| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series
of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into
good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort.
You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always
something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your
loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first
law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed,
made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of
livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE
ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence
which guided him among so many thousand follies and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: brighter than all others through the stillness of night, even
such was the gleam of the spear which Achilles poised in his
right hand, fraught with the death of noble Hector. He eyed his
fair flesh over and over to see where he could best wound it, but
all was protected by the goodly armour of which Hector had
spoiled Patroclus after he had slain him, save only the throat
where the collar-bones divide the neck from the shoulders, and
this is a most deadly place: here then did Achilles strike him as
he was coming on towards him, and the point of his spear went
right through the fleshy part of the neck, but it did not sever
his windpipe so that he could still speak. Hector fell headlong,
The Iliad |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: the mind, the opinion of the world, familiarizes them to us; and they take
more and more the form of immediate intuition. The moral sense comes last
and not first in the order of their development, and is the instinct which
we have inherited or acquired, not the nobler effort of reflection which
created them and which keeps them alive. We do not stop to reason about
common honesty. Whenever we are not blinded by self-deceit, as for example
in judging the actions of others, we have no hesitation in determining what
is right and wrong. The principles of morality, when not at variance with
some desire or worldly interest of our own, or with the opinion of the
public, are hardly perceived by us; but in the conflict of reason and
passion they assert their authority and are not overcome without remorse.
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