| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: doubt that La Grenadiere was originally nothing but a simple
vendangeoir--a vintage-house belonging to townsfolk in Tours, from
which Saint-Cyr is separated by the vast river-bed of the Loire. The
owners only came over for the day for a picnic, or at the vintage-
time, sending provisions across in the morning, and scarcely ever
spent the night there except during the grape harvest; but the English
settled down on Touraine like a cloud of locusts, and La Grenadiere
must, of course, be completed if it was to find tenants. Luckily,
however, this recent appendage is hidden from sight by the first two
trees of a lime-tree avenue planted in a gully below the vineyards.
There are only two acres of vineyard at most, the ground rising at the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at the spot
where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo."
Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground,
Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong.
It was the remaining half of the justly celebrated English cavalry.
Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset remained.
The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt,
was ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating
of bags of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished;
there had been no time to make a palisade for it.
Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there
Les Miserables |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: B. W. H.
INTRODUCTION
I am well aware that there is material in this book which will
be misused by fools both white and red. That is not my
fault. My object has been narrowly limited. I have tried by
means of a bald record of conversations and things seen, to
provide material for those who wish to know what is being
done and thought in Moscow at the present time, and
demand something more to go upon than secondhand
reports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either
one side or the other, and often by neither one side nor the
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: and are bound to represent the interests of, and to give the state the
benefit of, the insight of their class, in certain directions.
Those persons who imagine that the balance of great political parties in
almost any society would be seriously changed by the admission of its women
in public functions are undoubtedly wholly wrong. The fundamental division
of humans into those inclined to hold by the past and defend whatever is,
and those hopeful of the future and inclined to introduce change, would
probably be found to exist in much the same proportion were the males or
the females of any given society compared: and the males and females of
each class will in the main share the faults, the virtues, and the
prejudices of their class. The individuals may lose by being excluded on
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