THE INFLUENCE OF OMAR KHAYYAM.

MR. BERNARD HOLLAND, in the interesting and thoughtful paper on " The Popularity of Omar Khayyam" which he has contributed to the June number of the National Review, mistakes, we think, a little the meaning of the English appreciation of Fitzgerald's version of the Persian Horace. That this appreciation is spreading with singular rapidity over an ever-widening area is no doubt true—indeed, is proved by. the extraordinary demand for new editions both in England and America —and though we should hesitate to predict for the quatrains a life "as long as that of the Psalms of David," the appreciation will probably be durable. It does not, however, we imagine, proceed from sympathy with °Mar Khayyam's counsel, which is to make life happy with wine, women, and song, but from admiration of his statement, . at once so melodious and so neat, of the great underlying doubt which has begun once' again to torment our Western world, the doubt whether we are not all the victims of 'an illusion, absolutely powerless to control our fate, mere chess-pieces which He—be the He personal or impersonal--rphlys at will and then lays aside. That this doubt exists on every side of us, harassing multitudes, and acting as a narcotic for a few, is as patent to us as to Mr. Bernard HollanC we only differ with him as to its general effect. He thinks that effect is epicureanism ; we think it is an unrest which, perpetually seeking some new solution " of the great problem, rejects epicureanism provisionally with, a certain contempt as a mere doctrine of selfishness. -There are, it 'is true, littdrateurs among us whose worship of the beautiful tends to an ideal

not unlike Omar Khayyam's, but they are only a small tribe with a, atrictly_limited influence. The tendency of the great majority is rather to ask whether asceticism is not the true law ; whether all that is pleasant in life ought not to be sacri- ficed for the benefit of others ; whether, in fact, altruism is not. the one true religion. Some preach it as the forgotten . side of Christianity, others deduce it from pure reason, while

to others again—very_ numerous—it furnishes an intellectual . • luxury.;. but all alike are pressing this doctrine as. the one which, among the many doctrines now being proclaimed, must certainly be true. It is from this that the .new pity for the poor arises, from this the new impatience of -the 'social system, from this the new tendency towards " mercy " for everybody except those who break sanitary laws, for criminals, traitors, and all who die anywhere ex- cept in their own beds. There never was a time when the . disposition to make conduct the sole test of truth was so com- pletely in the ascendant. The fact that mathematics would

remain true even if all mathematicians were bad men is every day implicitly denied, while it is explicitly asserted that if conduct is good, the character of the individual's faith or scepticism, from which nevertheless conduct must ulti- mately spring, matters nothing at all. There is terrible unrest as to what the true faith is, but there is also . an eager searching to find it, leading sometimes, as all eager searches do, to the most astonishing displays of credulity. That mood is not Omar Khayyam's at all. . He is not a searcher, for his mind is made up. He cares nothing about conduct so long as life • is pleasant. To hini altruism would have appeared the silliest of impulses. Whether he was a pure fatalist, or whether he believed with other Mussulmans in the rule of a Sultan in the sky, unbound either by his own nature, or the claims of his creatures, or ihOse laws, such as the laws of numbers, or the law that good and evil are distinct, or the law that past and present cannot be the same, which surely to finite intelligence seem beyond the range of "omnipotent" power, is still to our mind matter of speculation. It is of the independence of God, his . independence of man, that he preaches, rather than the idea .. which Sir Alfred Lyall has expressed in lines as pellucid as the. Persian's :—

" Though the world repent of its cruel youth, And in age grow soft, and its hard law bend,

• Ye may spare or slaughter ; by rage or ruth All forms speed on to the far still end ;

. For the gods who have mercy,, who save or bless,

Are the visions of man in his hopelessness."

What Omar Khayyam was certain of was that man is an automaton, guided by another force than hiniself, that con-

.. duct makes no difference in his fate, and that, consequently, - the only truth worth knowing is that sugar is sweet. It seems to us that the whole current of Anglo-Saxon thought to-day' is hostile to this view, that there never was such sympathy for self-sacrifice, that even in enterprises, such as the building up of empire, there never was more readiness for a life of exertion, of bodily risk, of contempt for mere pleasure, such as to Omar Khayyam would have appeared ridiculous. There are doubters among us by the thousand— though litterateurs tend to exaggerate their number—and there may be, nay, there are, a few defiant atheists, but the dominant tendency of neither atheists nor doubters is towards epicureanism. The real devotees of luxury among us are neither religious nor irreligious, but only earthy men, many of whom confess' to an inner doubt whether they are not too earthy by an -effort to compensate for their luxury by large charitable gifts. It is the increase of wealth and idleness, rather than the shaking of beliefs, which produces among us so -many sensualists of the school of Omar Khayyam. We have poets-among us who are disciples of Baudelaire, but it is

to the "Recessional," and not to their work, that the heart of the People turns. Omar Khayyam's exquisite verses are admired, but to compare their influence with that of the Psalms would be positively absurd.

With another thought expressed by Mr. Bernard Holland. a thought which requires and deserves much more elaboration, we are more perfectly in sympathy. Indeed, we have been preaching it ourselves for more than a generation. With the enprfaous development of intercommunication, it is certain that the ideas of Asia must flow into Europe, and will have, for good and for evil. iagalculable influence. It would be so even if the ideas had in them but little of attractive quality ; but the Englishman, who in the pride of his science despises them, does not understand their potency or the great facts of religious history. Europe has invented printing, gunpowder, the electric telegraph, and chloroform, but she has never invented a successful religion. Every creed now accepted on earth, except fetishism, is Asiatic in origin. Buddha, Confucius, Munoo, Christ so far as he was human, St. Paul, Mahommed, were all Asiatics ; and it is by their ideas that the religious thought of the world is at this day domi- nated. There may yet be new "prophets" in Asia, and if there are not, the ideas which have fermented there for

ages are as sure to be imported as saltpetre, tea, or teak wood, —indeed, one of them, the notion that the subjection of self of itself, and without reference to the object of the suppres-

sion, brings man closer to the Divine, is already. here, and will produce strange consequences. There are others, such as the belief that man is indeed immortal, but that the spirits of men are, as it were, " pooled " in the future life, reabsorbed in the governing spirit for their happiness and its renewal, which our grandchildren will have to discuss as living and effective heresies. Mr. Bernard Holland thinks, we imagine, that all Asiatic ideas will, like those of Omar Khayyam, pro- duce mischief ; but we are not so sure. This much is certain, that they will not produce irreligion. Throughout Asia out- side China—indeed, we are partly wrong in making that ex- ception—the universal belief is that religion is the one important thing for man, the one by which he ought to live and for which he is bound to die. The Asiatic may be the most corrupt of mankind, but he never dreains of denying that he ought to live according to his faith. The Miissulman is constantly a base voluptuary, but let him see that the Faith is at stake; and he rushes on death as freely as the bravest Englishman or German,—ask, if you doubt, those who fought at Omdurman. The Asiatic has, too, succeeded on a point where we have partly failed,—he has driven his religious ideas into the minds of common men, till in India, in Turkey, in Egypt, peasants who labour twelve hours a day for bare subsistence and seem as ignorant as the fishes they eat or the cattle they drive understand their creed quite fully, and are as sensitive to any interference with it as the most educated professors. It does not even occur to the Hindoo, the Mahommedan, or the Buddhist that any subject can be as important to him as his life after death, or that any one can doubt that in man there is something spiritual and apart from both flesh and mind. The influence of the ideas which have produced this result may be bad or good—some of them will be utterly bad, for example one root idea of Asia that there can be different laws of morality for different persons—but they never can tend towards such a secularisation of the ideal as Mr. Bernard Holland apprehends from the influence of Omar Khayyam. He was a Persian of Persians, and Persians are the Parisians of Asia, but what he taught is not a great Asiatic idea, but revolt against the idea which dominates Asia. He is the philosopher of revolt as well as of piggish- ness, and admits the existence of the supernatural and his own secret longing even while he blasphemes :-

" Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev'n with Paradise devised the Snake ;

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!

Would but the Desert of the Fountain yield One glimpse—if dimly, yet indeed, reveal'd, To which the fainting Traveller might spring, As springs the trampled herbage of the field !

Would but some winged Angel ere too late Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate, And make the stern Recorder otherwise Enregister, or quite obliterate 1 "

We have more fear of the influence of one successful adven- turer like Mr. Rhodes than of a dozen Omar Khayyams.