|
During the eleventh century, when Europe lay | steeped in the blackest night of the Dark Ages, a | revival of learning was in full bloom in that ancient | cradle of civilisation, the Plateau of Iran, |
Khayyam was a man of many parts. In addition to | his mathematical text books, which were universally | used in Persia, he wrote upon medicine, meteorology, | the silting of rivers, and natural science generally. | Probably his works upon these subjects exist | somewhere today, but to the average modern they are | as dead as were his Rubaiyat before they were | translated and given re-birth by Fitzgerald.
| The four hundred years following the Mahommedan
| era were centuries of glory for Islam. In the day of
| Omar its star was at the zenith. One by one Syria,
| Egypt, Africa and Spain, Persia and India, over-run
| by the hosts of the Prophet, had been offered the
| three-fold choice
Leonardo da Vinci, the sublime painter, was then | in his fortieth year and his crowded life ran another | 27 summers before his death. He was to the Italian | Renaissance what Khayyam was to the Persian revival | of the eleventh century. Both were apostles of | freedom of thought: both anticipated the methods and | ideals of modern science. Da Vinci's imagination | teemed with visions of the marvellous achievements of | the present day. The steam-boat, the flying machine, | breech-loading cannon, and mincing machines were | amongst the problems to which he applied himself. He | anticipated modern scientists in his speculations | upon animal classification, the laws of gravitation, | the principle of the camera, the wave theory of | light, the principle of canal construction, the | circulation of the blood, and a score of minor | matters. His studies of anatomy, which were | undertaken, in the spirit of thoroughness that | characterised his whole work, as an adjunct to his | drawings of the human form represent the earliest | serious investigations in this direction, at least | since ancient times.
| That his mind was that of the modern scientist is
| exampled by his favorite expressions
|
etc.
Of the art of Leonardo we will say little
|
|he declared. The
|of infants (which he ascribed to the | use of swaddling bands) and the sufferings of lower | animals were the subjects of frequent expressions of | sympathy. Consideration for the weak and defenceless | were by no means common virtues in the nineteenth | century. |
So far we have stressed the points of coincidence
| between Leonardo da Vinci and Omar Khayyam. But at
| the same time there yawns a great gulf betwixt them.
| The philosophy of da Vinci is the creed of youth
| triumphant, the creed of a man and of an age that
| believed in a New Heaven and a New Earth. Omar's song
| is the swan-song of a dying world. Leonardo believed
| with all his soul in the
|
He firmly believed that one day
| mankind would leave the school-room by a more hopeful
| door that the one by which it entered. Omar had come
| to the conclusion that the school room was not even
| worth the entering
|
Comforting, in a doleful sort of way is the
| Khayyam wine philosophy to the fighter who, with
| bloody head, battered armour, and sick sense of
| defeat, staggers out of the conflict. Thus indeed was
| it with Khayyam's self. Though perhaps he knew it not
| he stood almost the last upon the battlefield of a
| lost cause, like Arthur at Morgarten. The ancient
| world was doomed, and Khayyam was the Last of the
| Ancients. Leonardo da Vinci, on the other hand,
| looked forward into vistas of New Worlds. He was the
| First of the Moderns