| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced
lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and
emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always
think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares
whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something
that Lionardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely
the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I
pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand
before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: ring to the laughter. Their table-talk was full of bitter irony which
turns a jest into a sneer; it told of the exhaustion of souls given
over to themselves; of lives with no end in view but the satisfaction
of self--of egoism induced by these times of peace in which we live. I
can think of nothing like it save a pamphlet against mankind at large
which Diderot was afraid to publish, a book that bares man's breast
simply to expose the plague-sores upon it. We listened to just such a
pamphlet as Rameau's Nephew, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the
course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which
the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken
for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Francis Bacon by Francis Bacon: or popularity. But the most honorable kind of fol-
lowing, is to be followed as one, that apprehendeth
to advance virtue, and desert, in all sorts of per-
sons. And yet, where there is no eminent odds in
sufficiency, it is better to take with the more pass-
able, than with the more able. And besides, to
speak truth, in base times, active men are of more
use than virtuous. It is true that in government, it
is good to use men of one rank equally: for to coun-
tenance some extraordinarily, is to make them
insolent, and the rest discontent; because they
Essays of Francis Bacon |
