On Everything
and virtuous fools; and thus the salt of the Fantastic Books, which is as good as the salt of the sea, is lost to the most of mankind.
Men sit in front of the writers of Fantastic Books fair and squarely with their hands on their knees, their eyes set, their mouths glum, their souls determined, and say:
"Come now, Fantastic Book, are you serious or are you not serious?"
And when the Fantastic Book answers "I am both."
Then the man gets up with a sigh and concludes that it is neither. Yet the Fantastic Book was right, and if people were only wise they would salt all their libraries with Fantastic Books.
Note that the Fantastic Books are not of necessity jocose books or ribald books, nor even extravagant books. If I had meant to write about extravagant books, quâ extravagant, you may be certain I should have chosen that word. Rabelais is extravagant and so is Sterne, but not on account of their extravagance are they fantastic. The note of the Fantastic Book is an easy escape from the world. It is not imagination, though imagination is a necessary spring to it: it is that faculty by which the mind travels, as it reads, whether through space or through time or through quality. A book is a Fantastic Book, though time and space be commonplace enough, though the time be to-day and the place Camberwell, if only the mind perpetually
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