I.
Jeláleddín Rúmí (A.D. 1207-1273) is now universally recognised by 'those who know,' as the greatest of the Persian Mystical Poets. This supremacy, in his own sphere, has been unanimously accorded to him for more than six centuries, by unnumbered myriads of his own disciples and followers in the Oriental World, who have been wrapt in devoutest admiration of the great Master to whom they have owed the highest joy and inspiration of their spiritual life. And at last, in our own Western World, the great Persian scholars of Europe, looking at him without personal or national bias, and through the clear, cold light of the new time, have come more and more, as with one voice, to join in this chorus of praise. His most appreciative recent editor and interpreter in England, in presenting a few leaves plucked with reverent hand from what he calls Jeláleddín's 'wreath of imperishable Lyric Song,' offers his own careful and conscientious work to us, as a contribution 'to a better appreciation of the greatest mystical poet of any age.' And with this designation, as summing up the judgment of a capable expert and critic—strange as it may sound—we venture, in all deference and sincerity, to agree. Jeláleddín is now rising upon our literary horizon in all his native Splendour—his name appropriately signifying 'The Splendour of the Faith'—as at once the Dante, the St. Bernard, the Spenser, the Milton, the Angelus Silesius, and the Novalis of the Orient. As a religious Lyrical Poet his mellifluous music, his variety of strain, his captivating charm of words, his purity of feeling, his joyous faith, and his elevation of thought, have never been surpassed in their own kind. Taking what Matthew Arnold has called 'the lyrical cry' even in its widest range, it would be doing no one wrong—although it dare hardly be done as yet—to rank Jeláleddín, when he comes fully before us 'with all his singing robes about him,' with the very highest—with Shakespeare, with Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, and with Goethe and Heine! He is certainly one of the most fertile poets of Nature among the Lyrical Singers of all time, and the most exuberant, if not also the most spiritual, Hymnist the world outside of Christendom has yet produced.
This estimate, however shaded or qualified, cannot but appear at first strangely exaggerated, and out of all just proportion, to those who mayhap read the name of Jeláleddín now for the first time. Let us listen, then, to the greatest students of Persian Poetry in the critical Nineteenth Century, the judges who have highest authority on the subject, and who have the best right to pronounce judgment on Jeláleddín. And let us hear in the first place, as is his due, the most learned Historian of Persian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, who with indefatigable industry and completest knowledge has adorned his pages with Extracts from no less than Two Hundred of Persia's greatest Poets. Joseph von Hammer, the great Austrian Orientalist (known later as Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall and as the Historian of Arabic Literature in seven immense volumes, containing Accounts of nearly ten thousand Authors) says:—
'Jeláleddín Rumi is the greatest Mystical Poet of the East, the Oracle of the Sofis, the Nightingale of the contemplative life, the Author of the Mesnevi (a celebrated double-rhymed ascetic poem), and the Founder of the Mevlevi, the most famous Order of Mystical Dervishes. As Founder of this Order, as the Legislator of the Contemplative Life, and as the Interpreter of Heavenly Mysteries, he is highly revered. And as such he has to be estimated by quite a different standard from that which applies to those Poets whose inspiration has not soared, like his, to the Vision of Divine things, to the primal Fountain of Love and Light. He cannot properly be compared either with Firdusi, the greatest of the Persian Epic Poets, nor with Nizami, the greatest of the Romantic Poets, nor with Saadi, the first of the moral Didactic Poets, nor with Hafiz, the chiefest of the erotic Lyrical Poets; for all these won the Palm of Poetry in entirely different fields from his. The only two great Poets of his kind, with whom a comparison can be in place, Senayi, the Author of the Mystical 'Flower Garden,' and Attar, the Author of the Mystical 'Bird Dialogues.' But both these works stand, as regards poetic merit, far below the Mesnevi, which is the Text Book of all The Sofis, from the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Bosphorus. The Collection of Jeláleddín's 'Lyrical Poems'—his Divan, properly so called—'is regarded by them as of still higher value; it is practically the Law Book and the Ritual of all these Mystics. These outbursts of the highest inspiration of its kind deserve to be more closely considered, as it is from them that we see shining forth as in clear splendour the essence of the Oriental Mysticism, the cardinal Doctrine that All is One—the view of the ultimate Unity of all Being—and giving with it Direction and Guidance to the highest goal of Perfection by the contemplative Way of Divine Love. On the wings of the highest religious enthusiasm, the Sofi, rising above all the outward forms of positive Religions, adores the Eternal Being, in the completest abstraction from all that is sensuous and earthly, as the purest Source of Eternal Light. Mevláná Jeláleddín thus soars, not only like other Lyrical Poets, such as Hafiz, over Suns and Moons, but even above Space and Time, above the world of Creation and Fate, above the Original Contract of Predestination, and beyond the Last Judgment, into the Infinite, where in Eternal Adoration he melts into One with the Eternal Being, and infinitely loving, becomes One with the Infinite Love—ever forgetting himself and having only the great All in his view.'[1]
Thus far the learned Von Hammer. But let us also hear the judgment of the East itself, of which this is only a Western echo, as it may be gathered from Devletshah, the greatest native biographer—the Dr. Johnson we may appropriately say—of the Persian Poets. Of Jeláleddín, he says:—
'His pure Heart is filled with Divine Mysteries, and through his eradiating Soul streams the Infinite Light. His View of the World leads the thirsty in the Vale of the Contemplative Life to the refreshing Fountain of Knowledge; and his Guidance leads those who have wandered in the Wilderness of Ignorance into the Gardens where Truth is really known. He makes plain to the Pilgrim the Secrets of the Way of Unity, and unveils the Mysteries of the Path of Eternal Truth:
As when the foaming Sea high swells in Wave upon Wave,
It casts out Pearls upon Pearls on every Shore they lave.'
And to cite only one Turkish Authority—for the Turks claim Jeláleddín as their own, although a Persian of royal race, born at Balkh, old Bactra, on the ground of his having sung and died at Qoniya, in Asia Minor (the Iconium of Paul and Barnabas and Timothy and St. Thecla), whence he was called Rumi 'the Roman,' usually rendered 'the Greek,' as wonning within the confines of old Oriental Rome. This is how Fehîm Efendi, the Turkish Historian of the Persian Literature, himself a Poet, begins his Sketch of the Life of the great poetic Mystagogue:—
'As the ideal of Searchers after Truth here below, as the pattern of the Pure, the Mevlana is honoured by great and small among the people, by the aristocrat and the common man. In all circles his words are held in high honour; among all the wise his knowledge is greatly esteemed; and no pen has had the power to praise him, and to celebrate his excellence worthily, or to describe it in fitting terms.
And should the fancy hold it can
His praise completely reach;
Mevlana's praise it ne'er shall scan—
How say it then in speech?'
Rosen, who gives this quotation, and an excellent rhymed German translation of part of the Mesnevi, refers to that poem as not only 'one of the most celebrated productions of the Persian Mysticism, but as being regarded by many Mohammedans as almost equal in holiness to the Koran and the Sunna.' Being attached, at the time he wrote, to the German Embassy at Constantinople, Rosen also mentions that not only did the educated Oriental regard the Mesnevi as the most perfect Book of Edification, which when its contents were received into his mind and heart, made him certain of Salvation; but that even the poor Persian retailers of the products of their home industries, on the streets, could recite with enthusiasm long passages from the poems of Jeláleddín. We believe that this holds true to-day, more or less, of the whole Mohammedan world.[2]
But coming to more familiar names, we might gather a whole cloud of the most approved witnesses in this connection. Thus Sir William Jones, the first great Anglo-Indian Scholar, the Columbus of the new Old World of Sanskrit and Persian Literature, enters with wonderful sympathy and insight into possession of the Persian and Hindu Mystical Poetry; he refers to their great Maulavi, and his astonishing work, The Mesnevi; and he translates the celebrated opening passage in rhyming couplets which would not have been unworthy of Pope himself.[3] Sir William Jones did not, indeed, touch Jeláleddín's Lyrics, but he rendered some precious morsels of Hafiz, 'Odes,' as they are called, both in English and French, in a way that made young European students and poets, like Herder and Goethe, turn again to the East with yearning expectant eyes. Similar testimony might be adduced from Henry Thomas Colebrooke, one of the very greatest of the successors of Sir W. Jones. The chief Historian of Persia, and the best informed Persian scholar of his day, Sir John Malcolm (of Langholm), if less sympathetic than Sir W. Jones in his painstaking account of the Persian Mystics, gives likewise the first place to Jeláleddín.[4] And then much more definitely Sir Gore Ouseley, the first English Biographer of the Persian Poets, gives Jeláleddín due recognition in connection with the unrivalled Mesnevi.[5] The Journal of the Asiatic Society, an ever valuable Magazine of Oriental learning, and the parent of many others of its kind, has been enriched by the contributions of many enthusiastic English scholars following in the footsteps of Sir W. Jones, and it contains the earliest fragments of English translations of Jeláleddín.[6] Robert Alfred Vaughan, in his Hours with the Mystics, 1856, a popular, sympathetic, and still attractive work, appreciates Jeláleddín, and compares him with Angelus Silesius and Emerson, but all his knowledge of the Persian Mystic was derived from Tholuck and Sir W. Jones. At last competent scholars began to deal worthily with Jelál's poetry in English. Sir James W. Redhouse has translated the First Book of the Mesnevi in rhyming couplets, with the utmost fidelity and care; and another distinguished Persian scholar, Mr. Whinfield, the most faithful English translator of Omar Khayyám, has given an abridged version of the whole immense work, which in the Persian original contains about 70,000 lines.[7] The Mesnevi has thus come now to be pretty well known by English readers interested in the subject; and in the last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Professor Hermann Ethé, an unquestionable authority, in his valuable Articles on Persian Literature and Jeláleddín Rumi, sums him up as 'the greatest Pantheistic Writer of all ages,' and speaks of 'his matchless Odes in which he soars on the wings of a genuine enthusiasm, high over Earth and Heaven, up to the Throne of Almighty God.' Be it noted, in passing, that it is at least remarkable how two such different writers as the Turkish Devlet Shah and the learned German Orientalist should both write of Jeláleddín in terms that undesignedly, but irresistibly, recall by their very superlativeness, the famous lines of Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare:—
'Each change of many-coloured Life he drew,
Exhausted Worlds and then imagin'd new;
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.'
All this makes it now intelligible that the late lamented Editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Dr. W. Robertson Smith, when Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, with the fine insight of the far-seeing scholar, should have directed the attention of a young, enthusiastic student to the 'Lyrical Poetry of Jeláleddín Rumi'; and it is to the loyal devotion of this young scholar that we owe the first appearance from an English Press of a Volume of forty-eight 'Selected Poems' of Jeláleddín, in a critical Persian Text and with accurate and elegant prose renderings.[8] Mr. Reynold A. Nicholson has thus established a right to pronounce judgment on the merits of Jeláleddín, and we now listen to him with deference, and no longer with astonishment, when he deliberately characterises him as 'the greatest Mystical Poet of any Age.'
As the object of this Introduction is only to determine, in some measure, the literary interest of the Lyrical Poetry—the Díván, as it is technically called—of Jeláleddín, space need not be taken up by narrating again what is traditionally known of his Life, and it is the less necessary as excellent accounts are now easily accessible. Sir James W. Redhouse gives in somewhat abridged translation El Eflākī's interesting narrative, with its romantic wreath of legend, and its quaint anecdotes and racy sayings. Mr. Nicholson furnishes an excellent summary. Professor Hermann Ethé's notice in the Encycl. Brit. has been already referred to, and reference may also be made to his Morgenländische Studien, and his popular Lecture in the Virchow-Holtzendorff Series, 1888, on 'The Mystical, Didactic, and Lyrical Poetry, and the later Literature of the Persians,' with its fine characterization, which we would fain have quoted. Rosen translates into German the Biographical Sketches of Devletshah and Jāmi. Professor E. G. Browne's recent 'Literary History of Persia,' which carries the subject down to A.D. 1000, and is undoubtedly so far the best History of Persian Literature yet produced, contains appreciative references to Jeláleddín, with a masterly account of the Sufi Mysticism; and we look forward with much interest to a comprehensive and judicial summing up of the great Mystic Poet, by this high authority upon the whole subject.[9]