ch there is no escape, yet knowing that
little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing
near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned
ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the
skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier
the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one
must take in the meaning of the total situation.

The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as
models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature
may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the
Greeks--Homer's flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines
upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are
cheerless,[73] and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive
and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.[74] The
jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the
all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the ultimate and
unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination.
The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern
fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to
those which we shall erelong see that Ilrahmans, Buddhists, Christians,
Mohammedans, twice-born people whose religion is non-naturalistic, get
from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation.

[73] E.g., Iliad XVII. 446: "Nothing then is more wretched anywhere
than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth."

[74] E.g., Theognis, 425-428: "Best of all for all things upon earth
is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the sun; next best
to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades." See also the
almost identical passage in Oedipus in Colonus, 1225.--The Anthology is
full of pessimistic utterances: "Naked came I upon the earth, naked I
go below the ground--why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked
before me?"--"How did I come to be? Whence am l? Wherefore did I come?
To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught
I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and
nothingness is the whole race of mortals."--"For death we are all
cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered."

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern
variety is that the Greeks had not made the discov