CHAPTER IV.
It will be helpful, if before starting on our journey, we trace an outline map of the road we are to follow; we shall therefore, before beginning the story of Ottoman poetry, sketch roughly and briefly the line of its development.
The history of strictly Ottoman poetry does not begin till the middle of the fifteenth century.
During the preceding hundred and fifty years, which we have called the First Period, a good deal of Turkish literature was produced in Asia Minor; but only a very small proportion of this was the work of strictly Ottoman writers. Each of the several little states into which the Turkish population of Western Asia was divided still looked upon itself as a distinct and separate power, and viewed its neighbours with a jealous, if not a hostile, eye. It was the work of Ottoman statecraft during this century and a half to bind together these antagonistic members of a single family, and through their union to re-create a Turkish empire in Western Asia.
This embryonic period of the Ottoman Empire was likewise the embryonic period of Ottoman literature. During this period the Western branch of the Turkish language was gradually shaping itself to become a literary medium; and during this period was determined by a combination of circumstances which, as we have seen, were beyond the control of the Turkish peoples the direction which their literature was to take, and the lines along which it was to develop. The age and the locality between them decreed that this direction was to be that of the Persian masters, that these lines were to be those of Persian poetry.
The primary result of this was the definite adoption as a fundamental principle by the strictly Ottoman poetry that followed of a practice which had held more or less from the very start, the practice of looking for guidance to contemporary Persian poetry and following whatever movement might develop therein.
The second result was the infection of Ottoman poetry in its every aspect with a Persianism so potent and so inveterate that its effects are operative even to the present day.
Mevláná Jelál-ud-Dín of Rúm presided at the birth of West-Turkish poetry, and during the First Period his was the most powerful personal influence. The poets who wrote under the immediate influence of this great teacher were too deeply engrossed in their subject to spare much attention to the merely literary aspect of their work, even had the language not been in so rough-hewn a condition as to render anything but the plainest and baldest style practically impossible. So although towards the close of the period, after the invasion of Timur, when the influence of Nizámí had made itself felt, a certain interest began to be shown in the more purely artistic side of poetry, the leading characteristic, from a literary point of view, of the work of the First Period is its naïveté.
By the middle of the fifteenth century — that is, by the time when through the Ottoman’s having become paramount in the land his dialect had been definitely accepted as the court and literary language of the new West-Turkish Empire, — the mystic atmosphere which in earlier years had so closely enveloped Nearer Asia was in certain measure passed away, and men were eager to make a start in some fresh direction.
In Persia the purely mystic period had been left behind for some time before the definite emergence of the Ottoman dialect from amid the welter of local patois as the West-Turkish literary medium, and literature in that country was now in the hands of the lyric and romantic poets who gathered round the court of Huseyn Bayqará. At the head of the first of these groups stood ῾Alí Shír-i Newá᾽í, the heir and successor of Háfiz, a writer distinguished alike in poetry and prose, and equal master of Persian and his native Jaghatay or Eastern Turkish. The second group was under the leadership of the famous poet Jámí. The influence of these two illustrious men of letters remained supreme in Persia for nearly a hundred years, not being seriously affected till ῾Urfí and Feyzí introduced a new style and taste towards the close of the sixteenth century.
All was therefore ready for the advent of Ottoman poetry; the formative forces at work during the First Period had fitted the West-Turkish language to serve as a literary medium, had determined which of its dialects was to become this medium, and had trained it to follow easily and without effort the lead of its accepted guide. This guide had now entered a region where the literary and ;:esthetic cravings of the age were recognised and answered; so there was nothing wanting but the man of destiny, the man who by discovering, if not pursuing, the road for which all were groping, who by stammering, if not by singing, the words for which all were seeking, was to inaugurate the literature of the Osmanic Empire and become the van-courier of the host of Ottoman poets.
The voice of the age cried aloud for a leader, and in response arose Ahmed Pasha. So it is with Ahmed Pasha that the history of Ottoman poetry proper begins. As with Shinásí Efendi in later times, so with Ahmed Pasha now, his real services were those of the pioneer, the intrinsic value of his work being comparatively slight. Vaguely conscious of an ideal which he could not clearly conceive, let alone express, Ahmed was stumbling along his way when, lo, out of the East came light, the light for which he and all his fellows were straining with eager gaze. When the ghazels sent by Newá᾽í to Constantinople came into the hands of Ahmed, his eyes were opened; he saw before him embodied in a form, fairer than which he could not picture, these very moods and fantasies which he and his companions had been vainly striving to express.
For a century and a half the movement thus begun flowed on without let or break; during this century and a half the poetry of Newá᾽í, either directly or through that of his Persian followers, was the main source of inspiration to the Ottoman lyric writers, as the works of Jámí and his imitators were to the Ottoman romancists. Now the style of Newá᾽í and Jámí, which was really but the culmination of a literary movement that had been in progress for three centuries in Persia, was remarkable for its lavish use of rhetorical embellishments of every description. This was the feature which most attracted the Ottoman poets and which they most strenuously endeavoured to reproduce in their own work. And so during this Second Period the chief aim of the Turkish poets was to decorate their verse with every imaginable variety of subtle and fantastic conceit, even at the expense, if need be, of grace of diction and beauty of thought. It was therefore with the opening of this Period that the Ottoman literary idiom definitively broke away from the spoken form of the language and began its development upon entirely distinct and purely artificial lines.
This movement culminated in the work of the poet Báqí, very shortly after whose death in A. H. 1008 (A. D. 1600) there occurred a modification in the method and purpose of poetry so marked as to inaugurate a Third Period. About the middle of the sixteenth century the style of Newá᾽í and Jámí had been superseded in Persian literature by that elaborated by ῾Urfí and Feyzí. The novelty in this style lay, apart from the introduction of a number of fresh terms into the conventional vocabulary of poetry, in the deposition of rhetoric from the chief seat and the enthronement of loftiness of tone and stateliness of language in its stead.
This was reflected in Ottoman poetry, especially in the writings of Nef῾í whose work is the high-water mark of this particular school. It was, moreover, during this Period that the Persianisation of Ottoman poetry reached its extreme point. Many native Turkish words and phrases which had been preserved up to this time were now discarded and their places filled by Persian or Perso-Arabic equivalents; and while the poets had in the preceding Period frequently alluded to purely Ottoman customs or institutions, even though treating these in the Persian manner, it now became the fashion altogether to ignore such and deal exclusively with matters to be found in the pages of the Persian poets. To such a pitch was this Persianisation of poetry carried that there are many passages in the productions of this Period which might have been cut out bodily from some Persian poem.
The Third Period lasted till the end of the seventeenth century; but towards its close there appeared a poet, Nábí by name, who by skilfully grafting on to the current style the peculiar didactic tone of the contemporary Persian poet Sá᾽ib, introduced a yet further modification into Ottoman poetry.
The Fourth Period, which covers the whole of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, is unlike the Second and Third Periods in that it is an age of eclecticism; there is no longer a single school including practically all the poets. The chief reason of this is that there was at that time no contemporary Persian poet of sufficient merit or eminence to command universal allegiance. The best that Persia could then show was the poet Shevket who is deservedly famous for his marvellous ingenuity and fertility in the invention of fresh and picturesque images and similes. For more than half a century this writer continued to be the guiding star for the majority of Ottoman poets. The work that these men produced was for the most part an amalgam of the style of Nábí with that of Shevket; its tone is didactic like that of the former, while it relies for decoration on a new and quaint imagery modelled upon that of the latter. These poets who looked to Shevket as their master were the last followers of the old tradition which taught the writers of Turkey to turn to contemporary Persia for guidance; and after their time Ottoman poetry ceases to reflect that of the eastern kingdom.
All along — though more especially during the sixteenth century — there had been sporadic outbursts of the national spirit in Ottoman poetry; the Persian forms had indeed always been respected, but from time to time the voice of the native genius had striven to speak through these. The most notable of such occasions was when the poet Sábit had at the end of the seventeenth century made the first determined effort to stem the overwhelming flood of Persianism and convert Turkish poetry into a somewhat truer interpreter of the Turkish mind. From his day, all through the first stage of the Fourth Period, the movement to which he had given so great an impulse continued to gather strength, till in the latter half of the eighteenth century it became sufficiently powerful to be the dominant motive in Ottoman poetry for some fifty years. This change marks the second of the three stages of the Fourth Period. The movement which brought this about had its origin in revolt, revolt against the traditional Persianism; but with success revolt very speedily developed into license. There was nothing to guide or control the new spirit thus suddenly advanced to a foremost place. It knew not how to speak save in the terms of Persian poetry, so it spoke in these while it defied them; it knew not of what to speak save the themes of the Persianists, so it spoke of these while it made light of them. The typical poetry of this stage truly reflects the genius neither of Turkey nor of Persia; what it displays is a struggle between the two, a struggle which while it lasted entailed anarchy. Had there been any guide to direct the national spirit, it must have triumphed; for it was full of vigour while Persianism was decrepit; but the latter, though it had no living champion, had behind it five centuries of culture, and thus it was able by the sheer dead-weight of the past to stifle for the time its rival’s efforts at emancipation.
And so with the early years of the nineteenth century there came a recrudescence of Persianism; but as there was now no contemporary Persian master, not even a Shevket, whom the poets could follow, for the next thirty or forty years there was not properly speaking any school, each poet choosing as guide or model whichever writer of former times appealed most strongly to his individual taste. These years of uncertainty form the third and last stage of the Fourth Period; and with them the history of the Old School of Ottoman poetry comes to a close.
It is usual to disparage the Fourth Period, to speak of it as an age of decline; and so in many respects, especially from the Persianist point of view, it unquestionably is. On the other hand, as it includes the one sustained attempt to dominate literary poetry made by the native genius without any guidance from outside, it yields in interest to few epochs in the history of this poetry.
At no time had Ottoman poetry appeared in so hopeless a plight as during the last years of the Old School. Persia, stricken with intellectual paralysis, was no longer able to act as guide; the effort of the Turkish poets to supply from within what had thus failed from without had ended in disaster; and poetry seemed to have fallen into a Chinese stagnation of lifeless conventionalism with neither wish nor power save to mumble the dry bones of a long-dead culture. Such was the position when at the end of the sixth decade of the nineteenth century Shinásí Efendi bade the vivifying spirit of the West breathe for the first time into the worn-out frame of Ottoman poetry. By the production in 1859 of a little volume of translations from the French poets into Turkish verse this author opened the eyes of his more thoughtful countrymen to the fact that there was a literature worthy of study outside the realms of Islam, and in this manner prepared the way for a revolution the results of which have been beyond compare more momentous and farther-reaching than those of any other movement by which Ottoman poetry has been affected.
The efforts of Shinásí Efendi to remodel literature after a Western pattern were ably and successfully seconded by his brilliant disciple Námiq Kemál Bey. But the work of these two distinguished reformers was practically confined to prose. No serious attempt was made to apply their principles to poetry till the year 1296 (1879) when ῾Abd-ul-Haqq Hámid Bey published his epoch-making Sahrá or ‘The Country.’1 This tiny booklet of but fifty-nine pages contains ten poems composed in Western verse-forms and treating their subject in a simple, natural, Western fashion, — the first original Turkish poems written in this style.2 The direction suggested by this book was at once recognised by the more talented among the younger poets as that in which salvation must be sought, with the result that there now began a steady flow of poetry written on the lines of the Sahrá, and consequently absolutely unlike anything which had gone before. As a matter of course the new movement was at first violently opposed by the adherents of the old system. But the result of the struggle was never for a moment doubtful; moribund Persianism might fret and fume for a few years, but that it could offer any effectual resistance to the strong fresh spirit that was inspiring with new life the intellectual world was inconceivable. It is now just twenty years since the first note of the new poetry was sounded, and within this brief period the whole aspect of things has changed. Where there seemed to lie the apathy of death there is now busy hopeful life; torpor and stagnation have given place to progress; for short as has yet been its life, the New School has passed through more than one stage.
Although Turkish poetry owes this marvellous transformation to the influence of the West, the position of the New School towards Western poetry is very different from that of the Old School towards Persian. The aim of the old poets was to write what was practically Persian poetry, and that as far as possible in Persian words. The object of the new poets has not been to write Western poetry, nor yet to stud their verses with foreign terms; they have not turned to the West to learn what to think, but to learn how to think. They have studied the attitude of the Western poet’s mind as displayed in his work, and they have themselves endeavoured to assume a similar mental attitude. Thus they have found that the Western poet seeks to describe the things which he sees about him and to express his own feelings in regard to these, so they likewise have tried to describe things that have come under their own eyes and to tell the emotions that these have awakened in their own breasts. As a consequence Turkish poetry has become for the first time natural and personal.
But this is not all; by leading the Turk straight to nature, to nature on which at the bidding of the Persian he turned his back six hundred years ago, the West has unconsciously, but none the less effectively, opened the way for a poetry which is truly Turkish. A century before, when the genius of the nation had grappled with and for a moment got the better of its ancient taskmaster, it had failed to profit by its victory, for it had not known what to make of it. But what was wanting then is forthcoming now; a trusty guide has pointed out the road; the Turkish poet has learned at last that his true duty is to copy neither the Persian nor the Frank, but to interpret the heart of the Turkish people; and that to perform this duty aright, he must study, not the díwáns or the dramas of foreign writers, but the lights and shadows, the joys and sorrows, that make up the daily life of the humble and simple among his own fellow-countrymen.1
The change from the Old to the New School must have come sooner or later; the Europeanisation of every department of Turkish life which had been in progress for years rendered it inevitable. But this does not alter the fact that the man who directly brought about this great and beneficial change is and must ever remain the central figure in the history of Ottoman poetry. The work of Hámid Bey forms the turning-point in this history; everything composed before he wrote bears in one form or another the mark of Persia, everything worthy of the name of poetry composed since he has written shows directly or indirectly the influence of Europe. No man of our generation has, as far as I know, so profoundly influenced the literary destinies of a nation as has this illustrious poet and reformer.1
The extraordinary enthusiasm with which this change was welcomed and the signal success with which, despite manifold discouragements from official quarters, it has been crowned, show how willing is the Turkish people, for all its innate loyalty to tradition, to accept beneficial reform and how able to profit by it. In the wide and complex question of reforming the institutions of the country, it is probably in this one particular alone, namely the reform of literature, that the Turkish people has had an absolutely free hand. Here and here alone foreign intriguer and domestic revolutionary have been unable to carry out their baleful programme of thwarting every effort at amelioration. Had the Turks, when the opportunity was presented to them, shown themselves unwilling or unable to carry out this vital reform in the one sphere which they wholly controlled, where neither Russian emissary nor Armenian anarchist could enter to blight the tender promise ere it could gather strength, then would the judgment of their traducers have been justified, and they would have proved themselves to friend and foe alike a race whose vital energy was spent. But since, on the contrary, nothwithstanding the alien source whence it was derived, they have welcomed with open arms this great, this revolutionary change in a province rendered sacred by the continuous tradition of near six hundred years; and have welcomed it, moreover, solely because they were satisfied of its superiority, without a thought of the impression their action might produce upon the outside world which is as ignorant of the progress of intellectual life in Turkey as it is of what may be developing in Mercury or Mars; and as they have applied it with such thoroughness that there is as great a difference between the language and spirit of a Turkish book of to-day and one of but fifty years ago as there is between the poetry of Tennyson and that of Chaucer, we are constrained to admit that the mental energy of this people is unimpaired, and that those who have so glibly doomed it as plunged in a lethargy from which there is no awakening, as stricken with a paralysis from which there is no recovery, have but shown once more how worthless is the judgment that is based upon ignorance and prejudice.
1 Hámid Bey is at present (1899) Councillor to the Ottoman Embassy in London.
2 Four years before this, in 1292 (1875), Hámid Bey had indeed published some incidental verses in the European style in a prose drama entitled Dukhter-i Hindú or ‘The Indian Maid.’ These verses are actually the first original Turkish poetry in the Western manner; but they seem to have been overlooked by the public, as it was not till after the issue of the Sahrá that Europeanised poetry came into vogue.
1 Early in the present year 1316 (1899) a little volume of verses entitled Turkje Shi῾rlar or ‘Turkish Poems,’ was published by Mehemmed Emín Bey, in which the first attempt is made to present in literary form the real speech and feelings of the great body of the Turkish people. In these little poems, put into the mouths of common soldiers and Anatolian peasants, the true voice of the Turkish people speaks for the first time in literature.
1 Hámid Bey followed up his Sahrá with a number of brilliant lyric and dramatic works which I hope to describe in detail in a later volume.