| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: blood! It will be by money paid for with hunger, by knowledge
stolen from sleep, by thoughts communicated under the shadow of
the gallows! It will be a movement beginning in the far-off
past, a thing obscure and unhonored, a thing easy to ridicule,
easy to despise; a thing unlovely, wearing the aspect of
vengeance and hate--but to you, the working-man, the wage-slave,
calling with a voice insistent, imperious--with a voice that you
cannot escape, wherever upon the earth you may be! With the
voice of all your wrongs, with the voice of all your desires;
with the voice of your duty and your hope--of everything in the
world that is worth while to you! The voice of the poor,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Apology by Xenophon: god addressed him with the words: 'I am considering whether to call
thee god or man.' Me he likened not indeed to a god, but in
excellence[27] preferred me far beyond other men."
[25] L. Dindorf cf. Athen. v. 218 E; Hermesianax ap. Athen. xiii. 599
A; Liban. vol. iii. pp. 34, 35; Plat. "Apol." 21 A; Paus. i. 22.
8; Schol. ad Aristoph. "Clouds," 144; Grote, "H. G." viii. 567
foll.
[26] See Herod. i. 65:
{ekeis, o Lukoorge, emon pori piona neon,
Zeni philos kai pasin 'Olumpia domat' ekhousi
dizo e se theon manteusomai e anthropon.
The Apology |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second
part of Goethe's Faust or Ibsen's Emperor or Galilean.
Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a
sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in
the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry
in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work
could reach success only when carried on the back of a very
fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that
the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the
overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact
|
