The interest of the writer in Jeláleddín has been from the first, and all through, philosophical and theological rather than specially historical or textual. This interest was awakened in him by Hegel. In early student days, when to him as to so many then, the Hegelian Philosophy was the all in all of his thought, he was startled by the unwonted enthusiasm with which the great thinker at the climax of his severest exposition, paused to pay a warm tribute to 'the excellent Jeláleddín,' when he came into view in the light of the Supreme Idea of his own System.[10] This passage in Hegel, seems always to have impressed the students of his own writings, and it has been frequently referred to both by his German and English expounders. The greatest speculative Thinker of the Nineteenth Century, seems to have felt a deep satisfaction in recognising the affinity of the greatest speculative Poet of the East to his own deepest thought, while at the same time carefully distinguishing the clearer and higher form of his own conception. Nay more, although parsimonious to the utmost of his space and words, in this, the most condensed and compacted Text Book of Philosophy written in any European language since Aristotle, the stern German Dialectician in a comparatively long Foot Note, says he 'cannot refrain' from quoting several passages from the Poet, in order that the reader may get a clearer knowledge of his ideas; and he quotes them from Rückert's Versions, to give, at the same time, some specimens of 'the marvellous Art of the translation.' The Reader who is not acquainted with German will find Hegel's words accurately translated by the late Dr. W. Wallace, who also gives an English version of the passages quoted from Rückert, in which he says he was 'kindly helped by Miss May Kendall'—although Dr. Wallace and Miss May, rhyming in utter ignorance of Persian Prosody, and consequently, like so many more, in the dark, have entirely failed to catch the delicate play of the Gazels, so faithfully reproduced by the tuneful Rückert.[11]
In another of Hegel's works—his valuable posthumous 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Art'—he takes up the same subject from the æsthetic point of view, and he deals with it again in a more popular, but in an essentially identical, way.[12] As the former passage has now obtained currency in our philosophical literature, it may be more useful, as well as more relevant to these pages, to reproduce the latter, the fuller and more intelligible, but hitherto untranslated, exposition. Hegel is here dealing with the Symbolical Forms of Art, and in particular with the symbolism of Sublimity, historically characteristic of Oriental Art, which thus gives expression to the consciousness of absolute subordination and the dependence of all that is individual and finite on the Universal and the Infinite. In his comprehensive historical survey Hegel, at this stage, finds occasion to deal with what he calls 'Pantheism in Art.' The profound thinker, with a vigorous grasp and original view of the historic evolution, is here singularly lucid and suggestive, as he delineates the Pantheistic Poetic Idea exhibited in the lyrical forms of 1. Indian Poetry; 2. Mohammedan Poetry; 3. Christian Mysticism. Very refreshing and sane is his representation of Indian Poetry, at a time when the uncritical enthusiasm of the Schlegels and other young Sanskrit Students, was carrying an unrestrained admiration beyond all reasonable bounds. Hegel castigates this juvenile weakness with a firm hand. He, too, has read the startling translations of the Sakuntala and the Bhagavad Gita, and he knows something of the Ramayana; but he is not dazzled or carried away. He recognises the marvellous exuberance and profusion of the Indian imagination, but it is all too fantastic as yet. While it is boundless, it is also formless, and just so far is it lacking in true Beauty. Its Sublimity is confused, chaotic, helpless; it ever struggles for a harmonious unity, for spiritual mastery of the manifold and the overwhelming, which it never attains. All this is truest insight, soundest criticism.—But a higher stage is reached in the Persian Poetry. Here the form of the Poet becomes more adequate, more masterful, more refined. Beauty springing up with Sublimity, is harmoniously wedded with it, and in one great Poet the victory of Love is freely consummated; for—to paraphrase with Tennyson—
'For all the past of Time reveals
A bridal dawn of thunder-peals,
Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact.'
But let us hear Hegel's own grave, well-weighed judgment, as he spoke it in those days to his own Students at Berlin:
'In a higher and subjectively freer way, the Oriental Pantheism has been developed in Mohammedanism, especially by the Persians. A special relationship now comes in. The Poet longs to behold the Divine in all things, and he actually does so behold it; but he also now surrenders his own Self and gives himself up to it, while he at the same time in the same degree grasps the Immanence of the Divine in his own inner Being, when thus expanded and freed. And thereby there grows in him that cheerful inwardness, that free joy, that abounding blessedness which is peculiar to the Oriental, who in becoming liberated from his own individual limitations, sinks forthwith into the Eternal and Absolute, and recognises and feels in everything the Image and the Presence of the Divine. Such a consciousness of being permeated by the Divine and of a vivified, intoxicated life in God, borders on Mysticism. Above all others Jeláleddín Rumi is to be celebrated in this connection, of whose poetry Rückert has furnished us with some of the finest specimens, in which, with his marvellous power of expression, he even allows himself to play, in the most skilful and free manner, with words and rhymes, as the Persians similarly do. Love to God, with whom Man identifies his Self through the most unlimited self-surrender, and Whom, as the One, he now beholds in all the realms of space, leads him to refer and carry back all and everything to God; and this Love here forms the centre which expands on all sides and into all regions.'[13]
Hegel thus deliberately gives Jeláleddín an eminent place not only among the great Poets, but among the great Thinkers of the world. He is more than satisfied with Rückert as a translator, and he is virtually at one with Jeláleddín's principle of thought. His qualification is historical rather than essential; the relation to Pantheism is the particular limiting condition of Jeláleddín's stage of development and environment; it is not a ground of reproach, nor of condemnation as more than relatively untrue, or rather incomplete. And so Hegel is at pains to vindicate the poet-thinker from the vulgar and unjust stigma commonly implied in the ascription of Pantheism. This he does in his remarks on the contributions to the subject by Dr. Tholuck, who became afterwards the eminent evangelical theologian of Halle, but who was then just entering on his distinguished career. Tholuck had quite a genius for languages, and his first intention was to devote himself to Oriental Philology. He prosecuted the study of Arabic, Persian and Turkish, with great zeal and success under the distinguished Dietz; and in 1821, at the age of twenty-two, he qualified as a University Teacher, by a learned Latin Dissertation on 'Sufism, or the Pantheistic Theosophy of the Persians.'[14] This remarkable exposition was at once recognised as of real merit, and it is still valuable. Tholuck, who was a born poet and had a rare breadth of literary appreciation, supplemented his work, four years later, by a very interesting Anthology from the Persian Mystical Poets in German verse, with an attractive introduction to the whole subject.[15] With the profoundest admiration for Dr. Tholuck's work as a theologian, and an unfading personal affection, kindled by tender and memorable student contact with him in his old age, we yet cannot dissent from Mr. Whinfield's critical judgment when he thus sums up the value of these contributions: 'Tholuck was an indifferent Persian Scholar, and many of his translations are wrong, but he grasped the meaning of Sufism and its affinity to European mysticism much more thoroughly than many who were far superior to him in mere verbal scholarship.' Hegel, who was not a Persian scholar, is generous in his recognition of Tholuck's Anthology, but he points out the weakness of Tholuck's criticism, and shews in particular that the young theologian is too perfunctory in his view of the subject generally, as merely adopting the 'current chatter about Pantheism,' and hurling it as a convenient term of reproach against the whole speculative thought of the time. This shallow popular criticism, as Hegel puts it, quite misunderstands the real principle of speculative Pantheism, confounds it with a crude view of the world which immediately identifies the object of sense with the Divine, but which no sane thinker ever really held, and it is to be rejected emphatically when applied to Jeláleddín. For, as he says, 'In the excellent Jeláleddín Rumi in particular we find the unity of the soul with the One set forth, and that unity described as Love; and this spiritual unity is an exaltation above the finite and common, a transfiguration of the natural and spiritual in which the externalism and transitoriness of nature is surmounted: in this poetry, which soars over all that is external and sensuous, who would recognise the prosaic ideas current about so-called Pantheism?' No; Jelál is not to be tabooed, off-hand, and labelled merely as a Pantheist!
With Hegel's correction of Tholuck and his vindication of the speculative standpoint of the Persian Poet, we are entirely agreed; but Hegel is himself here not quite adequate. All students of philosophy know that in this very relation has lain the chief ambiguity and weakness of his own System, and it is reflected in his view of Jeláleddín. With his dominating passion for systematising the evolution of History and conforming it to a logical scheme of thought, he yet fails to see—largely owing to the limitation of his material—how practically modern and how spiritually personal Jelál really is. For, after all, Jeláleddín is no mere idle dreamy mediaeval Mystic; he is essentially a modern poet and thinker, and is not to be pushed back into the dim vagueness and impersonal materialism of ancient thought. He has twelve centuries of Christian life and reflection behind him, with all the dogmatic development of the ancient orthodox Church, on the one hand; all the forms of Indian pantheistic and Greek freethought on the other; and six centuries of austere restraining Mohammedan Monotheism as his central curb and check—and well and clearly he knows them all. He is at once universally eclectic and originally constructive, and he moves freely and joyously with a larger insight all his own. The East and the West meet in him again, more richly than they have done in any other for centuries, and he binds them into a new, happy harmony, the 'heavenly harmony' of poesy. He is a true Seer, like his own ancient Zarathustra, like Lao-tse, like Buddha, and much more akin to Jesus, and Paul, and John, than to the fierce, relentless, one-sided Prophet of Arabia, whose barren religion he redeems from its mechanical inhumanity and quickens with the breath of a purer and Diviner love. His intellectual kinship is with Plato and the speculative Theologians of the Christian Church, and with the deep dreamers who live in the highest vision and lose themselves sweetly and gladly in God. He is the veritable Morning Star of the new Day of the World, rising in pure brightness, afar in the East—and after barbaric crusade and mad war, heralding, in a clearer and sweeter Song of Divine Love, the triumph of the new time.
And the Nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs,