So with literature. Your man may say to you at the end of your fine speeches: "I don't agree with you. I think the plots of 'Hamlet' and 'Œdipus Tyrannus' are horrible, morbid plots; as for 'Œdipus,' it's a beastly plot, and the play ought to be suppressed by the police. And they're silly as well as horrible. One turns on a nonsensical oracle. The parents of Œdipus are told by the oracle that their new born child will live to murder his father and marry his mother. So, believing in the oracle and the fate, the parents expose the infant on a mountain to die. But if they believed in the oracle, where was the sense of trying to alter its decree? Hamlet? The man who saw his father's ghost, and then talked of death as a bourne from which no traveller returns!"
The fellow is wildly wrong, no
