PERSIAN LOVE

A closer approximation to our ideal may be found in a story related by the Persian poet Saadi (358): 

“There was a handsome and well-disposed young man, who was embarked in a vessel with a lovely damsel:  I have read that, sailing on the mighty deep, they fell together into a whirlpool:  When the pilot came to offer him assistance; God forbid that he should perish in that distress; he was answering, from the midst of that overwhelming vortex, Leave me and take the hand of my beloved!  The whole world admired him for this speech, which, as he was expiring, he was heard to make; learn not the tale of love from that faithless wretch who can neglect his mistress when exposed to danger.  In this manner ended the lives of those lovers; listen to what has happened, that you may understand; for Saadi knows the ways and forms of courtship, as well as the Tazi, or modern Arabic, is understood at Baghdad.”

How did this Persian poet get such a correct and modern notion about love into his head?  Obviously not from his experiences and observations at home, for the Persians, as the scholarly Dr. Polak observes in his classical work on them (I., 206), do not know love in our sense of the word.  The love of which their poets sing has either a symbolical or an entirely carnal meaning.  Girls are married off without any choice of their own at the early age of twelve or thirteen; they are regarded as capital and sold for cash, and children are often engaged in the cradle.  When a Persian travels, he leaves his wife at home and enters into a temporary marriage with other women in the towns he visits.  In rural districts if the traveller is a person of rank, the mercenary peasants eagerly offer their daughters for such “marriages.” (Hellwald, 439.) Like the Greek poets the Persians show their contempt for women by always speaking of boy-favorites when their language rises above the coarsest sensuality.  Public opinion regarding Persian stories and poems has been led astray by the changes of sex and the expurgations made freely by translators.  Burton, whose version of the Thousand and One Nights was suppressed in England, wrote (F.F., 36), that “about one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation, and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare to render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder.”

Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea of altruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love?  Evidently from Europe by way of Arabia.  His own language indicates this—­his suspicious boast of his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strange discovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic.  Now it is well known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had been brought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and more intimate.  The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives in chivalrous efforts