| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: preferred in heart to the brilliant Duc de Rhetore, the lover in
chief.
Dutocq had seen with great uneasiness what he called the liaison of
des Lupeaulx with Madame Rabourdin, and his silent wrath on the
subject was accumulating. He had too prying an eye not to have guessed
that Rabourdin was engaged in some great work outside of his official
labors, and he was provoked to feel that he knew nothing about it,
whereas that little Sebastien was, wholly or in part, in the secret.
Dutocq was intimate with Godard, under-head-clerk to Baudoyer, and the
high esteem in which Dutocq held Baudoyer was the original cause of
his acquaintance with Godard; not that Dutocq was sincere even in
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: and this movement appears to graduate into one closely like a smile.
Or the smile or laugh may be real, although one of derision;
and this implies that the offender is so insignificant that he excites
only amusement; but the amusement is generally a pretence.
Gaika in his answers to my queries remarks, that contempt
is commonly shown by his countrymen, the Kafirs, by smiling;
and the Rajah Brooke makes the same observation with respect to the Dyaks
of Borneo. As laughter is primarily the expression of simple joy,
very young children do not, I believe, ever laugh in derision.
The partial closure of the eyelids, as Duchenne[2] insists,
or the turning away of the eyes or of the whole body,
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: been seen to blush.
[10] `Letters from Egypt,' 1865, p. 66. Lady Gordon is mistaken
when she says Malays and Mulattoes never blush.
[11] Capt. Osborn (`Quedah,' p. 199), in speaking of a Malay,
whom be reproached for cruelty, says he was glad to see that
the man blushed.
Mr. Washington Matthews has often seen a blush on the faces
of the young squaws belonging to various wild Indian tribes
of North America. At the opposite extremity of the continent
in Tierra del Fuego, the natives, according to Mr. Bridges,
"blush much, but chiefly in regard to women; but they certainly
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding
as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion,
her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded
and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck,
with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op.
112, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney.
Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again,
and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising
and falling of the ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden
droop forward of her own head, and when it passed out of sight she
was asleep.
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