| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they
do not conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the
elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the
impostor is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he
is taken for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be
treated as anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the
imagination when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual
experience it is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small
boy, my romantic imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction,
led me to brag to a still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a
simple soul, really believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: you as one I had met in my girlhood. Do you remember, when you
were studying at Heidelberg, an English family that was staying
there, who used to walk--"
"And the young lady who wore a long tail of rare-colored hair--ah,
I see it before my eyes!--who lost her gloves on the Great
Terrace--who was going back in the dusk to find them--to whom I
said, 'I'll go for them,' and you said, 'Oh, they are not worth
coming all the way up again for.' I DO remember, and how very long
we stayed talking there! I went next morning while the dew was on
the grass: there they lay--the little fingers sticking out damp
and thin. I see them now! I picked them up, and then--"
The Woodlanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: reference to the Greek, the English being really the more lucid and exact
of the two languages. In some respects it may be maintained that ordinary
English writing, such as the newspaper article, is superior to Plato: at
any rate it is couched in language which is very rarely obscure. On the
other hand, the greatest writers of Greece, Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, are generally those which are found to be
most difficult and to diverge most widely from the English idiom. The
translator will often have to convert the more abstract Greek into the more
concrete English, or vice versa, and he ought not to force upon one
language the character of another. In some cases, where the order is
confused, the expression feeble, the emphasis misplaced, or the sense
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