'Omar Chiam, born at Nishapur, was one of the greatest Astronomers of his time; he shared the fame of Nassireddin and Ulugbeg. But Astronomy led him not to the knowledge, but to the denial, of the Supreme Being; and he embodied the result of his sceptical meditations in Quatrains, which have become famous under the title: Rubayat Omar Chiam. In his youth he was at school with Nisamol-Mulk, who became afterwards the Grand Vizier of Melekshah, and with Hassan Sabbah, the Founder of the Order of the Assassins. In the bloody prescriptions of his Order, Hassan practically sealed the doctrinal Unbelief which Omar Chiam proclaimed in his Verses; and as its Grand master, he sacrificed his old schoolfellow, the Grand Vizier, to his revenge, because he continued to follow the path of Right and Virtue. Omar Chiam, as the friend of Hassan Sabbah, is supposed to have helped him to found his diabolical Doctrine and his diabolical Society.'
So far Von Hammer. We commend his last statement to the serious consideration of the amiable Devotees of the new Red-letter Cult of our fashionable Omar Khayyám Societies and Clubs! The remarks on this subject in our Introduction apply, of course, only to Fitzgerald's Omar, of whom he takes a low view—very pithily summed up by himself in this phrase: 'the burden of Omar's Song—if not "Let us eat"—is assuredly—"Let us drink, for To-morrow we die!"' As regards the real Omar, whom Mr. Fitzgerald did not rightly understand, our view agrees generally with that of Von Hammer and M. Nicolas, but it need not be discussed here. The phenomenal success of Mr. Fitzgerald's Version in recent years has been largely due to the witchery and glamour of his Versification. His lasting achievement—and it is not a small one—is to have thoroughly popularised the Quatrain. We now hear it echoed everywhere, and in all sorts of connections, even the most trivial. It has recently been applied, with amusing ingenuity, to the Game of Golf, and even to the translation of Homer by Mr. Mackail. But the most deliciously ridiculous thing of the kind in the connection, yet seen, is Baron Corvo's Translation of M. Nicolas—'Risum teneatis, Amici?'
These effusions are, after all, only amusing manifestations of the Omar Khayyám Distemper. It has, however, unhappily a deeper significance. Mr. Fitzgerald's success has arisen mainly from his playing into the pessimistic and cynical mood of the time, and here lies its moral danger, especially to young, unguarded and unthinking, readers. Let them be assured that all this is bad thought, bad taste, bad effort. The Byronic mood is not only unhealthy, but is critically antiquated, and cannot be permanently recalled in any relation whatever. Better—much better—than this is the healthy, if somewhat rabid, physical progression of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, even to 'ride with the reckless seraphim on the brim of a red-maned star'! If they will not take it from us, let them listen to the powerful and earnest words of a lofty, original, spiritual thinker with which he corrected the kindred morbid tendencies of his day, and which are again singularly relevant here. Says Professor Ferrier in a noble and indignant outburst: 'These aberrations betoken a perverse and prurient play of the abnormal fancy—groping for the very holy of holies in kennels running with the most senseless and God-abandoned abominations. Our natural superstitions are bad enough; but thus to make a systematic business of fatuity, imposture, and profanity, and to imagine, all the while, that we are touching on the precincts of God's Spiritual Kingdom, is unspeakably shocking. The horror and disgrace of such proceedings were never even approached in the darkest days of heathendom and idolatry. Ye who make shattered nerves and depraved sensations the interpreters of truth—ye who inaugurate disease as the prophet of all wisdom, thus making sin, death, and the devil, the lords paramount of the creation—have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred? Oh, ye miserable mystics! when will ye know that all God's truths and all man's blessings lie in the broad health, in the trodden ways, and in the laughing sunshine of the universe, and that all intellect, all genius, is merely the power of seeing wonders in common things!'
With this impressive appeal we pause, for the present. The standpoint and genius of Jeláleddín could not possibly be better expressed than in Ferrier's closing words.
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THE VISION OF GOD
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KANT'S COSMOGONY