It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy.  Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere.  Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided.  And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens.  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, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.  Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.  Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled.  Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world.  Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through