The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan | Page 2

celebrity of the
family name has, however, been revindicated in more recent diplomatic
history by the services of his nephew, the late Sir Robert Morier, who
died in 1893, while British Ambassador at St. Petersburg.
James Morier was an artist as well as an author. The bulk of the
illustrations in his two journeys were reproduced from his own
drawings; and he left upon his death a number of scrap-books, whose
unpublished contents are, I believe, not unlikely to see the light. In the
Preface to the second edition of Hajji Baba he also spoke of ‘numerous
notes which his long residence in Persia would have enabled him to
add,’ but which his reluctance to increase the size of the work led him
to omit. These, if they ever existed in a separate form, are no longer in
the possession of his family, and may therefore be presumed to have
ceased to exist. Their place can now only be ineffectually supplied, as
in the present instance, by the observations of later travellers over the
familiar ground, and of inferior gleaners in the same still prolific field.
Such was the historic mise-en-scène in which James Morier penned his
famous satire. I next turn to the work itself. The idea of criticising, and
still more of satirising, a country or a people under the guise of a
fictitious narrator is familiar in the literature of many lands. More
commonly the device adopted is that of introducing upon the scene the
denizen of some other country or clime. Here, as in the case of the
immortal Gil Blas of Santillane, with whom Hajji Baba has been not
inaptly compared, the infinitely more difficult plan is preferred of
exposing the foibles of a people through the mouth of one of their own
nationality. Hajji Baba is a Persian of the Persians, typical not merely
of the life and surroundings, but of the character and instincts and
manner of thought of his countrymen. And yet it is from his lips that
flows the delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm
that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without
vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however,

to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents
of the non-Oriental writer, who was responsible for so lifelike a
creation. No man could, have written or could now write such a book
unless he were steeped and saturated, not merely in Oriental experience,
but in Oriental forms of expression and modes of thought. To these
qualifications must be added great powers of insight and long
observation. James Morier spent less than six years in Persia; and yet in
a lifetime he could scarcely have improved upon the quality of his
diagnosis. If the scenic and poetic accessories of a Persian picture are
(except in the story of Yusuf and Mariam and a few other instances)
somewhat wanting, their comparative neglect is more than
compensated by the scrupulous exactitude of the dramatic properties
with which is invested each incident in the tale. The hero, a
characteristic Persian adventurer, one part good fellow, and three parts
knave, always the plaything of fortune--whether barber, water-carrier,
pipe-seller, dervish, doctor’s servant, sub-executioner, scribe and
mollah, outcast, vender of pipe-sticks, Turkish merchant, or secretary to
an ambassador--equally accepting her buffets and profiting by her
caresses, never reluctant to lie or cheat or thieve, or get the better of
anybody else in a warfare where every one was similarly engaged in
the effort to get the better of him, and equipped with the ready casuistry
to justify any transgression of the moral code, Hajji Baba never strikes
a really false chord, or does or says anything intrinsically improbable;
but, whether in success or adversity, as a victim of the roguery of others,
or as a rogue himself, is faithful to a type of human character which
modern times and a European surrounding are incapable of producing,
but which is natural to a state of society in which men live by their wits,
where the scullion of one day may be the grandee of the next, and the
loftiest is not exempt from the extreme vicissitudes of fortune, and in
which a despotic sovereign is the apex of a half-civilised community of
jealous and struggling slaves.
Perhaps the foibles of the national character upon which the author is
most severe are those of imposture in the diverse and artistic shapes in
which it is practised by the modern Persian. He delights in stripping
bare the sham piety of the austere Mohammedan, the gullibility of the
pilgrims to the sacred shrines, the sanctimonious humbug of the

lantern-jawed devotees of Kum. One of his best portraits is that of the
wandering dervish, who befriends and instructs, and ultimately robs
Hajji Baba, and who thus