“This is strange enough; and yet it’s a relief to meet a few happy people in this land of solemn faces; even if those happy ones do joy like fools.”
“They celebrate the passing of summer-heat and the coming of the rains of autumn. Say not fools; they are trying to be glad about something good, somehow coming from some one somewhere above them. Perhaps God can resolve scraps of thanksgiving out of it all.”
“Theirs is the laughter of wine! the laughter of the goat-god, Pan, whose face scared his mother and whose voice scared the gods!”
“We’ve a persistent custom here, son; and men do not play the fool for generations after one manner, at least, without cause.
“These attempt to press into the court of Pleasure to cajole her; all men do that; these have chosen merely an old way. They cling to the myth of Saturn, the subduer of the Titan of fiction. They say that deity, dethroned in the god-world, fled to Italy, where he gave happiness and plenty through life, and the freedom of air and earth after death, which latter he made to be only a little sleep.”
“That was not more than a mock golden-age; it never came, I think.”
“But very alluring to those that long for it; they dance half-naked, typifying the primitive times when men had fewer cares, because fewer wants.”
“Can one laugh hard fates out of countenance, and make his troubles run with a guffaw?”
“The devotees of Saturn were wont to offer their children in his altar-fires, and so ever more it happens; he that bends to the materialistic solely, kindles altar-fires for his posterity.”