| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: "Protect us!"
"Compel them to cease!"
"Thou didst abandon thy religion!"
"Impious as all the Herods!"
"Less impious than thou!" Antipas retorted. "Was it not my father that
erected thy Temple?"
Then the Pharisees, children of the proscribed tribes, partisans of
Mattathias, accused the tetrarch of all the crimes committed by his
family.
The Pharisees had pointed skulls, bristling beards, feeble hands, snub
noses, great round eyes, and their countenances bore a resemblance to
Herodias |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Daisy Miller by Henry James: Winterbourne stood looking after her; and as she moved away,
drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel, said to himself
that she had the tournure of a princess.
He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible, in promising
to present his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller.
As soon as the former lady had got better of her headache,
he waited upon her in her apartment; and, after the proper
inquiries in regard to her health, he asked her if she had
observed in the hotel an American family--a mamma, a daughter,
and a little boy.
"And a courier?" said Mrs. Costello. "Oh yes, I have observed them.
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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 What is Man? by Mark Twain: That was a quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of
my head more than twenty years ago, but I would rewrite it from
the pictures--for they remain. Here are three of them: (Fig. 1).
The first one is a haystack--below it a rattlesnake--and it
told me where to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley. The
second one told me where to begin the talk about a strange and
violent wind that used to burst upon Carson City from the Sierra
Nevadas every afternoon at two o'clock and try to blow the town
away. The third picture, as you easily perceive, is lightning;
its duty was to remind me when it was time to begin to talk about
San Francisco weather, where there IS no lightning--nor thunder,
What is Man? |
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 Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and
individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV., by creating
the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and
made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and
contemptible in their conformity to rule, and destroyed throughout
all France all those fine freedoms of expression that had made
tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique form. But
the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It
is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man
should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be.
The future is what artists are.
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