These new
rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books
I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the
fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever'.
"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets,
listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of
Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to
Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and
Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron
declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I
learned a little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do
with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary
tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every
literary tradition....
"Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from
me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life
rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.
"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some
time.
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