| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: into the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a
poor clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on.
He is very fond of Natural History and various scientific matters,
and he is hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position.
He has no money to spare--hardly enough to use; and that has led
him into card-playing--Middlemarch is a great place for whist.
He does play for money, and he wins a good deal. Of course that
takes him into company a little beneath him, and makes him slack
about some things; and yet, with all that, looking at him as a whole,
I think he is one of the most blameless men I ever knew. He has
neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do not owe
their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest, the
realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not
only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but of
the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is a
ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no
guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcated
submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves,
and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be
inculcated.
And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: like his own child. Then, when Sarrasine's genius stood revealed in
one of those works wherein future talent contends with the
effervescence of youth, the generous Bouchardon tried to restore him
to the old attorney's good graces. The paternal wrath subsided in face
of the famous sculptor's authority. All Besancon congratulated itself
on having brought forth a future great man. In the first outburst of
delight due to his flattered vanity, the miserly attorney supplied his
son with the means to appear to advantage in society. The long and
laborious study demanded by the sculptor's profession subdued for a
long time Sarrasine's impetuous temperament and unruly genius.
Bouchardon, foreseeing how violently the passions would some day rage
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