Page:Man in the Panther's Skin.djvu/11

 This is the divine frenzy (27, 29), breathed only into the gentle, the fair, the wise, the brave, and the generous (9), unseating the charioteer Reason, antecedent to a nuptial choice, transforming the lover into the divine likeness, and thus preparing him for the creative act by which mankind is renewed from age to age. It is a tender feeling (9), pure in its essence (10), hiding itself from the view of the world (12), needing not love in return, but enduring patiently the wrath of the beloved (10); it is changeless in its object (11), steadfast to the end; when it is reciprocated it sweetens death, for in eternity it finds full fruition (1280–1282). It is in this passion, relentless and beautiful like the panther whose coat he wears, that Tariel is wrapped.

If in his advocacy of reticence in affairs of the heart, and his insistence on "playing the game," Rust'haveli makes a special appeal to British readers, there are at least two points wherein he might seem likely to lack their approval: his hyperbolic descriptions of grief at separation, and his hackneyed astronomic similes for human beauty. But such emotional excesses are by himself disapproved (855, 911), and they find parallels in our own literature as late as the eighteenth century, and with passages like those in 806 and 1423 we have numerous analogies in Western literature; it is to be remembered that every parting is looked upon as possibly, or even probably, the last, and is thus invested with the bitterness of death (994). The radiant loveliness of the heroes and heroines is described in terms of the brightest celestial lights, because the shining forth of the soul through a fair countenance is in sober fact more brilliant, even, than those heavenly bodies which were of old the objects of worship.

Then, again, there are three unpleasant incidents in the story: Avt'handil's murder of the Chachnagir, and his intrigue with P'hatman, and Tariel's assassination of Khvarazmsha. We are not concerned to defend the morality of those transactions, and prefer to suppose that they were as repugnant to Rust'haveli as to ourselves; they are necessary to the working out of the plot, and they