The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan | Page 3

have been a prophet, by impudence I have wrought miracles, by impudence I have restored the dying to health--by impudence, in short, I lead a life of great ease, and am feared and respected by those who, like you, do not know what dervishes are.’
Equally unsparing is his exposure of the reputed pillars of the Church, mollahs and m?shteheds, as illustrated by his excellent stories of the Mollah Bashi of Tehran, and of the mollah Nadan. He ridicules the combined ignorance and pretensions of the native quacks, who have in nowise improved since his day. He assumes, as he still might safely do, the venality of the kadi or official interpreter of the law. He places upon the lips of an old Curd a ‘candid but unflattering estimate of the Persian character, ‘whose great and national vice is lying, and whose weapons, instead of the sword and spear, are treachery, deceit, and falsehood’--an estimate which he would find no lack of more recent evidence to corroborate. And he revels in his tales of Persian cowardice, whether it be at the mere whisper of a Turcoman foray, or in conflict with the troops of a European Power, putting into the mouth of one of his characters the famous saying which it is on record that a Persian commander of that day actually employed: ‘O Allah, Allah, if there was no dying in the case, how the Persians would fight!’ In this general atmosphere of cheerful rascality and fraud an agreeable climax is reached when Hajji Baba is all but robbed of his patrimony by his own mother! It is the predominance in the narrative of these and other of the less attractive aspects of Persian character that has led some critics, writing from the charitable but ill-informed distance of an English arm-chair, to deprecate the apparent insensibility of the author to the more amiable characteristics of the Iranian people. Similarly, though doubtless with an additional instigation of ambassadorial prudence, Sir Harford Jones-Brydges, Morier’s own chief, wrote in the Introduction to his own Report of his Mission to the Persian Court these words:--
‘One may allow oneself to smile at some of the pages of “Hajji Baba”; but it would be just as wise to estimate the national character of the Persians from the adventures of that fictitious person, as it would be to estimate the national character of the Spaniards from those of Don Raphael or his worthy coadjutor, Ambrose de Lamela.... Knowing the Persians as well as I do, I will boldly say the greater part of their vices originate in the vices of their Government, while such virtues as they do possess proceed from qualities of the mind.’
To this nice, but, as I think, entirely affected discrimination between the sources respectively of Persian virtues and vices, it might be sufficient answer to point out that in “Hajji Baba” Morier takes up the pen of the professional satirist, an instrument which no satirist worthy of the name from Juvenal to Swift has ever yet dipped in honey or in treacle alone. But a more candid and certainly a more amusing reply was that which Morier himself received, after the publication of the book, from the Persian envoy whom he had escorted to England. This was how the irritated ambassador wrote:
‘What for you write “Hajji Baba,” sir? King very angry, sir. I swear him you never write lies; but he say, yes--write. All people very angry with you, sir. That very bad book, sir. All lies, sir. Who tell you all these lies, sir? What for you not speak to me? Very bad business, sir. Persian people very bad people, perhaps, but very good to you, sir. What for you abuse them so bad?’
There is a world of unconscious admission in the sentence which I have italicised, and which may well stand in defence of Morier’s caustic, but never malicious, satire.
There is, however, to my mind, a deeper interest in the book than that which arises from its good-humoured flagellation of Persian peccadilloes. Just as no one who is unacquainted with the history and leading figures of the period can properly appreciate Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” or “Gulliver’s Travels,” so no one who has not sojourned in Persia, and devoted considerable study to contemporary events, can form any idea of the extent to which “Hajji Baba” is a picture of actual personages, and a record of veritable facts. It is no frolic of imaginative satire only; it is a historical document. The figures that move across the stage are not pasteboard creations, but the living personalities, disguised only in respect of their names, with whom Morier was brought daily into contact while at Tehran. The majority of the incidents so skilfully woven into the narrative of the hero’s adventures actually occurred, and