| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: unconnected beauties. But I divagate; and all this sits in the
bosom of the publisher.
What is more important, I accept the terms of the dedication with a
frank heart, and the terms of your Latin legend fairly. The sight
of your pictures has once more awakened me to my right mind;
something may come of it; yet one more bold push to get free of
this prisonyard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily
exercise with my contemporaries. I do not know, I have a feeling
in my bones, a sentiment which may take on the forms of
imagination, or may not. If it does, I shall owe it to you; and
the thing will thus descend from Keats even if on the wrong side of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: I did not like to leave either of the boys with it at night. I was in a
very bad temper, indeed, although I was pretty well used to these sort
of occurrences, and soothed myself by taking a rifle and going to kill
something. For a couple of hours I poked about without seeing anything
that I could get a shot at, but at last, just as I was again within
seventy yards of the waggon, I put up an old Impala ram from behind a
mimosa thorn. He ran straight for the waggon, and it was not till he
was passing within a few feet of it that I could get a decent shot at
him. Then I pulled, and caught him half-way down the spine. Over he
went, dead as a door-nail, and a pretty shot it was, though I ought not
to say it. This little incident put me into rather a better humour,
Long Odds |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: complaint was made. Now, when the veriest dauber of canvas can send in
his work, the whole talk is of genius neglected! Where judgment no
longer exists, there is no longer anything judged. But whatever
artists may be doing now, they will come back in time to the
examination and selection which presents their works to the admiration
of the crowd for whom they work. Without selection by the Academy
there will be no Salon, and without the Salon art may perish.
Ever since the catalogue has grown into a book, many names have
appeared in it which still remain in their native obscurity, in spite
of the ten or a dozen pictures attached to them. Among these names
perhaps the most unknown to fame is that of an artist named Pierre
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