| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: speak, in another ten years."
"You don't care for Ghosts, then," I ventured to suggest, unless they
are really terrifying?"
"Quite so," the lady assented. "The regular Railway-Ghosts--I mean
the Ghosts of ordinary Railway-literature--are very poor affairs.
I feel inclined to say, with Alexander Selkirk, 'Their tameness is
shocking to me'! And they never do any Midnight Murders.
They couldn't 'welter in gore,' to save their lives!"
"'Weltering in gore' is a very expressive phrase, certainly.
Can it be done in any fluid, I wonder?"
"I think not," the lady readily replied--quite as if she had thought
Sylvie and Bruno |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: think perhaps you scarce do justice to the fact that this is
a place of realism A OUTRANCE; nothing extenuated or
coloured. Looked at so, is it not, with all its tragic
features, wonderfully idyllic, with great beauty of scene and
circumstance? And will you please to observe that almost all
that is ugly is in the whites? I'll apologise for Papa
Randal if you like; but if I told you the whole truth - for I
did extenuate there! - and he seemed to me essential as a
figure, and essential as a pawn in the game, Wiltshire's
disgust for him being one of the small, efficient motives in
the story. Now it would have taken a fairish dose to disgust
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to
take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love,
the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds,
rancors, disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny
has bankrupted it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitious that are
hedged about, whoever hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short,
at the very bottom, the rabble, that mud which catches fire,--
such are the elements of revolt. That which is grandest and that
which is basest; the beings who prowl outside of all bounds,
awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants, vagabonds of the
cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of houses with no
Les Miserables |
