| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: congregated dewdrops. 'Alas!' thought Dick Naseby, 'how can
any other day come so distastefully to me?' He still wanted
his experience of the morrow.
CHAPTER VII - THE ELOPEMENT
IT was probably on the stroke of ten, and Dick had been half
asleep for some time against the bank, when Esther came up
the road carrying a bundle. Some kind of instinct, or
perhaps the distant light footfalls, recalled him, while she
was still a good way off, to the possession of his faculties,
and he half raised himself and blinked upon the world. It
took him some time to recollect his thoughts. He had
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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 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating,
but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the
restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon
and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw
anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she
flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in
requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none
The Scarlet Letter |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: movement of our own day. At other times it entirely anticipates
its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another
century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. In no case does
it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time
itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.
The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to
Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature
may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but before
they are of any real service to art they must be translated into
artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative
medium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete
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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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: 57. The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with
the strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world
becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever
coming into view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual
eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been an
occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for
children and childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn conceptions
that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions
"God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more importance
than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old man;--
and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be
Beyond Good and Evil |
