Part 1 (1/2)

The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan

by James Morier

INTRODUCTION

In the first decade of the present century Persia was for a short tilish and Indian states the preceding century, it suddenly and simultaneously focussed the ambitions of Russia, the apprehensions of Great Britain, the Asiatic schereat Powers flocked to its court, and vied with each other in the ifts hich they sought to attract the superb graces of its sovereign, Fath Ali Shah A these supplicants for the Persian alliance, then appraised at much beyond its real value, the most assiduous and also the itated at one han invasion of India, at another by the fear of an overland ainst Delhi of the combined armies of Napoleon and the Tsar These apprehensions were equally illusory; but while they lasted they supplied the excuse for a constant strean, others froal court at Calcutta, and were reproduced in a bewildering succession of Anglo-Persian Treaties Sir John Malcolm, Sir Harford Jones, Sir Gore Ouseley, and Sir Henry Ellis were the plenipotentiaries who negotiated these several instruments; and the principal coadjutor of the last three diplomats was James Justinian Morier, the author of ?Hajji Baba?

Born and nurtured in an Oriental ath educated at Harrow), he was one of three out of four sons, whom their father, himself British Consul at Constantinople, dedicated to the Diplomatic or Consular service in Eastern Europe or in Asia His Persian experience began when at the age of twenty-eight he accompanied Sir Harford Jones as private secretary, in 1808-1809, on that mission from the British Court direct which excited the bitter jealousy and provoked the undignified recriminations of the Indian Government After the Treaty had been concluded, Ja accompanied by the Persian envoy to the Court of St Jaures in this narrative as Mirza Firouz, and whose droll experiences in this country he subsequently related in the voluland?

While at home, Morier wrote the first of the torks upon Persia, and his journeys and experiences in and about that country, which, together with the writings of Sir John Malcolm, and the later publications of Sir W Ouseley, Sir R Ker Porter, and J Baillie Frazer, falishman of the first quarter of this century with Persian history and habits to a degree far beyond that enjoyed by the corresponding English to Persia with Sir Gore Ouseley in 1811-12 to assist the latter in the negotiation of a fresh Treaty, to meet the novel situation of a Franco-Russian alliance, Morier ree d?affaire_ after his chief had left, and in 1814 rendered similar aid to Sir H Ellis in the conclusion of a still further Treaty superseding that of Ouseley, which had never been ratified After his return to England in 1815, appeared the account of his second journey Finally, nearly ten years later, there was issued in 1824 the ripened product of his Persian experiences and reflections in the shape of the inimitable story to which is prefixed this introduction ?Hajji Baba? at once beca public, and passed speedily through several editions That popularity has never since been exhausted; and the constant demand for a new issue is a proof not merely of the intrinsic merit of the book as a contemporary portrait of Persian manners and life, but also of the fidelity hich it continues to reflect, after the lapse of three-quarters of a century, the salient and unchanging characteristics of a singularly unchanging Oriental people Its author, having left the Diplomatic service, died in 1849 The 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 A

James Morier was an artist as well as an author The bulk of the illustrations in his two journeys were reproduced fros; 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 ?nu 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 forer 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 faleaners in the same still prolific field

Such was the historic _mise-en-scene_ in which James Morier penned his famous satire I next turn to the work itself The idea of criticising, and still uise of a fictitious narrator is familiar in the literature of many lands More co upon the scene the denizen of some other country or clime Here, as in the case of the immortal Gil Blas of Santillane, hom Hajji Baba has been not inaptly compared, the infinitelythe foibles of a people through the mouth of one of their own nationality Hajji Baba is a Persian of the Persians, typical not s, but of the character and instincts and ht of his countryhtful 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, as responsible for so lifelike a creation No man could, have written or could norite such a book unless he were steeped and saturated, not merely in Oriental experience, but in Oriental forht To these qualificationsobservation James Morier spent less than six years in Persia; and yet in a lifetime he could scarcely have inosis If the scenic and poetic accessories of a Persian picture are (except in the story of Yusuf and Maria, their colect is more than compensated by the scrupulous exactitude of the dramatic properties hich 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, Turkishher 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 siet the better of hiression 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 victiue himself, is faithful to a type of hu 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 randee of the next, and the loftiest is not exempt from the extren is the apex of a half-civilised co 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 thebare the shari of the lantern-jawed devotees of ku dervish, who befriends and instructs, and ultimately robs Hajji Baba, and who thus explains the secrets of his trade:--

?It is not great learning that is required to redient By ihtto health--by ireat ease, and am feared and respected by those who, like you, do not knohat dervishes are?

Equally unsparing is his exposure of the reputed pillars of the Church, _mollahs_ and _mushteheds_, as illustrated by his excellent stories of the Mollah Bashi+ of Tehran, and of the norance and pretensions of the native quacks, who have in nowise iht 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 estireat 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 thewhich it is on record that a Persian commander of that day actually e in the case, how the Persians would fight!? In this general atreeable 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 so frolish arm-chair, to deprecate the apparent insensibility of the author to the more ah doubtless with an additional instigation of aes, Morier?s own chief, wrote in the Introduction to his own Report of his Mission to the Persian Court these words:--

?One es 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, A 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 ht 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 areply was that which Morier himself received, after the publication of the book, froland 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 froellation 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 iures that e are not pasteboard creations, but the living personalities, disguised only in respect of their naht 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 can be identified by the student who is familiar with the incidents of the time Above all, in its delineation of national custoy, and conveys a more truthful and instructive impression of Persian habits, methods, points of view, and courses of action, than any disquisition of which I am aware in the more serious volumes of statesmen, travellers, and men of affairs I will proceed to identify soes and events

No more faithful portrait is contained in the book than that of the king, Fath Ali Shah, the second of the Kajar Dynasty, and the great-grandfather of the reigning Shah His vanity and ostentation, his passion for money and for women, his love of flattery, his discreet deference, to the priesthood (illustrated by his annual pilgriarb of penance, to the shrine of Fatima at kum), his royal state, his jewels, and his around of every contees The royal processions, whether in semi-state when he visited the house of a subject, or in full state when he went abroad from the capital, and the annual departure of the royal household for the summer camp at Sultanieh, are drawn froood deal of their former splendour The Grand Vizier of the narrative, ?that notorious minister, decrepit in person, and nefarious in conduct,? ?a little oldnature,? was Mirza Sheffi as appointed by Fath Ali Shah to succeed if Ibrahim, the minister to whom his uncle had owed his throne, and who to death The Ae, coarse rocer of Ispahan,? was Mohaht verbal change is needed to transfor?s chief physician into Mirza Ahmed, the _Hakim Bashi+_ of Fath Ali Shah Namerd Khan, the chief executioner, and subsequent chief of the hero, whose swaggering cowardice is so vividly depicted, was, in actual life, Feraj Ullah Khan

The coive up his house to the British _Elchi_, was Mohammed Khan The Poet Laureate of the story, Asker Khan, shared the nan, Fath Ali Khan; and the story of his old coins, and stuffed on another with sugar-candy, as a mark of the royal approbation, is true The serdar of Erivan, ?an abandoned sensualist, but liberal and enterprising,? was one Hassan Khan; and the romantic tale of the Armenians, Yusuf and Maria of a hand-grenade into one of the subterranean dwellings of the Ar from aof the serdar?s palace at Erivan, is a reproduction of incidents that actually occurred in the Russo-Persian war of that date Finally, Mirza Firouz Khan, the Persian envoy to Great Britain, and the hero of ?Hajji Baba in England?, is a portrait of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, a nephew of the former Grand Vizier, who visited London as the Shah?s representative in 1809-10, and as subsequently sent on a si This individual land by his excellentquoted that does not appear in Morier?s pages When asked by a lady in London whether they did not worshi+p the sun in Persia, he replied, ?Oh yes, land too, if you ever saw him!?

The international politics of the ties of ?Hajji Baba? The French a in disgrace from Tehran, was Napoleon?s ened the Peace of Tilsit with the Tsar, found a very different estimate of the value of the French alliance entertained by the Persian Court

The English embassy, whose honorific reception is described in chapter lxxvii, was that of Sir Harford Jones The disputes about hats, and chairs, and stockings, and other points of divergence between English and Persian etiquette, are historical; and a conte of the first audience with the Shah, as described by Morier, still exists on the walls of the royal palace of Negaristan in the Persian capital There may be seen the portraits of Sir Harford Jones and Sir John Malcolrouped by a pardonable anachronis with his spider?s waist and his lordly beard; and there are the princes and theThe philanthropic efforts of the Englishmen to force upon the reluctant Persians the triple boon of vaccination, post-mortem examinations, and potatoes, are also authentic

Quite a number of smaller instances may be cited in which what appears only as an incident or an illustration in the story is in reality a historical fact It is the case that the Turcoman freebooters did on more than one occasion push their _alamans_ or raids as far even as Ispahan The tribe by who chapters is seely rather the Yomuts beyond Atrek River than the Tekke Turcomans of Akhal Tekke I have myself ridden over the road between Abbasabad and Shahrud, where they were in the habit of swooping down upon the defenceless and terror-stricken caravans; and the description of the panic which they created aerated The pillar of skulls which Aga Moha erected in chapter vii was actually raised by that truculent eunuch at Balish traveller, Sir Henry Pottinger, in 1810 I have seen the story of the unhappy Zeenab and her fate described a review of ?Hajji Baba? as lio at Stanorant remark; for this forn of Fath Ali Shah At shi+raz there still exists a deep well in the mountain above city, dohich, until recently, women convicted of adultery were hurled; and when I was at Bokhara in 1888 there had, in the preceding year, beenthrown from the sum but noell-nigh forgotten fact that the Christian dervish who is represented in chapter lix as publicly disputing with the _ a refutation of the Mohammedan creed, was no other than the faious sensation by the fearlessness of his polemics while at shi+raz, and who subsequently died at Tokat, in Asiatic Turkey, in 1812

The incidental ht? that orn by Fath Ali Shah in one of his _bazubands_ or arh historically inaccurate, is also of interest to English readers; since the jewel alluded to is the Daria-i-Nur or Sea of Light, the sister-stone to the Koh-i-Nur or Mountain of Light, which, in the previous century, had been carried froh the hands of Runjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, into the regalia of the British crown The ?Sea of Light? is still at Tehran