| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous by Oscar Wilde: at a private performance by the New Stage Club. No one present will
have forgotten the extraordinary tension of the audience on that
occasion, those who disliked the play and its author being
hypnotised by the extraordinary power of Mr. Robert Farquharson's
Herod, one of the finest pieces of acting ever seen in this country.
My friends the dramatic critics (and many of them are personal
friends) fell on Salome with all the vigour of their predecessors
twelve years before. Unaware of what was taking place in Germany,
they spoke of the play as having been 'dragged from obscurity.' The
Official Receiver in Bankruptcy and myself were, however, better
informed. And much pleasure has been derived from reading those
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Lutha, and what he had overheard in the inn at Burgova
was sufficient evidence that the fate of Lutha hung upon
the prompt and energetic decisions of the man who sat
upon Lutha's throne for the next few days.
Had Leopold been the present incumbent Lutha would
have been lost, for that he would play directly into the
hands of Austria was not to be questioned. Were Von der
Tann to seize the reins of government a state of revolution
would exist that would divide the state into two bitter
factions, weaken its defense, and give Austria what she most
desired--a plausible pretext for intervention.
The Mad King |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: observer surveys the intellectual history of this time, when one
reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps of
political oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected
out of a thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the
most striking thing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely
that hallucination of security. To men living in our present
world state, orderly, scientific and secured, nothing seems so
precarious, so giddily dangerous, as the fabric of the social
order with which the men of the opening of the twentieth century
were content. To us it seems that every institution and
relationship was the fruit of haphazard and tradition and the
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