| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: "And this straightforward, honourable man employed intrigues which he
had hitherto abhorred. He finally contrived that there should be a
competition for the picture which other artists were permitted to
enter into. Then he shut himself up in his room, and grasped his brush
with zeal. It seemed as if he were striving to summon all his strength
up for this occasion. And, in fact, the result turned out to be one of
his best works. No one doubted that he would bear off the palm. The
pictures were placed on exhibition, and all the others seemed to his
as night to day. But of a sudden, one of the members present, an
ecclesiastical personage if I mistake not, made a remark which
surprised every one. 'There is certainly much talent in this artist's
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: that Art may be learned, as book-keeping is, and when learned, will
give you more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no
more than you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is
always room on the walls for the bills to be read,--never for the
pictures to be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by
repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, nor
whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign countries, you
calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting in
abandoned wreck--(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately
pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all
the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when
there is nothing else to be said of them.
The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present and
can be interrogated. 'If he is the corrupter, who is the improver of the
citizens?' (Compare Meno.) 'All men everywhere.' But how absurd, how
contrary to analogy is this! How inconceivable too, that he should make
the citizens worse when he has to live with them. This surely cannot be
intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been instructed by
Meletus, and not accused in the court.
But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches men
not to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new gods.
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