| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: corners, most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which
the sun shines, most delinquents to the police courts.
Half-way down this street, which is always damp, and where the gutter
carries to the Seine the blackened waters from some dye-works, there
is an old house, restored no doubt under Francis I., and built of
bricks held together by a few courses of masonry. That it is
substantial seems proved by the shape of its front wall, not
uncommonly seen in some parts of Paris. It bellies, so to speak, in a
manner caused by the protuberance of its first floor, crushed under
the weight of the second and third, but upheld by the strong wall of
the ground floor. At first sight it would seem as though the piers
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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 Turn of the Screw by Henry James: "His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging
specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him
of the little natural man. Still," I mused, "They must do,
for they make me feel more than ever that I must watch."
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face
how much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote
struck me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing.
This came out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me.
"Surely you don't accuse HIM--"
"Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me?
Ah, remember that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody."
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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 A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay: sunshine and shadow. Branchspell was blazing in a cloudless sky, the
heat was insufferable - streams of sweat coursed down his face, and
the corpse seemed to grow heavier and heavier. Tydomin always walked
in front of him. His eyes were fastened in an unseeing stare on her
white, womanish calves; he looked neither to right nor left. His
features grew sullen. At the end of ten minutes he suddenly allowed
his burden to slip off his shoulders on to the ground, where it lay
sprawled every which way. He called out to Tydomin.
She quickly looked around.
"Come here. It has just occurred to me" - he laughed - "why should I
be carrying this corpse - and why should I be following you at all?
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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 The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous
for the mind; and it is by the means of such designed
reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most
pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action
most perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and
logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style,
that is the foundation of the art of literature. Books
indeed continue to be read, for the interest of the fact or
fable, in which this quality is poorly represented, but still
it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we
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