In Omar's Garden

It was eight centuries ago, in the year of the Hegira 517 (or A. D. 1123 by our calendar) that Omar Khayyam, the Anacreontic astronomer-poet of Persia, laid down his lute and passed with gentle stoic smile to the tomb he had chosen "in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses over it."

The present year of grace, 1923, therefore passes for Omar's 800th anniversary year. Two newly illustrated editions* of FitzGerald's English version of the Rubaiyat have been put on the market.

The more elaborate is illustrated by that brilliant but elusive lady who flashes about the dilettant magazines in purple seas of color-reproduction under the pseudonym of "Fish." The other illustrator, also an Englishwoman, is Hope Weston, who says she has tried to dip her paintbrush in star stuff to do justice to the "illumined unreason" of the Persian singer.

Both these artists depend upon color for their ultimate emotional expression, and Fish especially handles her medium with dashingly modern and exotic, not to say erotic, effect, combining it with glittering overlays of gold and silver and with rich arabesques of pen-and-ink design which suggest alternately Leon Bakst and the late Aubrey Beardsley. Hope Weston is more seriously thoughtful and mystic, in her endeavor "to visualize Khayyam as he appeared to his contemporaries--to study his mind before FitzGerald gilded his thoughts."

FitzGerald gilded Omar Khayyam, and Elihu Vedder's now classic illustrations have regilded FitzGerald. Vedder is academic, imaginative, poetic, and about everything else that he ought to be under the circumstances, except Persian. He is Roman, but not romantic.

It is the Vedder tradition evidently, that both Fish and Hope Weston are trying, in their respective manners, to get away from. Just how much nearer this brings them to Jamshid and Kaiko-bad may be a question, but certainly color helps out the illusion, sometimes magically--even though Fish seems oftener Parisian than Persian, and Hope Weston is rather like an orientalized English Rackham or Dulac.

One thing these passionate pictures do accomplish: they confirm a long-standing conviction that Omar will never do for prohibition propaganda nor for an anchorite's amulet.

Now and again the mood of melancholy surges up--it is never very deep below the surface--and Fish draws three lovely veiled figures in black and silver for another wine-cup stanza, now of an elegiac turn:

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and

best That Time and Fate of all their vintage

prest, Have drunk their cup a round or two

before, And one by one crept silently to rest.

* THE RUBAIYAT of Omar Khayyam--Button--illustrated by "Fish," $7.00; illustrated by Hope Weston, $3.00.