Both Hafiz and Heine, with Tu Fu, have that inexplainable quality that touches the heart. They say the things we can not forget. But there was an elfish caprice in Heine which Hafiz did not have, just as there was a mystic yearning in the Persian the Hebrew did not know. And in Tu Fu there were heights of lyric rapture none have surpassed. They were not lonely geniuses, seeking solitude, meditation. They lived in the whirl of life. They learned wisdom of its sadness. Heine had the beauty-loving soul of an ancient Greek, the restless pitiful heart of a modern, and the passionate vengeance, the hate of the Hebrew. He realized in his life, in the few years of health granted him, the fierce, furious ideals of pleasure of Anacreon and Hafiz. He lived like a God. And he received the punishment of a God, in a consuming Promethean fire of pain, that crippled him, then burned up his life. Each lived in an age of mental expansion, when minds were creative. The Paris of Heine was the most brilliant age of that gay city by the Seine, when she best deserved the proud appellation of the step-mother of genius. Poland had fallen. Paris was filled with a crowd of brilliant Slav exiles. It was the day, too, of Eugene Sue, Berlioz, George Sand, de Musset, Dumas, Gautier, the Goncourt Brothers, Gavarni, Saint Beuve, Liszt, Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Ary, Sheffer, Delacroix, Horace Vernet. Mickiewicz was there, too, editing the fourth volume of his poetry. And Julius Slowacki, and Count Krasinski. After the period of these men had passed there was no more writing whose inspiration came from deep conviction, and which was indifferent to gold and to the praise of the world. Tu Fu lived at the time lyric verse reached its height under art loving Emperors of Tang, and when one of the proudest periods of plastic art was beginning, the Period of Sung Emperors.
Anacreon was borne on the crest of the wave that was sweeping on to the sublime heights of Greek culture. And Hafiz, who wrote in the divine, high piping Pehlevi of old Omar, the language of heroes, crowns the crest of the great age of Persian lyric poetry.
Anacreon is product of soft, sensuous Ionia, home of art and song. Hafiz is product of the mystic imagination of India, of her unreckoned centuries of culture and meditation, and the dominant clear thinking wisdom of Persia. Tu Fu was the mental product of three thousand years of intensive cultivation.
Heine is product of the prophetic fury and eloquence of Israel and the grace of France. Heine and Hafiz had no little in common. They are to be added to the list of inspired teachers who have come out of Asia. Each was born into a received religion, but neither bore its limitation nor its restraint. Each was receptively tolerant of the religion of others, while having none of his own. Heine said proudly: I am the freest man since Goethe! Hafiz said equally proudly, in his Rubaiyat: “Only he is happy who draws inspiration from all things beautiful just so long as he shall be permitted to live!”
Heine loved the Orient. He longed for it. Heine has written a lyric of a pine in the north girdled with snow and ice, dreaming of a palm in the Orient. Like Gautier he dreamed of life under a bluer sky, its splendor of light. He read and loved the poets of Persia, Hafiz, Firdusi, Rûmi, Nizami. Schlegel was just telling the German world of that day of the literary treasures of Asia. In Heine he found a receptive listener. The oriental blood in his veins answered to call of the Persian poets. He, too, was of the East.
At the same time both Heine and Hafiz are modern, because of their free, their inquiring souls. No other writers have so eloquently expressed grief at the vanity of life. The lyric poets of other races and ages have not had their tragic fire, power of denunciation, nor their philosophic depth. None have so rebelled against life’s briefness, its inexorableness. None have so sounded hollowness of all things human.
At the same time the mind of each has been rainbow-prismed with joy. It is people of Asiatic blood who are capable of transitions from grief to joy. The fog bound lands of Europe can not shelter such chameleon-like changefulness.
The throb of warring ages in which they lived was in their blood. It beat in their verses. It modeled their measures. They were indebted to its storm, its stress for vivid vitality. And they were indebted likewise for warmer blood. Great lyric poets must come of impassioned, Asiatic races. Something hinders their European brothers, binds their utterance. They can not make of their souls a torch of joy to light a moment. They lack the passionate conviction that makes them great.
Each was born upon crest of an age of transition that resembles the one in which we live. A period that followed wars! Heine was born the last year of the Great Century, 1799. He saw blind worship of royal power, prerogative, give way to the modern spirit of freedom. Hafiz was born at end of a period of religious intensity which gave way during his life to a genial culture. Both felt the battling, invigorating influences of two distinct ages, each of which was strongly marked.
In Heine’s day art and letters reached highest development in Europe, just as lyric verse did in Persia in the age of Hafiz. And again in China, under Tang Emperors. After them came le déluge, which took guise of a wide-spread dilettantism, form without matter. Both Heine and Hafiz were pagans in that they clung to world of the senses; but they were modern in their lack of calmness, their restlessness, and in their dramatic dissatisfaction. Their hearts were lutes upon which the winds of the world blew. And with them love and hate were the destructive passions of an Asiatic race. Both were past masters of the art of expression. They knew how to say much in little. They could condense history or a romance into a quatrain, a couplet. Both were great and fluent artists. And they fought in their own way as best they could the battle of enlightenment of the human spirit. Each hated cant, hypocrisy, cowardliness, and vain seeming. Each felt and suffered the scorn, the hatred of his fellow men, then learned sadly to know that he who wishes to accomplish anything whatsoever, or has ideals of any kind to fight for, must know that the wings of his spirit are strong.