| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: rearranged. The next--
White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before
him.
14
The first of Benham's early essays was written in an almost boyish
hand, it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to
definitions and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part
to part. It was called TRUE DEMOCRACY. Manifestly it was written
before the incident of the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had
been done after Prothero's visit to Chexington. White could feel
that now inaudible interlocutor. And there were even traces of Sir
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: The mechanism and the scheme of the world was apparent to him, and its
working interested him no longer; he did not long disguise the
profound scorn that makes of a man of extraordinary powers a sphinx
who knows everything and says nothing, and sees all things with an
unmoved countenance. He felt not the slightest wish to communicate his
knowledge to other men. He was rich with all the wealth of the world,
with one effort he could make the circle of the globe, and riches and
power were meaningless for him. He felt the awful melancholy of
omnipotence, a melancholy which Satan and God relieve by the exercise
of infinite power in mysterious ways known to them alone. Castanier
had not, like his Master, the inextinguishable energy of hate and
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: through green on a tongue of land running down
from the north; and on the lower ridges and little
islands, pale and dark blue, and the most exquisite
fields of lavender. This last tint was reflected in
the water immediately below the ridge, and farther
out there were lakelets of pale green, as if the
islands, too, had the power to mirror themselves
when the sea itself was glass.
Santiago, Davidov, Carolina Xime'no, Delfina Ri-
vera, Concha and Rezanov, had climbed to the ridge.
The other young people had given out halfway up
Rezanov |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: Rumble's picture, and had my bottled resentment ready when, later
on, I found my distracted friend had been stuffed by Mrs. Wimbush
into the mouth of another cannon. A young artist in whom she was
intensely interested, and who had no connexion with Mr. Rumble, was
to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday, in return, was
naturally to write something somewhere about the young artist. She
played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and
her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the
biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene with
her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was
to exercise his genius - not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial
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