| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of
the mysterious restraint that kept "Eliza and our James" from teaching
Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why
Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers
went to the galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no
such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country
gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the
shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal
servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play,
Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as
normal rank and file men. In Julius Caesar, Shakespear went to work
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: fearfully shaken with drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the
thirty-five which, he said, was his real age. When a man begins to
sink in India, and is not sent Home by his friends as soon as may
be, he falls very low from a respectable point of view. By the time
that he changes his creed, as did McIntosh, he is past redemption.
In most big cities, natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs,
generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who
live more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to
know them. As McIntosh himself used to say:--"If I change my
religion for my stomach's sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to
missionaries, nor am I anxious for notoriety."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Hughes's sake: for his sake, and for the sake of Cyril Graham,
whom I drove to his death by my shallow scepticism and ignorant
lack of faith. The truth was once revealed to you, and you
rejected it. It comes to you now stained with the blood of two
lives, - do not turn away from it.'
It was a horrible moment. I felt sick with misery, and yet I could
not believe it. To die for one's theological beliefs is the worst
use a man can make of his life, but to die for a literary theory!
It seemed impossible.
I looked at the date. The letter was a week old. Some unfortunate
chance had prevented my going to the club for several days, or I
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