| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a much
vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence
Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer;
and since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book,
Wagner had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily
to the very beginnings of human society. And since, on this
world-embracing scale, it was clear that Siegfried must come into
conflict with many baser and stupider forces than those lofty
ones of supernatural religion and political constitutionalism
typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these minor antagonists
had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic, Mime,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: fellow-townsmen. My fellow-townsmen, dear boy, have treated me to
a fine serenade. MY FELLOW-TOWNSMEN, forsooth! I begin to wonder
how many fools go to make up that word, since I learned that two
or three of my old schoolfellows worked up the capital of the
Angoumois to this pitch of enthusiasm.
"If you could contrive to slip a few lines as to my reception in
among the news items, I should be several inches taller for it
here; and besides, I should make Mme. la Prefete feel that, if I
have not friends, I have some credit, at any rate, with the
Parisian press. I give up none of my hopes, and I will return the
compliment. If you want a good, solid, substantial article for
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: chattering, foolish for the most part, and vivaciously commonplace.
I don't know which made me feel most dreary. The predominance of
my countrymen gave the dinner the gayety of a funeral; the
predominance of the Mossoo gave it the fatigue of got-up
enthusiasm, of trivial expansiveness. To hear strangers imparting
the scraps of erudition and connoisseurship which they had that
morning gathered from their valets de place and guide-books, or
describing the sights they had just seen, to you, who either saw
them yesterday, or would see them to-morrow, could not be
permanently attractive. My mind refuses to pasture on such food
with gusto. I cannot be made to care what the Herr Baron's
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