| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: Monsieur de Maufrigneuse. Oh! my friend, you men can never know what
an old man of gallantry can be. What a home is that of a man
accustomed to the adulation of women of the world, when he finds
neither incense nor censer in his own house! dead to all! and yet,
perhaps for that very reason, jealous. I wished--when Monsieur de
Maufrigneuse was wholly mine--I wished to be a good wife, but I found
myself repulsed with the harshness of a soured spirit by a man who
treated me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating my self-
respect at every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his
experience, and in convicting me of total ignorance. He wounded me on
all occasions. He did everything to make me detest him and to give me
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: continually varying flow of sentiment, is the highest feat of the
musician: it is in this way that we get the fugue of Bach and the
symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly inferior musician is the
one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to mention our purveyors
of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited quantity of
symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.
When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact
that there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not
distinguish it from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference
is that in them the repetition was used for the mechanical
completion of conventional metric patterns, whereas in The Ring
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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 Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: traveller was regarding him, and read his curiosity in his
astonishment; and courteous as he was and ready to please everybody,
before the other could ask him any question he anticipated him by
saying, "The appearance I present to your worship being so strange and
so out of the common, I should not be surprised if it filled you
with wonder; but you will cease to wonder when I tell you, as I do,
that I am one of those knights who, as people say, go seeking
adventures. I have left my home, I have mortgaged my estate, I have
given up my comforts, and committed myself to the arms of Fortune,
to bear me whithersoever she may please. My desire was to bring to
life again knight-errantry, now dead, and for some time past,
Don Quixote |
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 Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as I followed the
footpath. Wendover lay well down in the midst, with mountains of
foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to the northward,
variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of the fields, but
growing ever more and more indistinct, until it became a mere hurly-
burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and snatches of
slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over
the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and there with
blue, and with certain faint russets that looked as if they were
reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear
the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of
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