| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great,
because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the
impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second
class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue
has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind
directed to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair
field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this
more solemn theatre. A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of
the issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, offend us like an
insincerity. All should be plain, all straightforward to the end.
Hence it is that, in RHODA FLEMING, Mrs. Lovell raises such
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: to one side when you haven't any room to speak of,
you won't take to the perpendicular cliffs on the other
shore when they appear to be blasting there, too.
Your resources are limited, you see. There is simply
nothing for it but to watch and pray.
For some hours we had been making three and a half or four
miles an hour and we were still making that. We had been
dancing right along until those men began to shout;
then for the next ten minutes it seemed to me that I had
never seen a raft go so slowly. When the first blast went
off we raised our sun-umbrellas and waited for the result.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: and McTeague observed with relief that the line of track
which had hitherto held westward curved sharply to the south
again. The train was unmolested; occasionally the crew
fought with a gang of tramps who attempted to ride the brake
beams, and once in the northern part of Inyo County, while
they were halted at a water tank, an immense Indian buck,
blanketed to the ground, approached McTeague as he stood on
the roadbed stretching his legs, and without a word
presented to him a filthy, crumpled letter. The letter was
to the effect that the buck Big Jim was a good Indian and
deserving of charity; the signature was illegible. The
McTeague |
