| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: It will do us all good. He and I can go to the Parsonage,
you know, and be no trouble to our friends at Mansfield Park.
It would really be gratifying to see them all again, and a
little addition of society might be of infinite use to them;
and as to yourself, you must feel yourself to be so wanted there,
that you cannot in conscience--conscientious as you are--
keep away, when you have the means of returning.
I have not time or patience to give half Henry's messages;
be satisfied that the spirit of each and every one is
unalterable affection."
Fanny's disgust at the greater part of this letter,
Mansfield Park |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: Venice theatre.
"Living was cheap, lodging inexpensive. I had a room in that Capello
palace from which the famous Bianca came forth one evening to become a
Grand Duchess of Tuscany. And I would dream that my unrecognized fame
would also emerge from thence one day to be crowned.
"I spent my evenings at the theatre and my days in work. Then came
disaster. The performance of an opera in which I had experimented,
trying my music, was a failure. No one understood my score for the
/Martiri/. Set Beethoven before the Italians and they are out of their
depth. No one had patience enough to wait for the effect to be
produced by the different motives given out by each instrument, which
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: as all good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth.
But, to set before either the painter or the historian the
inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued,
is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art
and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in
the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress:
IL NE FAUT DEMANDER DE L'ART QUE L'ART, DU PASSE QUE LE PASSE.
Herodotus wrote to illustrate the wonderful ways of Providence and
the nemesis that falls on sin, and his work is a good example of
the truth that nothing can dispense with criticism so much as a
moral aim. Thucydides has no creed to preach, no doctrine to
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