That was all right so long as we did not naturalise him, a course which
neither he nor we thought of our adopting. Had we naturalised him, it
would have been a different matter, and even Mayfair might have found
the fashions of China somewhat _risqué_. One remembers that introductory
note to Browning's _Ferishtah's Fancies_--"You, Sir, I entertain you for
one of my Hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you
will say they are Persian; but let them be changed."[1] The only safe
way of dealing with Omar Kayyám is to insist that his garments be _not_
changed. If you naturalise him he will become deadly in the West. The
East thrives upon fatalism, and there is a glamour about its most
materialistic writings, through which far spiritual things seem to
quiver as in a sun-haze. The atmosphere of the West is different, and
fatalism, adopted by its more practical mind, is sheer suicide.

Not that there is much likelihood of a nation with the history and the
literature of England behind it, ever becoming to any great extent
materialistic in the crude sense of Omar's poetry. The danger is
subtler. The motto, "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die," is
capable of spiritualisation, and if you spiritualise that motto it
becomes poisonous indeed. For there are various ways of eating and
drinking, and many who would not be tempted with the grosser appetites
may become pagans by devoting themselves to a rarer banquet, the feast
of reason and the flow of soul. It is possible in that way also to take
the present moment for Eternity, to live and think without horizons. Mr.
Peyton has said, "You see in some little house a picture of a cottage on
a moor, and you wonder why these people, living, perhaps, in the heart
of a great city, and in the most commonplace of houses, put such a
picture there. The reason for it is, that that cottage is for them the
signal of the immortal life of men, and the moor has infinite horizons."
That is the root of the matter after all--the soul and horizons. He who