Liberté et Science, l'art vous couronne ! Que l'art habite les chaumières et brille sur les trônes! De l'art comme là où l'Escaut roule ses ondes !" ON THE HISTORY, SYSTEM, AND VARIE TIES OF TURKISH POETRY. ILLUSTRATED BY SELECTIONS IN THE ORIGINAL, AND THE "Pleasures of Imagination" are the inheritance of the whole human race, barbarous or civilized. None are so untutored as not to indulge in reverie. By some authors, poetry has been said to be the elder sister of prose. Europe has long been aware that the poets of Greece and Rome were not the first on earth to versify their thoughts. Classical culture, however, to the virtual exclusion of almost every other branch of study from our schools, colleges, and universities for a long course of centuries, trained the mind of modern Europe, notwithstanding national and linguistical divergences, into a single system of poetical conception; and hence, the poetry of every modern European people is cast in one unvarying fundamental mould; makes use of the same imagery; repeats, in spite of the profession of Christianity, the same old pagan myths ; and follows the same methods of rhymes and metres. Consequently, the barriers of idiom and grammar once surmounted, an English reader, for example, has generally no difficulty in understanding the poets of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, or even Russia. When Sir Charles Wilkins and Sir William Jones, nearly a century back, first opened the eyes of the West to the existence of Sanscrit poetry, it was found that Greece had not been the teacher of the whole world in what, for want of a more appropriate term, we are constrained to speak of as the belles lettres. But it was also seen that a not very remote community of race between the authors of the Vedas, &c., and the writer or writers of the Iliad, &c., had had, as one effect, the natural consequence, that, on the whole, the ideas and methods of the two branches, eastern and western, of inditing verse, were not so radically different as to create for European students any great difficulty in understanding and admiring the productions of those hitherto unknown Eastern cousins, who, beginning with allusions and metaphors drawn from regions of ice and snow, ended in descriptions of tropical scenery and prac tices. The study of Hebrew had already revealed, in some of the books of the Old Testament, a style of poetry very different, in form and matter, from what had come down from the pagan authors of Greece and Rome. Leaving out the form, such portions of the matter of those books as were found appropriate have been, more or less, turned to account, and incorporated in modern European litera ture, sacred and profane. But those materials are too scant, and their students too few, besides that these are already ineradicably tinged with the ideas and methods of Greece and Rome, for any notable impression to have been stamped on recent secular verse through this slight intermixture. Arabian poetry has been studied with success for several centuries; especially in its more archaic and pagan stages. A certain celebrity has thus been given to it in Europe, as one branch of the fruits of mental activity shown by the primitive followers of Islam and their more immediate forefathers. The Mu'allaqat (Suspended Poems, though the actual meaning of the term is a subject of doubt), the Hamāsa (Odes on Courage, &c.), and the Agāni (Songs), are the best known; others have, however, been noticed by Western scholars. Persian poetry has also been, to a certain very limited extent, examined by European students. The Shāhnāma (Book of Kings) of Firdawsī,—an immense mythical history of Persia from soon after the Deluge to the advent of Islām, in between fifty and sixty thousand couplets, the prose and poetical writings of Sa'di, and the Odes of Hafiz, are those most quoted. These authors died, respectively, in A.D. 1020, 1292, and 1395. The first is an epic, the second a didactic, and the third an outwardly bacchanalian or anacreontic, but inwardly a religious mystic, whose writings must be interpreted as our Song of Solomon. Every word in the Odes of Hafiz has a deep, recondite, inner meaning, the natural parallels being systematically kept up between the details of the inward and spiritual with those of the outward and visible, as to things and actions. To understand this poet fully, therefore, a complete insight into the mysteries of dervish-doctrine, Sufiism—mysticism, as it is commonly called-must be possessed by the inquirer. Of this doctrine, a spiritual union of man with his Maker, through man's love for God, is the central idea, about which all others grow and cluster. The Dervishes may be considered a sort of Freemasons of Islām. The Turks, the Ottoman Turks, the Turkishspeaking and Turkish-writing Muslim Ottomans, who have so vexed the soul of all Europe for the last six centuries, who have for the last fifty years been themselves rapidly becoming Europeanized in general education, as in laws, naval and military science, and industrial enterprise; but who, with no fault of their own, have been so much misunderstood and misrepresented of late by political hypocrisy, religious bigotry, and classical bias, have been at all times as successful in the poetical and literary lines as they have been great in war and politics. Notices have not been wanting in European writers, from time to time, of the fact that poetry and literature were and are successfully cultivated by the Ottoman Turks. Their talents have frequently been spoken of in terms of very high praise; and specimens have been given, with translations of some of their poets. Von Hammer,1 in particular, has published in German a special work in six volumes, with extracts from more than two thousand of them; and again, in his history of the Ottoman Empire, mentions at the end of "Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte der Osmanischen Dichtkunst, &c., with translated extracts from 2,200 Poets." Pesth, 1826-31. |