| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: cocoon. She serves up, like some rare dainty, to your lavished eyes,
the forms which her bodice scarcely revealed in the morning. At the
theatre she never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at the
Italiens. You can there watch at your leisure the studied
deliberateness of her movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all
the little political artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude
all idea of art or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand,
the most perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely
necessary that she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet
or curl she plays with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will
be persuaded that she is giving irony or grace to what she says to her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist - to
sympathise with a friend's success.
In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the
immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is
so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of
the first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the
higher animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be
remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy
in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: children in extreme poverty. One of them, Tobie Piedefer, went out to
the Indies, leaving the pittance they had inherited to his elder
brother. During the Revolution Moise Piedefer bought up the
nationalized land, pulled down abbeys and churches with all the zeal
of his ancestors, oddly enough, and married a Catholic, the only
daughter of a member of the Convention who had perished on the
scaffold. This ambitious Piedefer died in 1819, leaving a little girl
of remarkable beauty. This child, brought up in the Calvinist faith,
was named Dinah, in accordance with the custom in use among the sect,
of taking their Christian names from the Bible, so as to have nothing
in common with the Saints of the Roman Church.
The Muse of the Department |
