| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: nature and all being: at one end descending to animals and plants, and
attaining to the highest vision of truth at the other. In an age when man
was seeking for an expression of the world around him, the conception of
love greatly affected him. One of the first distinctions of language and
of mythology was that of gender; and at a later period the ancient
physicist, anticipating modern science, saw, or thought that he saw, a sex
in plants; there were elective affinities among the elements, marriages of
earth and heaven. (Aesch. Frag. Dan.) Love became a mythic personage whom
philosophy, borrowing from poetry, converted into an efficient cause of
creation. The traces of the existence of love, as of number and figure,
were everywhere discerned; and in the Pythagorean list of opposites male
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: spent a couple of days at each of these places. On the whole,
with her poetic furbelows and her misshapen, intelligent little face,
she was, when you knew her, a decidedly interesting woman.
She was naturally shy, and if she had been born a beauty,
she would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy.
Now, she was both diffident and importunate; extremely reserved
sometimes with her friends, and strangely expansive with strangers.
She despised her husband; despised him too much, for she had been
perfectly at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love
with a clever man who had slighted her, and she had married
a fool in the hope that this thankless wit, reflecting on it,
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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 Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: events of the previous night naturally awakened in his mind, resolved
to question David, and went to find him on the pretext of asking after
Seraphita's health. Though Monsieur Becker spoke of the old servant as
falling into dotage, Wilfrid relied on his own perspicacity to
discover scraps of truth in the torrent of the old man's rambling
talk.
David had the immovable, undecided, physiognomy of an octogenarian.
Under his white hair lay a forehead lined with wrinkles like the stone
courses of a ruined wall; and his face was furrowed like the bed of a
dried-up torrent. His life seemed to have retreated wholly to the
eyes, where light still shone, though its gleams were obscured by a
Seraphita |
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 War and the Future by H. G. Wells: action. My friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business
organiser, who used to make the best steam omnibuses in the
world, and who is now making all sorts of things for the army,
would go pink with suspicious anger at the mere words "inspector"
or "socialism" three or four years ago. He does not do so now.
A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive
sort of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may
not be saying socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour
begins to realise what is adrift it will be divided between two
things: between appreciative co-operation, for which guild
socialism in particular has prepared its mind, and traditional
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