| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: absurdity. His notion of love may be summed up as the harmony of man with
himself in soul as well as body, and of all things in heaven and earth with
one another.
Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make laugh before he opens his mouth,
just as Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he begins
to speak. He expresses the very genius of the old comedy, its coarse and
forcible imagery, and the licence of its language in speaking about the
gods. He has no sophistical notions about love, which is brought back by
him to its common-sense meaning of love between intelligent beings. His
account of the origin of the sexes has the greatest (comic) probability and
verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: ERNEST. The sphere of the intellect?
GILBERT. Yes. You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in
his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be
merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion
for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with
equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the
use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and
more perfect. Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about the
theory. But perhaps I wronged you?
ERNEST. I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that
I feel very strongly that such work as you describe the critic
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making gods. He had
to make men; for he had few or none ready made among his old veterans
from Issus and Arbela. He had no hereditary aristocracy: and he wanted
none. No aristocracy of wealth; that might grow of itself, only too
fast for his despotic power. But as a despot, he must have a knot of
men round him who would do his work. And here came out his deep insight
into fact. It had not escaped that man, what was the secret of Greek
supremacy. How had he come there? How had his great master conquered
half the world? How had the little semi-barbarous mountain tribe up
there in Pella, risen under Philip to be the master-race of the globe?
How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of
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