With neighbours laid along the grass, to take The agony which drove him to self-slaughter was that he had fallen from that ideal into the sensuous baseness with which he had made himself but too fatally familiar. He too had his "Vision of Sin," the "crime of sense avenged by sense," and found the haunting burden of it unendurable, and in words which again remind us of Koheleth (Eccl. i. 9, 11, iii. 20), utters his resolve, "And therefore now Let her that is the womb and tomb of all, Those blind beginnings that have made me man, Dash them anew together at her will, Thro' all her cycles-into man once more, Or beast, or bird, or fish, or opulent flower:" And doing this, he looks forward to the time "When momentary man Shall seem no more a something to himself, With Tennyson, as with Shakespeare, there are few, if any, traces, that this striking parallelism with the Confessions of the Debater, is the result of any deliberate study of, or attempt to reproduce, them. The phrases of Ecclesiastes are not borrowed, admirably as they might have served to express his thoughts; there is no reference, however distant, to his experience. We have to do once more with parallelism pure and simple and not with derivation. What I have attempted to shew is that under every extremest variation in circumstances and culture the outcome of the pursuit of happiness, what we have learnt to call eudæmonism, after the Epicurean ideal, is sooner or later, that, in the absence of a clearer faith and loftier aim, the ideal breaks down and leaves the man struggling with the question 'Is life worth living?' perhaps finding the answer to that question in some form of a pessimist view of life and of the Universe. It will be admitted, I think, that, so far as I have proved this, I have added to the arguments which I have urged in favour of the view that I have maintained, both in the Notes and in the "Ideal Biography," as to the genesis and plan of Ecclesiastes. III. A PERSIAN KOHELETH OF THE TWELFTH I have yet another instance of unconscious parallelism with the experience and the thought of Koheleth to bring before the student's notice. It comes from a far off land and from a more distant age than the two which I have already discussed. Omar Khayyam (=Omar, the Tent maker)1 was born in the latter half of the eleventh century at Naishapur in Khorasan. He was in his youth the friend and fellow-student of Nizam ul Mulk, the Vizier of Alp Arslan, the son of Toghrul Bey. They read the Koran sitting at the feet of the Imam Mowaffek, the greatest teacher of his age and city. Another fellow-student became afterwards a name of terror as Hasan, the OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS, the head of the Assassins whose name and fame became a word of terror to the Crusaders. Omar, as acting on the Epicurean counsel, Xále Biwoas (=live as hidden from view), asked his Vizier friend to “let him live in a corner under the shadow of his fortune," giving his life to the pursuit of wisdom. Like the Greek and Roman Epicureans, he devoted himself chiefly to astronomy and physical science. He was employed in reforming the Persian Calendar, and died, as the paragon of his age, in A.D. 1123. It was characteristic of the mood of thought, the workings of which we are about to trace, that his wish as to his grave was that it might be "where the North wind might scatter roses over him." Like the Koheleth of the "Ideal Biography," in his relation to the Jewish Rabbis of his time, he startled alike the orthodox Imams of Islam and the mystics of the Sufi sect, by the half-voluptuous, half-cynical strain which found utterance in his poems and his conversation. The writer of an article in the Calcutta Review, No. 59, draws an elaborate parallel between his poetry and that of Lucretius, but it does not seem to have occurred to him to carry the line of thought further and to note the many coincidences which the Rubaiyat (= Tetrastichs) presents to the thoughts and language of Ecclesiastes, as well as to those of the later Epicurean poet. To these the attention of the student is now invited. The poem opens with the dawn of a New Year's day, and a voice calls as from a tavern where revellers are carousing, and summons to enjoyment "Come fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter-and the Bird is on the wing. 1 I owe my knowledge of the poet to the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” pub. lished by Quaritch, 1879. The name of the translator is not given. Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, Each morn a thousand Roses brings, you say, And this first summer-month that brings the Rose, Well, let it take them." The lesson drawn from that thought of the transitoriness of enjoyment is the old lesson of a calm and tranquil Epicureanism such as that of Eccl. ii. 24, v. 8, ix. 7. 66 "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a loaf of Bread-and thou Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow. Some for the Glories of this World, and some Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty face, Think-in this battered Caravanserai Abode his destin'd Hour, and went his way." And this sense of the transitoriness of all things human (Eccl. i. 4-7, ii. 16) leads, as with the Epicureans of all times and countries, to the Carpe diem of Horace, the "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die" of 1 Cor. xv. 34, to the belief that there is "nothing better for a man than that he should thus eat, drink and be merry.' Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and sans End." Man's aspirations after immortality are met with the scepticism of the "who knoweth?" of Pyrrho and of Koheleth (Eccl. iii. 21), or even with a more definite denial. "Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare, And those that after some to-morrow stare, A Muezzin from the towers of darkness cries (Eccl. The discussions of the Sages of his land, the making of many books without end, were for him but as the " feeding upon wind " xii. 2) and brought no satisfying answer. "Myself when young did eagerly frequent Came out by the same door where in I went. With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow; 'I came like Water and like Wind I go.' The problem of Life, the enigma of the Universe, found no solution. God had "set the world in the heart" of man to the intent that they might not "find out his work from the beginning to the end" (Eccl. iii. 11). "Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, And many a Knot unravell'd by the Road, But not the Master-knot of Human Fate. There was the Door to which I found no Key, Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs revealed, Agnosticism has, perhaps, never spoken in the tones of a more terrible despondency than in the words that follow, though the language of Koheleth in Eccl. iii. 13, ix. 3, falls not far short of it. "Then of the THEE IN ME who works behind A Lamp amid the Darkness; and I heard As from Without, "The ME within THEE blind.'” 1 We are reminded of the grand language of Job xxviii. 13, 14, but there the questioner, like Koheleth, was led to rest in a very different conclusion. The sense of the infinite littleness of the individual life (Eccl. i. 4, 11), is expressed in words which remind us (once more a case of unconscious parallelism) of Tennyson's gloomier Voice, "When you and I behind the Veil are past, Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last, A Moment's Halt-a momentary taste And Lo! the phantom Caravan has reacht The NOTHING it set out from. Oh, make haste." He takes refuge, like Koheleth (Eccl. ii. 3, ix. 7), from this despair, in the juice of the "fruitful Grape," "The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal into Gold transmutes." He is not deterred from that sweet balm by the Prophet's prohibition, or fears of Hell, or hopes of Paradise, "One thing is certain, and the rest is lies, The Flower that once has blown, for ever dies." None have come back from the bourne of that "undiscovered country" that lies behind the veil, "Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who Before us pass'd the doors of Darkness through, Like Milton's Satan he has come to the conviction that, Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven," and gives utterance to the conviction: "I sent my Soul through the Invisible Some letter of that After life to spell, And by and by my Soul return'd to me And answered, 'I myself am Heaven and Hell.' Cast on the darkness into which ourselves In words which remind us of Prospero's "We are such stuff As dreams are made of," |