| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: there is an escape into a wider world. It is sometimes said that
the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his
ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is
that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal
is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.
Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the
explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor
gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual
dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: and they are right in this sense,--that human happiness is
coincident with the annihilation of 'Self.' Only they do not
express themselves well. They say that Humanity should
annihilate itself to avoid its sufferings, that its object should
be to destroy itself. Now the object of Humanity cannot be to
avoid sufferings by annihilation, since suffering is the result
of activity. The object of activity cannot consist in
suppressing its consequences. The object of Man, as of Humanity,
is happiness, and, to attain it, Humanity has a law which it must
carry out. This law consists in the union of beings. This union
is thwarted by the passions. And that is why, if the passions
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: would have shot him violently out of any church at present established
in the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about
Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the
cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that
this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the
Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and
about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came
to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no
doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation
were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of
my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a
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