| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every
escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came
to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of
her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it,
whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de
la Paix. He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to
Bonnebault. He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry
remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one
perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death
here."
Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: He was a very curious man. He wanted to marry beneath him. Or
wouldn't, I believe. There was some scandal about it. The present
Lord Illingworth is quite different. He is very distinguished. He
does - well, he does nothing, which I am afraid our pretty American
visitor here thinks very wrong of anybody, and I don't know that he
cares much for the subjects in which you are so interested, dear
Mrs. Arbuthnot. Do you think, Caroline, that Lord Illingworth is
interested in the Housing of the Poor?
LADY CAROLINE. I should fancy not at all, Jane.
LADY HUNSTANTON. We all have our different tastes, have we not?
But Lord Illingworth has a very high position, and there is nothing
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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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: he marched through Trafalgar Square grasping a big stick? Had he
turned pages over and over, without reading them, sitting in his room
in St. John's Wood alone? She did not know what he had done, when he
heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the same.
They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the
sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. But this was one way
of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to
sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple
down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. She knew
that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry.
She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonorously.
To the Lighthouse |
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: like threads of fine gold, and whose mouth was as a pomegranate.
But the sympathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily with
what has found expression. In words or in colours, in music or in
marble, behind the painted masks of an AEschylean play, or through
some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed reeds, the man and his
message must have been revealed.
To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can
conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ
it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills
one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate,
the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself
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