Hafiz lies buried, it is good to know, where he loved to be, Mosella, the pleasure place by Shiraz. Loti, the eloquent, has told us about it in Ver Ispahan. He made a journey there. He did some of his most charming writing. In the year 1451, a conquering Sultan erected a splendid tomb in his honor, which has since been neglected and fallen to ruin. But the grave remains a place of pleasant pilgrimage for Persians, just as it was for Loti, and especially for the people of Shiraz. There is kept a holiday spirit in memory of the man who loved, then glorified life.
When that accomplished linguist, Friedrich von Bodenstedt, was living in Tiflis he learned Persian. He wrote of Hafiz:
“I have received and taken up Hafiz as I would an old and honored guest, in order to free him from dust of the highway and introduce him worthily to my circle of friends. He will sing them songs of quite peculiar beauty and voice thoughts of cryptic wisdom that are pleasanter to listen to than those of the blasé Solomon.” M. Carrier exclaims joyously at the name: “A blessing upon thy pleasure, dear inspired drunkard! Thy pleasure is fruit of freedom of the spirit, of deep, noble feeling, of confidence in God whom he had seen face to face. Unceasingly he praises spring, love, wine. He is always offering gems in new settings, but he lacks the epic, the organic. He is purely lyrist, one meant to attune, then harmonize emotion. The zealots have written Hafiz down in the black book of their disapproval. He advised them to pawn their priestly cowls for wine. Silver and gold are to him negligible things in comparison with freedom of soul. He desired greater, better things. And he found them! He brought heaven down upon earth. In intoxication of the spirit he found the flowing light of revelation. In wine he found truth. This is the way to look at Hafiz. Not as a wine tippler after the manner of Falstaff, but as wine’s high priest, crowned with vine-leaves, and its singer.”
Among nations of today the influence of Hafiz has been greatest in Germany, just as the English Byron’s influence was greatest in Russia. And there it is interesting to note the effect upon Goethe. He was an old man as years count, (He who was never old.), in the early seventies, when he first read Hafiz. Straightway he wrote memorable things of him: “That you can not end, that makes you great.... Your song is like the whirling star-set sky, on and on, the same.... And should the entire world perish and pass away, with you, with you, Hafiz, I will emulously strive. Let Joy and Pain, the twins, be yours and mine alone! To love, to live, to drink like you, be that my pride!”
This from Goethe, the calm, olympic God! This from Goethe, who believed in Greek standards of unemotional excellence! What was the result? In Hafiz, Goethe found another youth. He bathed in the spring of oriental love, life, was renewed and grew young. And he gave us again a poet’s book of youth, fire, fancy, Der West-Östlicher Divan. This book we owe to Hafiz! It has the fresh charm that distinguishes the Vita Nuova. It has all that delights in books of youth, without defects.
Goethe exclaimed with joy: “I will grow young! I will mingle with the herds’ boys in the desert! I will refresh myself in the oasis, in the waste places!”
Sometimes we are forced to think he borrowed from this Eastern poet. But he did not try to conceal it. He was great enough to borrow without bowed head. Hafiz’ meters and somewhat of his manner have become naturalized in Germany, thanks to men like Platen, Rückert. The Germans, too, have translated Hafiz better than other nations. There we find him freest from foreign substance, clearer, less betrübt.
Hafiz has the conversational freedom, fluency, which distinguish Tu Fu, and which give his poems freshness. Sometimes they have effect of brilliant improvisation, that promptitude of the moment, which fastidious Watteau held to be the essential of art. He has primal fire. His sunlight dazzles us. It is too strong for eyes accustomed to dilutions, to tempered shadows. His roses are brilliant, richly scented, and of the East; they are unlike pale, pastel tinted shadows into which Eighteenth Century art conventionalized them. He had not learned to like the mixing of light with shadow. He paints as Watteau painted his Italian Clown, under direct hard light, straight fronting us. We must learn to see with a painter’s trained eye the modulations of white. He knew how to harmonizer le blanc. Watteau, the lyric painter, is his kin in plastic art of the brush. He is likewise his kin in scornful, contemptuous creation of beauty, and in his scorn of things that perish. But it is not wise to write of one art in terms of another.
Strong indeed must have been the personality that burst priestly restraint six hundred years ago! And sure indeed was his realization of self.