“His style is clear, unaffected and harmonious, displaying at the same time great learning, matured science, and intimate knowledge of Sir Gore Ouseley on the genius of Ḥáfiẓ the hidden as well as the apparent nature of things; but above all a certain fascination of expression unequalled by any other poet.”
It is, however, to Miss Gertrude Lowthian Bell that we are indebted for the best estimate of Ḥáfiẓ, at once critical, sympathetic, and full of insight. In particular she compares and contrasts him in the most illuminating manner with his elder contemporary Dante, after characterizing whose poetry she says:*
“To Ḥáfiẓ, on the contrary, modern instances have no value; contemporary history is too small an episode to occupy his thoughts.
Miss Gertrude Lowthian Bell on Ḥáfiẓ and Dante During his life-time the city which he loved, perhaps as dearly as Dante loved Florence, was besieged and taken five or six times; it changed hands even more often. It was drenched with blood by one conqueror, filled with revelry by a second, and subjected to the hard rule of asceticism by a third. One after another Ḥáfiẓ saw kings and princes rise into power and vanish ‘like snow upon the desert's dusty face.’ Pitiful tragedies, great rejoicings, the fall of kingdoms and the clash of battle—all these he must have seen and heard. But what echo of them is there in his poems? Almost none. An occasional allusion which learned commentators refer to some political event; an exaggerated effusion in praise first of one king, then of another; the celebration of such and such a victory and of the prowess of such and such a royal general—just what any self-respecting court-poet would feel it incumbent upon himself to write; and no more.“But some of us will feel that the apparent indifference of Ḥáfiẓ lends to his philosophy a quality which that of Dante does not possess. The Italian is bound down within the limits of his philosophy, his theory of the universe is essentially of his own age, and what to him was so acutely real is to many of us merely a beautiful or a terrible image. The picture that Ḥáfiẓ draws represents a wider landscape, though the immediate foreground may not be so distinct. It is as if his mental eye, endowed with wonderful acuteness of vision, had penetrated into those provinces of thought which we of a later age were destined to inhabit. We can forgive him for leaving to us so indistinct a representation of his own time, and of the life of the individual in it, when we find him formulating ideas as profound as the warning that there is no musician to whose music both the drunk and the sober can dance.”
Shiblí Nu'mání ascribes the perfecting of the ghazal and What the ghazal, or ode, owes to Ḥáfiẓ the extension of its scope to Ḥáfiẓ, and in a lesser degree to his contemporaries Salmán and Khwájú. With the earlier masters, such as Sa'dí, Amír Khusraw and Ḥasan of Dihli, its almost invariable theme was love. Khwájú sang of other matters as well, such as the transitoriness of the world, while Salmán excelled in rhetorical artifices and novel comparisons and similes. Ḥáfiẓ combined the merits of all, adding to them a charm all his own, and often it pleased him to take from their Díwáns a couplet or hemistich and modify it so as to add to its beauty. In the case of Sa'dí I have given some Parallel passages of Ḥáfiẓ and Khwájú. instances of this in the second volume of my Literary History of Persia, * and Shiblí Nu'mání gives others as between Ḥáfiẓ and Khwájú and Salmán respectively. Amongst these latter are the following:
<text in Arabic script omitted> <text in Arabic script omitted>
Shiblí Nu'mání says that he could give many other parallels between Ḥáfiẓ and Khwájú,
Parallel passages of Ḥáfiẓ and Salmán but deems these few examples sufficient. In each case he discusses the relative merit of the parallel couplets, generally, but not always, giving the verdict in favour of Ḥáfiẓ. He then passes to a similar comparison between Ḥáfiẓ and Salmán.<text in Arabic script omitted> <text in Arabic script omitted> <text in Arabic script omitted>
Shiblí Nu'mání gives a great number of other instances of parallels between Ḥáfiẓ and Salmán
and Ḥáfiẓ and Khwájú, but the specimens cited above suffice to establish the fact of this parallelism,
which, so far as I know, has not been hitherto noticed by any European Orientalist. It is interesting
to note another fact to which reference has been previously made in vol. ii of my Literary
History of Persia (pp. 83-9), viz. the tendency of most Oriental literary critics to show less interest
in the diversity of ideas of two poets than in the diversity of form in which they have expressed
an idea common to both. And it is because this same tendency exists in the poets themselves
that we find so great a poet as Ḥáfiẓ, for instance, taking a couplet or a whole ode from one
of his elder contemporaries, such as Salmán or Khwájú, and endeavouring to give a new and
more attractive turn to the phraseology, while keeping the form, the rhyme and the general sense.
Such appropriation of the work of others is regarded as entirely legitimate, and is not reckoned as
plagiarism, when the object of the appropriating poet is to show that he can better the work of
his predecessor or contemporary. This, of course, is quite
different from parody, such as that indulged in by 'Ubayd-
The number of commentaries on the poems of Ḥáfiẓ,
Commentators of Ḥáfiẓ not only in Persian but also in Turkish, and possibly in Urdú also, is very considerable, but few of those which I have had occasion to examine are either very critical or very illuminating. The three best-known Turkish commentaries are those of Surúrí, Shem'í and Súdí, of which the last is the most accessible * and the most useful, since the author very wisely confines himself to the elucidation of the literal meaning, and avoids all attempts at allegorical interpretation and the search for the “inner meaning.” That many of the odes are to be taken in a symbolic and mystical sense few will deny; that others mean what they say, and celebrate a beauty not celestial and a wine not allegorical can hardly be questioned; that the spiritual and the material should, as Sháh Shujá' complained, be thus mingled will not surprise any one who understands the character, psychology and Weltanschauung of the people of Persia, where it is common enough to meet with persons who in the course of a single day will alternately present themselves as pious Muslims, heedless libertines, confirmed sceptics and mystical pantheists, or even incarnations of the Deity. * The student of Ḥáfiẓ who cannot decide for himself which verses are to be taken literally and which symbolically is hardly likely to gain much from a commentator who invariably repeats that Wine means Spiritual Ecstasy, the Tavern the Ṣúfí Monastery, the Magian elder the Spiritual Guide, and so forth. To the English reader who desires to pursue this method of study, however, Lieut.-One little Persian treatise on Ḥáfiẓ, to which my atten- The Laṭífa-iGhaybiyya of Muḥammad of Dáráb tion was first called by Mr Sidney Churchill, formerly Oriental Secretary of the British Legation at Ṭihrán, deserves a brief mention, chiefly because it formulates and subsequently endeavours to refute certain adverse criticisms on his poetry made by some of his compatriots. This little book is entitled Laṭífa-i-Ghaybiyya and was written by Muḥammad b. Muḥammad of Dáráb, concerning whose life and date I have been unable to learn anything. It comprises 127 pages of small size, was lithographed at Ṭihrán in 1304/ 1886-7, and chiefly consists of explanations of different verses. The three hostile criticisms which it seeks to refute are stated as follows on p. 5: