The Kadisah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi | Page 9

in the Yezd Province, he always preferred to style himself El-Hichmakani, a facetious ��lackab�� or surname, meaning ��Of No-hall, Nowhere.�� He had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his ��couplets.�� To a natural facility, a knack of language learning, he added a store of desultory various reading; scraps of Chinese and old Egyptian; of Hebrew and Syriac; of Sanskrit and Prakrit; of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and Greek, including Romaic; of Berber, the Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian, besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and Arabic, the classic of the schools. Nor was he ignorant of ��the -ologies�� and the?triumphs of modern scientific discovery. Briefly, his memory was well-stored; and he had every talent save that of using his talents.
But no one thought that he ��woo��d the Muse,�� to speak in the style of the last century. Even his intimates were ignorant of the fact that he had a skeleton in his cupboard, his Kas?dah or distichs. He confided to me his secret when we last met in?Western India��I am purposely vague in specifying the place. When so doing he held in hand the long and hoary honours of his chin with the points toward me, as if to say with the Island-King:
There is a touch of Winter in my beard,?A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence.
And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, seemed to protest against the plea of age. The MS. was in the vilest ��Shikastah�� or running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the writer declined to take the trouble of copying out his cacograph.
We, his old friends, had long addressed Haj? Abd? by the?sobriquet of _Nabbiana_ (��our Prophet��); and the reader will see that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a message to deliver. He evidently aspires to preach a faith of his own; an Eastern Version of Humanitarianism blended with the sceptical or, as we now say, the scientific habit of mind. The religion, of which Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom; Jud?ism, Christianity and Islamism are mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted by the Philosopher: it worships with single-minded devotion the Holy Cause of Truth, of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods it may bring; and this belief is equally acceptable to honest?ignorance, and to the highest attainments in nature-study.
With Confucius, the Haj? cultivates what Strauss has called the ��stern common-sense of mankind��; while the reign of order is a paragraph of his ��Higher Law.�� He traces from its rudest?beginnings the all but absolute universality of some perception by man, called ��Faith��; that sensus Numinis which, by?inheritance or communication, is now universal except in those who force themselves to oppose it. And he evidently holds this general consent of mankind to be so far divine that it primarily discovered for itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He does not cry with the Christ of Novalis, ��Children, you have no?father��; and perhaps he would join Renan in exclaiming, _Un monde sans Dieu est horrible!_
But he recognises the incompatibility of the Infinite with the Definite; of a Being who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an Actus purus who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful, with an ��Eternal that makes for righteousness.�� In the presence of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the Begriff of Providence, our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed by the perception of a Causa Causans (a misnomer), and to that intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of?distinct statement but incapable of proofs, which we term Belief.
He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own?opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong.
Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences; will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will anticipate the future with