Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi

“ The Persian Scholars have been amazed, and earnest Critics who still believe in the spiritual purpose of Poetry, have been distressed by this infatuation of the young free English mind, whose issue can only be the humiliation of convicted ignorance, spurious idolatry, and vain remorseful regret after the mad midnight debauch. All that is highest and noblest and truest in manhood is not to be thus wilfully flung away for nothing, or to be foolishly bartered for the smart Epigrams of the rudest wit and shallowest reflection. ”

“ O Nightingale to Rose trill, sounding: Allah hu!
O Soul, what if one Star should falter in the Dance?
His Will is Order ever founding: Allah hu!
Who knows Love's mazy circling, ever lives in God;
For Death, he knows, is Love abounding: Allah hu! ”

“ The Collection of Jeláleddín's 'Lyrical Poems'—his Divan, properly so called—'is regarded by them as of still higher value; it is practically the Law Book and the Ritual of all these Mystics. These outbursts of the highest inspiration of its kind deserve to be more closely considered, as it is from them that we see shining forth as in clear splendour the essence of the Oriental Mysticism, the cardinal Doctrine that All is One—the view of the ultimate Unity of all Being—and giving with it Direction and Guidance to the highest goal of Perfection by the contemplative Way of Divine Love. ”

“ Epitome of the Mystical System.—The Persian (and Hindu) mystical Poets 'concur in believing that the souls of men differ infinitely in degree, but not at all in kind, from the divine Spirit, of which they are particles, and in which they will ultimately be absorbed; that the spirit of God pervades the universe, always immediately present to his work, and consequently always in substance; that he alone is perfect benevolence, perfect truth, perfect beauty; that the love of him alone is real and genuine love, while that of all other objects is absurd and illusory ”

“ His soul, filled with this living glory, is in itself calm, independent, free, self-sufficient, spacious, large; and in this affirmative identity with itself, it expands its life in imagination till it attains to the same calm unity in the Soul of things. And so it coalesces with the objects of Nature and their magnificence, becomes one with the loved one, with the cup-bearer, etc.;—in a word, with all that is worthy of praise and of love, and this in the most blissful and joyous intimacy. The Occidental Romantic inwardness of Soul shews, indeed, a similar consciousness of Life in itself ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, {xxi} 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ And he has therefore rightly enough separated his Bacchanalian Rhymster from the holy Choir of the sweet-voiced Persian Songsters who ever made all the grove vocal with devout praise of God. Mr. Fitzgerald's Omar—he himself declares—is not a Sufi poet at all; he is but an old tipsy toper, whose drink is literally and really that of Bacchus; and he drinks—and drinks!—and drinks! till we hear him snore even in broad day, and till his dimm'd eyes and fuddled brain cannot distinguish the plainest things even in the clearest light. With Fitzgerald's hero it is the old, sad story over again ”

“ HEGEL ON THE CHARACTER OF THE PERSIAN LYRICAL POETRY.
Continuing the exposition quoted on p. xxi., Hegel goes on to say:—
'In Sublimity proper, the best objects and the most splendid forms are used only as a mere ornament of God, and they serve to proclaim the magnificence and glory of the One, being brought before our eyes only to glorify Him as the Lord of all creatures. But in Pantheism, on the contrary, the Immanence of the Divine in the objects, raises the mundane, natural, and human existence itself, to a more substantial glory of its own. ”

“ Fitzgerald by clever tailoring has indeed clothed his Satan in the well-fitting robes of an Angel of Light so that he might 'seduce, if it were possible, the very Elect,'—but for them all in vain do such 'lean and flashy songs, grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.' He has not hesitated even to eke out his vapid pessimistic song with verses of his own, and to make his poor old Omar's voice more cracked, querulous and quavering than it ever really was. ”

“ 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]
{xxii} Hegel thus deliberately gives Jeláleddín an eminent place not only among the great Poets, but among the great Thinkers of the world. ”

“ Oh, ye miserable mystics! when will ye know that all God's truths and all man's blessings lie in the broad health, in the trodden ways, and in the laughing sunshine of the universe, and that all intellect, all genius, is merely the power of seeing wonders in common things!'
With this impressive appeal we pause, for the present. The standpoint and genius of Jeláleddín could not possibly be better expressed than in Ferrier's closing words. ”

“ Thus we see in their glow of passion the most expansive blissfulness and outpouring of feeling; and with their inexhaustible wealth of brilliant and magnificent images, through it all there sound the constant tones of happiness, of beauty, and of joy. When the Oriental suffers and is unhappy, he accepts it as the immutable decree of Fate, and in presence of it still remains certain in himself, without becoming depressed, or feeling sensitive, or despondent, or distressed. In the poems of Hafiz we find complaining and repining enough about the loved one, the wine-bringer, etc. ”

“ Looking now at the poetical form of Jelál's Lyrics, it goes without saying that it is distinctively Persian, and always eminently so in its kind. The Persian Poets were truly 'makers'; they not only created most of the nature-imagery still current in all modern poetry, but they constructed new forms of rhythm and rhyme, in which they finely echoed the sweetest melodies of nature and gave a richer and more expressive music to human speech. ”

“ But when we speak in our Poetry of Roses, Nightingales, and Wine, it is done in a quite other and more prosaic sense: the Rose is regarded as for ornament; we are "crowned with Roses"; or we hear the {61} Nightingale and sympathise with it; we drink Wine, and call it the Dispeller of Care. With the Persian Poets, however, the Rose is not an image, or a symbol, or a mere ornament; but it actually appears to the Poet as animated with a Soul, as a loving Bride ”

“ Ye who make shattered nerves and depraved sensations the interpreters of truth—ye who inaugurate disease as the prophet of all wisdom, thus making sin, death, and the devil, the lords paramount of the creation—have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred? ”

“ As Weeds grow pale before the Rose and pine.
The Rose hides in her Heart the piercing Thorn,
For deepest hidden Pains with Love entwine.
The Rose is Beauty perfected in One,
Her Charms all glowing, Heaven and Earth outshine.
The full blown Rose in Splendour dims the Sun;
Each quivering Leaflet shows a Moon's design.
The Sun's sphered Light is moulded in her Form,
While bright-eyed Stars keep watch around her Shrine.
O Sun, the Rose that made the Moon to grow,
To my Heart's Friend give Love and Joy divine!
{42} The Friend Supreme
XL.
O what a Friend is mine! ”

“ Jeláleddín has both a wider relationship and a more modern significance than even Hegel has thought of.
And now we have surely cited Authorities enough to enable us to form at least a preliminary judgment, fair, reasonably informed, and impartial, concerning Jeláleddín's distinctive position and work as a Poet. We have seen him thrice crowned—in the Realms of Poetry. Philosophy, and Religion—by authoritative representatives, qualified kingmakers; and hardly any one who now knows truly of him, will dispute his right to be ranked as one of 'the great of old! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whinfield, have given us his own Persian Quatrains, and Mr. Payne has translated them best of all; but Edward Fitzgerald has turned them into a strange haunting music of his own, and in his hands the Astronomer Poet becomes really what our gifted friend Mr. Coulson Kernahan has so graphically and terribly depicted: A Literary Gent, A Study in Vanity and Dipsomania! Who cares now for his senile scepticism, his pessimistic whine, his withered cynicism, his agnostic blindness and despair, his insolent misanthropy, his impotent blasphemies? We know it all too well ”

“ Plann'd like the Bees' six-sided, true.
And warmed by radiant Fire of Flowers,
Old Winter's reign of Death undo.
Regret is dead; Love lives again;
New Life transforms the Landscape's Hue.
Bold enter, then, green Spring's loved Haunts,
And drink fresh Wine, nor fear to rue.
And drinking full Love's sweetest Draught,
The glowing Heart new Love shall woo.
Love wakes afresh in Earth and Heaven;
The Rose in green, the Sun in blue.
O Nightingale, behold thy Rose!
O Eagle, thy bright Sun pursue!
{8} Spring's Festival
VIII.
Our Fasting is over ”

“ Burn, like the Taper, out in Woe,
'The taper teaches man to laugh and weep; it laughs in bright glances through the flame, although it is melting at the same time in hot tears; even in burning itself out, it sheds a bright glance around. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ghazel is more irregular than the Greek or Latin Ode, one verse having often no apparent connection either with the foregoing or subsequent couplets. Ghazels were often, says Baron Revizky, written or spoken extempore at banquets or public festivities, when the poet, after expressing his ideas in one distich, impatient of confinement, roved through the regions of fancy, as wine or a luxuriant imagination inspired.' [18]
{xxix} This is excellent, and thoroughly intelligible. ”

“ The actual Life of the Spiritual in the phenomena of Nature and in human relationships, animates and spiritualises them in themselves, and establishes in turn a special relation of the subjective feeling and soul of the Poet to the objects of which he sings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For, after all, {xxiv} 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. ”

“ On the wings of the highest religious enthusiasm, the Sofi, rising above all the outward forms of positive Religions, adores the Eternal Being, in the completest abstraction from all that is sensuous and earthly, as the purest Source of Eternal Light. ”