| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: bankers, big merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be
found even more causes of moral and physical destruction than
elsewhere. These people--almost all of them--live in unhealthy
offices, in fetid ante-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend
their days bowed down beneath the weight of affairs; they rise at dawn
to be in time, not to be left behind, to gain all or not to lose, to
overreach a man or his money, to open or wind up some business, to
take advantage of some fleeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or
set him free. They infect their horses, they overdrive and age and
break them, like their own legs, before their time. Time is their
tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: the manner of my escape. In substance these reasons were, first,
that such publication at any time during the existence of slavery
might be used by the master against the slave, and prevent
the future escape of any who might adopt the same means that I did.
The second reason was, if possible, still more binding to silence:
the publication of details would certainly have put in peril
the persons and property of those who assisted. Murder itself was
not more sternly and certainly punished in the State of Maryland
than that of aiding and abetting the escape of a slave.
Many colored men, for no other crime than that of giving aid to
a fugitive slave, have, like Charles T. Torrey, perished in prison.
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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 Crito by Plato: to play truant (you may call the proceeding by any name which you like),
and the laws and the government come and interrogate me: 'Tell us,
Socrates,' they say; 'what are you about? are you not going by an act of
yours to overturn us--the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies?
Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the
decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by
individuals?' What will be our answer, Crito, to these and the like words?
Any one, and especially a rhetorician, will have a good deal to say on
behalf of the law which requires a sentence to be carried out. He will
argue that this law should not be set aside; and shall we reply, 'Yes; but
the state has injured us and given an unjust sentence.' Suppose I say
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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 Menexenus by Plato: quite equal to the task of praising men to themselves. When we remember
that Antiphon is described by Thucydides as the best pleader of his day,
the satire on him and on the whole tribe of rhetoricians is transparent.
The ironical assumption of Socrates, that he must be a good orator because
he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is
rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of
Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic
than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates.
Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which Socrates expresses that
he will get a beating from his mistress, Aspasia: this is the natural
exaggeration of what might be expected from an imperious woman. Socrates
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