| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: And 'Stand, who goes?' 'Two from the palace' I.
'The second two: they wait,' he said, 'pass on;
His Highness wakes:' and one, that clashed in arms,
By glimmering lanes and walls of canvas led
Threading the soldier-city, till we heard
The drowsy folds of our great ensign shake
From blazoned lions o'er the imperial tent
Whispers of war.
Entering, the sudden light
Dazed me half-blind: I stood and seemed to hear,
As in a poplar grove when a light wind wakes
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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: Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were already battering the
Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of the Champs
Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous
Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at
the historic laws and predestined end of our
capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too
inexperienced in technical government and administration and too
melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class
struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his
generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in
which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot
laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he
lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de
genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has
not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!
He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in GERMINAL, there is
something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong
from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but
on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what
it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes
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