Vedder's Drawings for Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát

IT is an experience probably common to all that passages in literature which have been perfectly familiar become suddenly illumined with new meaning when one or more of the senses is brought forward to assist in the interpretation. Every one has felt this stimulation of thought by sense in the new vitality given to Shakespeare’s lines by the impersonation of a great actor ; in the infinite loveliness which music lends to one of Heine’s simplest stanzas. Even the cloudy second part of Goethe’s Faust has, under the light of a magnificent presentation in the Weimar theatre, blazed out with a clearness which revealed coherence and unity to those who had regarded the work as an insoluble enigma. It is like wine acting upon the dull mind. It may be that in Omar Khayyám’s philosophy the praise of the wine-cup is thus to be taken in the larger sense of symbolizing the aid which the use and enjoyment of all our sensuous gifts may afford in bringing us to a truer understanding of the great problems of life and being.

This interpretation has been insisted upon by many students of Omar, a fact which Mr. Vedder seems to have had in mind ; for in conceiving the series of remarkable drawings which form his “accompaniment” to Omar’s Song he so placed his thought as to leave the solution of this question still at the reader’s option.

Mr. Vedder’s work is a rare instance of the perfect sympathy that may exist

between poet and painter, and find in art adequate expression, even after many years. The present century has given us at least four great artist individualities preëminent in imaginative power: William Blake, the Englishman; Arnold Boecklin, the Swiss; William Rimmer and Elihu Vedder, the Americans. Persons fond of tracing resemblances, and also of denying originality wherever they fancy resemblance, will perhaps ascribe certain peculiarities of the latter two to the influence of the first mentioned, and may possibly charge them with imitation. But nothing could be further from the truth. These four men have kindred traits, but all have powerful personalities, and each has worked out his problems in his own way. Any seeming evidence of influence comes from the fact that all are peculiarly children of this century, and in dealing with its questions their minds naturally trend in the same direction, just as do those of great inventors dealing with physical facts. Of the four, Blake shows himself to be more exclusively literary in quality ; his expression was inadequate to his conception ; there is something in his work repellent to many minds, and it will always remain of more interest to scholars than to lovers of art. Boecklin and Vedder have gained much of their largest inspiration in the atmosphere of Italy, have absorbed the spirit of its Renaissance, have learned the lessons of its abounding beauty and strengthened their souls with its passionate power. It was Rimmer’s fate, on the other hand, to work in solitude, with very little sympathetic fellowship or appreciation, amid the prosaic surroundings of the western world.

A lack of earnestness has rightfully been charged to the great body of our artists. They have acquired a most difficult language, but they have no thoughts to express in it. In former days artists treated what affected them most thoroughly ; the figures and events of religion and mythology were their themes. To-day the love of nature has been keenly developed, and we have great landscape painters. We have called upon our poets to treat the great features of nineteenth-century life. We likewise see our artists of the highest imaginative resources dealing with modern interpretations of the problems of existence. William Rimmer and Elihu Vedder, like Hawthorne with his mystic genius, are true growths of our soil; and although their country lacks an historic background and its physical environment is most prosaic, after all, it is the land of freedom and untrammeled thought. Like them, why should not others lift themselves above the barren plain of their physical surroundings, and give their thoughts free wing in the realms of ideality ?

The mind has its bounds, as the sea has, and the command, Thus far shalt thou reason, and no farther, has been set up against it. That the flood-mark was reached ages ago appears to be demonstrated by Omar Khayyám, whose universality of intellect is evinced by a singular freedom from the limitations and prejudices of contemporary creeds and philosophies. When Edward Fitzgerald translated the Rubáiyát, he gave a new classic to the English literature. We feel that while other translations may be more literal they cannot so completely represent the spirit of the poet. Fitzgerald was fortunate in preserving the form of the verse, which appears peculiarly adapted for the conveyance of such thoughts. This reiterated Oriental rhyme has been successfully employed by various German poets. Platen, a master of form, expresses the spirit of it well when he introduces his Gaselen with the lines, —

The group of leading thoughts in the Rubáiyát, floating aerially and ever recurrent, are given appropriate form in the rhyme which, after the break in the third line, is ever brought back in the fourth, like the lily’s swaying head secured by its anchored stem.

Mr. Vedder, as an artist interpreter of Omar Khayyam, is the peer of Mr. Fitzgerald. He has revealed new depths of meaning in the words of the great Persian poet-astronomer. He calls his work “an accompaniment of drawings,” a music-suggestive term of the broadest significance. The conventional accompaniment is but a support to the song, a dull groundwork of which the hearer is hardly aware. But in the hands of a master-composer the accompaniment threads and pervades the song: giving new meaning to its melody; grasping, perhaps, the whole scheme; and reaching, through the tone-sense, depths of the heart and soul to which words alone could not appeal. Something analogous Mr. Vedder has accomplished here. His drawings rise from the rank of mere comments to embodiments of the poet’s meaning; and frequently they carry the imagination beyond the poet to the real problem which gave him inspiration. The scope of the poem affords him the adequate range and compass for seizing upon and imprisoning in art thoughts accustomed to soar to the thither side of space. Weirdness is a word which occurs to all who know Mr. Vedder’s work, and yet it is but vaguely indicative of the mystic spirituality of its character, allied to which is a striking demonic element. With all the magnitude of their conception and the power of their imagery, these drawings possess an infinite tenderness, a grace and loveliness, which mark a close human sympathy as well as the utterances of a stern and inexorable fate.

The work is full of symbolic touches : some are evident at a glance, some will be found upon a short acquaintance, a few are explained in the notes, while others will reveal themselves only to the careful student. Upon the cover appears one of the most significant conceits. This pervades the work: the mysterious swirl of life, gradually gathering its forces from infinity ; then a halting and a reverse of the movement, as in the eddy of a stream, denoting the brief moment of existence ; followed by the dissipation of the forces as gradually as they gathered.

Possibly as many meanings may yet be read out of Omar’s clear, crystalline verses as out of Shakespeare or Goethe’s Faust. In Mr. Vedder’s drawings there is a wealth of subtle suggestions which indicate how thoroughly the artist has absorbed and assimilated the work. It has been aptly compared to a symphony, with its leading themes, its divisions, and its variations in treatment; running the gamut of human thought and passion, from the sparkling present to the vastness of eternity, from the heights of aspiration to the depths of despair.

In the three symphonic movements, as we might call them, into which the work is divided by Mr. Vedder, marked first by the bitter cup of life with a chaplet of prickly leaves, and second by the pardon giving and imploring hands entangled in the broken threads of life as they are stretched up to heaven, it may be easy to fancy the treatment of the same themes from the standpoint of life’s morning, afternoon, and evening : the stormy passions of youth, the quiet acceptance of fate by maturity, and the philosophic contemplation of age which now and then reverts to the half-solved problems of earlier days. Youth is not all joy or heedlessness. Amid the gayety, the recklessness, the exuberance, of vitality occur the great problems of life. But they are received with stormy unrest ; iron-handed fate is met with futile scorn, with rebellious bitterness. So we see in this part the facts and the problems of life stated in their various phases, from the keynote of the work,—

where, in the frontispiece, Omar is shown in the midst of his joyous companions looking down upon the conquering warrior, the miser, the scientist, and the priest, to the mighty conclusion of this part, with the Sphinx crouching amid the desolation of the wrecked world, her enigma,—

There are charming scenes of youth and loveliness, idyllic, gay, and elegiac as well. Opposed to life in its fullest vigor are glimpses of desolation and death in its most awful sublimity. The mysteries of the universe and of eternity are presented. The scene where “ the phantom caravan has reached the Nothing it set out from,” with the stream of earth’s millions face to face with eternity, some with averted, indignant eyes, others unmoved, is a picture of tremendous power. This, the last of four grand pictures of death, precedes the Sphinx and the dead world, whose hopelessness is relieved by a flash of lightning in the sky, which tells of a greater power than Fate.

The problems stated in the first part are discussed in the second. The inevitable is accepted, and the judgments of Fate are calmly examined by one who has struck from the calendar “ unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday.” The pleasures of life are enjoyed as they come. The wine-cup confutes the “ two and seventy jarring sects,” and the mighty Mahmúd, a powerful figure of great beauty, — Bacchus, — scatters with his whirlwind sword “ the misbelieving and black horde of fears and sorrows that infest the soul.” A voluptuous dark-eyed maid appears beneath a vine with the question, —

In this mood we behold the Present listening to the voices of the Past, in the guise of a graceful boy holding to his ear a sea-shell. In the same calm spirit we are shown a mighty conception of the three Fates, whose coiled-up thread of life, distaff, and shears laid aside show that they have finished with this world and are dealing with the universe ; casting out their cloud-nets into space, and seizing the planets, which are laid by at their feet, to be dealt with by the controlling powers. With this we read, —

Then there is the mighty conception of the Recording Angel unheeding the hands uplifted in agony from below ; later we are shown the Last Man with Love dead at his feet, but Evil, in the form of the serpent, still alive to whisper in his ear. Love affrighted at the sight of Hell, the Magdalen and Eve follow, accompanying the quatrain,—

This makes the culmination of the second division, which is closed by the picture of the uplifted and imploring hands.

In the third “ movement,” as Mr. Vedder has treated the problem, the poet has concluded that he is neither altogether responsible nor irresponsible, but in a large measure self-dependent, under restrictions. The simile of the Potter “ thumping his wet clay ” is introduced much like a prefatory motif. The series of pictures which continue through this passage, recalling the scriptural “ Hath not the potter power over the clay ? ” are exceedingly interesting in their interdependent relationship. It is the pot’s discussion of the maker’s intent, and the artist’s fancy lias invested the plastic shapes with characteristics of usefulness or simply ornamentation, but so delicately expressed as not to be in the least obtrusive. It is in this division of the poem that the oft-returning half-confidence in the prevalence of good over evil in the world asserts itself, as in the stanza, —

In these drawings of the Potter Mr. Vedder has given his figures and accessories a decided Oriental character, — a feature which he has heretofore considered sufficiently emphasized by undemonstrative hints. From the close of this simile to the last quatrain the poet seems to be considering life through the experience and with the enlightened mind of age; and here are some of Mr. Vedder’s most masterly efforts. Omar’s grave, with its “ snare of vintage,” marked by a slab, upon which are cut a lute with broken strings, an inverted cup, and behind all the mysterious “ swirl,” is followed by a drawing which brings back in full force the temptations of youth; then comes the regret, "Yet ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose,” and in the next two drawings the end. That the conclusion is announced by drawings which are worthy of their position is a triumph for the artist, for he has steadily accelerated the interest from page to page, and made his climax fitting. The two drawings accompany the stanzas, —

The former, in resentment of the inevitable order, is accompanied by a magnificent drawing representing Age uplifting youthful Love, who, cast down by the presence of evil, looks with horror at the ill-omened bird of prey, which has been driven from its victim. The drawing for the last stanza depicts the blissful errand of Sáki. Then follow the notes in ornamental borders. Mr. Vedder’s explanation of the initial with which he has signed all his drawings is most ingenious and characteristic. At the end of the volume this signature is enlarged to the size of a full-page illustration, and with this added dignity we perceive for the first time that the simple initial has a meaning all its own. The broken ends of a reed, torn up by the wind, have been lashed together and shaped into a double pipe, upon which some accompaniment is possible. The gnarled roots on the one side and the flag tops on the other form the upper extremities of the unique initial, while the Persian wine-cup that marks the full stop recalls the poet again; for Omar sang,—

The poet’s wish was not in vain. The vine that sprang from his ashes is spreading over the world. Tales of its beauty are heard in all lands, and many are the believers who rest in its shade and gratefully share the bounty of its fruit.

The fact that one so readily falls into considering the drawings from a literary point of view is in itself, we think, exceeding high praise of Mr. Vedder’s work. Seldom it is, alas ! that an artist enriches his picture with enough inspiration to arouse his friends to that state of sympathy which is absolutely necessary to those who would express a truly valuable opinion on the work, as well as to those who would more thoroughly enjoy meditation and recollection of it. That picture is of little actual worth to the world which, having no trace of inspiration whereon to place a recognized value, demands position simply as a drawing. Is it not true of all great artists that their pictures appeal so directly to the soul of the observer that the mind accepts drawing for what it really is, — a means to the end ? We think it will be found that Mr. Vedder’s pictures make their appeal in the same way.

The mechanical execution of the book is worthy of a word. The plates seem to reproduce the drawings with little or no loss, and in one or two cases with some trifling gain, which now and then follows reduction and translation into one color. This adaptation of an improved gelatine-printing method, made directly from original drawings, is a new feature in American illustrated bookmaking, and has been tried here for the first time in large and difficult plates. If the promise made by this addition to our illustrative methods is kept, we may hope to see other magnificent pictures contribute intimately to literary enjoyment.