| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: stroked his curling looks, and even kissed his ivory forehead: he
was my own Helen's son, and therefore mine; and as such I have ever
since regarded him. That pretty child is now a fine young man: he
has realised his mother's brightest expectations, and is at present
residing in Grassdale Manor with his young wife - the merry little
Helen Hattersley of yore.
I had not looked through half the book before Mrs. Maxwell appeared
to invite me into the other room to lunch. That lady's cool,
distant manners rather chilled me at first; but I did my best to
propitiate her, and not entirely without success, I think, even in
that first short visit; for when I talked cheerfully to her, she
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: to make and repeat maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucauld as though
there did not exist a mean, invented by the eighteenth century,
between a superfluity and absolute blank. If a few men of character
indulge in witticism, at once subtle and refined, they are
misunderstood; soon, tired of giving without receiving, they remain at
home, and leave fools to reign over their territory. This hollow life,
this perpetual expectation of a pleasure which never comes, this
permanent /ennui/ and emptiness of soul, heart, and mind, the
lassitude of the upper Parisian world, is reproduced on its features,
and stamps its parchment faces, its premature wrinkles, that
physiognomy of the wealthy upon which impotence has set its grimace,
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: from evil imputations. But the morals of a nation are not to be judged of
wholly by its literature. Hellas was not necessarily more corrupted in the
days of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, or of Plato and the Orators,
than England in the time of Fielding and Smollett, or France in the
nineteenth century. No one supposes certain French novels to be a
representation of ordinary French life. And the greater part of Greek
literature, beginning with Homer and including the tragedians,
philosophers, and, with the exception of the Comic poets (whose business
was to raise a laugh by whatever means), all the greater writers of Hellas
who have been preserved to us, are free from the taint of indecency.
Some general considerations occur to our mind when we begin to reflect on
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