| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: small unexplored tributary of a large river that empties into the
Atlantic not so far from the equator, lay a small, heavily
palisaded village. Twenty palm-thatched, beehive huts sheltered
its black population, while a half-dozen goat skin tents in the
center of the clearing housed the score of Arabs who found shelter
here while, by trading and raiding, they collected the cargoes which
their ships of the desert bore northward twice each year to the
market of Timbuktu.
Playing before one of the Arab tents was a little girl of ten--a
black-haired, black-eyed little girl who, with her nut-brown skin
and graceful carriage looked every inch a daughter of the desert.
The Son of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: extending far into the sea away from the rest of the continent, while the
surrounding basin of the sea is everywhere deep in the neighbourhood of the
shore. Many great deluges have taken place during the nine thousand years,
for that is the number of years which have elapsed since the time of which
I am speaking; and during all this time and through so many changes, there
has never been any considerable accumulation of the soil coming down from
the mountains, as in other places, but the earth has fallen away all round
and sunk out of sight. The consequence is, that in comparison of what then
was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be
called, as in the case of small islands, all the richer and softer parts of
the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.
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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 Chance by Joseph Conrad: complication was there! I looked at his unshaken solemnity with the
amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat ill-natured
practical joke.
"Oh hang it," he exclaimed--in no logical connection with what he
had been relating to me. Nevertheless the exclamation was
intelligible enough.
However at first there were, he admitted, no untoward complications,
no embarrassing consequences. To a telegram in guarded terms
dispatched to de Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-
four hours. This certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety. When the
answer arrived late on the evening of next day it was in the shape
Chance |
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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The
absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a
height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong
Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it
would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.
Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in
Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the
whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world
is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more
than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer
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