A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with
the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from
the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes
American bars with an axe. In these discussions it is almost always
felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or
such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should
venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely
dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a
medicine. And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in order to obtain
pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he
does not expect every hour of the day, something which, unless he is a
little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. But if a
man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get
something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without;
something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being
without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being
ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of
being ordinary. If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a
strong man, and said, “This will enable you to jump off the Monument,”
doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jump off the
Monument all day long to the delight of the City. But if we took it to
a blind man, saying, “This will enable you to see,” he would be under a
heavier temptation. It would be hard for him not to rub it on his eyes
whenever he heard the hoof of a noble horse or the birds singing at
daybreak. It is easy to deny one’s self festivity; it is difficult to
deny one’s self normality. Hence comes the fact which every doctor
knows, that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when
they need it. I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the
giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily
unjustifiable. But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is
the proper use of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.
The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound
rules—a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you
are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you
will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you
would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of
Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking,
and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it,
for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.
For more than thirty years the shadow and glory of a great Eastern
figure has lain upon our English literature. Fitzgerald’s translation
of Omar Khayyam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark
and drifting hedonism of our time. Of the literary splendour of that
work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of
men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an
epigram with the vague sadness of a song. But of its philosophical,
ethical, and religious influence which has been almost as great as its
brilliancy, I should like to say a word, and that word, I confess, one
of uncompromising hostility. There are a great many things which might
be said against the spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its prodigious
influence. But one matter of indictment towers ominously above the
rest—a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us. This is the
terrible blow that this great poem has struck against sociability and
the joy of life. Some one called Omar “the sad, glad old Persian.” Sad
he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever. He has been a
worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.
A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under the rose-tree with his
wine-pot and his scroll of poems. It may seem strange that any one’s
thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him, fly back to the dark
bedside where the doctor doles out brandy. It may seem stranger still
that they should go back to the grey wastrel shaking with gin in
Houndsditch. But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil
bond. Omar Khayyam’s wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is
wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical
wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not
happy. His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that
reveals it. It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and
instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an
investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile. Whole heavens above
it, from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style, rises the
splendour of some old English drinking-song—
“Then pass the bowl, my comrades all,
And let the zider vlow.”
For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth of truly
worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief and kindly
leisure of the poor. Of course, the great part of the more stolid
reproaches directed against the Omarite morality are as false and
babyish as such reproaches usually are. One critic, whose work I have
read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omar an atheist and a
materialist. It is almost impossible for an Oriental to be either; the
East understands metaphysics too well for that. Of course, the real
objection which a philosophical Christian would bring against the
religion of Omar, is not that he gives no place to God, it is that he
gives too much place to God. His is that terrible theism which can
imagine nothing else but deity, and which denies altogether the
outlines of human personality and human will.
“The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the field,
He knows about it all—he knows—he knows.”
A Christian thinker such as Augustine or Dante would object to this
because it ignores freewill, which is the valour and dignity of the
soul. The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism is
not in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God; it is
that it denies the existence of man.
In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyat stands
first in our time; but it does not stand alone. Many of the most
brilliant intellects of our time have urged us to the same
self-conscious snatching at a rare delight. Walter Pater said that we
were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy
exquisite moments simply for those moments’ sake. The same lesson was
taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar
Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is
not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy
does, not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the
immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of
immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all
space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in
“Tristram Shandy” or “Pickwick”, there is this sense of space and
incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an
endless tale.
It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in
certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of
them as passing, or enjoy them simply “for those moments’ sake.” To do
this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do
not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something
with a violent happiness in it—an almost painful happiness. A man may
have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of
victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for
the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake.
The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he
enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for
may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a
week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks
of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled
with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem
momentary. Once look at them as moments after Pater’s manner, and they
become as cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things.
He can only love immortal things for an instant.
Pater’s mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase. He asks us to
burn with a hard, gem-like flame. Flames are never hard and never
gem-like—they cannot be handled or arranged. So human emotions are
never hard and never gem-like; they are always dangerous, like flames,
to touch or even to examine. There is only one way in which our
passions can become hard and gem-like, and that is by becoming as cold
as gems. No blow then has ever been struck at the natural loves and
laughter of men so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes. 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.”