A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. FROM FIRDAWSI TO SAMI.* HE
who would write a history of Persian literature which shall be comprehensible to the ordinary European reader must incidentally undertake to outline the political history of the Middle East, and to include a brief review of the great field of Arabic literature. The intricate tale of the rise and fall of faiths and empires in Central Asia, so full of suggestion to the historian and the Orientalist, is almost a sealed book to the general public ; and whether for purposes of literary or of historical inquiry, it must be taken as a whole, there being no possible line of demarcation between authors who wrote in- differently in Arabic and in Persian, as there is none between trains of thought that acted and reacted on one another over a region that extended from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China. From this task Professor Browne does not shrink, and his colossal erudition enables him to perform it successfully. Nothing is more significant in his two volumes (the first was published four years ago) than the close relations, to which they bear witness, of so large a portion of the civilised world. If in his wide survey there is any aspect lacking, it is perhaps the role that was played by India. It is true that the initial unity of Aryan civilisation lies beyond the scope of his book, as it lies almost beyond the extreme limit to which history can reach, and that many of the Indian writers whose works are esteemed in Asia flourished after the thirteenth century, to the close of which his second volume now brings ns ; but even in the period before us we have evidences of a continuous give-and-take between the peninsula and its Western neighbours. The fecund soil of a great part of Northern India was included in the dominions of Sultan Mabmud of Gbazna, whose reign falls in the earlier part of Professor Browne's second volume. Moreover, we know that the restless and much-travelled poets and geographers of Persia and Arabia found the ocean and the Himalaya no barrier. Sa'di himself visited Somnath, and has described his somewhat saugrenu experiences with a Hindu priest there; Hafiz, at a later date, held communication with Bengal, and boasted that his poem, the child of a single night, was strong enough to find its year-long road thither. These considerations have the more weight, as some believe that they may bear upon the origin of Suffism, a doctrine which played so large a part in the golden age of Persian literature, which Professor Browne handles in the present volume. Almost all the great Sufi poets, with the exception of Jami and Hafiz (and it must be admitted that Hafiz sits on the fence between materialism and mysticism) appear in these pages, and are treated with a sympathy that reveals the profoundest knowledge. The writer is, indeed, limited by the enormous scope of his subject ; and when he holds that any part of it has been dealt with adequately by others, he refers his readers, with a few words of generous appreciation, to their works. We cannot but regret his self-denial in some instances, as when it deprives us of baying from his hand a version of the wonderful opening page
• A Literary Melon of Praia from Pirdmosi to Socti. By Edward G. Browse, Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic, and sometime Lecturer in Persian in the Univeraity of Cambridge. London: T. Fisher Cowin. ELle. 6d. Slot] of Jelaleddin Rumrs Mesnavi, of which it is not possible to be reminded too often, or to have too many scholarly transla- tions such as he would have given us. The mystics doctrine of which that poet is one of the chief exponents Professor Browne has already discussed in his first volume, but he touches upon it again here, and we fancy with a firmer hand. "Too many of those who have written on Salim," says he, " have treated it as an essentially Aryan movement, and for this reason it is particularly necessary to emphasise the fact that two of the greatest mystics of Islam were of non-Aryan origin." In another passage he condemns "the tendency to regard Snfiism as an essentially Persian or Aryan movement." We must confess that he has not shaken our belief in the opinion embodied in Renan's great phrase: Il feat y soir tone re'volte de Z'esprit arien contre Vefroyable simplicity de V esprit simitigue. Uninfluenced, it is difficult to show that the Semite turns to mysticism ; at least there is no evidence to that effect in his earliest literature,— witness the Old Testament, the pre-Mohammedan poems of Arabia, and the Koran itself. Bat it was the very breath of life to India and to Persia, it tinged Greek thought from first to last, and passed with Christianity (some day perhaps we shall be able to reckon up what Christianity owed to it) into the minds of men like St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and St. Francis. That two or three Arab poets should have been the first to set in writing the peculiar phase of it which is known as Sufiiem is neither bare nor there. Some of its tenets were familiar to Sakya Muni in the fifth century B.C., but what Jew or Phoenician was preaching them then ? We cannot trace the course of these beliefs from India; there are many streams of thought that are obscure to us; nor is it improbable that similar ideas sprang up independently in minds of the same temper. But the temper of the Semitic mind is different ; it is to us, as Renan said, terrible in its simplicity.
Entrancingly interesting as Professor Browne's book is, it leaves the reader with a sense of despondency, not only because it ends on the appalling cataclysm of the Mongol invasion, which gave the quietus to the stirring many-coloured civilisations of Central Asia, but because of a certain arti- ficiality and resulting monotony in one aide at least of Persian literature. In no art did form achieve so complete a triumph as it did in Persian poetry ; and form, if it may be admitted a good master, is a bad tyrant. Metre and phrase, and finally thought itself, became stereotyped to an extent that bound all but the very greatest imaginations, and while the prose authors continued to give to the world books on history, on geography, and on the art of government which are still standard works of the greatest value, the poets have in most cases lost the art of touching the strings of the heart. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they do not touch the strings of our hearts, for they seem to reach the sympathies of their own countrymen. But, then, Persians can read and enjoy Firdawsi's Shahscona,—we should like humbly to tender our thanks to Professor Browne for his bold strictures upon the intolerable dulness of that epic. He deserves hearty thanks for the delightful anecdotes with which his book is garnished. He has penetrated into the soul of Oriental story-telling, and he realises, with the East, that a fact flies the further when winged with an epigram. Admirable, too, are his short biographical notices of his authors, compiled from materials that his critical sense knows well how to use, and just as admirable are his appreciations of their works from a Western point of view, and even from an Eastern. Among many brilliant examples of his power of summing up the qualities of an Oriental man of letters, none is better than this paragraph on Siedi :— " The real charm of Sa'di and the secret of his popularity lies not in his consistency, but in his catholicity ; in his works is matter for every taste, the highest and the lowest, the most refined and the most coarse, and from his pages sentiments may be culled worthy on the one band of Eckhardt or Thomas a Kempis, or on the other of Caesar and Heliogabalus. His writings are a microcosm of the East, alike in its beat and its most ignoble aspects, and it is not without good reason that wherever the Persian language is studied they are, and have been for six centuries and a half, the first books placed in the learner's hands."
That criticism so new and so fresh, and at the same time so profound, should in these days be written of Sa'di shows Professor Browne's true insight.
English readers will doubtless turn with anxiety to the pages that treat of Omar Khayyam, and will be disappointed
to learn that he does not stand in repute as a poet in his own country. The quatrains translated by FitzGerald are very good quatrains, as those who have read them in the original will be the first to acknowledge ; but "it is hardly possible, save in a few exceptional cases, to assert that Omar Khayyam wrote any particular one of those ascribed to him." Members of the Omar Khayyam Society will be distressed to hear that their poet's grave is shadowed by a peach-tree and a pear-tree, not by a rose. We trust they will in future devote themeelves to the planting of those vegetables, if moved by a precise regard for historic accuracy, when they wish to honour his memory.
Professor Browne promises us at least one more volume ; and all who have read the first two will look forward to the third. That none is better fitted than he to lay bare the essence of Oriental civilisation is shown by the sentences in which be laments the subsidence in our own time of one Oriental State after another, and recognises that with the fall of each "something is lost to the world that can never be replaced." Oat of his great learning he can point the lesson which teaches how much Europe owes to Asia,—how much, perhaps, she has still to acquire.
Previous page
