| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best
described as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be
relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in the
pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your
hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are
moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their
weakness. It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment
was interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard
and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from
a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop
that "damned thing." "I've heard about enough of that," he added;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: equality be complete. Though it has been found that to contract
marriages through the agency of match-makers is humiliating, it
is nevertheless a thousand times preferable to our system. There
the rights and the chances are equal; here the woman is a slave,
exhibited in the market. But as she cannot bend to her
condition, or make advances herself, there begins that other and
more abominable lie which is sometimes called GOING INTO SOCIETY,
sometimes AMUSING ONE'S SELF, and which is really nothing but the
hunt for a husband.
"But say to a mother or to her daughter that they are engaged
only in a hunt for a husband. God! What an offence! Yet they
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: hand. Toward the end my mother used to take me off in a corner and
tell me that I hadn't spoken a word to the little girl that I had
taken in to dinner, and that if I couldn't forget my uncouth
western ways for an hour or two, at least, perhaps I'd better not
try to mingle with civilized people. I discovered that home isn't
always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place
where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody, or something
needs you. They didn't need me over there in England. Lord no!
I was sick for the sight of a Navajo blanket. My shack's glowing
with them. And my books needed me, and the boys, and the critters,
and Kate."
Buttered Side Down |
