[Speech of John Hay, American Ambassador to Great Britain, at a dinner
of the Omar Khayyam Club, London, December 8, 1897. Henry Norman,
President of the Club, took the chair and in introducing Colonel Hay,
as the guest of the evening, spoke of him as soldier, diplomatist,
scholar, poet and Omarian.]
GENTLEMEN:--I cannot sufficiently thank you for the high and
unmerited honor you have done me to-night. I feel keenly that on such an
occasion, with such company, my place is below the salt, but as you
kindly invited me it was not in human nature for me to refuse. Although
in knowledge and comprehension of the two great poets whom you are met
to commemorate I am the least among them, there is no one who regards
them with greater admiration, or reads them with more enjoyment than
myself. I can never forget my emotions when I first saw Fitzgerald's
translation of the Quatrains. Keats, in his sublime ode on Chapman's
Homer, has described the sensation once for all:--
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken."
The exquisite beauty, the faultless form, the singular grace of those
amazing stanzas, were not more wonderful than the depth and breadth of
their profound philosophy, their knowledge of life, their dauntless
courage, their serene facing of the ultimate problems of life and of
death.
Of course the doubt did not spare me, which has assailed many as
ignorant as I was of the literature of the East, whether it was the poet
or his translator to whom was due this splendid result. Was it, in fact,
a reproduction of a new song, or a mystification of a great modern,
careless of fame and scornful of his time? Could it be possible that in
the eleventh century, so far away as Khorassan, so accomplished a man of
letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth, such insight, such
calm disillusion, such cheerful and jocund despair? Was this
Weltschmerz, which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in
1100? My doubt lasted only till I came upon a literal translation of the
Rubaiyat, and I saw that not the least remarkable quality of
Fitzgerald's was its fidelity to the original. In short, Omar was a
Fitzgerald before the latter, or Fitzgerald was a reincarnation of Omar.
It is not to the disadvantage of the later poet that he followed so
closely in the footsteps of the earlier. A man of extraordinary genius
had appeared in the world; had sung a song of incomparable beauty and
power in an environment no longer worthy of him, in a language of narrow
range; for many generations the song was virtually lost; then by a
miracle of creation, a poet, a twin-brother in the spirit to the first,
was born, who took up the forgotten poem and sung it anew with all its
original melody and force, and all the accumulated refinement of ages of
art. [Cheers.]
It seems to me idle to ask which was the greater master; each seems
greater than his work. The song is like an instrument of precious
workmanship and marvellous tone, which is worthless in common hands, but
when it falls, at long intervals, into the hands of the supreme master,
it yields a melody of transcendent enchantment to all that have ears to
hear. If we look at the sphere of influence of the two poets there is no
longer any comparison. Omar sang to a half barbarous province;
Fitzgerald to the world. Wherever the English speech is spoken or read,
the Rubaiyat have taken their place as a classic. There is not a
hill-post in India, nor a village in England, where there is not a
coterie to whom Omar Khayyam is a familiar friend and a bond of union.
In America he has an equal following, in many regions and conditions. In
the Eastern States his adepts form an esoteric sect; the beautiful
volume of drawings by Mr. Vedder is a centre of delight and suggestion
wherever it exists. In the cities of the West you will find the
Quatrains one of the most thoroughly read books in every Club Library.
I heard Omar quoted once in one of the most lovely and desolate spots of
the High Rockies. We had been camping on the Great Divide, our "roof of
the world," where in the space of a few feet you may see two springs,
one sending its water to the Polar solitudes, the other to the eternal
Carib summer. One morning at sunrise as we were breaking camp, I was
startled to hear one of our party, a frontiersman born, intoning these
words of sombre majesty:--
"'Tis but a tent where takes his one day's rest
A Sultan to the realm of death addressed.
The Sultan rises and the dark Ferrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."
I thought that sublime setting of primeval forest and pouring cañon was
worthy of the lines; I am sure the dewless, crystalline air never
vibrated to strains of more solemn music.
Certainly our poet can never be numbered among the great popular writers
of all times. He has told no story; he has never unpacked his heart in
public; he has never thrown the reins on the neck of the winged horse,
and let his imagination carry him where it listed. "Ah! the crowd must
have emphatic warrant." Its suffrages are not for the cool, collected
observer, whose eye no glitter can ever dazzle, no mist suffuse. The
many cannot but resent that air of lofty intelligence, that pale and
subtle smile. But he will hold a place forever among that limited number
who, like Lucretius and Epicurus--without rage or defiance, even without
unbecoming mirth--look deep into the tangled mysteries of things; refuse
credence to the absurd, and allegiance to the arrogant authority,
sufficiently conscious of fallibility to be tolerant of all opinions;
with a faith too wide for doctrine and a benevolence untrammelled by
creed, too wise to be wholly poets, and yet too surely poets to be
implacably wise. [Loud cheers.]