discovered that going straightforward is an enormous mistake.
It was nobly and beautifully reasonable, and discovered in its
death-pang this lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages,
that reasonableness will not do. The pagan age was truly an Eden
or golden age, in this essential sense, that it is not to be recovered.
And it is not to be recovered in this sense again that,
while we are certainly jollier than the pagans, and much
more right than the pagans, there is not one of us who can,
by the utmost stretch of energy, be so sensible as the pagans.
That naked innocence of the intellect cannot be recovered
by any man after Christianity; and for this excellent reason,
that every man after Christianity knows it to be misleading.
Let me take an example, the first that occurs to the mind, of this
impossible plainness in the pagan point of view. The greatest
tribute to Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's "Ulysses."
The poet reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable
desire to wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all.
He desires to get home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable
qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is all.
There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a
Christian product. There is no love of Penelope for her own sake;
that is a Christian product. Everything in that old world would
appear to have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man;
a bad man was a bad man. For this reason they had no charity;
for charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul.
For this reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel;
for the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity.
For them a pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant
landscape unpleasant. Hence they had no idea of romance; for romance
consists in thinking a thing more delightful because it is dangerous;