A note from Jack King

I was skimming through a book entitled “The World’s Great Speeches” and ran across one delivered on December 8, 1897 by the US Ambassador to Great Britain, John Hay, before the Omar Khayamm Club of London. Here is an excerpt from the speech. I hope you enjoy it:

The exquisite beauty, the faultless form, the singular grace of those amazing stanzas, were not more wonderful than the depth and breadth of their profound philosophy, their knowledge of life, their dauntless courage, their serene facing of the ultimate problems of life and death.

Of course the doubt did not spare me, which has assailed many as ignorant as I was of the literature of the East, whether it was the poet or the translator to whom was due this splendid result. Was it, in fact, a reproduction of a new song, or a mystification of a great modern, careless of fame and scornful of his time? Could it be possible that in the eleventh century, so far away as Khorassan, so accomplished a man of letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth and insight, such calm disillusion, such cheerful and jocund despair? Was this Weltschmerz, which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in 1100? My doubt lasted only until I came upon a literal translation of the Rubaiyat, and I saw that not the least remarkable quality of Fitzgerald’s was its fidelity to the original. In short, Omar was Fitzgerald before the latter, or Fitzgerald was a reincarnation of Omar. It is not to the disadvantage of the later poet that he followed so closely in the footsteps of the earlier. A man of extraordinary genius had appeared in the world; had sung a song of incomparable beauty and power in an environment no longer worthy of him, in a language of narrow range; for many generations the song was virtually lost; then by a miracle of creation, a poet, a twin brother in the spirit to the first, was born, who took up the forgotton poem and sung it anew with all its original melody and force, and all the accumulated refinement of ages of art.

Certainly our poet cannot be numbered among the great popular writers of all time. He has told no story; he has never unpacked his heart in public; he has never thrown the reins on the neck of the winged horse, and let his imagination carry him where it listed. “Ah! the crowd must have emphatic warrant.” Its suffrages are not for the cool, collected observer, whose eye no glitter can ever dazzle, no mist diffuse. The many cannot but resent that lofty intelligence, that pale and subtle smile. But we will hold a place forever among that limited number who, like Lucretius and Epicurus — without rage or defiance, even without unbecoming mirth — look deep into the tangled mysteries of things, refuse credence to the absurd, and allegiance to the arrogant authority, sufficiently consci0us of fallibility to be tolerant of all opinions; with a faith too wide for doctrine and a benevolence untrammeled by creed, too wise to be wholly poets, yet too surely poets to be implacably wise.

Editor’s note: Image from the Wikipedia Commons.