For any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required;a certain shyness, a certain indeterminate hope, a certain boyish expectation. Purity and simplicity are essential to passions--yes even to evil passions. Even vice demands a sort of virginity.
Omar's (or Fitzgerald's) effect upon the other world we may let go, his hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing.
The Puritans, as I have said, are far jollier than he.
The new ascetics who follow Thoreau or Tolstoy are much livelier company;for, though the surrender of strong drink and such luxuries may strike us as an idle negation, it may leave a man with innumerable 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.
Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his hand.
And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink" he says "for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why.
Drink, for I know of when you go and where."
