| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: ready felt doubtful whether "it was a thing God
would approve," Art for Art's sake having in his
eyes no right to existence. For this reason a
didactic tendency is increasingly evident in these
later stories. "After the Ball" gives a painful
picture of Russian military cruelty; "The Forged
Coupon" traces the cancerous growth of evil,
and demonstrates with dramatic force the cumu-
lative misery resulting from one apparently trivial
act of wrongdoing.
Of the three plays included in these volumes,
The Forged Coupon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: story, as it was raked out before him in that public scene, was one of
disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime; and the
creature heard and it seemed at times as though he understood - as if at
times he forgot the horror of the place he stood in, and remembered the
shame of what had brought him there. He kept his head bowed and his
hands clutched upon the rail; his hair dropped in his eyes and at times
he flung it back; and now he glanced about the audience in a sudden
fellness of terror, and now looked in the face of his judge and gulped.
There was pinned about his throat a piece of dingy flannel; and this it
was perhaps that turned the scale in Archie's mind between disgust and
pity. The creature stood in a vanishing point; yet a little while, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: interest) into the country after Falleix, who has gone post-haste,
with a courier in advance of him."
"Is it possible!" said Gobseck.
"What for?" cried Gigonnet, "and where to?"
"To des Lupeaulx's magnificent country-seat," replied Mitral. "Falleix
knows the country, for he was born there; and he is going to buy up
land all round the secretary's miserable hovel, with the two hundred
and fifty thousand francs I speak of,--good land, well worth the
price. There are only nine days before us for drawing up and recording
the notarial deeds (bear that in mind). With the addition of this
land, des Lupeaulx's present miserable property would pay taxes to the
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