[49] Sir C.U. Aitchison’s Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, 2nd edition, vol. vi. Calcutta, 1876.
[50] A Tour to Sheeraz by the route of Karroon and Feerozabad, London, 1807.
[51] In two splendid volumes, printed by native hands under the sanction of the Government at Calcutta, in 1891, Lieutenant-Colonel H. Wilberforce Clarke published an English prose translation of The Divan, written in the Fourteenth Century, by Khwaja Shamshu-d-Din Muhammad-i-Hafiz. The work is described in the Quarterly Review of January 1892, by a writer who thus begins: ‘About two miles north-west of Shiraz, in the garden called Mosella which is, being interpreted, “the place of prayer,” lies, beneath the shadow of cypress-trees, one of which he is said to have planted with his own hand, Shems-Edden Mohammed, surnamed Hafiz, or “the steadfast in Scripture,” poet, recluse, and mystic.... No other Persian has equalled him in fame—not Sadi, whose monument, now in ruins, may be visited near his own; nor Firdusi, nor Jami. Near the garden tomb is laid open the book of well nigh seven hundred poems which he wrote. According to Sir Gore Ouseley, who turned over its pages in 1811, it is a volume abounding in bright and delicate colour, with illuminated miniatures, and the lovely tints of the Persian caligraphy.’
[52] Persia and the Persian Question, 2 vols. (Longmans), 1892.
[53] Travels, vol. i. pp. 687-8.
CHAPTER X
IN PERSIA—CONTROVERSIES WITH MOHAMMEDANS, SOOFIS, AND JEWS
Henry Martyn’s first week in Persia was enough to lead him to use such language as this: ‘If God rained down fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, how is it that this nation is not blotted out from under heaven? I do not remember to have heard such things of the Hindus, except the Sikhs; they seem to rival the Mohammedans.’ The experienced Bengal civilian, Mr. E. Scott Waring, had thus summed up his impressions: ‘The generality of Persians are sunk in the lowest state of profligacy and infamy, and they seldom hesitate alluding to crimes which are abhorred and detested in every civilised country in the universe. Their virtues consist in being most excellent companions, and in saying this we say everything which can be advanced in their favour. The same argument cannot be advanced for them which has been urged in favour of the Greeks, for they have laws which stigmatise the crimes they commit.’ Every generation seems to have departed farther and farther from the character of the hero-king, Cyrus. At the present time, after two visits to Europe by their Shah, the governing class, the priestly order of Moojtahids, and the people seem to be more hopelessly corrupt than ever.[54]
So early as the twelfth century the astronomer-poet of Persia, Omar Khayyam, of Naishapur, in his few hundred tetrastichs of exquisite verse which have ever since won the admiration of the world, struck the note of dreary scepticism and epicurean sensuality, as the Roman Lucretius had done. His age was one of spiritual darkness, when men felt their misery, and all the more that they saw no means of relieving it. The purer creed of Zoroaster had been stamped down but not rooted out by the illiterate Arab hordes of Mohammed. A cultured Aryan race could not accept submissively the ignorant fanaticism of the Semitic sons of the desert. The Arabs destroyed or drove out ultimately to India the fire-worshippers who had courage to prefer their faith to the Koran; the mass of the people and their leaders worked out the superficial Mohammedanism identified with the name and the sufferings of Ali. The new national religion became more and more a falsehood, alike misrepresenting the moral facts and the character and claims of God, and not really believed in by the general conscience. The few who from time to time arose endowed with spiritual fervour or poetic fire, found no vent through the popular religion, and no satisfaction for the aching void of the heart. The loftier natures ran by an inevitable law of the human mind either into such self-indulgent despairing scepticism as Omar Khayyam’s, or into the sensual mysticism of Sadi, Jami, and Hafiz, of the whole tribe of ascetic enthusiasts and impostors, the Soofis, fakeers, and durweshes, who fill the world of Islam, from the mosques on the Bosporus to the secret chambers of Persia and Oudh. To all such we may use one of the few rare tetrastichs which Omar Khayyam was compelled by his higher nature to write:[55]