| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling: of 'baccy," he goes on. "You're young, too! What wouldn't I give
to be young in France at this hour! There's nothing you couldn't
do," he says. "The ball's at your feet - kick it!" he says. He kicks
the old fire-bucket with his peg-leg. "General Buonaparte, for
example!" he goes on. "That man's a babe compared to me, and
see what he's done already. He's conquered Egypt and Austria
and Italy - oh! half Europe!" he says, "and now he sails back to
Paris, and he sails out to St Cloud down the river here -don't stare
at the river, you young fool! - and all in front of these pig-jobbing
lawyers and citizens he makes himself Consul, which is as good as
a King. He'll be King, too, in the next three turns of the capstan -
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: was one of them that "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where
thrift may follow fawning." Think of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern,
Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning
such people! If such evidence can prove anything (and Mr Harris
relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespear loathed courtiers.
If, on the other hand, Shakespear's characters are mostly members of
the leisured classes, the same thing is true of Mr Harris's own plays
and mine. Industrial slavery is not compatible with that freedom of
adventure, that personal refinement and intellectual culture, that
scope of action, which the higher and subtler drama demands.
Even Cervantes had finally to drop Don Quixote's troubles with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: indeed, exhibited Chichikov just as he exhibited himself to the
townsmen of N. and Manilov and the rest; well, then we may rest
assured that every reader would have been delighted with him, and have
voted him a most interesting person. For it is not nearly so necessary
that Chichikov should figure before the reader as though his form and
person were actually present to the eye as that, on concluding a
perusal of this work, the reader should be able to return, unharrowed
in soul, to that cult of the card-table which is the solace and
delight of all good Russians. Yes, readers of this book, none of you
really care to see humanity revealed in its nakedness. "Why should we
do so?" you say. "What would be the use of it? Do we not know for
Dead Souls |
