Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/682

Rh 656 TURKEY [LITERATURE.] Old school. General modelled, the one after the classics of Persia, the other after those of modern Europe, and more especially of France. The old or Persian school flourished from the foundation of the empire down to about 1830, and still continues to drag on a feeble existence, though it is now out of fashion and cultivated by none of the lead ing men of letters. These belong to the new or European school, which sprang up some fifty or sixty years ago, and which, in spite of the bitter opposition of the partisans of the old Oriental system, lias succeeded, partly through its own inherent superiority and partly through the talents and courage of its supporters, in expel ling its rival from the position of undisputed authority which it had occupied for upwards of five hundred years. For the present purpose it will be convenient to divide the old school into three periods, which may be termed respectively the pre-classical, the classical, and the post-classical. Of these the first extends from the early days of the empire to the accession of Suleyman L, 1301- 1520 (700-926) ; the second from that event to the accession of Mahmud I., 1520-1730 (926-1143) ; and the third from that date to the accession of Abd-ul- Aziz, 1730-1861 (1143-1277). The works of the old school in all its periods are entirely Persian character in tone, sentiment, and form. We find in them the same beauties of Otto- and the same defects that we observe in the productions of the Iranian authors. The formal elegance and conventional grace, alike of thought and of expression, so characteristic of Persian classical literature, pervade the works of the best Ottoman writers, and they are likewise imbued, though in a less degree, with that 5pirit of mysticism which runs through so much of the poetry of niii. But the Ottomans did not stop here : in their romantic pou.iis they chose as subjects the favourite themes of their Persian masters, such as Leyli and Mejnun, Khusrev and Shirin, Yusuf and Zuleykha, and so on ; they constantly allude to Persian heroes whose stories occur in the Shdh-Ndma and other storehouses of Iranian legendary lore ; and they wrote their poems in Persian metres and in Persian forms. The mesnevi, the kasida, and the ghazel, all of them, so far at least as the Ottomans are concerned, Persian, were the favourite verse-forms of the old poets. A mesnevi is a poem written in rhyming couplets, and is usually narrative in subject. The kasida and the ghazel are both mouorhythmic ; the first as a rule celebrates the praises of some great man, while the second discourses of the joys and woes of love. Why Persian rather than Arabian or any other literature became the model of Ottoman writers is explained by the early history of the race (see TURKS). Some two centuries before the arrival of the Turks in Asia Minor the Seljuks, then a mere horde of savages, had overrun Persia, where they settled and adopted the civilization of the people they had subdued. Thus Persian became the language of their court and Government, and when by and by they pushed their conquests into Asia Minor, and founded there the Seljuk empire of Rum, they carried with them their Persian culture, and diffused it among the peoples newly brought under their sway. It was the descendants of those Persianized Seljuks whom the early Ottomans found ruling in Asia Minor on their arrival there. What had happened to the Seljuks two centuries before happened to the Ottomans now : the less civilized race adopted the culture of the more civilized ; and, as the Seljuk empire fell to pieces and the Ottoman came gradually to occupy its place, the sons of men who had called themselves Seljuks began thenceforth to look upon themselves as Ottomans. Hence the vast majority of the people whom we are accustomed to think of as Ottomans are so only by adoption, being really the descendants of Seljuks or Seljiikian subjects, who had derived from Persia whatever they possessed of civilization or of literary taste. An extraordinary love of precedent, the result apparently of conscious want of original power, was sufficient to keep their writers loyal to their early guide for centuries, till at length the allegiance, though not the fashion of it, has been changed in our own days, and Paris has replaced Shiraz as the shrine towards which the Ottoman scholar turns. While conspicu ously lacking in creative genius, the Ottomans have always shown themselves possessed of receptive and assimilative powers to a remarkable degree, the result being that the number of their writers both in prose and verse is enormous. Of course only a few of the most prominent, either through the intrinsic merit of their work or through the influence they have had in guiding or shaping that of their contemporaries, can be mentioned in a brief review like the present. It ought to be premised that the poetry of the old school is greatly superior to the prose. Ottoman literature may be said to open with a few mystic lines, the work of Sultan Veled, son of Maulana Jelal-ud-Din, the author of the great Persian poem the Mathnawl. Sultan Veled flourished during the reign of Osman I., though he did not reside in the territory under the rule of that prince. Another mystic poet of this early time was Ashik Pasha, who left a long poem in rhyming couplets, which is called, inappropriately enough, his Divdn. The nocturnal expedition across the Hellespont by which Suleyman, the son of Orkhan, won Galipoli and therewith a foothold in Europe for his race, was shared in and celebrated in verse by a Turkish noble or chieftain named Ghazi Fazil. Sheykhi of Kermiyan, a Pre- classical period contemporary of Muhammed I. and Murad II., wrote a lengthy and still esteemed mesuevi on the ancient Persian romance of Khusrev and Shirin ; and about the same time Yaziji-oghlu gave to the world a long versified history of the Prophet, the Muhammcdiya. The writers mentioned above are the most important previous to the capture of Constantinople ; but there is little literature of real merit prior to that event. The most notable prose work of this period is an old collection of stories, the History of the Forty Vezirs, said to have been compiled by a certain Sheykh-zada and dedicated to Murad II. A few years after Constantinople passed into the hands of the Ottomans, some ghazels, the work of the contempo rary Tatar prince, Mir Ali Shir, who under the nom de plume of Nef ayi wrote much that shows true talent and poetic feeling, found their way to the Ottoman capital, where they were seen and copied by Ahmed Pasha, one of the viziers of Muhammed II. The poems of this statesman, though possessing little merit of their own, being for the most part mere translations from Nevayi, form one of the landmarks in the history of Ottoman literature. They set the fashion of ghazel-writing ; and their appearance was the signal for a more regular cultivation of poetry and a greater attention to literary style and to refinement of language. In Sinan Pasha, another minister of Muhammed the Conqueror, Ottoman prose found its first exponent of ability ; he left a religious treatise entitled Tazarru dt (Supplications), which, notwithstanding a too lavish employment of the resources of Persian rhetoric, is as re markable for its clear and lucid style as for the beauty of many of the thoughts it contains. The most noteworthy writers of the Conqueror s reign are, after Ahmed and Sinan, the two lyric poets Nejati and Zati, whose verses show a considerable improvement upon those of Ahmed Pasha, the romantic poets Jemali and Hamdi, and the poetesses Zeyneb and Mihri. Like most of his house, Muhammed II. was fond of poetry and patronized men of letters. He himself tried versification, and some of his lines which have come down to us appear quite equal to the average work of his contemporaries. Twenty -one out of the thirty -four sovereigns who have occupied the throne of Osman have left verses, and among these Selim I. stands out, not merely as the greatest ruler, warrior, and statesman, but also as the most gifted and most original poet. His work is unhappily for the greater part in the Persian language ; the excellence of what he has done in Turkish makes us regret that he did so little. The most prominent man of letters under Selim 1. was the legist Kemal Pasha-zada, fre quently called Ibn-Kemal, who distinguished himself in both prose and verse. He left a romantic poem on the loves of Yiisuf and Zuleykha, and a work entitled Nigdristdn, which is modelled both in style and matter on the Gulistdn of Sa di. His contemporary, Mesihi, whose beautiful verses on spring are perhaps better known in Europe than any other Turkish poem, deserves a pass ing mention. With the accession of Selim s son, Suleyman I., the classical Classical period begins. Hitherto all Ottoman writing, even the most highly period, finished, had been somewhat rude and uncouth ; but now a marked improvement becomes visible alike in the manner and the matter, and authors of greater ability begin to make their appearance. Fuzuli, one of the four great poets of the old school, seems to have been a native of Baghdad or its neighbourhood, and probably became an Ottoman subject when Suleyman took possession of the old capital of the caliphs. His language, which is very peculiar, seems to be a sort of mixture of the Ottoman and Azerbijan dialects of Turkish, and was most probably that of the Persian Turks of those days. Fuzuli showed far more originality than any of his predecessors ; for, although his work is naturally Persian in form and in general character, it is far from being a mere echo from Shiraz or Ispahan. He struck out a new line for himself, and was indebted for his inspiration to no previous writer, whether Turk or Persian. An intense and passionate ardour breathes in his verses, and forms one of the most remarkable as well as one of the most attractive characteristics of his style ; for, while few even among Turkish poets are more artificial than he, few seem to write with greater earnestness and sincerity. His influence upon his suc cessors has scarcely been as far-reaching as might have been ex pected, a circumstance which is perhaps in some measure owing to the unfamiliar dialect in which he wrote. Besides his Divdn, he left a beautiful mesnevi on the story of Leyli and Mejnun, as well as some prose works little inferior to his poetry. Baki of Constantinople, though far from rivalling his contemporary Fuzuli, wrote much good poetry, including one piece of great excellence, an elegy on Suleyman I. The Ottomans have as a rule been particu larly successful with elegies ; this one by Baki has ne.ver been sur passed. Ruhi, Lami i, Nev i, the janissary Yahya Beg, the mufti Ebu-Su ud, and Selim II. all won deserved distinction as poets. During the reign of Ahmed I. arose the second of the great poets of the old Ottoman school, Nef i of Erzerum, who owes his pre eminence to the brilliance of his kasi das. But Nef i could revile as well as praise, and such was the bitterness of some of his satires that certain influential personages who came under his lash in duced Murad IV. to permit his execution. Nef i, who, like Fuzuli,