| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: to passing over very superficially at the time, there were other
and more cogent reasons for wanting to go from Venice to the Big
Venetian. It was the first of July, and the city on the sea was
becoming tepid. A slumbrous haze brooded over canals and palaces
and churches. It was difficult to keep one's conscience awake to
Baedeker and a sense of moral obligation; Ruskin was impossible,
and a picture-gallery was a penance. We floated lazily from one
place to another, and decided that, after all, it was too warm to
go in. The cries of the gondoliers, at the canal corners, grew
more and more monotonous and dreamy. There was danger of our
falling fast asleep and having to pay by the hour for a day's
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian literature in the age
of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and rhetoric? We can discourse
and write about poems and paintings, but we seem to have lost the gift of
creating them. Can we wonder that few of them 'come sweetly from nature,'
while ten thousand reviewers (mala murioi) are engaged in dissecting them?
Young men, like Phaedrus, are enamoured of their own literary clique and
have but a feeble sympathy with the master-minds of former ages. They
recognize 'a POETICAL necessity in the writings of their favourite author,
even when he boldly wrote off just what came in his head.' They are
beginning to think that Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about
to disappear from the world. And would not a great painter, such as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: overcome by her visibility, by the great wonder of being palpably
loved. An old man's child, having lost his mother early, thrown
out to sea out of the way while very young, he had not much
experience of tenderness of any kind.
In this private, foliage-embowered verandah, and at this late hour
of the afternoon, he bent down a little, and, possessing himself of
Freya's hands, was kissing them one after another, while she smiled
and looked down at his head with the eyes of approving compassion.
At that same moment Heemskirk was approaching the house from the
north.
Antonia was on the watch on that side. But she did not keep a very
'Twixt Land & Sea |
