| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: passion, and lit by its own power, may pass as a pillar of fire as
well across the desert as across places that are pleasant. It is
none the less glorious though no man follow it - nay, by the
greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be quickened into
loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song. From the mean
squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the
idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with
fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun
and Bassarid dance there no more. Like Keats he may wander through
the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the
galley's deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: becomes didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of
the world as Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the
philosophy degenerates into the prescription of a romantic
nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only mortal after all,
succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was exhausted,
like any of the rest of us.
The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was
anticipated in the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from
Sussex named Shelley, in a work of extraordinary artistic power
and splendor. Prometheus Unbound is an English attempt at a Ring;
and when it is taken into account that the author was only 27
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: for the sole purpose of casting suspicion on Michu and the four
gentlemen. The unknown guilty parties must have had some strong reason
for wearing the skin, as it were, of five innocent men. To discover
them, even to get upon their traces, we need as much power as the
government itself, as many agents and as many eyes as there are
townships in a radius of fifty miles."
"The thing is impossible," said Bordin. "There's no use thinking of
it. Since society invented law it has never found a way to give an
innocent prisoner an equal chance against a magistrate who is pre-
disposed against him. Law is not bilateral. The defence, without spies
or police, cannot call social power to the rescue of its innocent
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