| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there
merely "because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything,
but because it is true to life."
Yet "Taras Bulba" was in a sense an accident, just as many other works
of great men are accidents. It often requires a happy combination of
circumstances to produce a masterpiece. I have already told in my
introduction to "Dead Souls"[1] how Gogol created his great realistic
masterpiece, which was to influence Russian literature for generations
to come, under the influence of models so remote in time or place as
"Don Quixote" or "Pickwick Papers"; and how this combination of
influences joined to his own genius produced a work quite new and
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: together into a heap and began dividing them into colours.
And Bruno went on in a low, rapid tone, more as if he were talking to
himself. "Yesterday I saw two little caterpillars, when I was sitting
by the brook, just where oo go into the wood. They were quite green,
and they had yellow eyes, and they didn't see me. And one of them had
got a moth's wing to carry--a great brown moth's wing, oo know, all dry,
with feathers. So he couldn't want it to eat, I should think--perhaps
he meant to make a cloak for the winter?"
"Perhaps," I said, for Bruno had twisted up the last word into a sort
of question, and was looking at me for an answer.
One word was quite enough for the little fellow, and he went on
Sylvie and Bruno |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: "Then you will degenerate still more, sir."
"Possibly: yet why should I, if I can get sweet, fresh pleasure?
And I may get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee
gathers on the moor."
"It will sting--it will taste bitter, sir."
"How do you know?--you never tried it. How very serious--how very
solemn you look: and you are as ignorant of the matter as this
cameo head" (taking one from the mantelpiece). "You have no right
to preach to me, you neophyte, that have not passed the porch of
life, and are absolutely unacquainted with its mysteries."
"I only remind you of your own words, sir: you said error brought
Jane Eyre |
