“So long, boys! See you in Berlin.” The shining and dividing sea was closer and not so wide.
He read a great deal—but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe, Smollet, Stern, and Fielding—the fine salt of the English novel lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of tea and molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron. At Buck Benson’s suggestion, he read Murray’s Euripides (at the time he was reading the Greek text of the Alcestis—noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death). He saw the grandeur of the Prometheus fable—but the fable moved him more than the play of Æschylus. In fact, Æschylus he found sublime—and dull: he could not understand his great reputation. Rather—he could. He was Literature—a writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore as Cicero— that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of Old Age and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet—he spoke like God among flashes of lightning: the Œdipus Rex is not only one of the greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories. This story—perfect, inevitable, and fabulous—wreaked upon him the nightmare coincidence of Destiny. It held him birdlike before its great snake-eye of wisdom and horror. And Euripides (whatever the disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.
He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse, from the Golden Ass to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of the moon and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found it, and for whatever purpose.
The best fabulists have often been the greatest satirists: satire (as with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a high and subtle art, quite beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale geese— slaughterings of the present degenerate age. Great satire needs the sustenance of great fable. Swift’s power of invention is incomparable: there’s no better fabulist in the world.
He read Poe’s stories, Frankenstein, and the plays of Lord Dunsany. He read Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the Book of Tobit. He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained.
