| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete condition, visible,
substantial, understandable and all right, like a cabbage; but
the artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower.
The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come
from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse
which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not
understand why, at first: all the words being the right words,
none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous,
therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their
message take hold.
The mossy marbles rest
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: the right to command them, or else the man with money
in his pockets to make it worth their while. These two
are the only leaders they understand. And if that's true
here in England, in times of peace, among our own people,
how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away from England,
in a time of war?"
"But, mamma," the Hon. Winifred intervened, "don't you
see how badly that might work nowadays? now that the good
families have so little money, and all the fortunes are
in the hands of stockjobbing people--and so on? It would
be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and
The Market-Place |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: than by what they are. Don John in Much Ado is a true villain: a man
with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in
a leading part; and when we come to the great villains like Macbeth,
we find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely identical
with the heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing
murders and engaging in hand-to-hand combats. And Hamlet, who does
not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always
apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to
his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. "It
cannot be," he says, "but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make
oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region
|
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 Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard: two young bulls quarrel they had better fight it out." So, at least, I
was told by the late Mr. F. B. Fynney, my colleague at the time of the
annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, who, as Zulu Border Agent, with the
exceptions of the late Sir Theophilus Shepstone and the late Sir Melmoth
Osborn, perhaps knew more of that land and people than anyone else of
his period.
As a result of this hint given by a maddened king, the great battle of
the Tugela was fought at Endondakusuka in December, 1856, between the
Usutu party, commanded by Cetewayo, and the adherents of Umbelazi the
Handsome, his brother, who was known among the Zulus as
"Indhlovu-ene-Sihlonti", or the "Elephant with the tuft of hair," from a
Child of Storm |
