| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: the galleries. The Salon should have remained within fixed limits of
inflexible proportions, where each distinct specialty could show its
masterpieces only. An experience of ten years has shown the excellence
of the former institution. Now, instead of a tournament, we have a
mob; instead of a noble exhibition, we have a tumultuous bazaar;
instead of a choice selection we have a chaotic mass. What is the
result? A great artist is swamped. Decamps' "Turkish Cafe," "Children
at a Fountain," "Joseph," and "The Torture," would have redounded far
more to his credit if the four pictures had been exhibited in the
great Salon with the hundred good pictures of that year, than his
twenty pictures could, among three thousand others, jumbled together
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: little rooms or even--even cupboards!
Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and
through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined
clouds.
Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! tiddle-um! tum tiddley-um tum ta! blew the band.
Two young girls in red came by and two young soldiers in blue met them, and
they laughed and paired and went off arm-in-arm. Two peasant women with
funny straw hats passed, gravely, leading beautiful smoke-coloured donkeys.
A cold, pale nun hurried by. A beautiful woman came along and dropped her
bunch of violets, and a little boy ran after to hand them to her, and she
took them and threw them away as if they'd been poisoned. Dear me! Miss
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: beauty, far beyond any which still exist, having in them also many wealthy
villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food
enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts,
abundant for each and every kind of work.
I will now describe the plain, as it was fashioned by nature and by the
labours of many generations of kings through long ages. It was for the
most part rectangular and oblong, and where falling out of the straight
line followed the circular ditch. The depth, and width, and length of this
ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent,
in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial.
Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of
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