Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers. W. A. Clouston
If a jewel falls in the mud it is still the same precious stone,20 and if dust flies up to the sky it retains its original baseness. A capacity without education is deplorable, and education without capacity is thrown away. Sugar obtains not its value from the cane, but from its innate quality. Musk has fragrance of itself, and not from being called a perfume by the druggist. The wise man is like the druggist’s chest, silent, but full of virtues; while the blockhead resembles the warrior’s drum, noisy, but an empty prattler. A wise man in the company of those who are ignorant has been compared by the sages to a beautiful girl in the company of blind men, and to the Kurán in the house of an infidel.”—The old proverb that “an evil bird has an evil egg” finds expression by Saádí thus: “No one whose origin is bad ever catches the reflection of the good.” Again, he says: “How can we make a good sword out of bad iron? A worthless person cannot by education become a person of any worth.” And yet again: “Evil habits which have taken root in one’s nature will only be got rid of at the hour of death.”
Firdausí, the Homer of Persia (eleventh century), has the following remarks in his scathing satire on the sultan Mahmúd, of Ghazní (Atkinson’s rendering):
Alas! from vice can goodness ever spring?
Is mercy hoped for in a tyrant king?
Can water wash the Ethiopian white?
Can we remove the darkness from the night?
The tree to which a bitter fruit is given
Would still be bitter in the bowers of heaven;
And a bad heart keeps on its vicious course,
Or, if it changes, changes for the worse;
Whilst streams of milk where Eden’s flow’rets blow
Acquire more honied sweetness as they flow.
The striking words of the Great Teacher, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” find an interesting analogue in this passage by Saádí: “There is a saying of the Prophet, ‘To the poor death is a state of rest.’ The ass that carries the lightest burden travels easiest. In like manner, the good man who bears the burden of poverty will enter the gate of death lightly loaded, while he who lives in affluence, with ease and comfort, will, doubtless, on that very account find death very terrible. And in any view, the captive who is released from confinement is happier than the noble who is taken prisoner.”
A singular anecdote is told of another celebrated Persian poet, which may serve as a kind of commentary on this last-cited passage: Faridú ’d-Dín ’Attár, who died in the year 1229, when over a hundred years old, was considered the most perfect Súfí21 philosopher of the time in which he lived. His father was an eminent druggist in Nishapúr, and for a time Faridú ’d-Dín followed the same profession, and his shop was the delight of all who passed by it, from the neatness of its arrangements and the fragrant odours of drugs and essences. ’Attár, which means druggist, or perfumer, Faridú ’d-Dín adopted for his poetical title. One day, while sitting at his door with a friend, an aged dervish drew near, and, after looking anxiously and closely into the well-furnished shop, he sighed heavily and shed tears, as he reflected on the transitory nature of all earthly things. ’Attár, mistaking the sentiment uppermost in the mind of the venerable devotee, ordered him to be gone, to which he meekly rejoined: “Yes, I have nothing to prevent me from leaving thy door, or, indeed, from quitting this world at once, as my sole possession is this threadbare garment. But O ’Attár, I grieve for thee: for how canst thou ever bring thyself to think of death—to leave all these goods behind thee?” ’Attár replied that he hoped and believed that he should die as contentedly as any dervish; upon which the aged devotee, saying, “We shall see,” placed his wooden bowl upon the ground, laid his head upon it, and, calling on the name of God, immediately resigned his soul. Deeply impressed with this incident, ’Attár at once gave up his shop, and devoted himself to the study of Súfí philosophy.22
The death of Cardinal Mazarin furnishes another remarkable illustration of Saádí’s sentiment. A day or two before he died, the cardinal caused his servant to carry him into his magnificent art gallery, where, gazing upon his collection of pictures and sculpture, he cried in anguish, “And must I leave all these?” Dr. Johnson may have had Mazarin’s words in mind when he said to Garrick, while being shown over the famous actor’s splendid mansion: “Ah, Davie, Davie, these are the things that make a death-bed terrible!”
Few passages of Shakspeare are more admired than these lines:
And this our life, exempt from public haunts,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.23
Saádí had thus expressed the same sentiment before him: “The foliage of a newly-clothed tree, to the eye of a discerning man, displays a whole volume of the wondrous works of the Creator.” Another Persian poet, Jámí, in his beautiful mystical poem of Yúsuf wa Zulaykhá, says: “Every leaf is a tongue uttering praises, like one who keepeth crying, ‘In the name of God.’ ”24 And the Afghan poet Abdu ’r-Rahman says: “Every tree, every shrub, stands ready to bend before him; every herb and blade of grass is a tongue to mutter his praises.” And Horace Smith, that most pleasing but unpretentious writer, both of verse and prose, has thus finely amplified the idea of “tongues in trees”:
Your voiceless lips, O Flowers, are living preachers,
Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book,
Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers,
From loneliest nook.
’Neath cloistered boughs, each floral bell that swingeth,
And tolls its perfume on the passing air,
Makes Sabbath in the fields, and ever ringeth
A call to prayer;—
Not to the domes where crumbling arch and column
Attest the feebleness of mortal hand,
But to that fane, most catholic and solemn,
Which God hath planned:
To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,
Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply;
Its choir, the winds and waves, its organ, thunder,
Its dome, the sky.
There, amid solitude and shade, I wander
Through the green aisles, and, stretched upon the sod,
Awed by the silence, reverently ponder
The ways of God.
When Saádí composed his Gulistán, in 1278, he was between eighty and ninety years of age, with his great mind still vigorous as ever; and he lived many years after, beloved and revered by the poor, whose necessities he relieved, and honoured and esteemed by the noble and the learned, who frequently visited the venerable solitary, to gather and treasure up the pearls of wisdom which dropped from his eloquent tongue. Like other poets of lofty genius, he possessed a firm assurance of the immortality of his fame. “A rose,” says he, “may continue to bloom for five or six days, but this Rose-Garden will flourish for ever”; and again: “These verses and recitals of mine will endure after every particle of my dust has been dispersed.” Six centuries have passed away since the gifted sage penned his Gulistán, and his fame has not only continued in his own land and throughout the East generally, but has spread into all European countries, and across the Atlantic, where long after the days of Saádí “still stood the forests primeval.”
ORIENTAL WIT AND HUMOUR.
Sport