[58] Infra, xi. 7.
[59] Plato, /Laws/, 959.
[60] Anth. Pal. vii. 670.
[61] Ibid. vii. 378, {agallomenoi kai taphon os thalamon}.
XV
Criticism, to be made effectively, must be made from beyond and outside the thing criticised. But as regards life itself, such an effort of abstraction is more than human. For the most part poetry looks on life from a point inside it, and the total view differs, or may even be reversed, with the position of the observer. The shifting of perspective makes things appear variously both in themselves and in their proportion to other things. What lies behind one person is before another; the less object, if nearer, may eclipse the greater; where there is no fixed standard of reference, how can it be determined what is real and what apparent, or whether there be any absolute fact at all? To some few among men it has been granted to look on life as it were from without, with vision unaffected by the limit of view and the rapid shifting of place. These, the poets who see life steadily and whole, in Matthew Arnold's celebrated phrase, are for the rest of mankind almost divine. We recognise them as such through a sort of instinct awakened by theirs and responding to it, through the inarticulate divinity of which we are all in some degree partakers.
These are the great poets; and we do not look, in any Anthology of slight and fugitive pieces, for so broad and sustained a view of life. But what we do find in the Anthology is the reflection in many epigrams of many partial criticisms from within; the expression, in the most brief and pointed form, of the total effect that life had on one man or another at certain moments, whether in the heat of blood, or the first melancholy of youth, or the graver regard of mature years. In nearly all the same sad note recurs, of the shortness of life, of the inevitableness of death. Now death is the shadow at the feast, bidding men make haste to drink before the cup is snatched from their lips with its sweetness yet undrained; again it is the bitterness within the cup itself, the lump of salt dissolving in the honeyed wine and spoiling the drink. Then comes the revolt against the cruel law of Nature in the crude thought of undisciplined minds. Sometimes this results in hard cynicism, sometimes in the relaxation of all effort; now and then the bitterness grows so deep that it almost takes the quality of a real philosophy, a nihilism, to use the barbarous term of our own day, that declares itself as a positive solution of the whole problem. "Little is the life of our rejoicing," cries Rufinus,[1] in the very words of an English ballad of the fifteenth century; "old age comes quickly, and death ends all." In many epigrams this burden is repeated. The philosophy is that of Ecclesiastes: "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, let thy garments be always white, and let thy head lack no ointment; see life with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity; for that is thy portion in life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun." If the irony here is unintentional it is all the bitterer; such consolation leads surely to a more profound gloom. With a selfish nature this view of life becomes degraded into cynical effrontery; under the Roman empire the lowest corruption of "good manners" took for its motto the famous words, repeated in an anonymous epigram,[2] Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. In finer tempers it issues in a mood strangely mingled of weakness of will and lucidity of intelligence, like that of Omar Khayyam. Many of the stanzas of the Persian poet have a close parallel, not only in thought but in actual turn of phrase, in verses of the later epigrammatists.[3] The briefness of life when first realised makes youth feverish and self-absorbed. "Other men perhaps will be, but /I/ shall be dead and turned into black earth"—as though that were the one thing of importance.[4] Or again, the beauty of returning spring is felt in the blood as an imperious call to renew the delight in the simplest physical pleasures, food and scent of flowers and walks in the fresh country air, and to thrust away the wintry thought of dead friends who cannot share those delights now.[5] The earliest form taken by the instinct of self-preservation and the revolt against death can hardly be called by a milder name than swaggering. "I don't care," the young man cries,[6] with a sort of faltering bravado. Snatch the pleasure of the moment, such is the selfish instinct of man before his first imagination of life, and then, and then let fate do its will upon you.[7] Thereafter, as the first turbulence of youth passes, its first sadness succeeds, with the thought of all who have gone before and all who are to follow, and of the long night of silence under the ground. Touches of tenderness break in upon the reveller; thoughts of the kinship of earth, as the drinker lifts the sweet cup wrought of the same clay as he; submission to the lot of mortality; counsels to be generous while life lasts, "to give and to share"; the renunciation of gross ambitions such as wealth and power, with some likeness or shadow in it of the crowning virtue of humility.[8]
It is here that the change begins. To renounce something for the first time wittingly and spontaneously is an action of supreme importance, and its consequences reach over the whole of life. Not only is it that he who has renounced one thing has shown himself implicitly capable of renouncing all things: he has shown much more; reflection, choice, will. Thenceforth he is able to see part of life at all events from outside, the part which he has put away from himself; for the first time his criticism of life begins to be real. He has no longer a mere feeling with regard to the laws of nature, whether eager haste or sullen submission or blind revolt; behind the feeling there is now thought, the power which makes and unmakes all things.
And so in mature age Greek thought began to make criticisms on life; and of these the Anthology preserves and crystallises many brilliant fragments. Perhaps there is no thought among them which was even then original; certainly there is none which is not now more or less familiar. But the perfected expression without which thought remains obscure and ineffectual gives some of them a value as enduring as their charm. A few of them are here set side by side without comment, for no comment is needed to make their sense clear, nor to give weight to their grave and penetrating reality.[9]
"Those who have left the sweet light I mourn no longer, but those who live in perpetual expectation of death."