| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he seeks to
exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of
himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.
With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the
recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond'
is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.
In his other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair'
even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his
work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by
directly mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever
of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: and breeding. His sole heir was a nephew, whom he greatly loved, in
whose interests he planted his poplars. When a man thinks without
annoyance about his heir, and watches the trees grow daily finer for
his future benefit, affection grows too with every blow of the spade
around her roots. Though this phenomenal feeling is not common, it is
still to be met with in Touraine.
This cherished nephew, named Octave de Camps, was a descendant of the
famous Abbe de Camps, so well known to bibliophiles and learned men,--
who, by the bye, are not at all the same thing. People in the
provinces have the bad habit of branding with a sort of decent
reprobation any young man who sells his inherited estates. This
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: relationship. It was no monotony of bliss--she with her impulses and
quicknesses; he with his shudders and glooms. Oh, no. The bedroom door
would slam violently early in the morning. He would start from the
table in a temper. He would whizz his plate through the window. Then
all through the house there would be a sense of doors slamming and
blinds fluttering, as if a gusty wind were blowing and people scudded
about trying in a hasty way to fasten hatches and make things ship-
shape. She had met Paul Rayley like that one day on the stairs. It had
been an earwig, apparently. Other people might find centipedes. They
had laughed and laughed.
But it tired Mrs Ramsay, it cowed her a little--the plates whizzing
To the Lighthouse |
