| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: As a rule models are absolutely DE NOTRE SIECLE, and should be
painted as such. Unfortunately they are not, and, as a
consequence, we are shown every year a series of scenes from fancy
dress balls which are called historical pictures, but are little
more than mediocre representations of modern people masquerading.
In France they are wiser. The French painter uses the model simply
for study; for the finished picture he goes direct to life.
However, we must not blame the sitters for the shortcomings of the
artists. The English models are a well-behaved and hard-working
class, and if they are more interested in artists than in art, a
large section of the public is in the same condition, and most of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: THE BIRTHMARK
In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of
science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural
philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made
experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any
chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an
assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke,
washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a
beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the
comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred
mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: job; and Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school. At
twenty-six George was a wanderer, a tramp, and Henry was pastor
of the village church. Then George came home, and was Henry's
guest. One evening a man passed by and turned down the lane, and
Henry said, with a pathetic smile, "Without intending me a
discomfort, that man is always keeping me reminded of my pinching
poverty, for he carries heaps of money about him, and goes by
here every evening of his life." That OUTSIDE INFLUENCE--that
remark--was enough for George, but IT was not the one that made
him ambush the man and rob him, it merely represented the eleven
years' accumulation of such influences, and gave birth to the act
What is Man? |
