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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: medium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete
failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are
modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. To us, who live
in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for
art except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that
do not concern us. It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself,
exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so
suitable a motive for a tragedy. Besides, it is only the modern
that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a
picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now?
It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
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