Another wit, Osama Ibn Murshid, having had a tooth drawn, produced the following verses, either at the time, for the delectation of the dentist, or afterwards, when seated among his friends: I had a companion of whom I was never tired, who suffered in my service, and laboured with assiduity; whilst we were together I never saw him; and when he appeared before my eyes, we had parted for ever.
This is how Osama wrote when the house of a miser was burnt down: See how the progress of time constrains us to acknowledge that there is a destiny. Ibn Talib never lit a fire in his house, through avarice, yet by fire it was destroyed.
"One thing," says Ibn Khallikan, in the notice of this satirist, "brings on another." He then proceeds: "Abu 'l-Hasan Yahya Abd Al-Azim Al-Misri, surnamed Al-Jazzar, recited to me the following verses which he had composed on another literary man at Cairo, far advanced in age, who, being attacked by a cutaneous eruption, anointed himself with sulphur: O, learned master, hearken to the demand of a friend devoid of sarcasm: thou art old, and of course art near to the fire of hell; why then anoint thyself with sulphur?"
As a further quite unnecessary proof of the antiquity of jests which we think new, I might append to this excellent sarcasm by a friend devoid of sarcasm the story, often now told, of the rival chemists in a provincial town, one of whom was old-fashioned and costly, and the other new and cheap. To the costly one, who had asked too much for sulphur, a customer remarked that if he went to the new shop opposite he could get it for fourpence; which brought from the old-fashioned chemist, weary of this competition, the admirable retort that if he went still farther, to a certain place, he would get it for nothing.
East and West join hands again. When I was a boy living in a town by the sea, one of my heroes in real life—whom I never knew, but admired fearfully from a distance—was a famous stockbroker, whose splendid name I could give if I chose. One of his many mansions was here, and I used to see him often as he managed the finest pair of horses on the south coast, which he drove in a phaeton with red wheels, always smoking a cigar as he did so. Many were the stories told of his princely Victor Radnor-ish ways, one of which credited him with a private compartment on the train, into which his guests walked without a ticket—a magnificent idea!—and another stated that he bought his trousers a hundred pairs at a time. And then I open this book and read that Barjawan, an Ethiopian eunuch, after being stabbed to death by the prince's umbrella-bearer, was found to possess a thousand pairs of trousers.
Not a little of the humorous effect of these Persian sayings comes from their dry frankness. For example: Ibn Omair, a trustworthy traditionist, when, once, he was ill, and a person sent his excuses for not going to visit him, answered: "I cannot reproach a person for not visiting me, whom I myself should not go to visit were he sick." Modern would-be wits might take the hint; for with candour so scarce, and self-criticism usually ending in a verdict of complete innocence, the blurted naked truth, not unaccompanied by a sidelong thrust at the speaker's own fallibility, would always produce the required laugh.
XI.—The Satirists
Al-Yazidi, a story of whom I quoted above, was a teacher of Koranic readings, a grammarian and a philologer, who taught in Baghdad in the ninth century. He was also a famous satirist; but satire seems to have been easier then than now. So at least I gather from the epigram which Al-Yazidi wrote upon Al-Asmai Al-Bahili: You who pretend to draw your origin from Asma, tell me how you are connected with that noble race. Are you not a man whose genealogy, if verified, proves that you descend from Bahila? "This last verse," said Ibn Al-Munajjim, "is one of the most satirical which have been composed by the later poets."
I need hardly say that Ibn Khallikan, with his eagle eye and fierce memory, does not let the originality of this pass unchallenged. The idea, he tells us, is borrowed from the verse in which Hammad Ajrad attacked Bashshar, the son of Burd. I like its directness. You call yourself the son of Burd, though you are the son of another man. Or, grant that Burd married your mother, who was Burd?
In sarcasms Al-Yazidi was hard pressed by Abu Obaida, who was a very Mr. Brown (vide Bret Harte) in being of "so sarcastic a humour that every one in Basra who had a reputation to maintain was obliged to flatter him." When dining once with Musa Ibn Ar-Rahman Al-Hilali, one of the pages spilled some gravy on the skirt of Abu Obaida's cloak.