| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women. But
it is equally true of what are called educated people. For an
educated person's ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art
has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what
Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past
is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real
perfection depends. A temperament capable of receiving, through an
imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and
beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate
a work of art. And true as this is in the case of the appreciation
of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: He swears he'll lick us all
If we dare even speak about
The day he played baseball.
About Boys
Show me the boy who never threw
A stone at someone's cat;
Or never hurled a snowball swift
At someone's high silk hat.
Who never ran away from school,
To seek the swimming hole;
Or slyly from a neighbor's yard
Just Folks |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: in comparison of them, and their art was only sufficient to provide them
with the means of life, and did not enable them to carry on war against the
animals: food they had, but not as yet the art of government, of which the
art of war is a part. After a while the desire of self-preservation
gathered them into cities; but when they were gathered together, having no
art of government, they evil intreated one another, and were again in
process of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race
would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and
justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship
and conciliation. Hermes asked Zeus how he should impart justice and
reverence among men:--Should he distribute them as the arts are
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