‘Mará búsa,’ guftá, ‘bi-taṣḥíf dih, Ki darwísh-rá túsha az búsa bih.’

“‘Give me,’ said he, ‘kisses with taṣḥíf, For to the poor man
túsha (provisions) are better than búsa’ (kisses).”

This figure cannot be illustrated or properly explained without the use of Arabic letters, else I should be tempted to cite an ingenious poem, quoted by Rashíd-i-Waṭwáṭ in his Ḥadá'iqu's-Siḥr, wherein the sense of each verse is changed from praise to blame by a slight alteration of the diacritical points, so that, for example, Hast dar aṣl-at bulandí bí-khiláf (“The nobility in thy stock is indisputable”) becomes Hast dar aṣl-at palídí bí-khiláf (“The uncleanness in thy stock is indisputable”).

Some few words should, perhaps, be said at this point con­cerning the satire (hajw) and the parody (jawáb). Satire was Satire and Parody. amongst the Arabs, even in pre-Muhammadan days, a powerful weapon, and commonly took the form of what were known as mathálib, i.e., poems on the disgraces and scandals attaching to some rival or hostile tribe. In Persian, one of the earliest satires preserved to us is that of Firdawsí on Sulṭán Maḥmúd, to which allusion has already been made. This, though very bitter, is utterly devoid of the coarse invective and innuendo which mar (according to Western ideas) most satirical poems of the Arabs and Persians. The five following verses may serve to give some idea of its style:—

“Long years this Sháhnáma I toiled to complete,
That the King might award me some recompense meet,
But naught save a heart wrung with grief and despair
Did I get from those promises empty as air!
Had the sire of the King been some Prince of renown,
My forehead had surely been graced by a crown!
Were his mother a lady of high pedigree,
In silver and gold had I stood to the knee!
But, being by birth not a prince but a boor,
The praise of the noble he could not endure!”

Any one who wishes to form an idea of the grossness which mars so much of the satirical verse of the Persians should peruse the crescendo series of abusive poems which marked the progress of the quarrel between the poet Kháqání (d. A.D. 1199) and his master and teacher, Abu'l-'Ulá, which will be found in full, with translations, in Khanikof's admirable Mémoire sur Khâcâni (Paris, 1865, pp. 14-23). The quatrain with which Abu'l-'Ulá opened the duel is delicacy itself compared to what follows, and will alone bear translation. He says:—

Kháqániyá! Agarchi sukhan ník dániyá,
Yak nukta gúyam-at: bi-shinaw ráyagániyá!
Hajw-i-kasí ma-kun ki zi tu mih buwad bi-sinn:
Báshad ki ú pidar buwad-at, tu na-dániyá!

which may be paraphrased in English:—

“Thy verse, Kháqání, deeply I admire,
Yet one small hint to offer I desire:
Mock not the man whose years outnumber thine:
He may, perchance (thou know'st not), be thy sire!”

The following, however, ascribed to Kamál Isma'íl of Iṣfahán (killed by the Mongols when they sacked that city in A.D. 1237-38), is the most irreproachable specimen of Persian satire with which I have met:—

Gar kwája zi bahr-i-má badí guft
Má chihra zi gham na-mí kharáshím:
Má ghayr-i-nikú'iyash na-gú'ím,
Tá har du durúgh gufta báshím!

which may be paraphrased:—

“My face shall show no traces of despite,
Although my Patron speaketh ill of me:
His praise I'll still continue to recite,
That both of us alike may liars be!”

As for the jawáb (literally “answer”), it may be either a parody or merely an imitation, this latter being also called a Parodies and Parallels. nadhíra, or “parallel.” The great parodists of Persia were 'Ubayd-i-Zákání, a ribald wit who died about A.D. 1370, and of whose satires in verse and prose a selection was published in Constantinople in A.H. 1303 (A.D. 1885-86); and Abú Isḥáq (Busḥaq) of Shíráz, the Poet of Foods; and Nidháma'd-Dín Maḥmúd Qárí of Yazd, the Poet of Clothes, from the works of both of whom selections were published in the same year and place. Each of these was a parodist, but the first-named was by far the greatest as a master of satire, and excelled in prose as well as in verse, as we shall have occasion to remark when we come to speak of his period.

Much more might be said on the Rhetoric of the Muslims, but considerations of space forbid me for the present to enlarge Conventionality in metaphor and simile. further on this subject, and I must refer such of my readers as desire fuller information to the works of Gladwin, Rückert, Gibb, Blochmann, and the native writers on these topics. A few words, however, must be added on a work of great utility to students of the erotic poetry of the Persians, I mean the “Lover's Companion” (Anísu'l-'Ushsháq) of Sharafu'd-Dín Rámí, who flourished in the latter part of the fourteenth century of our era. This book treats of the similes which may be employed in describing the various features of the beloved, and has been translated and annotated in French by M. Clément Huart, Professor of Persian at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes (Paris, 1875). It contains nineteen chapters, treating respectively of the hair, the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyes, the eyelashes, the face, the down on the lips and cheeks, the mole or beauty-spot, the lips, the teeth, the mouth, the chin, the neck, the bosom, the arm, the fingers, the figure, the waist, and the legs. In each chapter the author first gives the various terms applied by the Arabs and Persians to the part which he is discussing, differentiating them when any difference in meaning exists; then the metaphors used by writers in speaking of them, and the epithets applied to them, the whole copiously illustrated by examples from the poets. Thus the eyebrows (in Persian abrú, in Arabic ḥájib) may be either joined together above the nose (muttaṣil), which is esteemed a great beauty, or separated (munfaṣil), and they are spoken of by the Persian poets by thirteen metaphors or metaphorical adjectives. Thus they may be compared to crescent moons; bows; rainbows; arches; miḥrábs; * the letter nún, <text in Arabic script omitted>; the letter káf, <text in Arabic script omitted>; the curved head of the mall-bat or polo-stick; the dágh, or mark of ownership branded on a horse or other domestic animal; and the ṭughrá, or royal seal on the letters-patent of beauty. In the case of the hair the number of metaphors and metaphorical adjectives of which the use is sanctioned is much greater: in Persian, according to our author, “these are, properly speaking, sixty; but, since one can make use of a much larger number of terms, the hair is spoken of metaphorically as ‘that which possesses a hundred attributes’”; of which attributes a copious list is appended.

From what has been said, it will now be fully apparent how intensely conventional and artificial much Persian poetry is.

Essentially conventional character of Muslim Poetry. Not only the metres and ordering of the rhymes, but the sequence of subjects, the permissible com­parisons, similes, and metaphors, the varieties of rhetorical embellishment, and the like, are all fixed by a convention dating from the eleventh or twelfth cen­tury of our era; and this applies most strongly to the qaṣída. Hence it is that the European estimate of the greatness of a Persian poet is often very different from that of his own countrymen, since only beauties of thought can be preserved in translation, while beauties of form almost necessarily dis­appear, however skilful the translator may be. Thus it happens that 'Umar Khayyám, who is not ranked by the Persians as a poet of even the third class, is now, probably, better known in Europe than any of his fellow-countrymen as a writer of verse; while of the qaṣída-writers so highly esteemed by the Persians, such as Anwarí, Kháqání, or Dhahír of Fáryáb, the very names are unfamiliar in the West.

The early Arab poets of the classical (i.e., the pre-Muham­madan, early Muhammadan, and Umayyad) periods are natural,

Substance and style as canons of criticism. unaffected, and perfectly true to their environ­ment, and the difficulty which we often ex­perience in understanding their meaning depends on the unfamiliarity of that environment rather than upon anything far-fetched or fanciful in their comparisons; but, apart from this, they are splendidly direct and spontaneous. Even in Umayyad times, criticism turned rather on the ideas expressed than on the form into which they were cast, as we plainly see from an anecdote related in the charming history of al-Fakhrí (ed. Ahlwardt, pp. 149-150), according to which 'Abdu'l-Malik (reigned A.D. 685-705) one day asked his courtiers what they had to say about the following verse:—