One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one poem, belongs to the same
general atmosphere and impulse as Swinburne; the free but languid
atmosphere of later Victorian art. But this time the wind blew from
hotter and heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy. Edward
Fitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a friend of Tennyson, produced what
professed to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar, who wrote
quatrains about wine and roses and things in general. Whether the
Persian original, in its own Persian way, was greater or less than this
version I must not discuss here, and could not discuss anywhere. But it
is quite clear that Fitzgerald's work is much too good to be a good
translation. It is as personal and creative a thing as ever was written;
and the best expression of a bad mood, a mood that may, for all I know,
be permanent in Persia, but was certainly at this time particularly
fashionable in England. In the technical sense of literature it is one
of the most remarkable achievements of that age; as poetical as
Swinburne and far more perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting
quality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flows
by like a river or a song, with something else that is compact and
pregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of some
pagan philosopher.
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