And in the lines of Omar:—
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n a thousand places on the road I walk, thou placest snares.Thou sayest: "I will catch thee if thou steppeth into them,"In no smallest thing is the world independent of thee,_Thou_ orderest all things—and callest _me_ rebellious! majestically shaping into FitzGerald's rendering:— Oh, Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with GinBeset the Road I was to wander in,Thou wilt not with Predestination roundEnmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin? Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst makeAnd who with Eden didst devise the Snake;For all the Sin wherewith the Face of ManIs blacken'd, Man's Forgiveness give—and take! To what school did FitzGerald belong? Who were his literary progenitors?Lucretius, Horace and Donne, at any rate, had a considerable share inmoulding his thought and fashioning the form of his verse. The unrhymedline, so often but by no means uniformly resounding with a suspendedclangour that is not caught up by the following stanza is distinctlyreminiscent of the Alcaics of Horace. Epicurean, in the ordinary sense of the term, he certainly is, but it isof the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "_carpediem_" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commendeditself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, side by side withcomplete agnosticism, this is the keynote of the poem. Theoreticallyincompatible, these two "isms" are in practice inevitable companions. The theory of reincarnation and that alone, can furnish a fullexplanation of FitzGerald's splendid success as a translator. Omar was FitzGerald and FitzGerald was Omar. Both threw away theirshields and retired to their tent, not indeed to sulk, but to seek inmeditative aloofness, the calm and content that is the proper reward ofthose alone who persevere to the end. Retirement brought them all itcould bring, a yet deeper sense of the vanity of things and theirunknowableness. Herein for the mass of mankind lies the charm of theRubáiyát, in clear, tuneful numbers it chants the half-beliefs anddisbeliefs of those who are neither demons nor saints, neithertheological dogmatists nor devil-worshippers, but men. Those seeking further information as to the life and place in literatureof Edward FitzGerald are referred to Jackson's "FitzGerald and OmarKhayyám" [1899]; Clyde's "Life of FitzGerald" [1900]; Tutin's"Concordance to FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám" [1900]; and Prideaux's "Notesfor a Bibliography of FitzGerald" [1901], and his "Life" [1903]. For an interesting discussion as to the real nature of Omar, see theIntroduction to "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám" in the "Golden Treasury"Series.
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