Page:Persian Literature (1900), vol. 1.djvu/28

xii He had in him much that resembled Omar Khayyám; but he was not a philosopher. Therefore, in the East at least, his “Divan” is more popular than the Quatrains of Omar; his songs are sung where Omar’s name is not heard. He is substantially a man of melody—with much mannerism, it is true, in his melody—but filling whatever he says with a wealth of charming imagery and clothing his verse in delicate rhythms. Withal a man, despite his boisterous gladsomeness and his overflowing joy in what the present has to offer, in whom there is nothing common, nothing low. “The Garden of Paradise may be pleasant,” he tells us, “but forget not the shade of the willow-tree and the fair margin of the fruitful field.” He is very human; but his humanity is deeply ethical in character.

Much more than Omar and Sa’di, Háfiz was a thorough Sufi. “In one and the same song you write of wine, of Sufism, and of the object of your affection,” is what Sháh Shuja said to him once. In fact, we are often at an entire loss to tell where reality ends and Sufic vacuity commences. For this Mystic philosophy that we call Sufism patched up a sort of peace between the old Persian and the conquering Mohammedan. By using veiled language, by taking all the every-day things of life as mere symbols of the highest transcendentalism, it was possible to be an observing Mohammedan in the flesh, whilst the mind wandered in the realms of pure fantasy and speculation. While enjoying Háfiz, then, and bathing in his wealth of picture, one is at a loss to tell whether the bodies he describes are of flesh and blood, or incorporeal ones with a mystic background; whether the wine of which he sings really runs red, and the love he describes is really centred upon a mortal being. Yet, when he says of himself, “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,” there is a ring of reality in the substance which pierces through the extravagant imagery. This the Persians themselves have always felt; and they will not be far from the truth in regarding Háfiz with a very peculiar affection as the writer who, better than anyone else, is the poet of their gay moments and the boon companion of their feasts.

Firdusi, Omar, Sa’di, Háfiz, are names of which any lit-