rk
and drifting hedonism of our time. Of the literary splendour of that
work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of
men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an
epigram with the vague sadness of a song. But of its philosophical,
ethical, and religious influence which has been almost as great as its
brilliancy, I should like to say a word, and that word, I confess, one
of uncompromising hostility. There are a great many things which might
be said against the spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its prodigious
influence. But one matter of indictment towers ominously above the
rest--a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us. This is the
terrible blow that this great poem has struck against sociability and
the joy of life. Some one called Omar "the sad, glad old Persian." Sad
he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever. He has been a
worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.

A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under the rose-tree with his
wine-pot and his scroll of poems. It may seem strange that any one's
thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him, fly back to the dark
bedside where the doctor doles out brandy. It may seem stranger still
that they should go back to the grey wastrel shaking with gin in
Houndsditch. But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil
bond. Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is
wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical
wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not
happy. His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that
reveals it. It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and
instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an
investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile. Whole heavens above
it, from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style, rises the
splendour of some old English drinking-song--

"Then pass the bowl, my comrades all,
And let the zider vlow."

For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth of truly
worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief and kindly
leisure of the poor. Of course, the great part of the more stolid
reproaches directed against the Omarite morality are as false and
babyish as such reproaches usually are. One critic, whose work I have
read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omar an atheist and a
materialist. It is almost impossible