[In the following excerpt, Walker praises FitzGerald's Rubáiyát for capturing the essence of the original better than any other (more faithful) translation of it.]

There is no man in recent literature more difficult to ‘place’ than Edward FitzGerald. His position is unique. Professedly only a translator, he was in reality an original poet as well, ranking, in respect of power, after only a very few of his contemporaries. “An eccentric man of genius,” it was his whim or his peculiarity to mask and disguise his gifts; and only a few of his friends completely penetrated the veil which, consciously or unconsciously, he threw over himself. His diffidence partly concealed his genius even from himself. He was conscious of power to do as well as most; but whether he had power sufficient to do what was worth doing, of that he was uncertain. “I know,” he says in his Letters, “that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease: but I think unless a man can do better, he had best not do at all: I have not the strong inward call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of anything bigger than a mouse.” Far more than literary fame he valued the friendship of a few men of letters; and he enjoyed that of the greatest of the time. Both to Tennyson and to Thackeray he was “old Fitz” or “dear old Fitz”; and the latter, asked which of his friends he loved most, at once named him along with Brookfield¹. He was one of the few contemporaries for whom Carlyle felt nothing but kindliness. And one other friendship must be noticed because, although James Spedding cannot be ranked with these three, he was in FitzGerald's judgment the wisest man he had ever known.

Distrust of self, indifference to literary fame, and contentment with these friendships, all concurred to keep him silent. He had no “spur to prick the sides of his intent.” The retirement in which he lived tended to the same results. His seclusion became so deep that about Christmas, 1866, he wrote to Carlyle with compliments to Mrs Carlyle, who had been dead since the previous April. Nevertheless, this shy, retiring man, who looked upon himself as fit only to appreciate and to select the beauties of other men who were in danger of being forgotten, contrived to produce one of the most remarkable poems of the epoch, and by reason of that poem is more sure of immortality than any except a mere handful of his contemporaries.

Everything FitzGerald wrote has the touch of the born man of letters. He is excellent in prose as well as in verse. The letters to his friends flow on easily, delightfully, with bits of quiet humour and innumerable evidences of sincerity and kindliness of heart. The writer's whims and oddities, his waywardness, his strong and absolutely unconventional likes and dislikes, all combine with the most sterling qualities of head and heart to make those letters among the most charming in the English language. His prose dialogue, Euphranor (1851), is full of grace and of the beauty of pure, limpid English; and the passage descriptive of the boatrace is a model of faultless prose style. But it is as a translator of Calderon, of Aeschylus, and above all of Omar Khayyám, that he will live. In this department of translation the Victorian era has been as copious as it has been in other branches of literature. All sorts of men—scholars, statesmen, poets—have tried their hand at it. Limiting the view to the three classical authors, Homer, Virgil and Horace, who have most attracted translators, we have, among many others, versions by Lords Derby, Lytton and Bowen, Gladstone, William Morris, Theodore Martin, Conington, Worsley, Norgate, Butcher and Lang, Mackail. Prose and verse—blank, ballad metre, Spenserian stanza—have all been tried. But the law of selection among translations is almost as severe as it is in original poetry.

“A thousand poets pried at life,
And only one amid the strife
Rose to be Shakespeare.”

And the number of translations which are likely to retain a permanent position in literature might almost be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Three, upon which time has already set its seal, are the Authorised Version of the Bible, Chapman's Homer and Pope's Homer; two more, which probably will receive that seal, are achievements of the nineteenth century—Jowett's Plato and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám. All of these examples go to show that a translation, to be literary, must not be too literal. Of the five mentioned, Jowett's Plato has been severely criticised on the ground that it does not accurately render the Greek of Plato; and all the immense labour of the Revised Version was undergone in order to correct the inaccuracies of the Authorised Version. But no competent judge would assert that, as a piece of literature, the Revised Version is fit to take the place of its predecessor; and only prejudice can be blind to the fact that if Jowett has not rendered the words of Plato as accurately as some of his rivals, he has rendered his spirit far better. As to the other three translations, not one of them even makes a pretence of verbal accuracy. It would seem that each generation will insist on re-discovering for itself what precisely a great man has said in a foreign tongue, and will make its own literal translation; but it will accept from the past and permanently cherish that which gives in grand bold outline the form of the thing translated, or that which, like Pope's work, is “a very pretty poem,” though it may not be Homer.

To the latter category all FitzGerald's translations belong. The liberties he takes with his text are great; but by some subtle intellectual chemistry he ‘precipitates’ the soul of the original with a success no literal renderer ever has succeeded in rivalling. The best description of the character of his work is that of Professor C. E. Norton: “He is to be called ‘translator’ only in default of a better word, one which should express the poetic transfusion of a poetic spirit from one language to another, and the re-presentation of the ideas and images of the original in a form not altogether diverse from their own, but perfectly adapted to the new conditions of time, place, custom and habit of mind in which they reappear. … It is the work of a poet inspired by the work of a poet; not a copy, but a reproduction, not a translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration².”

The series of FitzGerald's translations began with his rendering of six dramas by Calderon (1853), the only book which ever bore his name on publication. He afterwards added The Mighty Magician and Such Stuff as Dreams are made on, “taken from” El Mágico Prodigioso and La Vida es Sueño. The original six dramas had been selected from among the less-known plays of Calderon; and apparently FitzGerald had been influenced in his choice by a fear that the liberties he took with the text would be resented if they were taken with the better-known plays. In the Advertisement he apologises for those liberties. He curtails and omits, and, where it is necessary, fills in by lines of his own the lacunae so created. The justification of the liberties lies in their success. FitzGerald succeeded in his aim of making Calderon readable and interesting to those who knew no Spanish; while to those who are familiar with the language his deviations from the original are harmless. The result consequently is a clear gain to the great Spanish dramatist, who gets a new audience which assuredly would not have been won by a literal translation.

Underterred by the far wider knowledge of his originals, FitzGerald took equally great liberties when, long afterwards, he came to translate, or, as he jestingly says, to make ‘per-versions’ from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles. In these cases he had far less justification. In Calderon, as he sensibly urges, there was much that was likely to alienate an English reader—improbabilities, bombast, stage properties, that were better removed. But such a plea is not valid with respect to the classical dramas. The classical tradition was familiar to English readers, and the classical form of drama was represented to them by great original works in their own language. Moreover, the plays he selected were among the best-known works of antiquity. These were strong reasons for leaving them as he found them and translating, if not literally, at least with every respect for the form and substance. But FitzGerald cuts and carves, omits and adds, and takes liberties as great or nearly as great as he takes with Calderon. He attempts to justify himself; but the best justification is one which he does not plead. This free way was the only way in which he could work: he is compelled in all cases to mix himself with his author; in all cases we find in his versions much of Edward FitzGerald; at no point can we be sure, without reference to the original, that we have Calderon, or Sophocles, or Omar.

FitzGerald never pretended to be a learned man. At Cambridge he was under some anxiety as to whether he would pass the examination for his poll degree. But he read in a leisurely fashion what interested himself, and in the long run acquired a wide knowledge of books in a considerable number of languages. And as he walked in the by-ways of life, so he was apt to turn aside from the beaten track in literature. About the time when he finished his Spanish dramas he began the study of Persian under the influence of his friend, E. B. Cowell, the Oriental scholar. At that time few either knew or cared for Persian literature, though Morier's Hajji Baba had done something to spread a knowledge of Persian life and manners. FitzGerald's acquaintance with Persian was never great; but even through the obscurity of a language half mastered he had the gift of detecting what suited his own genius; and he found it here. He tried his hand, still 'prentice at Persian, on Jámí's Salámán and Ábsál (1856); but he found his title to immortality in the great rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). No great book ever stole more silently into print. No one noticed it. Two hundred and fifty copies were printed, and of these FitzGerald presented some two hundred to Quaritch. He kept the rest, but all except two or three long remained hidden away in his cupboards: he did not present them because he thought most would be indifferent, and many would be shocked by the philosophy and theology of the astronomer-poet. The experience of the bookseller showed that the translator was not mistaken as to the indifference. Quaritch disposed of the copies in his hands at a penny each, because customers would pay no more; and at that price copies were bought the year after publication by Rossetti and Swinburne. Now, a small library has grown up round Omar, and the greater part of that library is unquestionably due to the inspiration of FitzGerald.

The point in which FitzGerald's Omar surpasses almost if not quite all translations of poetry is that in itself it gives the impression of a great original poem. In ordinary verse translations, the reader cannot forget the existence of the original, even if he has never read it, because the translator is manifestly not uttering his own thoughts. In FitzGerald, notwithstanding Eastern symbolism, we never without an effort remember Omar. There is none of the sense of loss which translation normally gives. Only the freedoms which FitzGerald allowed himself could have produced such a result; and these would have been unavailing had not the man who took them been himself a poet of no mean quality³.

A good deal of investigation has been made, and some complaint uttered, with regard to FitzGerald's treatment of his text. “Many quatrains,” he himself says, “are mashed together: and something lost, I doubt, of Omar's simplicity, which is such a virtue in him.” “It must be admitted,” says his editor, with a touch of solemnity, “that FitzGerald took great liberties with the original in his version of Omar Khayyám⁴.” Several later translations have appeared which purport to represent the true Omar more faithfully than FitzGerald. As to their fidelity, only Persian scholars have a right to pronounce an opinion; but it is plain to the English reader that the true Omar has small cause to be thankful for the more literal versions. He shines out a far greater poet in the free rendering of FitzGerald than in any of those which claim to be more faithful.

A poem built up, like Omar's, out of quatrains unconnected by any story and without specific theme might easily become a mere jumble of atoms. Each quatrain might have a beauty of its own, like a sonnet; and, the units being short, they would be apt to group themselves together like the quatrains in the sections of Tennyson's In Memoriam. But they need have no unity further than that. FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám has, however, a unity which goes far beyond this; and herein lies its subtlest charm. The parts are bound together as intimately as those of In Memoriam, though by a less palpable bond. It is more like the connexion between the sonnets of Shakespeare; and, as in Shakespeare's case, it has to be felt rather than expressed. This unity seems to have been in part the creation of FitzGerald, skilfully working upon and adapting the materials supplied to him by Omar. At any rate, the peculiarly modern tone, which does so much to bring home to the English reader the inner meaning of the poem, is largely imparted by FitzGerald. It is curious enough that that quatrain which was most obnoxious to popular views of religion, and which, among others, occasioned a certain awe and fear to some of FitzGerald's friends, and even to FitzGerald himself⁵, appears to be the outcome partly of interpolation, and partly, it is suggested, of the process of ‘mashing’:—

“Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
          For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!”

Professor Cowell says that there is no original for the line about the snake; and he adds that he has always supposed the last line to be FitzGerald's mistranslation of a quatrain in Nicolas's edition, which he gives. It may be so; but it would be strange to find in a mere mistranslation the origin of such a powerful and conspicuously modern line. The fact that FitzGerald never cared to alter it, though his attention was called to the supposed mistake, is suggestive of a very different explanation.

At the outset FitzGerald had to choose between two rival interpretations of the original quatrains. According to one view, all the sensuous imagery, the cup and the wine and the rest, were to be taken literally, and the poem was the utterance of an epicurean determined to make the best of an evanescent life which was all he knew and all he might ever enjoy:—

“Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
          One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.”

The rival theory was that which saw in the poem an allegory, in the poet a devout Súfi, in the wine an emblem of God. Fortunately, FitzGerald had no hesitation about his interpretation. He had been sceptical about the Súfism even of Hafiz: he was fully convinced that there was no Súfism at all about Omar, that the wine he sang was the wine which is forbidden to the orthodox Mahommedan, which maketh glad the heart of man, and which also steals away his reason. In this light accordingly the translation represents Omar. Its spirit and character cannot be better given than in FitzGerald's own words to his friend Cowell. “It is,” he says, “most ingeniously tesselated into a sort of Epicurean Eclogue in a Persian Garden⁶.”

Yet FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám is far from being a mere drinking song. Its hold upon the mind is due to the fact that it is the expression of a philosophy of life. The sum of that philosophy, it is true, is no more than “eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” But it is tinged with the “infinite regret for all that might have been.” It is full of the wistful melancholy of a nature greater than its destiny. Omar—FitzGerald's Omar—is best compared with Horace; and the qualities which have made Horace pre-eminently the poet of the man of the world give Omar too an eloquence of appeal to the heart. The Roman poet garlands his brow with flowers, quaffs the Falernian and the Massic wine, and bids defiance to care. And even so Omar:—

“Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,
          And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.”

But Horace has his other mood, in which he feels the need of Stoicism to buttress the Epicureanism which cannot wholly satisfy a thoughtful mind:—

                                                                      “O beate Sesti,
Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam.
          Jam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes
Et domus exilis Plutonia.”

Omar too has his more serious moods, and is perplexed with obstinate questionings:—

“There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
          Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was—and then no more of Thee and Me.
Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn;
          Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.”

He too has his melancholy regret at the passing of youth and beauty and pleasure:—

“Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
          The Nightingale that in the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows!”

There are strings in the lyre of Horace which are mute in that of Omar. In the latter, there is nothing to set beside the heroic odes at the opening of the third book of Horace. But on the other hand, there are notes in Omar which set our deepest thoughts vibrating as nothing in Horace does. Modern European civilisation is founded partly upon the East as well as upon the West. Horace is purely western; but in Omar as translated by FitzGerald the East is blended with the West. This is the reason why Omar might have proved “dangerous” among Parker's divines. They regarded with easy indifference the sceptical Epicureanism of Horace; for, though he is singularly modern in some respects, he is nevertheless essentially of the ancient world and belongs to another “dispensation.” But Omar, passed through the alembic of FitzGerald's mind, is a modern, and when he turns his sceptical intellect upon the problems of the universe—proximus ardet Ucalegon. The Rubáiyát are a “criticism of life,” not in some far-off country and among unfamiliar men, but here and now—the life all have to live, the destiny all have to look forward to, the bounds of thought against which all must beat in vain.

The single work upon which FitzGerald's fame will permanently rest consists of only 404 lines, and it professes to be no more than a translation. He therefore lacks volume, and he lacks originality, two very important wants. But the poem which the world owes to Edward FitzGerald and to Omar Khayyám jointly is one of the jewels of the nineteenth century. Coleridge, who has one of the safest reputations among the poets of recent times, owes it all to a mere handful of verses; but Mr Stopford Brooke said of him long ago that those verses ought to be bound in pure gold. And no binding less precious is worthy of the masterpiece of Edward FitzGerald.

Notes

1. Melville's Life of Thackeray, ii. 71.

2. Quoted in The Library of Literary Criticism, vii. 516.

3. As to FitzGerald's relation to his original, the most thorough investigator, Mr Heron-Allen, pronounces that “a translation pure and simple it is not, but a translation in the most artistic sense of the term it undoubtedly is.” The materials Mr Heron-Allen furnishes prove conclusively that FitzGerald almost always had some original, but that he handled it with the utmost freedom.

4. Letters.

5. “I told Parker,” he says before the publication, “he might find it rather dangerous among his Divines”; and he adds that “he thinks he will take it back and add some stanzas which he had kept out for fear of being too strong” (Letters, 469).

6. Letters.