| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: father belonged to the old school . . . . . And my story was driven
back upon myself. I whispered it to my pillow--my pillow that was
often damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears. And
I added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one
heartfelt request: 'Please God I may dream of the garden. Oh! take
me back to my garden! Take me back to my garden!'
"I dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may
have changed it; I do not know . . . . . All this you understand
is an attempt to reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early
experience. Between that and the other consecutive memories of my
boyhood there is a gulf. A time came when it seemed impossible I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: abduction?--whatever it is." Mrs. Dick puckered her face to cry,
and Mr. Dick took a step forward, but Miss Patty waved him off.
"You know father as well as I do, Dolly. You know what he is,
and lately he's been awful. He's not well--it's his liver
again--and he won't listen to anything. Why, the Austrian
ambassador came up here, all this distance, to talk about the
etiquette of the--of my wedding, something about precedence, and
he wouldn't even see him."
"He can't annul it," said Mr. Dick angrily. "I'm of age. And I
can support my wife, too, or will be able--soon."
"Dolly's not of age," said Miss Patty wearily. "I've sat up all
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to
which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham
Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has
recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and
unanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to make
themselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, cries
out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man
that it owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does not
innovate, but reproduces.
ERNEST. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of
the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what
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