translation of the same. It has 158 stanzas. And there are other smaller versions, as those of Johnson Pasha and O. A. Shrubsole. hi B tec Turning now to the MSS. of Omar Khayyám in his native Persian-none of these are early. The oldest (that used by Heron-Allen) is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It contains, as has been said, 158 stanzas or strophes, and was written in Shiraz in the year 1460, or nearly 350 years after the death of the author. One of the MSS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris contains 349 stanzas and is dated 1527, or just 400 years after Omar; and another in the British Museum with 540 stanzas is dated 1624, or almost exactly 500 years after the death of the poet; and so on. It will be seen that the later the MS. the greater the number of stanzas, until in the lithographed editions they rise to well-nigh a thousand. That all these stanzas or 'quatrains' were not written by Omar Khayyám is certain. And this makes it necessary for us to revise the statement sometimes made, that Omar the poet had no honour in his own country and among his own kin. For, if imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, no one could have had much more of it than Omar, and it seemed to grow as the centuries went by. In addition to the MSS. which, as a whole, are ascribed to Omar, there are a number (less than a hundred) of fugitive or detached stanzas, which are assigned, now to Omar, and now to some other author. The whole of these are to be found in the text followed by Nicolas, but only fourteen of them in the oldest (the Bodleian) MS. These fourteen are all, it must be confessed, such as any one might be tempted to plagiarise. That Omar could have been the pirate is unlikely, from the fact that the quatrain or rubá'í stanza, as such, was introduced by the poet Abu Sa'id ibn abi'l-Khayr, who died only some seventy-four years before Omar. The only exception might be in the case of those which are ascribed now to Omar and now to the man into whose shoes, in his capacity of philosopher and mathematician, Omar stepped -the mighty Avicenna. There was, in fact, a very compelling motive why later poets should have ascribed their heretical verses to the earlier, for what might be ventured under the lenient sway of the Seljuks, would often, under later dynasties, be as much as the poet's E head was worth. By that time Omar was lying securely in his grave at Nishapor. But not only have the stanzas which occur only in the later MSS. and lithographed editions the inherent defect of lateness. They seem to differ also both in style and content from the earlier, although it is a well-known fact that the Persian language is as unchangeable as the laws of the ancient Medes and Persians were said to be. The literary Persian of to-day is identical with that of 800 years ago. But, to mention only one non-literary I point, there is hardly a line in the Bodleian (the oldest) MS. which would betray the religious provenance of the author. He might be a Muslim, a Jew, a Zoroastrian, or a Christian. With the stanzas found only in the later MSS. it is not so. Many of them could only have been written by, or would be intelligible only to a Muslim. We are, therefore, justified in saying that for us Omar Khayyam the poet means the Bodleian MS. and it alone. All the stanzas translated by Nicolas, Bodenstedt, Whinfield, Payne, and others from later MSS. or from printed editions will have to be jettisoned, for it is quite useless to say that some are certainly genuine' and others 'doubtful' or 'spurious.' We have no means of knowing what Omar might have written or might not have written, any more than we have in the case of Shakespeare, but rather less. The Oxford MS. is the nearest we can get to the author. Over the 350 years which separate them there is no bridge. With this we must be content. As the Oxford MS., however, was the one from which FitzGerald made his translation, it might be supposed that in order to know Omar, all we have to do is to read FitzGerald. Unfortunately, although FitzGerald's quatrains might well have been written by Omar, the fact remains that they were written, not by Omar, but by FitzGerald. For not in one half of his stanzas is it possible to say of which stanzas of Omar they are a translation. Indeed, it would hardly be unfair to set FitzGerald among those compatriots of Omar who did not dare, or did not care, to own the authorship of their verses, and so fathered them upon their great predecessor. It has been pointed out that of FitzGerald's stanza (No. 81): 'Oh Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blacken'd, man's forgiveness give, and take!' not a word is to be found in Omar, and even he would not have dared or wished to pen the last line.* In order to get an accurate rendering of the Bodleian MS. one must have recourse to Heron-Allen's translation, the notes to which give cross-references to the corresponding stanzas of FitzGerald, Nicolas, Whinfield, and others. The Bodleian MS. contains, as has been said, 158 strophes. Each strophe consists of four lines, of which lines 1, 2, and 4 rhyme with each other. As, in Arabian poetry, all the lines of a poem end in the same rhyme, and as the first half-line rhymes with the second half, it follows that the first two lines of every poem form a quatrain, that is, half-lines 1, 2, and 4 rhyme. In the Persian quatrain, however, there is also a fixed metre, and the rhyming portion may extend to nearly half the line, which means generally that the same phrase is repeated after the consonant which is the rhyme proper. The following stanzas have been made for the writer so as to show both the metre and the rhyme of the original : 'Life's wonderful caravan from sight hasteth away. Boy! Care not a doit for ills that bend over us all. Bring hither a cup of wine, for night hasteth away.' (60) 'Realms never so fair for wine I'd fain barter away. Yea! Would'st thou do well? For wine all gain barter away. Yond land of Feridún and the crown Cyrus doth wear, Sweet tile of the jar! for thee I'd e'en barter away.' (139) The quatrains are arranged in alphabetical order according to the final letter of lines 1, 2, and 4, from Alif to Ya, the first and last letters of the Persian alphabet. There are, however, three exceptions. The series opens with two strophes of which the final letter is Z. The first of these is an apology for the author's having written the quatrains: 'Had I not threaded the pearl of obedience to Thee at any time, Nor swept the dust of sin from my face at any time, Yet were I not hopeless of Thy generosity, Inasmuch as I have never called the One "two" at any time.' That is to say, whatever offence the verses which follow may give, no one can say that the author is a Zoroastrian, or anything but a strict monotheist, although his theism may not amount to very much. But, although this stanza is an evident apology for those which follow, that is not to say that the apologist was not the author himself; just as Herrick apologises in his Prayer for Absolution, 6 For those my unbaptiséd Rhimes, Writ in my wild unhallowed Times.' Or as Tennyson opens In Memoriam' with a prayer for forgiveness for 'these wild and wandering cries.' The second stanza is also an apology, or rather an attempt at justification : 'With Thee in the winehouse that I talk in secret Is better than that in the prayer-niche I say, without Thee, a prayer. O Thou First and Last of all creatures! If Thou wilt, burn: if Thou wilt, caress !' This stanza also may well have been penned by Omar himself. How the closing stanza came to be where it is would be hard to say. Its final letter is D. It depicts the delight with which the close of the month of Fasting is hailed. The remaining 155 quatrains of the Bodleian MS. are arranged, as has been said, in alphabetical order. There is no other connexion between them except that, as in the Hebrew Psalms, an expression which occurs nowhere else may be found in two consecutive stanzas. As in the 119th Psalm, the author speaks now as if he were young and at another time as if he were old. He probably wrote down the quatrains as they came into his head at different times. Hence they show him in all sorts of moods and phases: optimist, pessimist, fatalist, agnostic, ascetic, pietist, humorist. In this he often reminds us of the author of Ecclesiastes, or of the speakers in the Book of Job. One might say he even borrows their language. And it would be as useless to attempt to nail him down to any one mood as it would them. At the same time it cannot be denied that Omar leans to one side more than to the other. He is more inclined to despair than to hope: to worldliness than to piety: to scepticism than to faith. But he has no cut-and-dried philosophy of life to offer. The enigma vitæ remains unsolved and the Sphinx's riddle unread. Moreover, as each quatrain forms a complete poem by itself, and usually contains more than one idea, it is difficult to illustrate one side of Omar's thoughts from his own verses, without bringing in other sides at the same time, or cutting up the stanzas into single lines—always a dangerous proceeding. His faith and works must, therefore, generally be taken together. Perhaps the thought which takes up most room in the quatrains, and which was most constantly in the mind of the writer, was that of the shortness and seeming meaninglessness of human life, and the failure of all religious and philosophical systems to account for it. 6 From my coming there has been to the World no profit, And at my going its beauty and glory will not increase, And from no man have my ears ever heard, As to this coming and going, for the sake of what it is.' (51) Had my coming been through me, I had not come. I had not come, nor gone, nor been.' (157) 'Since the issue for man in this salt-marsh (124) A curious fancy which takes hold of Omar's mind is the idea of a sort of transmigration of the body, or, to use an Irishism, a metempsychosis of matter. The red of the rose has at one time coloured the blood of a king. The cup from which he drinks is made from clay which was once a human body. This conceit is not uncommon, |