| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard: to say that I was not implicated in these proceedings; neither
of them gave me her hand to kiss.
Then Nyleptha turned and addressed the man who appeared to be
in command of the bodyguard, apparently from her manner and his
frequent obeisances, giving him very stringent and careful orders;
after which, with a somewhat coquettish nod and smile, she left
the hall, followed by Sorais and most of the guards.
When the Queens had gone, the officer whom Nyleptha had addressed
came forward and with many tokens of deep respect led us from
the hall through various passages to a sumptuous set of apartments
opening out of a large central room lighted with brazen swinging
Allan Quatermain |
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: Hunding, by whose hearth he has taken refuge, is clansman to the
slain brothers and is bound to avenge them. He tells the Volsung
that in the morning, weapons or no weapons, he must fight for his
life. Then he orders the woman to bed, and follows her himself,
taking his spear with him.
The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing to
console himself with but an old promise of his father's that he
shall find a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last
flicker of the dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword
that sticks in the tree; but he does not see it; and the embers
sink into blackness. Then the woman returns. Hunding is safely
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: effect, and even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford
to have a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been
as poor as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort
that the Sicilian players gave us here; and that was not the best that
lay in Shakespear's power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure and
grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch
which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then will be
those in which none of the persons represented are troubled with want
of money or wretched drudgery. Our plays of poverty and squalor, now
the only ones that are true to the life of the majority of living men,
will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read
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