[In the following essay, Yohannan suggests that the immense fin de siècle popularity of the Rubáiyát was due to its existential angst, which corresponded with the diminishment of religious faith in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and also due to its accessibility, as a brief and “middlebrow” poem.]

A translated Persian poem, which was Edward FitzGerald's consolation against a melancholy life, became—even in his own lifetime—a literary fad in both England and America. After FitzGerald's death in 1883, it was to become a cult and indeed to produce its own anticult.

Some critics remained content to explain the extraordinary success of the poem in purely aesthetic terms: John Ruskin, for instance, thought it “glorious” to read;¹ Holbrook Jackson saw it as part of the maturing “Renaissance” of English poetry that had begun with Blake and passed through Keats to arrive at Dante Gabriel Rossetti;² Theodore Watts-Dutton judged it generically—with the entire fin de siècle preoccupation with Persian poetry, in Justin McCarthy, John Payne, and Richard LeGallienne—as merely another species of Romanticism.³

But such a view could hardly explain the excessively strong feelings the Rubaiyat engendered in both proponents and opponents—feelings which lay at the levels of psychological bent or philosophical bias considerably below the level of a purely aesthetic need. More to the point was the explanation of Elizabeth Alden Curtis, herself a translator of the Rubaiyat. For her, Omar was the “stern materialist from mystic skies,” who, by combining Horatian hedonism with Old Testament fatalistic pessimism, had produced a “fundamental human cry [that] had no nationality.”⁴ For Richard LeGallienne, too, there was more to the poem than its poetry, which he had successfully adapted as he had that of Hafiz. To be sure, the Khayyam-FitzGerald Rubaiyat was “one of the finest pieces of literary art in the English language”; but, he added, “this small handful of strangely scented rose-leaves have been dynamic as a disintegrating spiritual force in England and America during the last 25 years.”⁵ A few years later, LeGallienne wrote Omar Repentant, a book of original verses in the rubaiyat stanza in which he advised the young:

Boy, do you know that since the world began
No man hath writ a deadlier book for man?
The grape!—the vine! oh what an evil wit
Have words to gild the blackness of the pit!
Said so, how fair it sounds—The Vine! The Grape!
Oh call it Whiskey—and be done with it!(6)

Whether the Rubaiyat was a “disintegrating” force would depend on one's spiritual view—whether of religion or temperance: but at any rate, the poem seemed to have much more relevance to the age than most native contemporary poetry. A. C. Benson, looking back at that time, later wrote:

It heightened the charm to readers, living in a season of outworn faith and restless dissatisfaction, to find that eight hundred years before, far across the centuries, in the dim and remote East, the same problem had pressed sadly on the mind of an ancient and accomplished sage.⁷

The question, of course, was: Precisely what in the contemporary intellectual climate corresponded to precisely what in the philosophical quatrains of Omar Khayyam? Alfred North Whitehead has somewhere spoken of the inability of the nineteenth century to make up its mind as to what sort of cosmogony it wished to believe in. This is certainly demonstrated in the variety of coteries that either adored or despised the Rubaiyat. It was the shibboleth for such various and often conflicting dogmas as theosophy, aestheticism, eroticism, determinism, socialism, materialism, and numerous types of occultism. It would not be unfair to classify some of these in the lunatic fringe.

In light of the subsequent furor over the profound implications of the poem, there is a charming innocence in James Thomson's interest in it as an excuse for a good smoke. As early as 1877 Thomson, who wrote under the initials “B. V.” (for Bysshe Vanolis, an allusion to his two favorite poets, Shelley and Novalis), contributed an article on Omar Khayyam to a trade journal called Tobacco Plant. Despite his admiration for the poet's intellectual fearlessness and daring love of wine, it is obvious that what chiefly interested Thomson was tobacco. Believing that “in default of the weed, [Omar] celebrates the rose,” Thomson imagined “What a smoker our bard would have made had the weed flourished in the Orient in his time! Hear him address his Beloved in the very mood of the narghile [water-pipe]. …” There followed the familiar quatrain beginning “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough.”⁸ (Twenty years later, Edwin Arlington Robinson, discovering the same poem, was to have the same fantasy!)

More serious challenges in the poem were sensed by translators, editors, reviewers, and readers—both in England and America—to whom it increasingly appealed in the last years of the nineteenth century. John Leslie Garner of Milwaukee, who made his own translation of the Rubaiyat in 1888, refused (as had FitzGerald) to accept the Sufistic or mystical interpretation of Omar Khayyam. For him, Omar was a pantheist-fatalist (and a precursor of Schopenhauer), whom the Sufis had taken over after his death, as Huxley had said theologicans craftily are apt to do.⁹ That was one view.

Talcott Williams, editing FitzGerald's translation ten years later, was impressed with the power of race rather than religion. Omar's Aryanism as a Persian was more important than the Semitic Islamic faith which he had to accept:

Watered by his desires, rather than his convictions, the dry branch of semitic monotheism puts forth the white flower of mysticism and sets in that strange fruitage which is perpetually reminding us that under all skies and for both sexes religious fervor and sensuous passion may be legal tender for the same emotions.¹⁰

If pantheism and fatalism can be bedfellows, why not sex and religion? It was perhaps good Pre-Raphaelite doctrine.

A dominant note in the interpretation of the Rubaiyat was struck by a Harvard undergraduate who, along with George Santayana, edited the Harvard Monthly. A. B. Houghton announced with surprising urbanity in the mid-eighties that the philosophy of despair Omar passed on to the present generation was equally a refutation of those who believed in a “far off divine event towards which the whole creation moves” and of those who would rebel against “Him.” The “He” was not God, but the force of the universe—a pantheistic-materialist force. If this did not make perfect sense, there was little ambiguity about the decadent accents that rang out of the following:

Omar's thought is thoroughly in accord with the essence of the thought of this century. We are no longer a younger race … our faces are no longer turned towards the sunrise: they look towards the sunset … today we are given over to introspection. We have lost our healthy out of door life … our religious faith is disappearing.¹¹

At a later date, confessing his love of the Rubaiyat, the Hon. John Hay, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, reechoed these sentiments. He marveled at the “jocund despair” which the twelfth century Persian had felt in the face of life's bafflements. “Was this Weltschmerz,” he asked, “which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in 1100?”¹²

The initial impact of the Rubaiyat had been as a statement of religious skepticism. It appeared, after all, in 1859, the same year as The Origin of Species, a book which Bernard Shaw said abolished not only God but also the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican faith. There had been a natural hesitancy on the part of the translator in offering it to a mid-Victorian public, especially as he had had the benefit of a pious clergyman's help in discovering it. After the death of FitzGerald in 1883, however, the poem spoke to a generation who were the products, not of the milieu which had produced the translation, but of the milieu which the translation had helped produce. Its advocates were a bit more aggressive. To these younger devotees (whom perhaps Shaw had in mind when he spoke of “Anacreontic writers [who] put vine leaves in their hair and drank or drugged themselves to death”),¹³ the epicureanism of Omar Khayyam was of equal importance with his skepticism. Moreover, the translator was of equal importance with the Persian poet. Out of these two ingredients came the Omar Khayyam Clubs of England and America.

Veneration of the translator tended to surpass worship of the poet. FitzGerald came to be thought of as the author of a poem called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rather than as the man who rendered into English Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. Theodore Watts-Dunton recalls his excitement in the presence of a man who, as a child of eight, had actually talked with FitzGerald and “been patted on the head by him.” In an obituary notice of F. H. Groome, he wrote:

We, a handful of Omarians of those ante-deluvian days, were perhaps all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with the wonderful old “Fitz.”¹⁴

One of these early “Omarians” actually depicted himself and his group in the words that Shaw had applied to the unidentified “Anacreontic writers.” Sharply distinguishing between two possible interpretations of the Rubaiyat, Justin H. McCarthy said that “to some, the head of Omar is circled with the halo of mysticism, while others see only the vine-leaves in his hair.”¹⁵ The phrase was repeated in a Blackwoods article that described members of the Omar Khayyam Club with vine leaves in their hair drinking cheap Chianti wine and fixing a keen eye on posterity.¹⁶

The British, or parent, organization of the Omar Khayyam Club came into being in 1892 with Edmund Gosse as President. He was playfully referred to by the members as “Firdausi,” in part no doubt in allusion to that poet's preeminence among Persian authors, but probably also because Gosse had written a lengthy poem about Firdausi's legendary exile at the hands of the conqueror Mahmound.¹⁷ There are differing accounts of the number of founding members, who included McCarthy, Clement Shorter (a later president), and Edward Clodd, whose Memories in 1916 embalmed some of the Club's earlier activities.¹⁸ It was apparently agreed that membership should never exceed fifty-nine, the year of the appearance of FitzGerald's first edition. The Club's purpose was primarily social, not literary. Its quarterly dinners began at Pagani's Restaurant, then moved to the Florence, and on to Frascati's; still later, when omnibuses showed up on Oxford Street, they returned to Pagani's. The official table cloth bore the insignia of a flagon, the sun, and a total of fifty-nine apples; five apples, denoting the original founders, were always to the right of the cloth.

In 1895, Meredith, Hardy, and Gissing attended one of the dinners; at another were J. M. Barrie, Andrew Lang, Augustine Birrell, and, from the United States, Charles Scribner. An occasional visitor was Henry James. It was humorously reported that the Shah of Persia, during one of his trips to England, was asked to dine at the Omar Khayyam Club, to which he supposedly replied, “Who is Omar Khayyam?”¹⁹ At the March 25, 1897, dinner, Austin Dobson read some verses challenging the supremacy of Horace as the poet of good fellows:

Persicos odi—Horace said
And therefore is no longer read.
Since when, for every youth or miss
That knows Quis multa gracilis,
There are a hundred who can tell
What Omar thought of Heaven or Hell …
In short, without a break can quote
Most of what Omar ever wrote.(20)

In the following year, without prejudice to Horace, a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, rendered FitzGerald's quatrains into Latin verse “as a breviary for those who make a sort of cult of the Rubaiyat.”²¹ There is an amusing account of the cultists in a satirical skit of the time in which a bright child asks his elder some pointed questions.

True, there were numerous new translations of the Rubaiyat, and some by Club members. But it was common knowledge that “the Club recognizes one and only one translation of Omar Khayyam—that it is concerned with FitzGerald's poem and none other.”²³ The figure of the Squire of Sussex was easier for Englishmen to identify with than that of the distant poet of Nishapur.

When John Hay addressed the English Club in 1897, he was able to report that a similar movement was afoot in America, where “in the Eastern states [Omar's] adepts have formed an esoteric sect. …” (He had himself heard a Western frontiersman reciting “'Tis but a tent,” etc.)²⁴ In fact, the American Club was formed in 1900, on the ninety-first anniversary of FitzGerald's birth. No doubt the idea had been given encouragement by Moncure Daniel Conway's detailed account, in the Nation, of the activities of the English organization—how the British had tried in vain to persuade the Persian Shah to repair the tomb of Omar Khayyam in Nishapur, how the artist William Simpson, visiting the site with the Afghan Boundary Commission in 1884, had brought back seeds of the roses growing at the old tomb, and how he had had them grafted to the roses in Kew Garden.²⁵

Thus, what started as a barely audible voice of dissent in 1859 had become by the end of the century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, an articulate caucus of dissidence that threatened to win majority support. Inevitably, the opposition was galvanized into action. Scholars, amateur philosophers, and poetasters took part in an interesting game. The new culture hero, Omar-Fitz, was made to confront some worthy antagonist, who might be a rival philosophy or a large figure in human thought—ancient or modern—designed to serve as foil. But since even the opposition seemed to have a soft spot in its heart for the Rubaiyat, the foil often turned out to be a fellow.

An anonymous reply to Khayyam came out in 1899 as An Old Philosophy. The rebuttal to the Islamic hedonism of the Rubaiyat took the form of one-hundred one quatrains inspired by a sort of liberal Christianity much in the spirit of Tennyson. Altering the typography of FitzGerald's quatrains so that the third line, instead of being indented, was extended, the author rather weakly argued:

                    The Moslem still expects an earthly bliss,
                    The Huri's winning smile, the martyr's kiss,
And with fair Ganymedes dispensing wine,
                    No future lot, thinks he, can vie with this.
                    There shall no Huris be to please the eye;
                    No happy hunting grounds shall round thee lie.
Of sensual pleasures there shall be no need:
                    Shall not the Great Eternal be thee nigh?(26)

It was not likely that such doggeral would persuade many to shed the vine leaves from their hair.

There was more challenge in a confrontation arranged by Paul Elmer More, the American humanist. For More, the chief intellectual struggle of the time was symbolized in the persons of its two most popular poets: Omar Khayyam and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling advocated the energetic, forward-looking life (perhaps the out-of-door life earlier mentioned by A. B. Houghton?); Omar stood for defeatism and ennui. More observed that for many people, the “virility and out-of-door freedom” of Kipling was a much-needed tonic to the fin de siècle mood and entertained the thought that the rising star of Kipling's imperialism—which extolled the “restless energy impelling the race, by fair means or foul, to overrun and subdue the globe”—might signal the decline of the dilletantish and effeminate Omar worship.²⁷

For W. H. Mallock, the polarity was between Christianity and the philosophy of Omar Khayyam and Lucretius.

In Christ, originated that great spiritual and intellectual movement which succeeded, for so many ages, in rendering the Lucretian philosophy at once useless and incredible to the progressive races of mankind; but now, after a lapse of nearly two thousand years, the conditions which evoked that philosophy are once more reappearing.

Those conditions were not indicated exactly, but obviously the new representative of the Lucretian view was Omar Khayyam in his contemporary vogue. Not that he and Lucretius were of identical mind, but a strong enough resemblance existed to warrant offering the ideas of the classical poet in the meter of the Rubaiyat. And so the famous opening passage of De Rerum Natura comes hobbling out thus:

When storms blow loud, 'tis sweet to watch at ease,
From shore, the sailor labouring with the seas:
          Because the sense, not that such pains are his,
But that they are not ours, must always please.(28)

Mallock found Lucretius more relevant to the science of the time than Omar Khayyam; and, though he did not believe that Christianity was still the superstition Lucretius attacked, he urged a second look at the great materialist.

In the opinion of John F. Genung, a rhetorician who wrote and lectured on religious subjects, the proper pendant for the Rubaiyat was Ecclesiastes. He did not view Omar with particular alarm. Indeed, he found in him no pessimism, but rather a gaiety that boded well for the future.²⁹ People were less morose (in 1904) than in the time of Clough and Arnold. Genung could cite no less an activist than Robert L. Stevenson to the effect that

… old Omar Khayyam is living anew, not so much from his agnosticism and his disposition to say audacious things to God, as from his truce to theological subtleties and his hearty acceptance of the present life and its good cheer.³⁰

But for all that, Ecclesiastes offered the better alternative.

We think again of the Epicurean man, the loafer of Omar Khayyam's rose-garden, and our Koheleth ideal looks no more paltry but strong and comely. There is not enough of Omar's man to build a structure of grace and truth upon.³¹

It has been asserted that Robert Browning wrote “Rabbi ben Ezra” as a retort to the “fool's philosophy” of the Rubaiyat. It remained for Frederick L. Sargent to stage the debate formally. With a fairness that betrays a real ambivalence in the author's thinking, Sargent matches the seductive pessimism of Omar with the bracing optimism of the Rabbi, giving the polemical advantage to the latter, but gladly permitting the former to continue with his pagan revels—to the satisfaction, no doubt, of an equally ambivalent reader.³²

So potent was the appeal of the lovely quatrains that some were determined to save Omar Khayyam from the perdition to which his blasphemous ideas assigned him. A way out was provided in the legend that the poet had indeed made a deathbed retraction. Thus there appeared in 1907 a so-called Testament of Omar Khayyam, whose author, Louis C. Alexander, announced in his prefatory “Note”:

To those who conceive of Omar Khayyam only as a sot and Agnostic—if not the despairing Materialist and Infidel—of the Rubaiyat, these poems will come as a surprise and a revelation … For Omar Khayyam was a man of lofty yet humble piety … and the majestic figure of the real Omar Khayyam—the Astronomer, Poet, Philosopher, and Saint—stands revealed.

The Wassiyat, or Testament, consisted of eighty-five quatrains in a Job-like dialogue with God, who justifies himself in rather Browningesque terms:

For God is the end for which the universe
Travails by Knowledge and Love and Pain entwined;
And Joy is its music, and Death, ah! no curse—
For the enlarged Soul, through it, itself doth find.

The book added as a bonus some odes, presumably composed by the disciples of Omar Khayyam, lauding his piety in stanzas reminiscent of Arnold's “Empedocles.” One disciple points out that the Master did teach “in sense/ of metaphor and parable” and “feign discontent and doubt,” and that one day “lands thou never knewest will proclaim thy fame.” Another disciple pleads:

Hast thou a word, Oh, Master,
For thy faithful band,
Who knew thy face unmasked, thy tears beneath thy laugh,
And the devotion
Of thy soul's most secret strand,
And that the wine ne'er flowed thou didst pretend to quaff.(33)

This was, of course, a return to the persistent idea that the sensuous imagery of the Rubaiyat is but a cloak to cover the mystical Sufi thought beneath.

H. Justus Williams would not allow this backsliding from the old paganism. His sixty-three quatrains purported to be The Last Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. These, he maintained, gave proof that the story of the poet's repentance had been exaggerated. Omar was never converted; he only temporarily changed his ways, as is apparent from the following:

At last! At last! freed from the cowl and hood,
I stand again where once before I stood,
And view the world unblinded by a Creed
That caught me in a short repentant mood.(34)

Obviously, the best, the most effective opposition to Omar Khayyam would have to come from one of his compatriots—a sort of homeopathic treatment for what so many called the sickly Rubaiyat malaise. The Reverend William Hastie, a Scottish student of Hegelian idealism, thought he had the cure:

We confess … that we have hated this new-patched Omar Khayyam of Mr. FitzGerald, and have at times been tempted to scorn the miserable self-deluded, unhealthy fanatics of his Cult. But when we have looked again into the shining face and glad eyes of Jelalleddin, “the glory of religion,” our hate has passed into pity and our scorn into compassion.

These words were part of an obiter dictum on Omar that Hastie permitted himself in a book of adaptations (from the German of Rückert) of some mystical poems of Jelalleddin Rumi.³⁵ If Christian orthodoxy could not fight off the virus of the Rubaiyat, perhaps Islamic mysticism, in the work of a great Sufi poet of Persia, could.

The leading Persian scholar in England, Edward G. Browne, showed sympathy for the spiritual legacy Persia had passed to the world. In Religious Systems of the World: A Contribution to the Study of Comparative Religion, he dealt specifically with Sufism and with Bahaism, a new offshoot of Islam, both of which he regarded as pantheistic systems of thought occupying a middle ground between religion and philosophy, and therefore as applicable in England as in Persia.³⁶ Another scholar in this area, Claud Field, prophesied that the Bahais would improve the quality of both Islam and Christianity. In an article for The Expository Times (an Edinburgh religious publication emphasizing the higher criticism), he asserted that, with so much mysticism in the air of late, it behoved Englishmen to know the Master Mystic, Jelalleddin Rumi. It was a pity, he thought, that Rumi did not have his FitzGerald.³⁷

That was the difficulty. FitzGerald himself, in deference to the Reverend E. B. Cowell, Omar's true begetter, had expressed the wish that Cowell would translate Rumi, who would constitute a more potent polar force to Omar than did Jami, whose Salaman and Absal was FitzGerald's first translation from Persian (published anonymously, 1856). But Cowell never brought himself to deal any more fully with Rumi than with the other Persian poets. When Rumi found a soulmate in the superb Arabic and Persian scholar Reynold A. Nicholson, things looked promising for the anti-Omarians.

Nicholson had begun as a student of classical literature, and some of his early attempts at rendering the Persian poets show that orientation. In a poem on “The Rose and Her Lovers,” he was clearly dealing with the familiar Persian theme of the gul and the bulbul, the rose and the nightingale, but he chose to call the bird Philomel. Very much in the spirit of the late nineteenth century, he allowed himself a parody of the Rubaiyat called “Omar's Philosophy of Golf.” He experimented with the Persian verse form, the ghazal or lyrical ode, and made the usual translations from Hafiz and the other classical poets of Persia. In an original poem addressed to Hafiz, he both imitated and paraphrased the poet:

Nightingale of old Iran,
Haunt'st thou yet Ruknabad's vale,
Dumbly marveling that man
Now unqueens the nightingale?
Zuhra, mid the starry quire,
Hangs her head and breaks her lyre.(38)

But he came into his element with the translation of some of Rumi's passionate but mystical love poems. Convinced that Rumi was “the greatest mystical poet of any age,” he devoted the remainder of his life as scholar and popularizer to the translation, publication, and elucidation of that poet's work.

His absorption with Sufism led him to the belief that many of the popular stories of Islamic literature—the romance of Yusuf and Zulaikha (Joseph and Potiphar's Wife), the legend of the moth and the flame, of the gul and the bulbul, were but “shadow pictures of the soul's passionate longing to be reunited with God.”³⁹ But he would not join those who wished to make Omar a Sufi. He contented himself with asking “What should they know of Persia who only Omar know?” It was his belief that

to find the soul of Persia, we must say good-bye to her skeptics and hedonists—charming people, though sometimes (like the world) they are too much with us—and join the company of mystics led by three great poets, Jelalledin Rumi, Sadi and Hafiz, who represent the deepest aspirations of the race.⁴⁰

Not all students of religion and mysticism in England, however, were prepared to accept the aid of Jelalleddin Rumi and the Sufis. The gloomy Dean Inge, a serious student of the subject, in a course of lectures in the late nineteenth century, spoke with some acerbity of the loose (as he conceived it) mysticism of the Persian Sufis. He held that, in regarding God as both immanent and transcendent, they denied the existence of evil and threw the door open to immorality, lack of purpose, and pessimism. The tendency to self-deification he found in both the Sufis and Ralph Waldo Emerson; where a predecessor of his had accepted both, he now rejected both. “The Sufis or Mohammedan mystics,” he said, “use erotic language freely, and appear, like true Asiatics, to have attempted to give a sacramental or symbolical character to the indulgence of their passions.”⁴¹ At the High Church level, at any rate, ecumenism was a dubious possibility.

The sum of it was that, whether cultivated as flower or attacked as weed, the Rubaiyat continued to thrive. Especially after 1909, when the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of FitzGerald was celebrated (and the copyright lifted), editions multiplied. Even Nicholson, in that memorable year, edited a reissue of FitzGerald's translation.⁴² The explanation of the extraordinary appeal of the poem to readers of all sorts may be found in an area bounded on one side by high art, on another by pop culture, but on the other two sides trailing off into a no-man's-land of unsolved anthropological problems. Andrew Lang found the diagnosis for “Omaritis” (in America, at least) in a condition of middle-browism. “Omar is the business man's poet. … To quote Omar is to be cultured.” There was so little of him, you could take him everywhere and read him hurriedly as you rushed about your business. The Americans were throwing out Browning and Rossetti and reading Omar along with David Harum and The Virginian.⁴³ For the Reverend John Kelman, Omar was not an influenza, but a kind of plague. Calling for a quarantine, he warned that “if you naturalize him, he will become deadly in the West.” It would be wiser, he advised, to take the poem as simply a fascinating example of exotic Eastern fatalism.⁴⁴ But by 1912 it was probably already too late.

Even more sober commentators, attempting to answer the question, tended to leave it in ambiguity or to raise new and more difficult questions. It helped little for Arnold Smith to tell readers of his book on Victorian poetry in 1907 that the Rubaiyat appealed to doubters, atheists, and Christians alike, and that it counseled Epicurean asceticism.⁴⁵ Equally unsatisfactory was the commentary of Edward M. Chapman, a historian of religious ideas. It seemed to him that Omar's translator mixed the zest and the satiety of the third quarter of the century. The new discoveries in science, he said, had left the heart clamant, but the deeper feelings did not find utterance; “their burden, therefore, [was] increased by a school of thinkers who would, if they could, have denied them utterance at all.” When the new science told people to deny these feelings, when they thought about religion but weren't sure they had a right to, they fell into Omar's mood of jovial cynicism. The “humorous perversity” of the poem, Chapman believed, led directly to the reductio ad absurdum of W. E. Henley's verses:

Let us be drunk, and for a while forget,
Forget, and ceasing even from regret,
Live without reason and in spite of rhyme.(46)

Warren B. Blake turned his attention, with more interesting results, to the translator. FitzGerald, after all, was both a symptom of the condition that had produced his poem and a cause of the malady that came out of it. Fascinated by the valetudinarian habits of FitzGerald, Blake said darkly that “the curse of the nineteenth century lay upon him,” as it did upon Flaubert, who was also an incomplete man wanting to be either an atheist or a mystic.

We are waiting to be told what it was that doomed these men, these Flauberts and FitzGeralds, to an incompleteness that seems almost failure. Does the expression “atrophy of the will” help explain the riddle?⁴⁷

The answer is of course not given, but the implied premises of the question say much about the age that made a cult of the Rubaiyat. What constitutes success? Are success in art and in life identical? Whatever FitzGerald might have given to life, would it have been more or better than he gave to art?

Notes

1. Quoted in Alfred M. Terhune, The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947), p. 212.

2. Holbrook Jackson, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam, an Essay (London: David Nutt, 1899), section IV.

3. Theodore Watts-Dutton, Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916), “Poetry.”

4. Elizabeth Alden Curtis, One Hundred Quatrains from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (New York: Brothers of the Book, 1899), p. 11.

5. Richard LeGalienne, “The Eternal Omar,” in The Book of Omar and Rubaiyat (New York: Riverside Press, 1900), pp. 16, 21.

6. Idem., Omar Repentant (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1908), unpaged.

7. Quoted by John T. Winterich in Books and the Man (New York: Greenberg, 1929), p. 332.

8. “B. V.,” Selections from Original Contributions by James Thomson to Cope's Tobacco Plant (Liverpool, 1889), p. 60 ff.

9. John Leslie Garner, The Strophes of Omar Khayyam (Milwaukee: The Corbett and Skidmore Co., 1888).

10. Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, ed. Talcott Williams (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates & Co., 1898), “Foreword.”

11. A. B. Houghton, “A Study in Despair,” Harvard Monthly, I (Oct. 1885-Feb. 1886), p. 102 ff.

12. John Hay, In Praise of Omar Khayyam, an Address before the Omar Khayyam Club (Portland, Maine: Mosher, 1898).

13. Bernard Shaw, “Preface,” in Richard Wilson, The Miraculous Birth of Language (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948).

14. James Douglas, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist, Critic (New York: John Lane, 1907), p. 79.

15. Justin H. McCarthy, The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam in English Prose (New York: Brentano's 1898), “Note on Omar.”

16. Cited in The Book of Omar and Rubaiyat, p. 47.

17. Edmund Gosse, “Firdausi in Exile,” in Helen Zimmern, Epic of Kings, Stories Retold from Firdausi (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1883).

18. Edward Clodd, Memories (London: Chapman and Hall, 1916), esp. pp. 89, 98, 161.

19. John Morgan, Omar Khayyam, an Essay (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1901), “Introduction.”

20. Austin Dobson, Verses Read at a Dinner of the Omar Khayyam Club (London: Chiswick Press, 1897). “Persian garlands I detest” is William Cowper's rendering of “Persicos odi” from Horace's Odes, I, 38. John Milton's version of “Quis multa gracilis” (Odes, I, 5) is “What slender youth, bedew'd with liquid odors,/courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,/Pyrrha?” The two odes are among Horace's best known.

21. Herbert W. Greene, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald and into Latin by … (Boston: Privately printed, 1898).

22. The Book of Omar and Rubaiyat, p. 47 ff.

23. Ibid., 37.

24. Hay, In Praise of Omar Khayyam.

25. Moncure Daniel Conway, “The Omar Khayyam Cult in England,” Nation, Vol. LVII, No. 1478 (Oct. 26, 1893), 304.

26. An Old Philosophy in 101 Quatrains, by the Modern Umar Kayam (Ormskirk: T. Hutton, 1899).

27. “Kipling and FitzGerald,” Shelburne Essays, 2d ser. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), pp. 106, 117.

28. W. H. Mallock, Lucretius on Life and Death, in the Metre of Omar Khayyam (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1900), p. xix and stanza 1.

29. John F. Genung, Ecclesiastes, Words of Koheleth, Son of David, King of Jerusalem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), p. 167.

30. John F. Genung, Stevenson's Attitude to Life (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1901), pp. 16-17.

31. Genung, Ecclesiastes, p. 156.

32. Frederick L. Sargent, Omar and the Rabbi (Cambridge: Harvard Cooperative Society, 1909).

33. Louis C. Alexander, The Testament of Omar Khayyam [the Wassiyat] Comprising His Testament (or Last Words), a Song, Hymn of Prayer, The Word in the Desert, Hymn of Praise, also the Marathi or Odes of the Disciples (London: John Long, 1907), “Note,” stanza LXXVI, and “The Marathi.”

34. H. Justus Williams, The Last Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Sisley's Ltd., n.d.), stanza I.

35. William Hastie, Festival of Spring, from the Divan of Jelalleddin (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1903), p. xxxiii.

36. Edward G. Browne, “Sufism” and “Babism” in Religious Systems of the World (London: Swan Sonenschein & Co., 1902), pp. 314 ff., 333 ff.

37. Claud Field, “The Master Mystic,” The Expository Times, XVII (Oct. 1905-Sept. 1906), 452 ff. Field also wrote Mystics and Saints of Islam (London: F. Griffiths, 1910).

38. R. A. Nicholson, The Don and the Dervish, a Book of Verses Original and Translated (London: J. M. Dent, 1911), pp. 62, 70 ff.

39. Nicholson, Mystics of Islam (London: G. Bell, 1914), pp. 116-17.

40. Nicholson, Persian Lyrics (London: Ernest Benn, 1931, “Preface.”

41. William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism (New York: Scribner's, 1899), pp. 118, 321, 371.

42. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald, edited with an Introduction and Notes by R. A. Nicholson (London: A. & C. Black, 1909).

43. Andrew Lang, “At the Sign of the Ship,” Longman's Magazine, July 1904, p. 264.

44. John Kelman, Among Famous Books (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912), p. 89 ff.

45. Arnold Smith, The Main Tendencies of Victorian Poetry (Cournville, Birmingham: St. George Press, 1907), pp. xii, 135 ff.

46. Edward M. Chapman, English Literature in Account with Religion, 1800-1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), pp. 457-59.

47. Warren B. Blake, “Poetry, Time and Edward FitzGerald,” The Dial (Chicago: 1909), XLVI, 177-80.