| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: art by which, from the little red-and-black cruse of oil or wine, a
Greek boy could learn of the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the
strength of Hector and the beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen,
long before he stood and listened in crowded market-place or in
theatre of marble; or by which an Italian child of the fifteenth
century could know of the chastity of Lucrece and the death of
Camilla from carven doorway and from painted chest. For the good
we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become
through it. Its real influence will be in giving the mind that
enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to
demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: the house of Orleans, different shades of royalty? Under the Bourbons,
Large Landed Property ruled together with its parsons and lackeys; under
the Orleanist, it was the high finance, large industry, large commerce,
i.e., Capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and orators. The
Legitimate kingdom was but the political expression for the hereditary
rule of the landlords, as the July monarchy was bur the political
expression for the usurped rule of the bourgeois upstarts. What,
accordingly, kept these two factions apart was no so-called set of
principles, it was their material conditions for life--two different
sorts of property--; it was the old antagonism of the City and the
Country, the rivalry between Capital and Landed property. That
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: the meaning of the misty and aged look imparted to his pictures in
Elie's shop, and the utility of the subjects the picture-dealer had
required of him.
Far from losing the esteem of his admiring bottle-merchant, Monsieur
de Fougeres (for so the family persisted in calling Pierre Grassou)
advanced so much that when the portraits were finished he presented
them gratuitously to his father-in-law, his mother-in-law and his
wife.
At the present day, Pierre Grassou, who never misses exhibiting at the
Salon, passes in bourgeois regions for a fine portrait-painter. He
earns some twenty thousand francs a year and spoils a thousand francs'
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