The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus
or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten
by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life,
not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet
as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things
are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the
cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic,
sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly;
they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world
was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view
they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened
with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world
was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact
that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence,
about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least.
I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable
about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else.
I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at
peace about everything--they were at war about everything else.
But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos,
then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody
streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden
of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides,
but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things,
but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma
defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself,
man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him,
and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude,