SOURCE: An introduction to The Poems of Shemseddin Mohammed Hafiz of Shiraz, E.J. Brill, Leyden, 1901, pp. xi-xxix.

[In the following essay, Payne discusses the limitations of various biographies of Hafiz before providing his own sketch of the poet's life which emphasizes his lack of religious belief.]

I

There are many so-called lives of the greatest of Persian poets; but they are all, without exception, mere collections of pointless and irrelevant anecdotes, mostly bearing manifest signs of ex post facto fabrication and often treating of matters completely foreign to the nominal subject¹, and carefully refrain from touching upon the essential points of Hafiz's history. For instance, in none of these insipid compilations are we vouchsafed any particulars as to his family and extraction, nor is even the date of his birth stated; and indeed the only real biographical information, such as it is, which is to be gleaned from their jejune and wearisome pages, is that the poet was born and lived all his life at Shiraz and that there he died at some date, towards the end of the fourteenth century of our era, yariously stated as from A.D. 1384 to A.D. 1393. In this absence of official record, the only trustworthy data at our disposal, respecting the life and career of Hafiz, are those to be gathered from the study of his poems and from such painstaking and authoritative commentaries upon the latter as that of the Turkish seventeenth century writer Soudi. Pursuing this line of research, with the primary object of establishing some probable date as approximately that of our poet's birth, the earliest landmark which offers itself to us is the mention, as a prince contemporary with himself, of Sultan Shah Mesoud, (Emir Jelaleddin Mesoud Injou), Viceroy or Sultan of Fars, A.D. 1335–6, to whom he, in Ode DXCII, addresses a petition on the subject of his mule, which had apparently been stolen from him and hidden in the royal stables, and complains that all the substance, which he had, in three years' space, amassed by the munificence of the king and his minister, had been ravished from him by malignant Fortune. From this latter statement it is evident that Hafiz must have been established at the court of Shiraz, in high favour with the reigning prince and his ministers and probably in some official character, such as court-poet, at least as far back as A.D. 1333, which would bring us to the later years of the viceroyalty of Mesoud's father, Mehmoudshah Injou. It may fairly be supposed that, at this date (1333), the poet had at least reached man's estate, or he would hardly have attained the position which he seems to have held at Shiraz; and this supposition is corroborated by the fact that, as the commentators tell us, he had, in his youth, followed the regular collegiate course of education, necessary to fit the Muslim aspirant for any kind of public career, and had taken the theological degree of Hafiz (whence his sobriquet)², which after enabled him to fill the chair of Koranic exegesis founded for his benefit by a later patron. We are, therefore, entitled to assume that he must have been at least twenty years old in 1333, and this assumption would fix his birth as having occurred in 1313 at the latest, a postulate to which there seems to be no reasonable objection, as the latest estimate of the date of his death would not thus attribute to him an age of more than eighty years. Shiraz, the poet's birthplace and life-long residence, is a town of considerable size, pleasantly and picturesquely situated in a small but beautiful and fertile plain surrounded by a chain of lofty hills, in the heart of the great South-Western mountain-system of Coelo-Persia. It is the capital of the great province of Fars or Persia Proper and was, in Hafiz's time, a place of more than its present importance, being the seat of a Sultan and possessing, in all probability, at least double its present population. It is, however, still a thriving town of some forty or fifty thousand inhabitants and is (as in the Middle Ages) celebrated for the production of wine and rosewater, of which it exports considerable quantities to all parts of the East. In addition to the pleasance-place of Musella, in which Hafiz's grave is situated, some two miles without the walls, Shiraz possesses numerous beautiful pleasure-gardens and is famous for its orchards and rose-fields. The climate is, however, not altogether congenial, the cold being severe in winter, and the country is said to be malarious in the hot season. The province of Fars formed part of the vast dominions of the Khalifate; but, after the fall of Baghdad in 1258, it passed under the sway of the new dynasty founded by the Mongol conqueror Hulagou (or Holagou) upon the ruins of the Abbaside power, the seat of government of which continued to be the ancient capital of the Khalifs on the Tigris and which was styled the Ilkhani or Tribal dynasty, as being nominally subject to the suzerainty of the Khacans or Mongol emperors of China and Tartary. The last effectual ruler of Hulagou's house was Abou Said, the eighth Sultan in succession from the conqueror of Baghdad, upon whose death, in 1335, the Persian portion of the Ilkhani empire, although continuing to be nominally ruled, first, by a succession of puppet princes of the same family and later by the powerful Emirs of the Jelayir house, (who also assumed the title of Ilkhani, as claiming kinship with the original founder), was, until the irruption of Tamerlane (Timour-i-Leng) at the end of the century, divided among a number of petty princes, who, although professedly viceroys and vassals of the suzerain Sultans of Baghdad, were, in all but name, independent rulers. The principality of Fars, with its capital Shiraz, fell to the lot of Abou Said's former Grand Vizier, Mehmoudshah Injou before-mentioned, who appears to have, during the last years of that monarch's reign, acted as viceroy of the province and survived his master but a few months. He was succeeded by his son, Sultan Shah Mesoud, who died in 1336 and left the throne of Fars to his brother, Shah Sheikh Abou Ishac. Hafiz's position at the court of Shiraz was unaffected by the accession of Abou Ishac, with whom (probably owing to the fact that they had both been members, in youth, of the same Soufi order,) he remained in high favour during the whole of his reign, and the new prince's Grand Vizier, Hajji Kiwameddin Hassan, so often mentioned and eulogized by Hafiz, was the latter's constant friend and patron and appears to have befriended and supported him on every occasion until his own death, which occurred in 1353. It is he who is said to have founded, for the poet's benefit, a professorship of Koranic exegesis, the duties of which (according to Soudi) Hafiz actually performed, at all events, from time to time, during his benefactor's lifetime, signalizing his occupation of the chair by annotating the Keshf-ul-Keshshaf, Ez Zemekhsheri's famous Commentary on the Koran, and the Miftah-ul-Uloum (Key of the Sciences or Encyclopedia) of Sekkaki, copies of which two works, with marginal glosses in the poet's handwriting, are stated by Soudi to have been still extant at Shiraz in his own time. Shah Sheikh Abou Ishac was, in 1353, ousted from Shiraz and afterwards, in 1357, from Ispahan, where he lost his life, by the robber prince, Mubarizeddin Muhemmed el Muzeffer, Sultan of Yezd and Kirman, and the Muzefferi dynasty replaced that of Injou on the throne of Fars and Persian Irac. Hafiz does not seem to have in any way suffered by the change of dynasty, being apparently confirmed in his official position by the new sovereign, whose Vizier, Khwajeh Kiwameddin-w'ed-daulet Sahib Eyar,³ became his patron and continued to protect and befriend him until his own death, ten years later; and he appears to have enjoyed the consistent favour and protection of the succeeding princes of the house of Muzeffer (all of whom, with the exception of Zein-ul-abidin, 1384-7, are mentioned and eulogized by him,) until their final overthrow and expulsion by Timour in 1393. A well-known anecdote represents the Tartar conqueror as having, on his entry into Shiraz, summoned the famous Persian lyrist to his presence and reproached him, with grim jocularity, for the affront which he had put upon his (Timour's) two famous cities of Bokhara and Samarcand, in presuming to promise them as an equivalent for such a trifle as the mole or beauty-spot upon his mistress's cheek; to which Hafiz is said to have replied that it was the practice of such extravagant acts of generosity which had reduced him to his present state of indigence or (according to another version of the story) by asking how the gifts of the slave (himself) could impoverish the lord (Timour). The poet's ready reply is said to have at once established him in the favour of the rough soldier of fortune; but it is doubtful whether the interview in question ever took place, as there is no certain record of Tirnour having personally visited Shiraz during Hafiz's lifetime. It seems, at all events, certain that Hafiz was not molested by the Tartar invaders⁴ and was allowed by them to end his days in peace at Shiraz, where, according to the tarikh or chronogram on his tomb, which is still extant at Musella aforesaid, he died in 1389. There is, however, as has already been remarked, no consensus of opinion as to the actual date of his death, some authorities holding that he died as early as 1384, whilst others prolong his life till 1393, the year of the definitive defeat and slaughter by Timour of Shah Mensour, the last Muzefferi Sultan of Fars. Nor is this last opinion without some basis of probability. Hafiz repeatedly mentions and eulogizes Shah Mensour as the regnant king and it is therefore evident that he survived till some time after that prince's accession in 1388. Indeed, to judge from the fact that the name of no other contemporary sovereign occurs with such frequency in his poems⁵, it is probable that he lived for several years at Shah Mensour's court, in the exercise of his functions as poet-royal, and it is even possible that he may have survived till 1393 and so have come in contact with Timour, in accordance with the legend. However, had this been the case, it is difficult to account for the absence, in his poems, of any mention of the catastrophe which deprived him of so staunch a patron as the last Muzefferi Sultan of Fars and for the fact that no reference of any kind is made by him to the Tartar conqueror, although he⁶ bestows an elaborate eulogy upon the latter's most troublesome and persistent antagonist, Sultan Ahmed, the last Jelayir sovereign of Baghdad, who was incessantly at war with Timour and his successors, now losing and now regaining his capital, from his accession in 1382 till his death in 1410⁷. Despite the continual complaints which he makes of the inappreciative and curmudgeonly character and behaviour of his fellow-countrymen and the chronic neglect and closefistedness which he attributes to the royal and noble patrons upon whom he depended for the means of subsistence, Hafiz appears, on the whole, (as he himself acknowledges in such poems as Odes CCCCVII and CCCCXLI) to have led a fairly comfortable life at Shiraz, under the protection of the various kings and viziers of his time. The continual intestine wars, which devastated the country, do not seem to have occasioned him any considerable inconvenience, as the various robber chieftains, who succeeded each other in the occupation of the province, appear not only to have respected his person and property, but to have treated him, as far as we can judge, with distinguished consideration and even munificence; and his situation, therefore, will compare not unfavourably with that of the other poets and scholars of his day. He seems, at any rate, to have been passionately attached to the land of his birth, and no promises or inducements, such as were, according to contemporary chronicle, not lacking on the part of the Sultans of Baghdad and the other princes of Persia and even India, appear to have availed to persuade him permanently to abandon those waters of Ruknabad and that earth and air of Musella of which he speaks with such fondness. Indeed, he is said by several of his biographers to have left Shiraz on but one occasion, that of the expedition, of whose ill results he speaks with such bitterness, to Yezd, in South-West Khorasan, then a town of some fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants and the seat of an independent Sultan, situate about 185 miles, as the crow flies, and 245 or 250 miles, by road, to the North-East of Shiraz. Nevertheless, it appears certain, on the evidence of his own poems,⁸ that he made one or more journeys to Ispahan, the capital of Persian Irac, a town about 300 miles North-East of Shiraz, and even resided there awhile. It is also probable that he, at some time or other, (possibly in the reign of Sheikh Uweis or that of Sultan Ahmed, both patrons of his,) visited Baghdad, the seat of the suzerain power and the residence of his intimate friend and fellow-poet Selman Sewaji, and he seems, indeed, to have retained so favourable a memory of his stay there and of the local wine that he was apparently only prevented from returning thither by want of means.⁹ He appears, also, to have received at least two royal invitations to visit India, one (according to Ferishteh, the seventeenth century historian of the Mohammedan dynasties of the Peninsula) from Mehmoudshah Behmani I (A.D. 1378-97), King of the Deccan, and another from Ghiyatheddin. Purbi, King of Bengal, to whom¹⁰ he had addressed an eulogistic poem, which is not extant; and he is said to have actually travelled to Hurmouz or some other port on the Persian Gulf, with the intention of taking ship for India, but abandoned his purpose on being reminded, by the sight of the stormy sea, of the perils and hardships of the voyage. These scanty particulars represent all that can, with any certainty, be predicated as to the essential points of Hafiz's career; and the task of gleaning and winnowing these scattered grains of fact from the mass of his verse is much increased in difficulty and incertitude by the whimsical Oriental habit (already mentioned in the Introduction to my Translation of the Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam) of arranging the collected poems of an author, not in the order of their composition or according to the nature of their contents, or indeed in any other logical order, but after an arbitrary and unmeaning fashion, in the alphabetical sequence of the end-letters of their rhyme-words.

II

None of the Persian poets has been more strenuously and more persistently claimed as an affiliate and coreligionist by the mystical fraternity, known as the Soufis or Wool-wearers, than Hafiz; and none, to my mind, with less colour of reason. Of the followers of this curious religious sect (whose tenets are a sort of bastard offshoot of Vedantic pessimism, awkwardly grafted upon the alien stem of Semitic optimism, and who, for their insinuating persistence and their skill in adapting and fashioning to their own ends the most opposite of influences and currents of opinion and circumstance, may not inaptly be styled the Jesuits of the East,) and of their habit of claiming to interpret the writings of the most obviously unmystical and indeed anti-religious authors in a formal symbolical sense, in correspondence with their own theosophical doctrines, I have already spoken in the Introduction to my Translation of the Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam, where I have so fully stated the considerations, which seem to me to negative the theory of the Soufism of such poets as Kheyyam and Hafiz, that it is unnecessary to repeat them here. It need only be noted, in addition, that the anti-Soufi case is, in my judgment, much stronger with respect to Hafiz than to Kheyyam, as the later poet was certainly, in youth, a member of some Soufi community and tells us again and again, in his poems, that the insight, which his early connection with the sect had given him into the hypocrisy and insincerity with which the whole order was tainted and the scandalous system of falsehood and imposture, by which the Soufis and their like contrived to hoodwink the world and to exploit the credulity of the folk for their own mean purposes, had for ever disgusted him with the theosophists, and indeed with professional pietists and religionists generally, and had caused him to become a toper and an amorist, in the confidence that winebibbing and loverhood were venial sins, compared with the unpardonable crime of hypocrisy, which, with all its attendant and consequent vices, he is never tired of ascribing to his former associates. Moreover, it is abundantly evident to those who have studied the history, literary and general, of the Mohammedan East, that the adoption by the pietists of the Epicurean poet of Shiraz as a symbolical writer, conveying abstract theosophical doctrines in poetical form and under the guise of sensuous exhortations to pleasure and gallantry, as well as the pretention to claim him as a secret affiliate of the Soufi order, whose dithyrambic effusions were to be construed, according to a set formula peculiar to that sect, as in reality hymning the praises of a personal God and inculcating the tenets of an anthromorphic cult, mystically sublimated after the regular theosophical recipe, was an afterthought, neither conceived nor acted upon until long after the poet's death and forced upon the adopters by irresistible stress of circumstance. Nothing, for instance, can be more obvious than the fact that Hafiz was, during his lifetime, generally regarded by the professors of religion as an enemy of the orthodox faith and that it was solely to the abiding favour in which his exquisite literary gift and the charm of his personality had established him with the easy-going monarchs and ministers, who ruled the land of his birth, that he owed his exemption from persecution and punishment at the hands of the pietists and zealots; whilst he himself continually tells us that the Soufis, in particular, were never weary of calumniating and backbiting him and endeavouring to compass his disgrace and ruin. Nor did their enmity cease with his life; no sooner had the breath left his body than the orthodox party with one voice denounced the dead man as a notorious unbeliever, evil liver and enemy of the Faith and protested against the concession to his remains of the customary rites of decent burial; and it was not until his friends, by a happy stroke of luck or skill, extracted from his own works a Sors or oracular declaration,¹¹ in favour of his acceptance with the heavenly powers, that the superstitious deference of the Oriental to anything in the shape of a fatidical pronouncement from the Unseen World overrode the opposition of the poet's foes and he was suffered to be buried in peace. The pietists, silenced, but not convinced, soon recovered from their temporary defeat and continued to rail at the dead poet and to oppose, by all means in their power, the circulation of his poems, which were duly collected and made public, in Divanform, by his friends and disciples and at once became popular throughout Persia, whence their reputation rapidly spread all over the Muslim East. In short, Hafiz quickly became the favourite poet of the Persian-speaking peoples of India and Asia generally, amongst whom he still holds much the same position as that of Shakspeare with ourselves; and in Turkey, in particular, the knowledge of his poems was so wide-spread and their popularity so great with all classes of the population as to raise to the highest pitch the alarm and indignation of the orthodox party, who, making a supreme effort to compass the defeat of the heretical influence, endeavoured to obtain a virtual decree of excommunication against the memory of the bard of Shiraz, in the shape of a canonical declaration that his poems were unfit, by reason of their immoral and unorthodox tendencies, for the perusal of the Faithful. Their machinations were, however, defeated by the common sense and impartiality of Abou Suoud, the Chief Mufti, or supreme authority on canonical jurisprudence, of the time, who, on the case being submitted to his decision, issued a fetwa or formal judicial pronouncement, to the effect that every one was at liberty to use his own judgment in the matter of the meaning to be assigned to Hafiz's poems and that, in fine, to the pure all things were pure. Thus baffled in their hopes of securing the help of the canonical authorities for the suppression of the obnoxious writings, the Soufis and other zealots of the orthodox camp executed a complete change of front and finding that they could not succeed in ousting the love and admiration of Hafiz from the popular intelligence, determined, with characteristic flexibility, to adopt him as one of themselves and so convert their deadliest foe into an actual auxiliary. To this end, they applied themselves to insist that the Shirazi poet was, in reality, although in secret, an affiliate of the Soufi order and that his apparent abuse of the Soufis was only to be held to apply to those false members of the brotherhood who perverted its forms and doctrines to hypocritical and egotistical uses; that his (apparently) dissolute and erotic verse was to be construed solely in a symbolic and mystical sense, according to a formula constructed to harmonize with the tenets of the sect; that, when he spoke of wine and intoxication, he was to be understood as meaning the love of God and the ecstasy of spiritual communion with the Deity; that the Beloved was only a symbolical name for the Supreme Being; that by the often-mentioned cupbearer and wine-seller the Murshid or spiritual teacher and the Pir or Elder of the sect were in reality meant, and so on, in accordance with a regular vocabulary drawn up for the purpose; and this course they pursued with such consummate skill, persistence and success that the opinion of the Mohammedan world is still divided upon the point, the majority of men of culture, indeed, especially in India, inclining, to this day, (incredible, in view of the uncompromising thoroughness with which the poet contrives to dissemble any sneaking kindness he may have secretly cherished for the Soufis and their fashions and opinions, as it may seem to the European student of his works, who does not bear in mind the absorbing passion, well illustrated in such treatises as that of Gobineau on Oriental letter-magic and talismancy,¹² of the Eastern theologian and general reader for the extortion of an esoteric meaning from phrases and writings, the exoteric sense of which is obvious and sufficient,) to the belief that Hafiz's verse is only rightly to be understood, when paraphrased in the terminology of a cut-and-dried symbolical system of interpretation, which might, in the judgment of the unprejudiced critic, be applied with equal fitness and success to the Bab Ballads or L'Imitation de Notre Dame la Lune.¹³

III

It is evident to the impartial student of his poems that Hafiz was no mystic, except as every true poet is a mystic, in the sense that he sees life and the world through a haze of imaginative glamour, which invests them with a glory and a significance invisible and incomprehensible to the common herd. The unmistakable fragrance of personal goodness exhales from his verse; but otherwise there is nothing to show that he held any religious sentiments, in the ordinary meaning of the word, or that he professed any religious belief other than that of the poet, whose gospel is the worship of beauty, truth and righteousness and whose observance is to do justly and love mercy and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

To his tenure of this creed his poems bear ample witness; but, beyond this, there is nothing to show that he in any way concerned himself with the forms and dogmas of technical religion. He appears, indeed, to have taken life and its problems altogether more lightly than his great predecessor, Kheyyam. Lacking the Indian and Greek culture of the latter, his attitude towards revealed religion was rather that of the tolerant man of the world than of the uncompromising philosopher who refuses to allow that the wise and the just should be deluded in a world such as ours.¹⁴ If religion would leave him in peace, he was content to do likewise, to live and let live; and beyond the general insistance on the right of the poet to drink and make merry, to avail himself of such passing compensations as might offer for the toils and troubles of this sorry sublunary existence, and the bitter contempt with which he branded the sacrilegious pretenders to piety, we find little in his poems to account for the accusations of heresy and impiety with which he was pursued, both in his lifetime and after his death, by the orthodox party. The whole question, upon which the debate of religion turned, was manifestly without significance for his Olympian view and the matters in dispute were too trivial and too ill-defined for him to risk the spoliation of the rare sweet hours of life by the courting of unnecessary martyrdom for the sake of opinions which were, at bottom, indifferent to him. Hafiz was no Leopardi, no heaven-born "empêcheur de danser en rond", cast in the midst of the contemporary revel of inanity and impurity; no desdichado de la vida, divorced from all delight, like Heine; no eternal exile, like Lamennais, brow-branded with the Cain-mark of a divine despair,¹⁵ whose stern soul refused to compromise with the brutalities and meannesses of life and who was incapable of solacing his Titanic miseries with its trivial pleasures. Though free from the coarseness of moral fibre and the ignoble weaknesses of the two French poets, he had this in common with Hugo and de Musset that "du pain, du vin et la première venue" sufficed for his satisfaction at those unirradiated hours when the angels forbore to warble to him from the battlements of heaven, reminding him of his celestial origin and of the obligations in which it involved him. There were two men in him; one the celestial poet, whose lips burned with the live coals of inspiration and whose soul was consumed with contempt for all that was not the "blauen Blumen" of the fields of heaven, whose eyes were blinded to the sights of this sublunary sphere by the visions of the viewless world and whose ears deafened to the sounds of life by the spheral harmonies of the Ideal; and another (the Div, to use his own language, who entered in, when the Angel departed from his soul,) the careless Epicurean, for whom life was sweet and who was unconcerned to quarrel with a world in which wine and women, praise and pleasure, were to be purchased at the cost of a trifling song or a set of laudatory verses addressed to some king or man of wealth and liberality. His Epicureanism was that of the child of nature, who knows not, in his unclouded hours, of evil and is as incapable as Hawthorne's Donatello of forbearing to rejoice in the natural pleasures of unharassed existence, in the intoxication of the Spring's rebirth and the calmer, if fuller, joys of the Summer splendours, that of the poet rather than that of the voluptuary, and his needs and the satisfactions which he sought for them were rather moral than material. He was of the race of his own "Calenders of debauchery," the dreamers who, with "brick beneath the head for pillow and foot upon the Seven Stars," give and take away, at will, the diadems of kingship and the realms of night and day. It was little that he needed for the establishment of his own heaven here on earth; it was enough for him to sit at the willow-foot, to drink the bitter wine of Bihisht and listen to the chirp of the rebeck and the wail of the reed-pipe, by the marge of the rill, the silver lapse of whose waters recalled to him, with no unpleasing admonition, the fleeting character of those goods of life and the world which he was content to barter for the darling and less deceptive illusions of dreamland. Here, under the spell of the heart-kindling moonlight, the charm of the night-exhaled rose-breath and the music-making stress of the rivulet's ripple, he was fain to forget the sorrows and miseries, the gauds and glories of existence, and to dream away the hours in an Armida's garden of his own creation, for whose evocation there sufficed him a cup of wine and a handful of roses in blossom. The modest subsidies, upon which the man of letters, in a time when learning and literary and artistic ability of all kinds looked entirely to the patronage and too often the caprice of the rich and great for their reward, depended for the means of life and comfort, were often, it is true, hard to come by, capriciously or corruptly withheld or delayed; but, the necessary funds once forthcoming, the troubles of the time of straitness were quickly forgotten and the poet hastened to provide himself with the simple elements of mirth, "the gear of pleasance," as he calls it, roses and wine, a cupbearer and a minstrel and a fair-faced light of love to share and poetize the frugal debauch. These granted, life had yet sweet hours for Hafiz. When the rose-bride came once more to the festival of Spring, when the sweet bird had brought its dulcet pipe at Summer's sign and the tulips overran the April meadows with their red-raimented hosts, the loveling of youth's sweet season tarried not to return to the visions of the bard of Shiraz and he was content for awhile to dream the dreams of the lover and the poet in the banqueting-hall of the cornfields, overshaded by the canopy of the clouds. Who shall blame him? Who will not rather, in these our days of stress and storm, when the old naïve remedies suffice us no longer against the culminating agonies of the Weltschmerz, look back with indulgence and sympathy upon the sweet singer of Fars and envy him his ableness to conjure from his path, by such simple spells, the troubles and wearinesses of life? Who would not wish that he could himself exorcise, at so cheap a rate, the giant phantoms that squeak and gibber in the streets of the city of our life, in this our eleventh hour of the night? Let us take Hafiz as he was; Epicurean and idealist, courtier (in the sense of Boccaccio and Baltasar Gracian) and poet; in his one shape, admirable and immortal, and in the other, surely not destitute of claim to our sympathy and our affection. We of these latter days, belated wayfarers wandering distractedly in the goblin-haunted mazes of our nightmare-dream of universal democracy, are apt to forget that Nature, in her eternal character of the most aristocratic of all institutions, still produces (as she has always produced and will forever continue to produce, until that supreme moment when this our distracted globe, "défonçant sa "vieille et misérable écorce, Ira fertiliser de ses restes immondes Les sillons "de l'espace où fermentent les mondes,") certain creatures of election, not alone distinguished above their fellows, but differing toto coelo from the rank and file of humanity, in that they are not to be appraised by the ordinary rules of criticism and that the laws of social conduct and the canons of everyday morality show, when applied to the appreciation of their actions and characteristics, but as the idlest of fables agreed upon. Exiled Sun-Gods, tending the Admetus-herds of an unappreciative contemporaneity, falcons-royal of the Empyrean, winged for the travel of the plains of heaven, they are among us, but not of us; their joys and sorrows are other than ours. The splendour of their celestial origin shines in their faces; the heavenly ichor that floods their veins is untroubled by the puzzles and perplexities that stir our sluggish blood. Unbound by our laws and unfettered by our prescriptions, above our approof and beyond our blame, such as Hafiz are not to be tried by our standards or condemned by our limitations; they have an inalienable title to the privilege which forms the foundation of our English judicial system; they can only be judged by their peers. Like Shakspeare, like Socrates, like Mendelssohn, Hafiz was of the children of the bridechamber, who mourn not, for the bridegroom is with them. Happy, thrice happy those rare elect ones among the servants of the Ideal, to whom it is given, through shower and sunshine and without default against their august vocation, to cull the rose of hilarity from the storm-swept meads of life, who are gifted to respire with impunity the intoxicating breath of the lilies and jessamines of love and joy, unconstrained by iron necessity to sate the burning longings of their souls with the hueless and scentless blossoms of the plant of Sad Content, that austere flowerage of renouncement which is the common portion of those who seek the things of the spirit, the one stern solace which the Gods vouchsafe to the majority of their servants! These are the Parthenogeniti of life; they need no purification, as do those who have come out of great tribulation and have made white their robes in the blood of the Lamb; intemerate and free were they born, as the flowers of the field, and pure and incontaminable shall they abide for ever. Like Ben Jonson's lily of a day, they are the plants and flowers of light; they toil not neither do they spin; yet eternity is full of their glory.

Notes

¹ E. g. the lengthy account of Sultan Ahmed, the last Jelayir sovereign of Baghdad, and his struggles with Timour-i-Leng, which occupies a full quarter of Dauletshah's so-called Life of Hafiz.

² His own name was Shemseddin Mohammed. His family name is not known.

³ In the note to Ode CLXVI, 1, the name "Hajji Kiwameddin Hassan" should read "Khwajeh Kiwameddin". The mistake is that of Soudi, who constantly confounds the two Kiwameddins with each other and with another Vizier of the Ilkhani Sultans bearing the same name. The second Kiwameddin, the Vizier of Mubarizeddin and of his son Shah Shejaa, is stated by some biographers to have been the patron who founded for Hafiz the chair of Koranic exegesis before-mentioned; but Soudi asserts Hajji Kiwameddin Hassan to have been the benefactor in question and (as the Orientals say) "God [alone] is most (i. e. all) knowing!" It may here also be conveniently explained (in replacement of an accidentally omitted note) that these and other Viziers are styled by Hafiz the "Asefs of the time" in a complimentary sense, as likening them to Solomon's famous but mythical Vizier, Asef ben Berkhiya, who is the Muslim type of good government.

⁴ A fact which testifies to the comparatively high culture and esteem for poetry and poets of the people of mediaval Asia and one which it would be difficult to match in our ruder days. One cannot, for instance, imagine any special consideration being shown to Mr. Swinburne, as the greatest of living poets, by French, Russian or even Prussian invaders of London.

⁵ See Odes CLXVII, CCLXXVI, CCLXXVII, CCCLXXX, CCCCXVIII, CCCCXXXVIII, CCCCLIII, CCCCLVI, DLXXVIII and Skinker-Rime, also Odes DXIII and DXXII, in which Mensour's Finance Minister, Imadeddin, is mentioned.

⁶ Ode CCCCXCVII.

⁷ Five years after that of Timour.

⁸ See Odes CCLIII, CCLXX, CCCXCI etc.

⁹ See Odes CCXIV, CCCCXCVII, etc.

¹⁰ See Ode CLVIII.

¹¹ According to the biographers, such of the (as yet uncollected) poems of Hafiz as were accessible were cut up into slips, each containing a single couplet, and thrown into an urn, from which a young child was deputed to draw a slip at random. The couplet drawn was the last of Ode LX, i. e. "Withhold not the foot from the funeral of Hafiz; For, though he be drowned in sin, he fareth to heaven"; which, of course, formed a victorious answer to the poet's traducers. The story is probably apocryphal; but the custom of using the Divan of Hafiz for bibliomantic purposes, after the fashion of the Sortes Coranicae, Virgilianae, Biblicae etc., has long been established in the East.

¹² See Traite des Ecritures Cuneiformes par le Comte A. de Gobineau.

¹³ In this connection it may be interesting to note a fact which has been overlooked by the translators and commentators of Hafiz, to wit, that Soufism, which is now (like Agnosticism with us) a mere abstract opinion, its place as an active religious force having been, to a great extent, taken by Babism, appears, on the evidence of his poems, to have been, in Hafiz's time, a regular business, the affiliates of the sect forming, it would seem, an ordinary mendicant order, like the Dervishes, Fakirs and Calenders of the present day, the members of which, like the latter, contrived, under colour of religious enthusiasm and on pretence of the practice of extreme asceticism, to fare royally at the expense of the credulous and wealthy of the day, putting in action by anticipation the doctrine of the Sage of Wapping; "Them as has plenty money and no brains is meant for them as has plenty brains and no money." It will be seen that Hafiz, in many passages of his poems, accuses the Soufis of his day of being, not only hypocrites and impostors, but thieves and "oppressors", i.e. reprobates and malefactors, of the deepest dye.

¹⁴ v. Kheyyam, Q. 296.

¹⁵ "Celui que Dieu a touche est toujours un etre a part; il est, quoiqu'il fasse, deplace parmi les hommes; on le reconnait a un signe. II n'a point de compagnon parmi ceux de son age; pour lui les jeunes filles n'ont point de sourire".—Renan. "L'exile partout est seul".—Paroles d'un Croyant.