| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: shield us from all harsh and alien influences, we of the Northern
races must turn rather to that strained self-consciousness of our
age which, as it is the key-note of all our romantic art, must be
the source of all or nearly all our culture. I mean that
intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century which is always
looking for the secret of the life that still lingers round old and
bygone forms of culture. It takes from each what is serviceable
for the modern spirit - from Athens its wonder without its worship,
from Venice its splendour without its sin. The same spirit is
always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting
what it owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: one more nearly related to the emotional side of him than
to the intellectual, as is often the case with young men.
One day while in lodgings at Alfredston he had gone to Marygreen
to see his old aunt, and had observed between the brass
candlesticks on her mantlepiece the photograph of a pretty
girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating folds under
the brim like the rays of a halo. He had asked who she was.
His grand-aunt had gruffly replied that she was his cousin
Sue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family; and on
further questioning the old woman had replied that the girl lived
in Christminster, though she did not know where, or what she
Jude the Obscure |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: uncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were children's
lawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and imprisonment,
there would be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters, the
quality of school books, and the amenities of school life. That
Consciousness of Consent which, even in its present delusive form, has
enabled Democracy to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its
vulgarities and stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and
ignorances, would operate as powerfully among children as it does now
among grown-ups. No doubt the pedagogue would promptly turn
demagogue, and woo his scholars by all the arts of demagogy; but none
of these arts can easily be so dishonorable or mischievous as the art
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