| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with
lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young
friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in
an agony. 'This is too bad of you,' he cried. 'Willoughby
is me!' 'No, my dear fellow,' said the author; 'he is all of
us.'
I have read THE EGOIST five or six times myself, and I mean
to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the
anecdote - I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very
serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: ``Sir Knight,'' answered the hermit, ``your
thoughts, like those of the ignorant laity, are according
to the flesh. It has pleased Our Lady and
my patron saint to bless the pittance to which I restrain
myself, even as the pulse and water was blessed
to the children Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego,
who drank the same rather than defile themselves
with the wine and meats which were appointed
them by the King of the Saracens.''
``Holy father,'' said the knight, ``upon whose
countenance it hath pleased Heaven to work such
Ivanhoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: these stories, it would no doubt be wasting ingenuity to
attempt to assign a mythical origin for each point of detail.
The ointment of the dervise, for instance, in the Arabian
tale, has probably no special mythical significance, but was
rather suggested by the exigencies of the story, in an age
when the old mythologies were so far disintegrated and mingled
together that any one talisman would serve as well as another
the purposes of the narrator. But the lightning-plants of
Indo-European folk-lore cannot be thus summarily disposed of;
for however difficult it may be for us to perceive any
connection between them and the celestial phenomena which they
Myths and Myth-Makers |
