Thou God, art the Light
That shall shine in the soul of the pure;
Now Thou art hidden by sin, by sin with its cloud of night.
Now Thou art hidden, but then, as over the height,
Then shall Thy glory break through the clouds that obscure,
And be seen in the mount of the Lord.
It is not pessimism but hope that speaks of the clearer vision to be won hereafter. One need not love this world less because one loves the future world more; belief in continuous growth of the soul is the most optimistic of thoughts. Critics who term Ibn Gebirol a pessimist make the common mistake of confounding despair with earnestness. Your truest optimist may be the most serious of men, just as sorrow may be at its purest, its strongest, in association with hope.
BAR HISDAI’S “PRINCE AND DERVISH”
The “moral” is a tiresome feature about certain types of allegory; we prefer that a story should tell us its own tale. Why end off with a “moral”? As Dr. Joseph Jacobs wrote in his edition of Caxton’s Aesop (p. 148): “It seems absurd to give your allegory, and then, in addition, the truth which you wish to convey. Either your fable makes its point or it does not. If it does, you need not repeat your point; if it does not, you need not give your fable. To add your point is practically to confess the fear that your fable has not put it with sufficient force.”
And yet it seems probable that some of the world’s stories would never have been circulated so widely but for their morals. When, in the thirteenth century, Abraham Bar Hisdai, of Barcelona, produced his Prince and Dervish, his motive was not to tell a tale but to point a moral. He had a poor opinion of his age. Little wonder! Among the delectable episodes which he witnessed was the burning of some of the works of Maimonides by monks, instigated thereto by anti-Maimonist Jews. He made his protest. But it was not this experience that predisposed him to castigate his contemporaries. His language, in the preface to his Prince and Dervish, is vague. The most definite thing is its grim earnestness. His chance had come. An Arabic book had happened to fall under his notice, and it seemed to him the very thing! So he translated it into Hebrew. And beautiful Hebrew it is. Bar Hisdai was a master of the style known as rhymed prose. With him, however, it is hardly prose; it is poetry. It is not nearly so unmetrical in form as is usual in this genre. There is a lilt about his unrhythms, a regularity not so much of syllables as of stressed phrases; and these are marks of verse. Still it is prose, as one clearly perceives when Bar Hisdai, following the rules of the game, introduces snatches which are professedly poetical. Bar Hisdai, perhaps unfortunately, did more than translate. He considered his original badly arranged, he says; so he re-arranged the material. Possibly, then, he added to it stories taken from other sources. A rather piquant problem, for instance, is presented by the inclusion of a version of the parable of the sower, which in Bar Hisdai’s original must have been drawn from the New Testament. Assuredly Bar Hisdai did not derive it from the latter source directly; we are quite uncertain, however, as to the indirect route by which it reached him. This is, I repeat, a little unfortunate, because it complicates the problem as to the nature of the Arabic on which he drew. The gain of the book as a collection of tales carries with it loss from the point of view of literary history.
Now what was the book which he called by the title usually rendered Prince and Dervish? Bar Hisdai names it “King’s Son and Nazirite” (Ben ha-Melek we-ha-Nazir). By Nazirite he means ascetic, and Dervish is a fair reproduction which we owe to W. A. Meisel (1847). A Dervish is not the same as the biblical Nazirite, inasmuch as the former devoted himself to a much wider range of austerities than the latter. But Bar Hisdai undoubtedly intends his Nazirite to be identical with the Dervish type. How comes he to use the word in this extended sense? The answer is easily found. Bar Hisdai was a hero-worshipper, and the object of his cult was David Kimhi, the famous grammarian of Provence. Almost pathetic is Bar Hisdai’s admiration for Kimhi. Now the latter, in his Hebrew dictionary (included in the Miklol) defines the verb nazar as meaning “to abstain from eating and drinking and pleasures” (compare Zechariah 7. 3). This was not a new idea, for the same interpretation is given by Rashi (loc. cit.), and is adumbrated in the talmudic use of the verb. But I doubt whether Bar Hisdai would have employed the noun but for Kimhi’s emphatic definition.
The Hebrew title, which is Bar Hisdai’s own invention, well fits the contents. Briefly, these consist of a framework into which are built a number of fables. An Indian king, fearing that his son will become a devotee of the ascetic life, places him (like Johnson’s Rasselas) in a beautiful palace, where he is kept ignorant of human miseries. But he comes under the influence of a hermit (the Nazirite), who impresses on the prince the vanity of life, and converts him (despite the king’s active hostility) to the new way of thinking. It is in the course of this narrative that the fables and parables are introduced. Obviously, however, Ibn Hisdai was much impressed by the narrative as such. “No king nor king’s son, but a slave of slaves was I until thou didst set me free to understand and obey God’s Law”—thus does Ibn Hisdai’s romance sum up the moral at its close, the speaker being the prince, and the one addressed the Nazirite.
A most significant point to be noted is that India is the scene of the story. In 1850 Steinschneider discovered the truth. And a surprising truth it is. The same story was known to medieval Christians as the Romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. But the whole is nothing more or less than an account of the life of Buddha, the great Indian saint, the founder of a religion. Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians revelled in the story without having a notion as to its original significance. Nothing so brings races and creeds together as a good tale. The folk are united by their common interest in the same lore. Mr. Zangwill, in his beautiful poem prefixed to Dr. Jacobs’ edition of Barlaam and Josaphat, looks deeper, and finds in the general admiration for this legend a symbol of the universal identity of men’s aspirations for the ideal.
Was Barlaam truly Josaphat,
And Buddha truly each?
What better parable than that
The unity to preach—
The simple brotherhood of souls
That seek the highest good;
He who in kingly chariot rolls,
Or wears the hermit’s hood!
Bar Hisdai felt nothing of this religious cosmopolitanism. But he realized that devotion to a spiritual ideal was a lesson he might profitably present to his age in the guise of allegory.