The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan | Page 3

explains the secrets of his trade:--
‘It is not great learning that is required to make a dervish; assurance is
the first ingredient. By impudence I 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 mûshteheds, 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