The KasÎdah of HÂjÎ Abdû El-yezdÎ, by Richard Burton

The Translator has ventured to entitle a Lay of the Higher Law the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the Higher Culture. The principles which justify the name are as follows:

The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the divine gift of Pity are mans highest enjoyments.

He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of Facts, the idlest of superstitions.

For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume.

F. B.

THE KASÎDAH

NOTES

NOTE I

HÂJÎ ABDÛ, THE MAN

Hâjî Abdû has been known to me for more years than I care to record. A native, it is believed, of Darâbghird in the Yezd Province, he always preferred to style himself El-Hichmakâni, a facetious lackab or surname, meaning Of No-hall, Nowhere. He had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his couplets. To a natural facility, a knack of language learning, he added a store of desultory various reading; scraps of Chinese and old Egyptian; of Hebrew and Syriac; of Sanskrit and Prakrit; of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and Greek, including Romaic; of Berber, the Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian, besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and Arabic, the classic of the schools. Nor was he ignorant of the -ologies and the triumphs of modern scientific discovery. Briefly, his memory was well-stored; and he had every talent save that of using his talents.

But no one thought that he wood the Muse, to speak in the style of the last century. Even his intimates were ignorant of the fact that he had a skeleton in his cupboard, his Kasîdah or distichs. He confided to me his secret when we last met in Western IndiaI am purposely vague in specifying the place. When so doing he held in hand the long and hoary honours of his chin with the points toward me, as if to say with the Island-King:

And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, seemed to protest against the plea of age. The MS. was in the vilest Shikastah or running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the writer declined to take the trouble of copying out his cacograph.

We, his old friends, had long addressed Hâjî Abdû by the sobriquet of Nabbianâ (our Prophet); and the reader will see that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a message to deliver. He evidently aspires to preach a faith of his own; an Eastern Version of Humanitarianism blended with the sceptical or, as we now say, the scientific habit of mind. The religion, of which Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom; Judæism, Christianity and Islamism are mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted by the Philosopher: it worships with single-minded devotion the Holy Cause of Truth, of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods it may bring; and this belief is equally acceptable to honest ignorance, and to the highest attainments in nature-study.

With Confucius, the Hâjî cultivates what Strauss has called the stern common-sense of mankind; while the reign of order is a paragraph of his Higher Law. He traces from its rudest beginnings the all but absolute universality of some perception by man, called Faith; that sensus Numinis which, by inheritance or communication, is now universal except in those who force themselves to oppose it. And he evidently holds this general consent of mankind to be so far divine that it primarily discovered for itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He does not cry with the Christ of Novalis, Children, you have no father; and perhaps he would join Renan in exclaiming, Un monde sans Dieu est horrible!

But he recognises the incompatibility of the Infinite with the Definite; of a Being who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an Actus purus who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful, with an Eternal that makes for righteousness. In the presence of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the Begriff of Providence, our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed by the perception of a Causa Causans (a misnomer), and to that intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of distinct statement but incapable of proofs, which we term Belief.

He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong.

Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences; will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted development; this, too, by a process, not negative and distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he satisfies himself,the main point.

Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of their science as the morphology of common opinion. Contemporary investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with introspection; their labors have become merely physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, Il est plus aisé de connoître lhomme en général que de connoître un homme en particulier; and on so wide a subject all views must be one-sided.

But this is not the fashion of Easterns. They have still to treat great questions ex analogiâ universi, instead of ex analogiâ hominis. They must learn the basis of sociology, the philosophic conviction that mankind should be studied, not as a congeries of individuals, but as an organic whole. Hence the Zeitgeist, or historical evolution of the collective consciousness of the age, despises the obsolete opinion that Society, the State, is bound by the same moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, too, it holds that the spirit of man, being of equal and uniform substance, doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater equality and uniformity than is in Truth.

Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth of the human race. Hâjî Abdû would account for the tardy and unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call pure truths, by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief; rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate. Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every progressive age.

Hâjî Abdû seeks Truth only, truth as far as man, in the present phase of his development, is able to comprehend it. He disdains to associate utility, like Bacon (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the High Priest of the English Creed, le gros bon sens, with the lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to see the injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the â posteriori superstition, the worship of facts, and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas. Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together with a mighty development of egotism resulting from the pampered sentiment of personality.

The Hâjî regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind, no Catholic opinion held semper, et ubique, et ab omnibus. The intellectual faculties (perception and reflection) are mute upon the subject: they bear no testimony to facts; they show no proof. Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals,the development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment is a system.

Man has done much during the sixty-eight centuries which represent his history. This assumes the first Egyptian Empire, following the pre-historic, to begin with B. C. 5000, and to end with B. C. 3249. It was the Old, as opposed to the Middle, the New, and the Low: it contained the Dynasties from I. to X., and it was the age of the Pyramids, at once simple, solid, and grand. When the praiser of the Past contends that modern civilization has improved in nothing upon Homer and Herodotus, he is apt to forget that every schoolboy is a miracle of learning compared with the Cave-man and the palæolithic race. And, as the Past has been, so shall the Future be.

The Pilgrims view of life is that of the Soofi, with the usual dash of Buddhistic pessimism. The profound sorrow of existence, so often sung by the dreamy Eastern poet, has now passed into the practical European mind. Even the light Frenchman murmurs,

But our Hâjî is not Nihilistic in the no-nothing sense of Hoods poem, or, as the American phrases it, There is nothing new, nothing true, and it dont signify. His is a healthy wail over the shortness, and the miseries of life, because he finds all created things

He reminds us of St. Augustine (Med. c. 21). Vita hæc, vita misera, vita caduca, vita incerta, vita laboriosa, vita immunda, vita domina malorum, regina superborum, plena miseriis et erroribus . . . Quam humores tumidant, escæ inflant, jejunia macerant, joci dissolvunt, tristitiæ consumunt; sollicitudo coarctat, securitas hebetat, divitiæ inflant et jactant. Paupertas dejicit, juventus extollit, senectus incurvat, importunitas frangit, mæror deprimit. Et his malis omnibus mors furibunda succedit. But for furibunda the Pilgrim would perhaps read benedicta.

With Cardinal Newman, one of the glories of our age, Hâjî Abdû finds the Light of the world nothing else than the Prophets scroll, full of lamentations and mourning and woe. I cannot refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the sake of its lame and shallow deduction. To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration. the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostles words, having no hope and without God in the worldall this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely without human solution. Hence that admirable writer postulates some terrible original calamity; and thus the hateful doctrine, theologically called original sin, becomes to him almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God. Similarly the Schedule of Doctrines of the most liberal Christian Church insists upon the human depravity, and the absolute need of the Holy Spirits agency in mans regeneration and sanctification.

But what have we here? The original calamity was either caused by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. Far better and wiser is the essayists poetical explanation now apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of the sage bards day:

The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, so likewise is Evil the revelation of Good. With him all existences are equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or vital force, it matters not they be,

War, he says, brings about countless individual miseries, but it forwards general progress by raising the stronger upon the ruins of the weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones ravage small areas; but the former builds up earth for mans habitation, and the latter renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. Hence he echoes:

Ancillary to the churchmans immoral view of original sin is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples? What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of Development?

Some will charge the Hâjî with irreverence, and hold him a lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence. But he is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain, who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others think and hide. With the author of Supernatural Religion, he holds that we gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of revelation; and he looks forward to the day when the old tyranny shall have been broken, and when the anarchy of transition shall have passed away. But he is an Eastern. When he repeats the Greeks Remember not to believe, he means Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas lead to right actions. Among the couplets not translated for this eclogue is:

a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen Age of Science following the Golden Age of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim continues:

Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a man who believes in everything equally and generally may be said to believe in nothing. It is not a simple European view which makes honest Doubt worth a dozen of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposition to the noted writer who holds that the man of simple faith is worth ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man, fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and reflective powers,a simple absurdity! It produced a Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded a converted heretic lest the latter by lapse from grace lose his immortal soul.

But this vein of speculation, which bigots brand as Doubt, Denial, and Destruction; this earnest religious scepticism; this curious inquiry, Has the universal tradition any base of fact?; this craving after the secrets and mysteries of the future, the unseen, the unknown, is common to all races and to every age. Even amongst the Romans, whose model man in Augustus day was Horace, the philosophic, the epicurean, we find Propertius asking:

To return: the Pilgrims doctrines upon the subject of conscience and repentance will startle those who do not follow his train of thought:

This again is his modified fatalism. He would not accept the boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble British Philisterwe know were free and theres an end on it! He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great progression; a result of the interaction of organism and environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere product of organization; living bodies being subject to the natural law governing the lifeless and the inorganic. Whilst the religionist assures us that man is not a mere toy of fate, but a free agent responsible to himself, with work to do and duties to perform, the Hâjî, with many modern schools, holds Mind to be a word describing a special operation of matter; the faculties generally to be manifestations of movements in the central nervous system; and every idea, even of the Deity, to be a certain little pulsation of a certain little mass of animal pap,the brain. Thus he would not object to relationship with a tailless catarrhine anthropoid ape, descended from a monad or a primal ascidian.

Hence he virtually says, I came into the world without having applied for or having obtained permission; nay, more, without my leave being asked or given. Here I find myself hand-tied by conditions, and fettered by laws and circumstances, in making which my voice had no part. While in the womb I was an automaton; and death will find me a mere machine. Therefore not I, but the Law, or if, you please, the Lawgiver, is answerable for all my actions. Let me here observe that to the Western mind Law postulates a Lawgiver; not so to the Eastern, and especially to the Soofi, who holds these ideas to be human, unjustifiably extended to interpreting the non-human, which men call the Divine.

Further he would say, I am an individual (qui nil habet dividui), a circle touching and intersecting my neighbours at certain points, but nowhere corresponding, nowhere blending. Physically I am not identical in all points with other men. Morally I differ from them: in nothing do the approaches of knowledge, my five organs of sense (with their Shelleyan interpretation), exactly resemble those of any other being. Ergo, the effect of the world, of life, of natural objects, will not in my case be the same as with the beings most resembling me. Thus I claim the right of creating or modifying for my own and private use the system which most imports me; and if the reasonable leave be refused to me, I take it without leave.

But my individuality, however all-sufficient for myself, is an infinitesimal point, an atom subject in all things to the Law of Storms called Life. I feel, I know that Fate is. But I cannot know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and indeed my only duty, the I being duly blended with the We. I object to be a selfless man, which to me denotes an inverted moral sense. I am bound to take careful thought concerning the consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to grieve or to repent over that which was decreed by universal Law.

The usual objection is that of mans practice. It says, This is well in theory; but how carry it out? For instance, why would you kill, or give over to be killed, the man compelled by Fate to kill your father? Hâjî Abdû replies, I do as others do, not because the murder was done by him, but because the murderer should not be allowed another chance of murdering. He is a tiger who has tasted blood and who should be shot. I am convinced that he was a tool in the hands of Fate, but that will not prevent my taking measures, whether predestined or not, in order to prevent his being similarly used again.

As with repentance so with conscience. Conscience may be a fear which is the shadow of justice; even as pity is the shadow of love. Though simply a geographical and chronological accident, which changes with every age of the world, it may deter men from seeking and securing the prize of successful villainy. But this incentive to beneficence must be applied to actions that will be done, not to deeds that have been done.

The Hâjî, moreover, carefully distinguishes between the working of fate under a personal God, and under the Reign of Law. In the former case the contradiction between the foreknowledge of a Creator, and the free-will of a Creature, is direct, palpable, absolute. We might as well talk of black-whiteness and of white-blackness. A hundred generations of divines have never been able to ree the riddle; a million will fail. The difficulty is insurmountable to the Theist whose Almighty is perforce Omniscient, and as Omniscient, Prescient. But it disappears when we convert the Person into Law, or a settled order of events; subject, moreover, to certain exceptions fixed and immutable, but at present unknown to man. The difference is essential as that between the penal code with its narrow forbiddal, and the broad commandment which is a guide rather than a task-master.

Thus, too, the belief in fixed Law, versus arbitrary will, modifies the Hâjîs opinions concerning the pursuit of happiness. Mankind, das rastlose Ursachenthier, is born to be on the whole equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. Thus Dante (Inf. vi. 106):

So Buddhism declares that existence in itself implies effort, pain and sorrow; and, the higher the creature, the more it suffers. The common clay enjoys little and suffers little. Sum up the whole and distribute the mass: the result will be an average; and the beggar is, on the whole, happy as the prince. Why, then, asks the objector, does man ever strive and struggle to change, to rise; a struggle which involves the idea of improving his condition? The Hâjî answers, Because such is the Law under which man is born: it may be fierce as famine, cruel as the grave, but man must obey it with blind obedience. He does not enter into the question whether life is worth living, whether man should elect to be born. Yet his Eastern pessimism, which contrasts so sharply with the optimism of the West, re-echoes the lines:

Life, whatever may be its consequence, is built upon a basis of sorrow. Literature, the voice of humanity, and the verdict of mankind proclaim that all existence is a state of sadness. The physicians of the Soul would save her melancholy from degenerating into despair by doses of steadfast belief in the presence of God, in the assurance of Immortality, and in visions of the final victory of good. Were Hâjî Abdû a mere Theologist, he would add that Sin, not the possibility of revolt, but the revolt itself against conscience, is the primary form of evil, because it produces error, moral and intellectual. This man, who omits to read the Conscience-law, however it may differ from the Society-law, is guilty of negligence. That man, who obscures the light of Nature with sophistries, becomes incapable of discerning his own truths. In both cases error, deliberately adopted, is succeeded by suffering which, we are told, comes in justice and benevolence as a warning, a remedy, and a chastisement.

But the Pilgrim is dissatisfied with the idea that evil originates in the individual actions of free agents, ourselves and others. This doctrine fails to account for its characteristics,essentiality and universality. That creatures endowed with the mere possibility of liberty should not always choose the Good appears natural. But that of the milliards of human beings who have inhabited the Earth, not one should have been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the complete man under the present state of things. The Hâjî rejects all popular and mythical explanation by the Fall of Adam, the innate depravity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of certain Incarnations, which argues their divinity. He can only wail over the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation to be error, and purpose to abate it by unrooting that Ignorance which bears and feeds it.

His eschatology, like that of the Soofis generally, is vague and shadowy. He may lean towards the doctrine of Marc Aurelius, The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried: all things are changes not into nothing, but into that which is not at present. This is one of the monstruosa opinionum portenta mentioned by the XIXth General Council, alias the First Council of the Vatican. But he only accepts it with a limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not to the intellectual, worship of Nature, which moderns define to be an unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of observed phenomena. Consequently he holds to the dark and degrading doctrines of the Materialist, the Hylotheist; in opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between Spirit and Matter: Asia does not.

Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and vice versâ, that they cannot say what matter is; and, lastly, that Berkeley and his school have proved the existence of spirit while denying that of matter.

The Materialists reply that the want of agreement shows only a study insufficiently advanced; that man cannot describe an atom, because he is still an infant in science, yet there is no reason why his mature manhood should not pass through error and incapacity to truth and knowledge; that consciousness becomes a property of matter when certain conditions are present; that Hyle ({Greek: hylae}) or Matter may be provisionally defined as phenomena with a substructure of their own, transcendental and eternal, subject to the action, direct or indirect, of the five senses, whilst its properties present themselves in three states, the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous. To casuistical Berkeley they prefer the common sense of mankind. They ask the idealist and the spiritualist why they cannot find names for themselves without borrowing from a dark and degraded school; why the former must call himself after his eye (idein); the latter after his breath (spiritus)? Thus the Hâjî twits them with affixing their own limitations to their own Almighty Power, and, as Socrates said, with bringing down Heaven to the market-place.

Modern thought tends more and more to reject crude idealism and to support the monistic theory, the double aspect, the transfigured realism. It discusses the Nature of Things in Themselves. To the question, is there anything outside of us which corresponds with our sensations? that is to say, is the whole world simply I, they reply that obviously there is a something else; and that this something else produces the brain-disturbance which is called sensation. Instinct orders us to do something; Reason (the balance of faculties) directs; and the strongest motive controls. Modern Science, by the discovery of Radiant Matter, a fourth condition, seems to conciliate the two schools. La découverte dun quatrième état de la matière, says a Reviewer, cest la porte ouverte à linfini de ses transformations; cest lhomme invisible et impalpable de même possible sans cesser dêtre substantiel; cest le monde des esprits entrant sans absurdité dans la domaine des hypothèses scientifiques; cest la possibilité pour le matérialiste de croire à la vie doutre tombe, sans renoncer au substratum matériel quil croit nécessaire au maintien de lindividualité.

With Hâjî Abdû the soul is not material, for that would be a contradiction of terms. He regards it, with many moderns, as a state of things, not a thing; a convenient word denoting the sense of personality, of individual identity. In its ghostly signification he discovers an artificial dogma which could hardly belong to the brutal savages of the Stone Age. He finds it in the funereal books of ancient Egypt, whence probably it passed to the Zendavesta and the Vedas. In the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which part is still attributed to Moses, it is unknown, or, rather, it is deliberately ignored by the author or authors. The early Christians could not agree upon the subject; Origen advocated the pre-existence of mens souls, supposing them to have been all created at one time and successively embodied. Others make Spirit born with the hour of birth: and so forth.

But the brain-action or, if you so phrase it, the mind, is not confined to the reasoning faculties; nor can we afford to ignore the sentiments, the affections which are, perhaps, the most potent realities of life. Their loud affirmative voice contrasts strongly with the titubant accents of the intellect. They seem to demand a future life, even, a state of rewards and punishments from the Maker of the world, the Ortolano Eterno, the Potter of the East, the Watchmaker of the West. They protest against the idea of annihilation. They revolt at the notion of eternal parting from parents, kinsmen and friends. Yet the dogma of a future life is by no means catholic and universal. The Anglo-European race apparently cannot exist without it, and we have lately heard of the Aryan Soul-land. On the other hand many of the Buddhist and even the Brahman Schools preach Nirwâna (comparative non-existence) and Parinirwâna (absolute nothingness). Moreover, the great Turanian family, actually occupying all Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the 200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass of the nation, protest emphatically against the mainstay of the western creeds, because it unfits men for the business and duty of life by fixing their speculations on an unknown world. And even its votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the next world is a copy, more or less idealized, of the present; and that it lacks a single particular savouring of originality. It is in fact a mere continuation; and the continuation is not proven.

and the Pilgrims sole consolation is in self-cultivation, and in the pleasures of the affections. This sympathy may be an indirect self-love, a reflection of the light of egotism: still it is so transferred as to imply a different system of convictions. It requires a different name: to call benevolence self-love is to make the fruit or flower not only depend upon a root for development (which is true), but the very root itself (which is false). And, finally, his ideal is of the highest: his praise is reserved for:

NOTE II

A few words concerning the Kasîdah itself. Our Hâjî begins with a mise-en-scène; and takes leave of the Caravan setting out for Mecca. He sees the Wolfs tail (Dum-i-gurg), the {Greek: lykaugés}, or wolf-gleam, the Diluculum, the Zodiacal dawn-light, the first faint brushes of white radiating from below the Eastern horizon. It is accompanied by the morning-breath (Dam-i-Subh), the current of air, almost imperceptible except by the increase of cold, which Moslem physiologists suppose to be the early prayer offered by Nature to the First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biyâbân (Desert-Demon) is evidently the personification of mans fears and of the dangers that surround travelling in the wilds. The wold-where-none-save-He (Allah)-can-dwell is a great and terrible wilderness (Dasht-i-lâ-siwâ Hu); and Allahs Holy Hill is Arafât, near Mecca, which the Caravan reaches after passing through Medina. The first section ends with a sore lament that the meetings of this world take place upon the highway of Separation; and the original also has:

The next section quotes the various aspects under which Life appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with Shab-i-târîk o bîm-i-mauj, etc. Hûr is the plural of Ahwar, in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly Houries. Follows Umar-i-Khayyâm, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualized Moslem Puritanism. The verses alluded to are:

Here Wine is used in its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the Hymn of Life, despite the commonplace and the navrante vulgarité which characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same has been done to the words of Isâ (Jesus); for the author, who is well-read in the Ingîl (Evangel), evidently intended the allusion. Mansur el-Hallâj (the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned for crudely uttering the Pantheistic dogma Ana l Hakk (I am the Truth, i.e., God), wa laysa fi-jubbatî il Allah (and within my coat is nought but God). His blood traced on the ground the first-quoted sentence. Lastly, there is a quotation from Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes, etc.: here {Greek: paîze} may mean sport; but the context determines the kind of sport intended. The Zâhid is the literal believer in the letter of the Law, opposed to the Soofi, who believes in its spirit: hence the former is called a Zâhiri (outsider), and the latter a Bâtini, an insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and punishments. As regards the two Eternities, Persian and Arab metaphysicians split Eternity, i.e., the negation of Time, into two halves, Azal (beginninglessness) and Abad (endlessness); both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective significance. In English we use Eternal (Æviternus, age-long, life-long) as loosely, by applying it to three distinct ideas; (1) the habitual, in popular parlance; (2) the exempt from duration; and (3) the everlasting, which embraces all duration. Omniscience-Maker is the old Roman sceptics Homo fecit Deos.

The next section is one long wail over the contradictions, the mysteries, the dark end, the infinite sorrowfulness of all existence, and the arcanum of grief which, Luther said, underlies all life. As with Euripides to live is to die, to die is to live. Hâjî Abdû borrows the Hindu idea of the human body. It is a mansion, says Menu, with bones for its beams and rafters; with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for cement; with skin for its outer covering; filled with no sweet perfume, but loaded with impurities; a mansion infested by age and sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed with pains; haunted with the quality of darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of standing. The Pot and Potter began with the ancient Egyptians. Sitting as a potter at the wheel, Cneph (at Philæ) moulds clay, and gives the spirit of life to the nostrils of Osiris. Hence the Genesitic breath. Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being by whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is fabricated. We find him next in Jeremiahs Arise and go down unto the Potters house, etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans (ix. 20), Hath not the potter power over the clay? No wonder that the first Hand who moulded the man-mud is a lieu commun in Eastern thought. The waste of agony is Buddhism, or Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have moulded Earth on Earth upon Seint Ysidres well-known rhymes (A.D. 1440):

The Camel-rider, suggests Ossian, yet a few years and the blast of the desert comes. The dromedary was chosen as Deaths vehicle by the Arabs, probably because it bears the Bedouins corpse to the distant burial-ground, where he will lie among his kith and kin. The end of this section reminds us of:

The Hâjî now passes to the results of his long and anxious thoughts: I have purposely twisted his exordium into an echo of Milton:

He boldly declares that there is no God as man has created his Creator. Here he is at one with modern thought:En général les croyants font le Dieu comme ils sont eux-mêmes, (says J. J. Rousseau, Confessions, I. 6): les bons le font bon: les méchants le font méchant: les dévots haineux et bilieux, ne voient que lenfer, parce quils voudraient damner tout le monde; les âmes aimantes et douces ny croient guère; et lun des étonnements dont je ne reviens pas est de voir le bon Fénélon en parler dans son Télémaque comme sil y croyoit tout de bon: mais jespère quil mentoit alors; car enfin quelque véridique quon soit, il faut bien mentir quelquefois quand on est évêque. Man depicts himself in his gods, says Schiller. Hence the Naturgott, the deity of all ancient peoples, and with which every system began, allowed and approved of actions distinctly immoral, often diabolical. Belief became moralized only when the conscience of the community, and with it of the individual items, began aspiring to its golden age,Perfection. Dieu est le superlatif, dont le positif est lhomme, says Carl Vogt; meaning, that the popular idea of a numen is that of a magnified and non-natural man.

He then quotes his authorities. Buddha, whom the Catholic Church converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the deity), on account of the mystery of the cruelty of things. Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbes model pessimist, who at the humblest distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found the vision of mans unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent, heartless, cowardly, and arrogant. Confucius, the Throneless king, more powerful than all kings, denied a personal deity. The Epicurean idea rules the China of the present day. God is great, but he lives too far off, say the Turanian Santâls in Aryan India; and this is the general language of man in the Turanian East.

Hâjî Abdû evidently holds that idolatry begins with a personal deity. And let us note that the latter is deliberately denied by the Thirty-nine Articles. With them God is a Being without Parts (personality) or Passions. He professes a vague Agnosticism, and attributes popular faith to the fact that Timor fecit Deos; every religion being, without exception, the child of fear and ignorance (Carl Vogt). He now speaks as the Drawer of the Wine, the Ancient Taverner, the Old Magus, the Patron of the Mughân or Magians; all titles applied to the Soofi as opposed to the Zâhid. His idols are the eidola (illusions) of Bacon, having their foundations in the very constitution of man, and therefore appropriately called fabulæ. That Natures Common Course is subject to various interpretation, may be easily proved. Aristotle was as great a subverter as Alexander; but the quasi-prophetical Stagyrite of the Dark Ages, who ruled the world till the end of the thirteenth century, became the twice execrable of Martin Luther; and was finally abolished by Galileo and Newton. Here I have excised two stanzas. The first is:

He is not the only one who so regards bothering Time and Space. A late definition of the infinitely great, viz., that the idea arises from denying form to any figure; of the infinitely small, from refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair specimen of the dismal sciencemetaphysics.

One would think that he had read Kant on the Knowable and the Unknowable, or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite. It is a common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena, the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the residuum of a bad metaphysic, which deforms the system of Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are, or can be conceived, things in themselves (i.e., unrelated to thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that we cannot know what they are. But who dares say cannot? Who can measure mans work when he shall be as superior to our present selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?

The Chain of Universe alludes to the Jain idea that the whole, consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles, existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the non-human, i.e., the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the other for nothing (e.g., ourselves and not-ourselves), with the contraries (e.g., rich and not-rich = poor), in which both terms express a something. So the positive-negative infinite is not the complement of finite, but its negation. The Western man derides the process by making not-horse the complementary entity of horse. The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human knowledge, and that no form of man, incarnation of the deity, prophet, apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea not conceived within his brain by the sole operation of these vulgar material agents. Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor idealist.

He then proceeds to show that man depicts himself in his God, and that God is the racial expression; a pedagogue on the Nile, an abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldæa; where Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, § 2, and II. 9, § 2) was skilful in the celestial science. He notices the Akârana-Zamân (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands the God of the Hebrews with pugnacity and cruelty. He has heard of the beautiful creations of Greek fancy which, not attributing a moral nature to the deity, included Theology in Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall, seemed to consider all matter everywhere alive. We have adopted a very different Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Creator; Pantheism with its one Spirits plastic stress; and Science with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its trinal God: I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} = a riddle), although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant or exclusive care for the practice of right, is represented by Semitic and Arab influence, Korânic and Hadîsic. The latter, the religion of humanity, a passion for life and light, for culture and intelligence; for art, poetry and science, is represented in Islamism by the fondly and impiously-cherished memory of the old Guebre kings and heroes, beauties, bards and sages. Hence the mention of Zâl and his son Rostam; of Cyrus and of the Jâm-i-Jamshîd, which may be translated either grail (cup) or mirror: it showed the whole world within its rim; and hence it was called Jâm-i-Jehân-numâ (universe-exposing). The contemptuous expressions about the diet of camels milk and the meat of the Susmâr, or green lizard, are evidently quoted from Firdausis famous lines beginning:

The Hâjî is severe upon those who make of the Deity a Khwân-i-yaghmâ (or tray of plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He looks upon the shepherds as men,

So Schopenhauer (Leben, etc., by Wilhelm Gewinner) furiously shows how the English nation ought to treat that set of hypocrites, imposters and money-graspers, the clergy, that annually devours £3,500,000.

The Hâjî broadly asserts that there is no Good and no Evil in the absolute sense as man has made them. Here he is one with Pope:

Unfortunately the converse is just as true:whatever is, is wrong. Khizr is the Elijah who puzzled Milman. He represents the Soofi, the Bâtini, while Musâ (Moses) is the Zâhid, the Zâhiri; and the strange adventures of the twain, invented by the Jews, have been appropriated by the Moslems. He derides the Freewill of man; and, like Diderot, he detects pantaloon in a prelate, a satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in a minister, and a goose in a chief clerk. He holds to Fortune, the {Greek: Túxae} of Alcman, which is, {Greek: Eunomías te kaì Peithoûs adelphà kaì Promatheías thugátaer},Chance, the sister of Order and Trust, and the daughter of Forethought. The Scandinavian Spinners of Fate were Urd (the Was, the Past), Verdandi (the Becoming, or Present), and Skuld (the To-be, or Future). He alludes to Plato, who made the Demiourgos create the worlds by the Logos (the Hebrew Dabar) or Creative Word, through the Æons. These {Greek: Aìwnes} of the Mystics were spiritual emanations from {Greek: Aìwn}, lit. a wave of influx, an age, period, or day; hence the Latin ævum, and the Welsh Awen, the stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. Basilides, the Egypto-Christian, made the Creator evolve seven Æons or Pteromata (fulnesses); from two of whom, Wisdom and Power, proceeded the 365 degrees of Angels. All were subject to a Prince of Heaven, called Abraxas, who was himself under guidance of the chief Æon, Wisdom. Others represent the first Cause to have produced an Æon or Pure Intelligence; the first a second, and so forth till the tenth. This was material enough to affect Hyle, which thereby assumed a spiritual form. Thus the two incompatibles combined in the Scheme of Creation.

He denies the three ages of the Buddhists: the wholly happy; the happy mixed with misery, and the miserable tinged with happiness,the present. The Zoroastrians had four, each of 3,000 years. In the first, Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then Ahriman, the bad-god, began to rule subserviently: in the third both ruled equally; and in the last, now current, Ahriman has gained the day.

Against the popular idea that man has caused the misery of this world, he cites the ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites produced the mighty reptile tyrants of air, earth, and sea; and when the monsters of the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the ground with their ponderous tread. And the world of waters is still a hideous scene of cruelty, carnage, and destruction.

He declares Conscience to be a geographical and chronological accident. Thus he answers the modern philosopher whose soul was overwhelmed by the marvel and the awe of two things, the starry heaven above and the moral law within. He makes the latter sense a development of the gregarious and social instincts; and so travellers have observed that the moral is the last step in mental progress. His Moors are the savage Dankali and other negroid tribes, who offer a cup of milk with one hand and stab with the other. He translates literally the Indian word Hâthî (an elephant), the animal with the Hâth (hand, or trunk). Finally he alludes to the age of active volcanoes, the present, which is merely temporary, the shifting of the Pole, and the spectacle to be seen from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter.

The Hâjî again asks the old, old question, What is Truth? And he answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China, Truth hath not an unchanging name. A modern English writer says: I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed temperament. Our poet seems to mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and the Sentiments, the working of the moral region, or the middle lobe of the phrenologists, supplies only subjective truth, personal and individual. Thus to one man the axiom, Opes irritamenta malorum, represents a distinct fact; while another holds wealth to be an incentive for good. Evidently both are right, according to their lights.

Hâjî Abdû cites Plato and Aristotle, as usual with Eastern songsters, who delight in Mantik (logic). Here he appears to mean that a false proposition is as real a proposition as one that is true. Faith moves mountains and Manet immota fides are evidently quotations. He derides the teaching of the First Council of the Vatican (cap. v.), all the faithful are little children listening to the voice of Saint Peter, who is the Prince of the Apostles. He glances at the fancy of certain modern physicists, devotion is a definite molecular change in the convolution of grey pulp. He notices with contumely the riddle of which Milton speaks so glibly, where the Dialoguists,

In opposition to the orthodox Mohammedan tenets which make Mans soul his percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Soofi considers it a fancy, opposed to body, which is a fact; at most a state of things, not a thing; a consensus of faculties whereof our frames are but the phenomena. This is not contrary to Genesitic legend. The Hebrew Ruach and Arabic Ruh, now perverted to mean soul or spirit, simply signify wind or breath, the outward and visible sign of life. Their later schools are even more explicit. For that which befalls man befalls beasts; as the one dies, so does the other; they have all one death; all go unto one place (Eccles. iii. 19). But the modern soul, a nothing, a string of negations, a negative in chief, is thus described in the Mahâbhârat: It is indivisible, inconceivable, inconceptible: it is eternal, universal, permanent, immovable: it is invisible and unalterable. Hence the modern spiritualism which, rejecting materialism, can use only material language.

These, says the Hâjî, are mere sounds. He would not assert Verba gignunt verba, but Verba gignunt res, a step further. The idea is Bacons idola fori, omnium molestissima, the twofold illusions of language; either the names of things that have no existence in fact, or the names of things whose idea is confused and ill-defined.

He derives the Soul-idea from the savage ghost which Dr. Johnson defined to be a kind of shadowy being. He justly remarks that it arose (perhaps) in Egypt; and was not invented by the People of the Book. By this term Moslems denote Jews and Christians who have a recognized revelation, while their ignorance refuses it to Guebres, Hindus, and Confucians.

He evidently holds to the doctrine of progress. With him protoplasm is the Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word matter is derived from the Sanskrit {Sanskrit} (mâtrâ), which, however, signifies properly the invisible type of visible matter; in modern language, the substance distinct from the sum of its physical and chemical properties. Thus, Mâtrâ exists only in thought, and is not recognizable by the action of the five senses. His Chain of Being reminds us of Prof. Huxleys Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, Mesohippus, Meiohippus, Protohippus, Pleiohippus, and Equus. He has evidently heard of modern biology, or Hylozoism, which holds its quarter-million species of living beings, animal and vegetable, to be progressive modifications of one great fundamental unity, an unity of so-called mental faculties as well as of bodily structure. And this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea that man is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which, strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the microscope. As man is of recent origin, and may end at an early epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth all things revolved round nothing, and may continue to do so after his death.

The Hâjî, who elsewhere denounces compound ignorance, holds that all evil comes from error; and that all knowledge has been developed by overthrowing error, the ordinary channel of human thought. He ends this section with a great truth. There are things which human Reason or Instinct matured, in its undeveloped state, cannot master; but Reason is a Law to itself. Therefore we are not bound to believe, or to attempt belief in, any thing which is contrary or contradictory to Reason. Here he is diametrically opposed to Rome, who says, Do not appeal to History; that is private judgment. Do not appeal to Holy Writ; that is heresy. Do not appeal to Reason; that is Rationalism.

He holds with the Patriarchs of Hebrew Holy Writ, that the present life is all-sufficient for an intellectual (not a sentimental) being; and, therefore, that there is no want of a Heaven or a Hell. With far more contradiction the Western poet sings:

For what want is there of a Hell when all are pure? He enlarges upon the ancient Buddhist theory, that Happiness and Misery are equally distributed among men and beasts; some enjoy much and suffer much; others the reverse. Hence Diderot declares, Sober passions produce only the commonplace . . . the man of moderate passion lives and dies like a brute. And again we have the half truth:

The latter implies an equal capacity for pleasure, and thus the balance is kept.

Hâjî Abdû then proceeds to show that Faith is an accident of birth. One of his omitted distichs says:

In a manner of dialogue he introduces the various races each fighting to establish its own belief. The Frank (Christian) abuses the Hindu, who retorts that he is of Mlenchha, mixed or impure, blood, a term applied to all non-Hindus. The same is done by Nazarene and Mohammedan; by the Confucian, who believes in nothing, and by the Soofi, who naturally has the last word. The association of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph with the Trinity, in the Roman and Greek Churches, makes many Moslems conclude that Christians believe not in three but in five Persons. So an Englishman writes of the early Fathers, They not only said that 3 = 1, and that 1 = 3: they professed to explain how that curious arithmetical combination had been brought about. The Indivisible had been divided, and yet was not divided: it was divisible, and yet it was indivisible; black was white and white was black; and yet there were not two colours but one colour; and whoever did not believe it would be damned. The Arab quotation runs in the original:

Gehenna, alias Jahim, being the fiery place of eternal punishment. And the second saying, Al- nâr wa lâ l-ArFire (of Hell) rather than Shame,is equally condemned by the Koranist. The Gustâkhi (insolence) of Fate is the expression of Umar-i-Khayyam (St. xxx):

Soofistically, the word means the coquetry of the beloved one, the divinæ particula auræ. And the section ends with Popes:

CONCLUSION

Here the Hâjî ends his practical study of mankind. The image of Destiny playing with men as pieces is a view common amongst Easterns. His idea of wisdom is once more Popes:

Regret, i.e., repentance, was one of the forty-two deadly sins of the Ancient Egyptians. Thou shalt not consume thy heart, says the Ritual of the Dead, the negative justification of the soul or ghost (Lepsius Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs). We have borrowed competitive examination from the Chinese; and, in these morbid days of weak introspection and retrospection, we might learn wisdom from the sturdy old Khemites. When he sings Abjure the Why and seek the How, he refers to the old Scholastic difference of the Demonstratio propter quid (why is a thing?), as opposed to Demonstratio quia (i.e. that a thing is). The great Man shall end with becoming deathless, as Shakespeare says in his noble sonnet:

Like the great Pagans, the Hâjî holds that man was born good, while the Christian, tormented by the things divine, cleaves to the comforting doctrine of innate sinfulness. Hence the universal tenet, that man should do good in order to gain by it here or hereafter; the enlightened selfishness, that says, Act well and get compound interest in a future state. The allusion to the Theist-word apparently means that the votaries of a personal Deity must believe in the absolute foreknowledge of the Omniscient in particulars as in generals. The Rule of Law emancipates man; and its exceptions are the gaps left by his ignorance. The wail over the fallen flower, etc., reminds us of the Pulambal (Lamentations) of the Anti-Brahminical writer, Pathira-Giriyâr. The allusion to Mâyâ is from Dâs Kabîr:

Nirwâna, I have said, is partial extinction by being merged in the Supreme, not to be confounded with Pari-nirwâna or absolute annihilation. In the former also, dying gives birth to a new being, the embodiment of karma (deeds), good and evil, done in the countless ages of transmigration.

Here ends my share of the work. On the whole it has been considerable. I have omitted, as has been seen, sundry stanzas, and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the metre adopted by Hâjî Abdû was the Bahr Tawîl (long verse), I thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with the rough, unobtrusive rhyme of the original.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî

THE KASÎDAH OF HÂJÎ ABDÛ EL-YEZDÎ

By Richard Burton

Translated And Annotated By Hs Friend And Pupil, F.B.

TO THE READER