| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: and high-spirited, but they have all run away, overpowered by your superior
force of character; not one of them remains. And I want you to understand
the reason why you have been too much for them. You think that you have no
need of them or of any other man, for you have great possessions and lack
nothing, beginning with the body, and ending with the soul. In the first
place, you say to yourself that you are the fairest and tallest of the
citizens, and this every one who has eyes may see to be true; in the second
place, that you are among the noblest of them, highly connected both on the
father's and the mother's side, and sprung from one of the most
distinguished families in your own state, which is the greatest in Hellas,
and having many friends and kinsmen of the best sort, who can assist you
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do one thing by doing
something else, however closely allied the two things may be,
Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it
is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece
without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint
by the standard of Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can
realize how atrocious it used to sound to musicians of the old
school. When I first heard it, with the clear march of the
polyphony in Bach's B mmor Mass fresh in my memory, I confess I
thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that some of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Gain?" repeated Villon with a shrug. "Gain! The poor fellow
wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign.
Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If
they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to
the others. The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the
burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a
good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country, ay, I have
seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when
I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was
because they could not scrape together enough crowns to satisfy the
men-at-arms."
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