| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: word to generations of long-shore loafers and dishonest
boatmen. I obtained three months' pay and a five days'
leave, and made a rush for London. It took me a day
to get there and pretty well another to come back--but
three months' pay went all the same. I don't know what
I did with it. I went to a music-hall, I believe, lunched,
dined, and supped in a swell place in Regent Street, and
was back to time, with nothing but a complete set of
Byron's works and a new railway rug to show for three
months' work. The boatman who pulled me off to the
ship said: 'Hallo! I thought you had left the old thing.
Youth |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: people, and under such conditions that all the inhabitants of
the Union could directly take part in it.
All the head lines of railroads in the States were joined by
flying rails; and on all the platforms, lined with the same
flags, and decorated with the same ornaments, were tables laid
and all served alike. At certain hours, successively
calculated, marked by electric clocks which beat the seconds at
the same time, the population were invited to take their places
at the banquet tables. For four days, from the 5th to the 9th
of January, the trains were stopped as they are on Sundays on
the railways of the United States, and every road was open.
From the Earth to the Moon |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic
dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us
wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he
stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the
very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his
"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
What did he give me exactly?
He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he
provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion
and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express,
that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to
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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 Gorgias by Plato: them from his teacher as a part of the art of rhetoric. But he who has
learned carpentry is a carpenter, and he who has learned music is a
musician, and he who has learned justice is just. The rhetorician then
must be a just man, and rhetoric is a just thing. But Gorgias has already
admitted the opposite of this, viz. that rhetoric may be abused, and that
the rhetorician may act unjustly. How is the inconsistency to be
explained?
The fallacy of this argument is twofold; for in the first place, a man may
know justice and not be just--here is the old confusion of the arts and the
virtues;--nor can any teacher be expected to counteract wholly the bent of
natural character; and secondly, a man may have a degree of justice, but
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