| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.
What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they
say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has
said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a
work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made
a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has
reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they
probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use
ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or
prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British
public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: the silence was frightful.
But Corentin had heard a fall from the ladder on the precipice side of
the tower, and he suspected some ruse.
"None of those animals are growling," he said to Hulot; "our lovers
are capable of fooling us on this side, and escaping themselves on the
other."
The spy, to clear up the mystery, sent for torches; Hulot,
understanding the force of Corentin's supposition, and hearing the
noise of a serious struggle in the direction of the Porte Saint-
Leonard, rushed to the guard-house exclaiming: "That's true, they
won't separate."
The Chouans |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I seized my colleague's arm. "She's there, she's there!"
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she
had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the
first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having
brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified;
she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad.
She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps
so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--
with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would
catch and understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude.
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