When he appeared before Adud Ad-Dawlat, that prince said to him: "What motive could have induced thee to compose an elegy on the death of my enemy?"
Abu 'l-Hasan replied: "Former obligations and favours granted long since; my heart therefore overflowed with sorrow, and I lamented his fate."
There were wax-lights burning, at the time, before the prince, and this led him to say to the poet: "Canst thou recollect any verses on wax-lights?" and to this the other replied by the following lines: The wax-lights, showing their ends tipped with fire, seemed like the fingers of thy trembling foes, humbly stretched forth to implore thy mercy.
On hearing these verses, Adud Ad-Dawlat clothed him in a pelisse of honour and bestowed on him a horse and a bag of money.
IX.—A Western Interlude
That beautiful phrase of the poet on his crucified hero—I never saw a tree, before this, enabled to sustain all that was generous—has an oddly close parallel, which I am tempted to record here: a phrase, not less beautiful, used by a modern Frenchman, also of a dead man and a tree. It occurs in a letter written by François Bonvin on the death of his brother, Léon, the painter of flowers. Léon Bonvin's work is little known and there is little of it, but those who possess examples treasure them like black pearls. François Bonvin, who is represented in the National Gallery, in the modern French and Dutch room, by a scene of cattle painted with great decision and confidence and breadth, and who died in 1888, was the son of a policeman at Vaugiraud, on the outskirts of Paris: an old soldier who divided his time between protecting the property of the market gardeners and constructing rockeries for poor people's windows. Another, and the youngest son, was Léon, who after a shy and lonely boyhood and youth, under the tyranny of his father, which was mitigated by rambles in the neighbouring forest of Meudon, gathering flowers and painting them under his brother's encouragement with a felicity and fidelity that have not been surpassed, fell, when still quite young, into the hands of a shrewish vulgar wife, and with her opened a tavern. No couple could be more ill-assorted than this gentle creature, full of poetry and feeling, whose one ambition was to set exquisitely on paper the blossoms which gave him pleasure, and the noisy, bustling, angry woman whom he had married.
The union and the commercial venture were alike disastrous; unhappiness was accompanied by poverty, and after a short period of depression the unfortunate artist, early one morning, in his thirty-third year, wandered into the forest of Meudon, where the world had once spread so happily before his eyes, and hanged himself.
All this happened in the middle years of the last century, when the same revival of nature-worship was inspiring painters in France as had, fifty years earlier, flushed Wordsworth's poetry, and such famous and more fortunate contemporaries of Léon Bonvin as Corot and Rousseau and Millet and Daubigny and Jacque and Dupré were painting in the forest of Fontainebleau. Theirs to succeed; poor Léon found life too hard, and was dead when still far from his prime.
And what of the notable phrase? It is one that I know I shall never forget, one that will remain indissolubly linked to the name of Bonvin, whether it is Léon who inspired it or François who penned it and who had been so useful in providing his brother with the materials for his one absorbing pleasure and had always exhorted him to "do everything from nature." Writing to some one of influence in Paris, François told the story of his brother's death. In a postscript he added the information that the weight of Léon's body had broken a branch of the tree. Then came the words: "This is the only damage he ever did."
Could there be a more beautiful epitaph or a more poignant commentary on a world askew?