, and the power of the house of Hulagu crumbled away. There
followed a long period of anarchy, which was brought to an end when
Oweis, another descendant of Hulagu, seized the throne. He and his son
Ahmed reigned in Baghdad until Ahmed was driven out by the invading army
of Timur. But during the years of anarchy the authority of the Sultan of
Baghdad had been considerably curtailed. On Abu Said’s death, Abu Ishac,
one of the three sons of Mahmud Shah Inju who had so narrowly escaped
from the hands of Sheikh Hussein, took possession of Shiraz and Isfahan,
finally ousting his old enemy, while Mahommad ibn Muzaffar, who had
earned a name for valour in the service of Abu Said, made himself master
of Yezd.
From this time onward the governors of the Persian provinces seem to
have given a nominal allegiance now to the Sultan of Baghdad, now to the
more distant Khalif. The position of Shiraz between Baghdad and Cairo
must have resembled that of Venice between Rome and Constantinople, and,
like Venice, she was obedient to neither lord.
Abu Ishac had not steered his bark into quiet waters. In 1340 Shiraz was
besieged and taken by a rival Atabeg, and the son of Mahmud Shah was
obliged to content himself with Isfahan. But in the following year he
returned, captured Shiraz by a stratagem, and again established himself
as ruler over all Fars. The remaining years of his reign are chiefly
occupied with military expeditions against Yezd, where Mahommad ibn
Muzaffar and his sons were building up a formidable power. In 1352,
determined to put an end to these attacks, Mahommad marched into Fars
and laid siege to Shiraz. Abu Ishac, whose life was one of perpetual
dissipation, redoubled his orgies in the face of danger. Uncertain of
the fidelity of the people of Shiraz, he put to death all the
inhabitants of two quarters of the town, and contemplated insuring
himself of a third quarter in a similar manner. But these measures did
not lead to the desired results. The chief of the threatened quarter got
wind of the King’s design, and delivered up the keys of his gate to Shah
Shudja, son of Mahommad ibn Muzaffar, and Abu Ishac was obliged to seek
refuge a second time in Isfahan. Four years later, in 1357, he was given
up to Mahommad, who sent him to Shiraz and, with a fine sense of
dramatic fitness, had him beheaded in an open space before the ruins of
Persepolis.
The Arab traveller Ibn Batuta, who visited Shiraz between the years 1340
and 1350, has left a description of its ruler: “Abu Ishac,” says he, “is
one of the best Sultans that can be found” (it must be confessed that
the average of Sultans was not very high in Ibn Batuta’s time); “he is
fair of face, imposing of presence, and his conduct is no less to be
admired. His mind is generous, his character remarkable, and he is
modest although his power is great and his territories extensive. His
army exceeds the number of 30,000 men, Turks and Persians. The most
faithful of his subjects are the inhabitants of Isfahan; but he fears
the Shirazis, who are a brave people, not to be controlled by kings, and
he will not trust them with arms.”[2] This view of his relations with
the two towns tallies with Abu Ishac’s subsequent history, and points to
a considerable power of observation on the part of Ibn Batuta. But he
relates a tale which would seem to show that Abu Ishac was not unpopular
even in Shiraz: on a certain occasion he wished to build a great gate in
that city, and hearing of his desire the inhabitants vied with each
other in their eagerness to satisfy it; men of all ranks turned out to
do the work, putting on their best clothes and digging the foundations
with spades of silver. Abu Ishac shared the passion of the age for
letters, and was anxious to be accounted a rival to the King of Delhi in
his generosity to men of learning; “but,” sighs Ibn Batuta, “how far is
the earth removed from the Pleiades!” The Persian historian who
describes Abu Ishac’s execution, quotes a quatrain which the Atabeg is
supposed to have written while he was in prison:
“Lay down thine arms when Fortune is thy foe,
’Gainst Heaven’s wheel, Wrestler, try not a throw,
Drink steadfastly the cup whose name is Death,
Empty the dregs upon the earth, and go.”
So perished the first patron of Hafiz.
From 1353 to 1393, when Timur conquered Shiraz for the second and last
time, the greater part of Persia was ruled by members of the house of
Muzaffar. Scarcely a year passed undisturbed by civil war, scarcely a
year in which one of the sons or grandsons of Mahommad did not suffer
imprisonment or worse ills at the hands of his brothers. Mahommad
himself was the first to fall. Shah Shudja seized his father while he
was reading the Koran aloud with a poet of his court, and caused him to
be blinded. A few years later the grim life beat itself out against the
prison walls of Ka’lah-i-Safid. “Without just cause,” sings Hafiz, “the
victor of victors suffered imprisonment; guiltless, the mightiest head
was laid low. He had overcome Shiraz and Tabriz and Irak; at the last
his own hour came. He who, in the eyes of the world, was the light he
had kindled (_i.e._ Mahommad’s son, Shah Shudja), through those eyes
which had gazed victorious upon the world, thrust the hot iron.” A stern
and pitiless man was this Mahommad, brave in battle, wise in council,
ardent in religion, but hard and cruel beyond measure, a perfidious
friend and a relentless enemy. The Persian historian, Lutfallah, relates
that on several occasions he had seen criminals brought before Mahommad
while the Amir was engaged in reading the Koran. Laying the book aside,
he would draw his sword and kill the offenders as they stood, and then
return unmoved to his devotions. Shah Shudja once asked his father
whether he had killed 1000 men with his own hand. “No,” replied
Mahommad, “but I think that the number of them that I have slain must
reach 800.”
After his death, Shah Shudja reigned in Shiraz, and his brother Shah
Yahya in Yezd. Shah Shudja was a man of like energy with his father, but
it was an energy directed into different channels; the stern religious
ardour of the elder man was changed into a spirit of frenzied
dissipation in the younger. Whenever he was not engaged in conducting
expeditions against his brothers and nephews, he was taking part in the
wildest orgies in Shiraz. He was scarcely less cruel than Mahommad. In a
fit of drunkenness he ordered one of his own sons to be blinded, and
though, at the instance of his vizir, he repented and sent a second
messenger hot foot after the first, it was already too late to save the
boy. Before Shah Shudja’s death the knell of the house of Muzaffar had
sounded—Tamberlain and his Tartar hordes had advanced into Northern
Persia. In 1382 Shah Shudja sent a propitiatory embassy to him with
gifts—jewels and silks, horses, a scarlet daïs, a royal standard, and a
Chinese umbrella; and Timur in return sent the King a robe of honour and
a belt studded with jewels.
Worn out before his time with riotous living, Shah Shudja did his utmost
to secure the welfare of his family before he died. He sent letters both
to Timur and to Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad recommending to their protection
his son Zein-el-Abeddin, his brothers, and his nephews. The curtain is
drawn aside for a moment from the death-bed of the King, and an
anecdote, such as Oriental historians love, reveals to us the fearless
and terrible face. Hearing that his brother Ahmed was preparing to
dispute the succession with Zein-el-Abeddin, he sent for him in order to
persuade him to withdraw his claims. But when Ahmed entered the room
where Shah Shudja lay sick to death, both brothers burst into tears, and
Ahmed was so much overcome by emotion that he was obliged to withdraw.
Thereupon Shah Shudja sent him a letter by the hand of a faithful
servant. “The world,” he said, “is like unto the shadow of a cloud and a
dream of the night; for the one has no resting-place, and when the
dreamer awakens there remains to him but a vain memory of the other. I
foresee much disturbance in Shiraz; Kerman is the home of our fathers. I
have no complaint to lay at your door; but now that I am about to fare
upon a long journey, if you were to become a sower of discord, not I
alone would reproach you, but God also; and our enemies would rejoice.
Go therefore to Kerman and renounce this unhappy city.” And Ahmed went.
Shah Shudja died in the odour of sanctity. Ten holy men were with him
continually, reading the Koran aloud from end to end each day. He left
behind him a name renowned for courage and for liberality. He was a
poet, after the fashion of kings, and from boyhood he could repeat the
Koran by heart.
The son, whose future he had spent his last hours in assuring, was not
to remain for long upon the throne bequeathed to him by his father.
During his short reign, Zein-el-Abeddin was engaged in defending himself
from the attacks of his cousin Mansur, but in 1388 he was obliged to
flee before an enemy more terrible than any he had yet known. Timur, who
for several years had been hovering upon the borders of Fars, overran
Southern Persia and took Shiraz. Zein-el-Abeddin sought refuge with
Mansur, who repaid his confidence by imprisoning and blinding him. It
must have been in the year 1388 that the celebrated interview between
Hafiz and Timur took place (see note to Poem V.), and not at the time of
the second conquest of Shiraz in 1393. The confusion between the two
dates has led several writers to doubt the truth of the story, since it
is almost certain that the poet had died before 1393. Timur bestowed
Shiraz upon Shah Yahya, uncle to Mansur, and some time governor of Yezd;
but no sooner was the Tartar army called away by disturbances in the
northern parts of the empire than Mansur overthrew his uncle and
possessed himself of Shiraz. Hafiz did not live to see the end of the
drama, but the end was not far off. In 1393 Timur advanced with 30,000
picked men against Mansur. The Muzaffaride, with only 3000 or 4000 men,
twice charged into the heart of the Tartar force, and at one moment
Timur’s own life was in danger. Mansur, who was himself fighting in the
thickest of the battle, sent a message back to the wings of his army,
ordering them to support his desperate charge; but they did not obey his
command. He fell fighting beneath the sword of Shah Rukh Mirza, Timur’s
son, leaving the conqueror to “march in triumph through Persepolis.”
Courage was a quality in which the descendants of Mahommad ibn Muzaffar
were not deficient, but among a race of soldiers Mansur seems to have
been distinguished for his reckless bearing. He, too, like the other
members of his family, was a patron of learning, and it is related that
he used to distribute 200 tomans daily among the poor scholars of
Shiraz. Both on account of their popularity and of their bravery, Timur
saw that there would be no peace for him in Shiraz while one member of
the house of Muzaffar remained alive; Mansur’s survivors were put to the
sword.
Through all these changes of fortune, Hafiz appears to have played the
prudent, if rather unromantic part of the Vicar of Bray. The slender
thread of his personal history is made up for the most part of more or
less mythical anecdote. He was the son, according to one tradition, of a
baker of Shiraz, in which city he was probably educated. The poet Jami
says that he does not know under what Sufi doctor Hafiz studied. As a
young man, however, he was one of the followers of Sheikh Mahmud Attar,
who would seem to have been somewhat of a free-lance among the learned
men of Shiraz. Sheikh Mahmud did not give himself up completely to the
contemplative life, but combined the functions of a teacher with those
of a dealer in fruit and vegetables. “Oh disciple of the tavern!” sings
Hafiz, “give me the precious goblet, that I may drink to the Sheikh who
has no monastery.” Sheikh Mahmud’s attitude doubtless brought him under
the condemnation of the stricter Sufis, of the disciples of a certain
Sheikh Hassan Asrakpush in particular, who, as the title of their master
denotes, clad themselves only in blue garments, and declared that their
minds were filled with heavenly desires, just as their bodies were
clothed in the colour of heaven. Hafiz falls foul of this rival school
in several of his poems. “I am the servant,” he says, “of all who
scatter the dregs of the cup and are clothed in one colour (that is,
clothed in sincerity), but not of them whose bodies are clad in blue
while black is the colour of their heart.” And again: “Give me not the
cup until I have torn from my breast the blue robe,” by which he means
that he cannot receive the teachings of true wisdom until he has
divested himself of the errors of the uninitiated. From Sheikh Mahmud,
perhaps, he learnt a wholesome philosophy which enabled him to see
through the narrow-minded asceticism of other religious teachers,
whether Sufi or orthodox, and he was not unmindful of the debt he owed
him. “My Grey-Beard,” he sings, “who scatters the dregs of the wine, has
neither gold nor power, but God has made him both munificent and
merciful.” And indeed if he succeeded in unchaining the spirit of his
disciple from useless prejudice, it may be admitted that the Sheikh went
far towards providing him with a good equipment for life. Although he
never submitted to any strict monastic rule, Hafiz assumed the dervish
habit of which he speaks so contemptuously. We must suppose that he took
the precaution, which he himself recommends, of washing it clean in the
wine that Sheikh Mahmud provided for him; in other words, that he
tempered his orthodoxy with the freer doctrines he had derived from his
teacher. He also became a sheikh.
How he first revealed his inimitable gift of song is not known. There is
a tradition that upon a certain day one of his uncles was engaged in
composing a poem upon Sufiism, and being but a mediocre poetaster, could
get no further than the first line. Hafiz took up the sheet in his
uncle’s absence and completed the verse. The uncle was not a little
annoyed; he bade Hafiz finish the poem, and at the same time cursed him
and his works. “They shall bring insanity,” he declared, “upon all that
read them.” Men say that the curse still hangs over the Divan, therefore
let no one whose reason is not strongly seated venture to study the
poet. Whatever were his beginnings, it was not long before the young man
rose into high repute. Abu Ishac was his first patron. “By the favour of
the victorious standards of a king,” says Hafiz, “I was uplifted like a
banner among the makers of verse.” There is a long poem addressed to Abu
Ishac, in which he is called the King under whose feet the garden of his
kingdom bursts into flower. “Oh great and holy!” cries the poet, “every
man who is a servant of thine is uplifted so high that the stars of
Gemini are but as his girdle.” Hafiz must have been in Shiraz when Abu
Ishac was brought thither, a prisoner, from Isfahan; he may even have
witnessed his execution outside Persepolis. “Fate overtook him,” he
sighs, “all too speedily—alas for the violence and oppression in this
world of pitfalls! alas for the grace and the mercy that dwelt among us!
Hast thou not heard, oh Hafiz, the laugh of the strutting partridge?
Little considered be the clutching talons of the falcon of death.”
From the protection of Abu Ishac, Hafiz passed into that of Shah Shudja,
but the relations between the two men seem to have been somewhat
strained. Shah Shudja may have distrusted the loyalty of one to whom Abu
Ishac had been so good a patron; moreover, he nursed a professional
jealousy of Hafiz, being himself a writer of occasional verse. The
historian Khondamir tells of an interview which cannot have increased
the goodwill of either interlocutor towards the other. Shah Shudja
reproached Hafiz with the discursiveness of his songs. “In one and the
same,” he said, “you write of wine, of Sufiism, and of the object of
your affections. Now this is contrary to the practice of the eloquent.”
“That which your Majesty has deigned to speak,” replied Hafiz (laying
his tongue in his cheek, though Khondamir does not mention the fact),
“is the essence of the truth; yet the poems of Hafiz enjoy a wide
celebrity, whereas those of some other writers have not passed beyond
the gates of Shiraz.” But an occasional bandying of sharp speeches, in
which the King usually came off second best, did little harm to a
friendship which was based upon a marked correspondence in tastes.
“Since the hour,” declares Hafiz, “that the wine-cup received honour
from Shah Shudja, Fortune has put the goblet of joy into the hand of all
wine-drinkers”; and in several poems he welcomes Shah Shudja’s accession
to the throne and the consequent removal of an edict against the
drinking of wine: “The daughter of the grape has repented of her
retirement; she went to the keeper of the peace (_i.e._ Shah Shudja) and
received permission for her deeds. Forth came she from behind the
curtain that she might tell her lovers that she has turned about.”
Partly out of gratitude, partly with an eye to future favours, Hafiz
proclaimed the glory of Shah Shudja, just as he had proclaimed that of
the hapless Abu Ishac, and the King was not averse from such good wishes
as these from the most famous poet of the age: “May the ball of the
heavens be for ever in the crook of thy polo stick, and the whole world
be a playing-ground unto thee. The fame of thy goodness has conquered
the four quarters of the earth; may it be for all time a guardian unto
thee!”
One of Shah Shudja’s vizirs, Hadji Kawameddin Hassan, was also a good
friend to Hafiz. In the poems he is frequently alluded to as the second
Assaf (the first Assaf having been King Solomon’s vizir, renowned for
his wisdom), while Shah Shudja masquerades under the title of Solomon
himself. On his return from a journey, probably to Yezd, Hafiz spent
some months in the house of the Vizir—induced thereto by a cogent
argument. In one of the poems there is a dialogue between himself and a
friend, in which the friend says to him, “When after two years’ absence
thy destiny has brought thee home, why comest thou not out of thy
master’s house?” Hafiz replies that the road in which he walks is not of
his choosing: “An officer of my judge stands, like a serpent, in ambush
upon the path, and whenever I would pass beyond my master’s threshold he
serves me with a summons and hurries me back into my prison.” He goes on
to remark that under these painful circumstances he finds his master’s
house a sure refuge, and the servants of the Vizir useful allies against
the officers of the law. “If any one proffers a demand to me there, I
call to my aid the strong arm of one of the Vizir’s dependants, and with
a blow I cause his skull to be cleft in two.” A summary manner, one
would think, of dealing with the law, and little calculated to incline
the heart of his judge towards the offender.
There is another Khawameddin who is frequently mentioned, the Vizir of
Sultan Oweis of Baghdad. He founded in Shiraz a college for Hafiz, in
which the poet gave lectures on the Koran, and read out his own verses,
and whither his fame drew a great number of pupils. We find Hafiz asking
his benefactor for money to support this school in the following terms:
“Oh discreet friend (my poem), in some retired spot to which even the
wind is a stranger, come to the ear of the master, and between jest and
earnest place the pointed saying, that his heart may consent unto it;
then, of thy kindness, pray his munificence to tell me, if I were to ask
for a small stipend, would my request be tolerated?” One cannot but hope
that so charming a begging letter, couched in verse withal, was more
than tolerated. It was probably this Vizir who sent a robe of honour to
Hafiz which, when it came, proved to be too short for him; “but,” says
the poet politely, “no favour of thine could be too short for any man.”
From Oweis himself Hafiz is said to have received kindness, but he does
not seem to have been satisfied with the Sultan’s conduct towards him:
“From my heart,” he says, “I am the slave of Sultan Oweis, but he
remembers not his servant.” The son of Oweis, Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad,
whose cruelty caused his subjects to call in the aid of Timur against
him, was very anxious to induce Hafiz to visit his court; but Hafiz,
perhaps with prudence, declined the invitation, saying that he was
content with dry bread eaten at home, and had no desire to taste the
honey that pilgrims gather by the roadside. He sent to Ahmed a poem in
which he loaded his name with extravagant praise. “On Persian soil,” he
declared, “the bud of joy has never blown for me. How excellent is the
Tigris of Baghdad and the perfumed wine! Oh wind of the dawn, bring unto
me the dust from my friend’s threshold, that Hafiz may wash bright with
it the eyes of his heart.”
Once only did he comply with the invitations of foreign kings, and his
experience on that occasion was far from encouraging. He visited Shah
Yahya, Shah Shudja’s brother, at Yezd, but the reward which he received
was not commensurate with his expectations. “Long life to thee and thy
heart’s desire, oh Cup-bearer of Djem’s court!” he writes—and the
context shows that the allusion is to Shah Yahya—“though while I dwelt
with thee my cup was never filled with wine.” Moreover, a devoted lover
of Shiraz, Hafiz was overcome with homesickness when he was absent from
his native town. “Why,” he says in a pathetic little poem written while
he was at Yezd—“Why should I not return to mine own home? Why should I
not lay my dust in the street of mine own beloved? My bosom cannot
endure the sorrows of exile; let me return to mine own city, let me be
master of my heart’s desire.” It was after this luckless visit to Shah
Yahya that he is said to have remarked, “It seems that Fortune did not
intend kings to be wise.”
He never again gathered the honey of the roads of pilgrimage. Once,
indeed, in answer to the pressing invitation of Shah Mahmud Purabi,
Sultan of Bengal, he set forth for India; but a series of accidents
befell him, he lost heart and returned home again. The story is told in
a note to Poem XXI.
From the Sultan of Hormuz he received many favours, though he refused to
visit him and his pearl fisheries in the Persian Gulf. He compares this
Sultan with Shah Yahya, much to the disadvantage of the latter, saying
that the King who had never seen him had filled his mouth with pearls,
whereas Shah Yahya, to whose court he had journeyed, had sent him empty
away.
Shah Shudja was not the only member of the house of Muzaffar who
protected Hafiz; the warrior prince Mansur was his staunch friend. He
appears to have been absent from Shiraz at the time of Mansur’s
accession—perhaps he had accompanied Timur’s retreating army. “The wind
has brought me word,” he cries, “that the day of sorrow is overpast; I
will return to Shiraz through the favour of my friend. On the banners of
the Conqueror (_i.e._ Mansur, of whose name this is the meaning) Hafiz
is borne up into heaven; fleeing for refuge, his destiny has set him
upon the steps of a throne.” Mansur held the poet in high esteem. There
is a tradition that when he appointed one of his sons governor over a
province, the young man asked his father to give him his vizir,
Jelaleddin, as a counsellor, and Hafiz as a teacher. “What!” replied
Mansur, “wouldst thou be King even in thy father’s lifetime, that thou
demandest of him the two wisest men in his realm?”
Hafiz by this time had grown old. Youth had been very pleasant; not
without a sigh the grey-haired man relinquished it. “Ah, why has my
black hair turned white!” he laments, and tries to warm his old blood
with the wine of former days. “Yesterday at dawn I came upon one or two
glasses of wine—as sweet as the lip of the Cup-bearer they seemed to my
palate. And then, my brain afire, I desired to return to my mistress,
Youth, but between us a divorce had been pronounced.” And again: “Last
night Hafiz strayed into the tavern, and it seemed to him that Youth,
his mistress, had come back, and that love and madness had returned to
his old head.” “Gieb meine Jugend mir zurück!” Other poets besides Hafiz
have sung to the same tune. Whether or no he lived to witness the
overthrow of the race that had sheltered him, he foresaw the troubles
that were coming upon it and upon his beloved Shiraz. There is a short
poem full of foreboding which is said to have been written after the
entry of Timur: “What tumult I see beneath the moon’s orbit, every
quarter of the earth is full of evil and wickedness! There is strife
among our daughters, and among our mothers contention, and the father is
evilly disposed towards his son. Only the foolish are drinking sherbet
of rose-water and sugar; the wise are nourished upon their own heart’s
blood. The Arabian horse is wounded beneath the saddle, and the ass
wears a collar of gold about his neck. Master, take the counsel of
Hafiz: ‘Go and do good!’ for I see that this maxim is worth more than a
treasure-house of jewels.” In several verses he congratulates Mansur
upon a victory and a fortunate return to Shiraz, which may perhaps refer
to the re-establishment of the Muzaffaride line after Timur’s departure.
“Give me the cup,” he says in one of these, “for the airs of youth blow
through my old head, so glad am I to see the King’s face again.”
The date of his death is variously given as 1388, 1389, 1391, and 1394,
but it seems unlikely that he should have been alive as late as 1394.
1389 is the year given in a couplet by an unknown author, which is
inscribed upon his tomb: “If thou wouldst know when he sought a home in
the dust of Mosalla, seek his date in the dust of Mosalla.” The letters
of the Persian words Khak-i-Mosalla, dust of Mosalla, give the number
791, that is 1389 of our era. He lies in the garden of Mosalla outside
Shiraz, a garden the praises of which he was never tired of singing, and
on the banks of the Ruknabad, where he had so often rested under the
shade of cypress-trees. When, some sixty years after the poet’s death,
Sultan Baber conquered Shiraz, he erected a monument over the tomb of
Hafiz. An oblong block of stone on which are carved two songs from the
Divan, marks the grave. At the head of it is inscribed a sentence in
Arabic: “God is the enduring, and all else passes away.” The garden
contains the tombs of many devout Persians who have desired to rest in
the sacred earth which holds the bones of the poet, and his prophecy
that his grave should become a place of pilgrimage for all the drunkards
of the world has been to a great extent fulfilled. A very ancient
cypress, said to be of Hafiz’s own planting, stood for many hundreds of
years at the head of his grave, and “cast its shadow o’er the dust of
his desire.”
It is not often that a teacher and the favourite of princes enjoys
unmixed popularity, especially when his criticisms of such as disagree
with him are as harsh and as often repeated as are those of Hafiz; nor
does he seem to have been an exception to the general rule. Moreover,
his own conduct gave his enemies sufficient grounds for complaint. His
biographers, as biographers will, take a rosy view of his life. Daulat
Shah, for instance, states that “he turned always to the company of
dervishes and of wise men, and sometimes he attained also to the society
of princes; a friend of persons of eminent virtue and perfection, and of
noble youths.” But such accounts as these are not entirely borne out by
other traditions, and his poems do not seem to the unbiased reader to be
the works of a man of ascetic temperament. With all due deference to
Daulat Shah, I would submit that Abu Ishac, Shah Shudja, and Shah Mansur
were none of them persons of eminent virtue; indeed, it is difficult to
imagine that a friend and panegyrist of theirs could have renounced all
the joys of life. His enemies went so far as to accuse him of heresy and
even of atheism, and so strong was popular feeling against him that, on
his death, it was debated whether his body might be given the rites of
burial. The question was only settled by consulting his poems, which, on
being taken at haphazard, opened upon the following verse: “Fear not to
follow with pious feet the corpse of Hafiz, for though he was drowned in
the ocean of sin, he may find a place in paradise.” It is a fortunate
age which will allow a man’s writings to stand his doubtful reputation
in such good stead.
Hafiz was married and he had a son. He laments the death of both wife
and child in two poems which are translated in this volume. In spite of
all the favours which he received from the great men of his day, he is
said to have died poor.
During his lifetime he was too busy “teaching and composing
philosophical treatises,” says his great Turkish editor, Sudi, “to
gather together his songs; he used to recite them in his school,
expressing a wish that these pearls might be strung together for the
adornment of his contemporaries.” This was done after his death by his
pupil Sayyed Kasim el Anwar, and the Divan of Hafiz is one of the most
popular books in the Persian language. From India to Constantinople his
songs are sung and repeated by all who speak the Persian tongue, and the
number of his European translators shows that his uncle’s curse has a
special and peculiar influence in Western countries. Like the Æneid, the
Divan of Hafiz is consulted as a guide to future action. There are
several stories of famous men who have had recourse to these _Sortes
Hafizianæ_. It is related that Nadir Shah took counsel from Hafiz’s book
when he was meditating an expedition against Tauris, and opened it at
the following verse: “Irak and Fars thou hast conquered with thy songs,
oh Hafiz; now it is the turn of Baghdad and the appointed hour of
Tabriz.” Nadir Shah took this as an encouragement to fresh conquest, and
went on his way rejoicing.
It is not only as a maker of exquisite verse but also as a philosopher
that Hafiz has gained so wide an esteem in the East. No European who
reads his Divan but will be taken captive by the delicious music of his
songs, the delicate rhythms, the beat of the refrain, and the charming
imagery. Some of them are instinct with the very spirit of youth and
love and joy, some have a nobler humanity and cry out across the ages
with a voice pitifully like our own; and yet few of us will turn to
Hafiz for wisdom and comfort, or choose him as a guide. It is the
interminable, the hopeless mysticism, the playing with words that say
one thing and mean something totally different, the vagueness of a
philosophy that dares not speak out, which repels the European just as
much as it attracts the Oriental mind. “Give us a working theory,” we
demand. “Build us imaginary mansions where our souls, fugitives from the
actual, may dream themselves away”—that, it seems to me, is what the
Persian asks of his teacher.
Hafiz belonged to the great sect from which so many of the most famous
among Persian writers have sprung. Like Sa’di and Jami and Jelaleddin
Rumi and a score of others, he was a Sufi. The history of Sufiism has
yet to be written, the sources from which it arose are uncertain, and
that it should have found a home in Mahommadanism, the least mystical of
all religions, is still unexplained. Some have supposed that Sufiism was
imported from India after the time of Mahommad; some that it was a
development of the doctrines of Zoroaster which the Prophet’s successors
silenced but did not destroy. In reply to the first theory it has been
objected that there is no historic proof of relations between India and
Mahommadan countries after the Mahommadan era and before the rise of
Sufiism, by which the doctrines of the Indian mystics could have been
propagated; and as for the second, it seems improbable that Sufiism, of
which the essential doctrine is unity, could have borrowed much from a
religion as sharply opposed to it as that of Zoroaster, whose creed is
founded upon a dualism. A third theory is that the origins of Sufiism
are to be looked for in the philosophy of the Greeks, strangely
distorted by the Eastern mind, and in the influence of Christianity; but
though the works of Plato are frequently quoted by mystical writers, and
though it seems certain that they owe something both to the Neo-Platonic
school of Alexandria and to the Christian religion, this would not be
enough to account for the great perversion of Mahommad’s teaching.
Baron Sylvestre de Sacy suggested the following explanation of the
matter.[3] The second century of the Hejira was a time of fermentation
and of the rise of sects. This was due in the first place to the
introduction of Greek philosophy, and in the second to the rivalry
between the partisans of Ali and those of the Ommiad and Abbaside
Khalifs. It was among the followers of Ali that the doctrines of the
union of God and man, the infusion of the Divinity in the imams, and the
allegorical interpretation of religious ceremonies grew up. Daulat Shah
in his Biography of the Persian Poets traces back mysticism as far as to
Ali himself, though it is probable that he is imputing to the son-in-law
of the Prophet beliefs which were of a somewhat later date. By force of
circumstances the Alides were placed in opposition to the ruling
Khalifs, and were obliged to find a justification for their attitude,
and for submitting to the observances enjoined by those whom they
refused to recognise as true representatives of Mahommad. They read the
Koran by the light of a new creed, and interpreted it in a manner far
different from that intended by its author. From the moment when the
division between Shi’ite and Sunni sprang into being, the Shi’ites, or
followers of Ali, made the eastern provinces of the Khalifate their
stronghold. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a mysticism, in every
way contrary to the true spirit of the Koran, made in those provinces
nearest to India so rapid a progress, because, before the conquest of
Persia by the Arabs, Indian mysticism had already struck root there.
That is to say, that there had grown up, side by side with
Zoroastrianism, a mysticism eminently congenial to the peculiar temper
of the Persian mind—so congenial, indeed, that it was not stamped out by
the Arab conquerors, but insinuated itself into the stern and practical
creed which they forced upon a nation of dreamers and metaphysicians.
The author of the Dabistan, a book written in the seventeenth century,
containing the description of twelve different faiths, relates that
there existed in Persia a sect belonging to the Yekaneh Bina, of those
whose eyes are fixed upon One alone: “They say that the world has no
external or tangible existence; all that is, is God, and beyond him
there is nothing. The intelligences and the souls of men, the angels,
the heavens, the stars, the elements, and the three kingdoms of nature
exist only in the mind of God and have no existence beyond.” “If this
Indian doctrine of Maya, or Illusion,” adds M. de Sacy, “had been
transferred to Persia, there is every reason to believe that mysticism,
grounded on the doctrine that all things are an emanation from God and
that unto him they shall return, may be traced to the same source.”
The keynote of Sufiism is the union, the identification of God and man.
It is a doctrine which lies at the root of all spiritual religions, but
pushed too far it leads to pantheism, quietism, and eventually to
nihilism. The highest good to which the Sufis can attain, is the
annihilation of the actual—to forget that they have a separate
existence, and to lose themselves in the Divinity as a drop of water is
lost in the ocean.[4] In order to obtain this end they recommend ascetic
living and solitude; but they do not carry asceticism to the absurd
extremes enjoined by the Indian mystics, nor do they approve of
artificial aids for the subduing of consciousness, such as opium, or
hashish, or the wild physical exertions of the dancing dervishes. The
drunkenness of the Sufi poets, say their interpreters, is nothing but an
ecstatic frame of mind, in which the spirit is intoxicated with the
contemplation of God just as the body is intoxicated with wine.
According to the Dabistan there are four stages in the manifestation of
the Divinity: in the first the mystic sees God in the form of a corporal
being; in the second he sees him in the form of one of his attributes of
action, as the Maker or the Preserver of the world; in the third he
appears in the form of an attribute which exists in his very essence, as
knowledge or life; in the fourth the mystic is no longer conscious of
his own existence. To the last he can hope to attain but seldom.
This losing of the soul in God is only a return (and here we come near
to such Platonic doctrines as those embodied in the Phædrus) to the
conditions which existed before birth into the world. Just as in the
Dialogue the immortal steed which is harnessed to the chariot of the
soul, longs to return to the plain of birth, and to see again the true
justice, beauty, and wisdom of which it has retained an imperfect
recollection, so the soul of the Sufi longs to return to God, from whom
it has been separated by the mortal veil of the body. But this reunion
is pushed much further by the Eastern philosophers than by Plato; it
implies, according to them, the complete annihilation of distinct
personality, corresponding to the conditions, quite unlike those
described by the Platonic Socrates, which they believe to have existed
before birth. There is nothing which is not from God and a part of God.
In himself he contains both being and not being; when he chooses he
casts his reflection upon the void, and that reflection is the universe.
There is a fine passage in Jami’s Yusuf and Zuleikha in which he sets
forth this doctrine of the creation. “Thou art but the glass,” the poet
concludes, “his is the face reflected in the mirror; nay, if thou
lookest steadfastly, thou shalt see that he is the mirror also.” In a
parable, Jami illustrates the universal presence of God, and the blind
searching of man for that by which he is surrounded on every side. There
was a frog which sat upon the shores of the ocean, and ceaselessly day
and night he sang its praise. “As far as mine eyes can see,” he said, “I
behold nothing but thy boundless surface.” Some fish swimming in the
shallow water heard the frog’s song, and were filled with a desire to
find that wonderful ocean of which he spoke, but go where they would
they could not discover it. At last, in the course of their search, they
fell into a fisherman’s net, and as soon as they were drawn out of the
water they saw beneath them the ocean for which they had been seeking.
With a leap they returned into it.
The story of the creation as told in the Koran it is impossible for the
Sufis to accept; they are bound to give an outward adhesion to it, but
in their hearts they treat it as an allegory. The world is posterior to
God only in the nature of its existence and not in time: the Sufis were
not far from the doctrine of the eternity of matter, from which they
were only withheld by the necessity of conforming with the teaching of
the Koran. They content themselves with saying that the world came into
existence when it pleased God to manifest himself beyond himself, and
will cease when it shall please him to return into himself again. It is
more difficult to dispose of the resurrection of the body, which is
constantly insisted upon by Mahommad. That the soul, when it has at last
attained to complete union with God, should be obliged to return to the
prison from whence it has escaped at death, is entirely repugnant to all
Sufis; nor can they explain satisfactorily the divergence of their
opinions from those of the Prophet.
It has been well said that all religious teachers who have honestly
tried to construct a working formula, have found that one of their
greatest difficulties lay in reconciling the all-powerfulness of God
with man’s consciousness of his will being free; for on the one hand it
is impossible to conceive a God worth the name who shall be less than
omnipotent and omniscient, and on the other it is essential to lay upon
man some responsibility for his actions.[5] Mahommad more especially, as
Count Gobineau points out in his excellent little book,[6] found himself
confronted with this difficulty, since his primary object was to exalt
the divine personality, and to lift it out of the pantheism into which
it had fallen among the pre-Islamitic Arabs; but if he did not succeed
in indicating a satisfactory way out of the dilemma, it is at least
unjust to accuse him of having failed to recognise it. He insisted that
man is responsible for his own salvation: “Whosoever chooseth the life
to come, their desire shall be acceptable unto God.”[7] There is a
tradition that when some of his disciples were disputing over
predestination, he said to them: “Why do you not imitate Omar? For when
one came to him and asked him, ‘What is predestination?’ he answered,
‘It is a deep sea.’ And a second time he replied, ‘It is a dark road.’
And a third time, ‘It is a secret which I will not declare since God has
seen fit to conceal it.’” The Sufis were obliged to abandon free will:
it was impossible to attach any responsibility to the reflection in the
mirror. But here, again, they did not venture to give expression to
their real opinions, and their statements are therefore both confused
and contradictory. “A man may say,” remarks the author of the Dabistan,
“that his actions are his own, and with equal truth that they are
God’s.” In the Gulshen-i-Raz, a poem written in the year 1317, and
therefore contemporary with Hafiz, it is distinctly laid down that God
will take men’s actions into account: “After that moment (_i.e._ the Day
of Judgment) he will question them concerning good and evil.” But such
expressions as these are in direct opposition to the rest of Sufi
teaching. There is neither good nor evil, since both alike flow from
God, from whom all flows. Some go so far as to prefer Pharaoh to Moses,
Nimrod to Abraham, because they say that though Pharaoh and Nimrod were
in apparent revolt against the Divinity, in reality they knew their own
nothingness and accepted the part that the divine wisdom had imposed
upon them. There is neither reward nor punishment; Paradise is the
beauty, Hell the glory of God, and when it is said that those in Hell
are wretched, it is meant that the dwellers in Heaven would be wretched
in their place.[8] And finally, there is no distinction between God and
man; the soul is but an emanation from God, and a man is therefore
justified in saying with the fanatic Hallaj, “I am God.” Though Hallaj
paid with his life for venturing to give voice to his opinion, he was
only repeating aloud what all Sufis believe to be true.[9] “It is
permitted to a tree to say, ‘I am God,’” writes the author of the
Gulshen-i-Raz (the allusion is to the burning bush that spoke to Moses);
“why then may not a man say it?” And again: “In God there is no
distinction of quality; in his divine majesty I, thou, and we shall not
be found. I, thou, we, and he bear the same meaning, for in unity there
is no division. Every man who has annihilated the body and is entirely
separated from himself, hears within his heart a voice that crieth, ‘I
am God.’”
The conception of the union and interdependence of all things divine and
human is far older than Sufi thought. It goes back to the earliest
Indian teaching, and Professor Deussen, in his book on Metaphysics, has
pointed out the conclusion which is drawn from it in the Veda. “The
gospels,” he says, “fix quite correctly as the highest law of morality,
Love thy neighbour as thyself. But why should I do so, since by the
order of nature I feel pain and pleasure only in myself, not in my
neighbour? The answer is not in the Bible (this venerable book being not
yet quite free from Semitic realism), but it is in the Veda: You shall
love your neighbour as yourselves because you _are_ your neighbour; a
mere illusion makes you believe that your neighbour is something
different from yourselves. Or in the words of the Bhagaradgitah: He who
knows himself in everything and everything in himself, will not injure
himself by himself. This is the sum and tenor of all morality, and this
is the standpoint of a man knowing himself a Brahman.”
The Sufis were forced to pay an exaggerated deference to the Prophet and
to Ali in order to keep on good terms with the orthodox, but since they
believed God to be the source of all creeds they could not reasonably
place one above another; nay more, since they taught that any man who
practised a particular religion had failed to free himself from duality
and to reach perfect union with God, they must have held Mahommadanism
in like contempt with all other faiths. “When thou and I remain not
(when man is completely united with God), what matters the Ka’ba and the
Synagogue and the Monastery?”[10] That is, what difference is there
between the religion of Mahommadan, Jew, and Christian? “One night,”
says Ferideddin Attar in a beautiful allegory, “the angel Gabriel was
seated on the branches of a tree in the Garden of Paradise, and he heard
God pronounce a word of assent. ‘At this moment,’ thought the angel,
‘some man is invoking God. I know not who he is; but this I know, that
he must be a notable servant of the Lord, one whose soul is dead to evil
and whose spirit lives.’ Then Gabriel desired to know who this man could
be, but in the seven zones he found him not. He traversed the land and
the sea and found him not in mountain or in plain. Therefore he hastened
back to the presence of God, and again he heard him give a favourable
answer to the same prayers. Again he set forth and sought through the
world, yet he saw not the servant of God. ‘Oh Lord,’ he cried, ‘show me
the path that leads to him upon whom thy favours fall!’ ‘Go to the Land
of Rome,’ God answered, ‘and in a certain monastery thou shalt find
him.’ Thither fled Gabriel, and found him whom he sought, and lo! he was
worshipping an idol. When he returned, Gabriel opened his lips and said,
‘Oh Master, draw aside for me the veil from this secret: why fulfillest
thou the prayers of one who invokes an idol in a monastery?’ And God
replied, ‘His spirit is darkened and he knows not that he has missed the
way; but since he errs from ignorance, I pardon his fault: my mercy is
extended to him, and I allow him to enter into the highest place.’”
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.”