"To God's beloved even the dark hour
Shines as the morning glory after rain.
Except by Allah's grace thou hast no power
Nor strength of arm such rapture to attain."
It was against this sort of poetry that Omar Kayyám revolted. He had not
any proof of such spiritual assurances, and he did not want that of
which he had no proof. He understood the material world around him, both
in its joy and sorrow, and emphatically he did not understand any other
world. He became a sort of Marlowe's Faust before his time, and
protested against the vague spirituality of the Súfis by an assertion of
what may be called a brilliant animalism. He loved beauty as much as
they did, and there is an oriental splendour about all his work, albeit
an earthly splendour. He became, accordingly, an audacious epicurean who
"failed to find any world but this," and set himself to make the best of
what he found. His was not an exorbitant ambition nor a fiery passion of
any kind. The bitterness and cynicism of it all remind us of the
inscription upon Sardanapalus' tomb--"Eat, drink, play, the rest is not
worth the snap of a finger." Drinking-cups have been discovered with
such inscriptions on them--"The future is utterly useless, make the most
of to-day,"--and Omar's poetry is full both of the cups and the
inscription.
The French interpreter, Nicolas, has indeed spiritualised his work. In
his view, when Omar raves about wine, he really means God; when he
speaks of love, he means the soul, and so on. As a matter of fact, no
man has ever written a plainer record of what he means, or has left his
meaning less ambiguous. When he says wine and love he means wine and
love--earthly things, which may or may not have their spiritual
counterparts, but which at least have given no sign of them to him. The
same persistent note is heard in all his verses. It is the grape, and
wine, and fair women, and books, that make up the sum total of life for
Omar as he knows it.
"Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing.
A Book of verses underneath the Bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show."
It would show a sad lack of humour if we were to take this too
seriously, and shake our heads over our eastern visitor. The cult of
Omar has been blamed for paganising English society. Really it came in
as a foreign curiosity, and, for the most part, that it has remained.
When we had a visit some years ago from that great oriental potentate Li
Hung Chang, we all put on our best clothes and went out to welcome him.
That was all right so long as we did not naturalise him, a course which
neither he nor we thought of our adopting. Had we naturalised him, it
would have been a different matter, and even Mayfair might have found
the fashions of China somewhat _risqué_. One remembers that introductory
note to Browning's _Ferishtah's Fancies_--"You, Sir, I entertain you for
one of my Hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you
will say they are Persian; but let them be changed."[1] The only safe
way of dealing with Omar Kayyám is to insist that his garments be _not_
changed. If you naturalise him he will become deadly in the West. The
East thrives upon fatalism, and there is a glamour about its most
materialistic writings, through which far spiritual things seem to
quiver as in a sun-haze. The atmosphere of the West is different, and
fatalism, adopted by its more practical mind, is sheer suicide.
Not that there is much likelihood of a nation with the history and the
literature of England behind it, ever becoming to any great extent
materialistic in the crude sense of Omar's poetry. The danger is
subtler. The motto, "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die," is
capable of spiritualisation, and if you spiritualise that motto it
becomes poisonous indeed. For there are various ways of eating and
drinking, and many who would not be tempted with the grosser appetites
may become pagans by devoting themselves to a rarer banquet, the feast
of reason and the flow of soul. It is possible in that way also to take
the present moment for Eternity, to live and think without horizons. Mr.
Peyton has said, "You see in some little house a picture of a cottage on
a moor, and you wonder why these people, living, perhaps, in the heart
of a great city, and in the most commonplace of houses, put such a
picture there. The reason for it is, that that cottage is for them the
signal of the immortal life of men, and the moor has infinite horizons."
That is the root of the matter after all--the soul and horizons. He who
says, "To-day shall suffice for me," whether it be in the high
intellectual plane or in the low earthly one, has fallen into the grip
of the world that passeth away; and that is a danger which Omar's advent
has certainly not lessened.
The second reason for care in this neighbourhood is that epicureanism is
only safe for those whose tastes lie in the direction of the simple
life. Montaigne has wisely said that it is pernicious to those who have
a natural tendency to vice. But vice is not a thing which any man loves
for its own sake, until his nature has suffered a long process of
degradation. It is simply the last result of a habit of luxurious
self-indulgence; and the temptation to the self-indulgent, the present
world in one form or another, comes upon everybody at times. There are
moods when all of us want to break away from the simple life, and feel
the splendour of the dazzling lights and the intoxication of the strange
scents of the world. To surrender to these has always been, and always
will be, deadly. It is the old temptation to cease to strive, which we
have already found to be the keynote of Goethe's _Faust_. Kingsley, in
one of the most remarkable passages of _Westward Ho!_ describes two of
Amyas Leigh's companions, settled down in a luscious paradise of earthly
delights, while their comrades endured the never-ending hardships of the
march. By the sight of that soft luxury Amyas was tempted of the devil.
But as he gazed, a black jaguar sprang from the cliff above, and
fastened on the fair form of the bride of one of the recreants. "O Lord
Jesus," said Amyas to himself, "Thou hast answered the devil for me!"
It does not, however, need the advent of the jaguar to introduce the
element of sheer tragedy into luxurious life. In his _Conspiracy of
Pontiac_, Parkman tells with rare eloquence the character of the Ojibwa
Indians: "In the calm days of summer, the Ojibwa fisherman pushes out
his birch canoe upon the great inland ocean of the North; ... or he
lifts his canoe from the sandy beach, and, while his camp-fire crackles
on the grass-plot, reclines beneath the trees, and smokes and laughs
away the sultry hours, in a lazy luxury of enjoyment.... But when winter
descends upon the North, sealing up the fountains ... now the hunter can
fight no more against the nipping cold and blinding sleet. Stiff and
stark, with haggard cheek and shrivelled lip, he lies among the
snow-drifts; till, with tooth and claw, the famished wild-cat
strives in vain to pierce the frigid marble of his limbs."
Meredith tells of a bird, playing with a magic ring, and all the time
trying to sing its song; but the ring falls and has to be picked up
again, and the song is broken. It is a good parable of life, that
impossible compromise between the magic ring and the simple song. Those
who choose the earth-magic of Omar's epicureanism will find that the
song of the spirit is broken, until they cease from the vain attempt at
singing and fall into an earth-bound silence.
Thus Omar Kayyám has brought us a rich treasure from the East, of
splendid diction and much delightful and fascinating sweetness of
poetry. All such gifts are an enrichment to the language and a
decoration to the thought of a people. When, however, they are taken
more seriously, they may certainly bring plague with them, as other
Eastern things have sometimes done.