natural pleasures, and, above all, with man's natural power of happiness.
Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise without a cup of coffee. If Tolstoy
cannot admire marriage, at least he is healthy enough to admire mud.
Nature can be enjoyed without even the most natural luxuries.
A good bush needs no wine. But neither nature nor wine nor anything
else can be enjoyed if we have the wrong attitude towards happiness,
and Omar (or Fitzgerald) did have the wrong attitude towards happiness.
He and those he has influenced do not see that if we are to be truly gay,
we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things.
We cannot enjoy thoroughly even a pas-de-quatre at a subscription dance
unless we believe that the stars are dancing to the same tune. No one can
be really hilarious but the serious man. "Wine," says the Scripture,
"maketh glad the heart of man," but only of the man who has a heart.
The thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual.
Ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things.
Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion. Once in the world's
history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune
of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since.
With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has
quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety.
He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church
was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman.
Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.
Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament.
But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts
because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad.
"Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why.
Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the
stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink,
because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for.