| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: his barge-load of hungry and starving men.
For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if
civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds
upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered,
opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame' over nations
destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined,
fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies.
Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war
still burn amidst the ruins?
Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance
in their answers to that question. Already once in the history
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: the last of which the Downs, or open country, begins, which we in
general, though falsely, call Salisbury Plain. But my resolution
being to take in my view what I had passed by before, I was obliged
to go off to the left hand, to Alresford and Winchester.
Alresford was a flourishing market-town, and remarkable for this--
that though it had no great trade, and particularly very little, if
any, manufactures, yet there was no collection in the town for the
poor, nor any poor low enough to take alms of the parish, which is
what I do not think can be said of any town in England besides.
But this happy circumstance, which so distinguished Alresford from
all her neighbours, was brought to an end in the year -, when by a
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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 An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: accompanied the consulting physician to the door, detected the
family doctor in the act of pulling a long face just outside it.
Restraining a desire to seize him by the throat, he seated
himself on the edge of the table and said cheerfully:
"Well, doctor, how has the world used you since we last met?"
The doctor was taken aback, but the solemn disposition of his
features did not relax as he almost intoned: "Has Sir Francis
told you the sad news, Mr. Trefusis?"
"Yes. Frightful, isn't it? Lord bless me, we're here to-day and
gone to-morrow."
"True, very true!"
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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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Shakespear's verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespear always
seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still
unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship
delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be
outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the
language of passion: their cruelty shews it. There is no evidence
that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his
revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing
neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that
she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.
In seizing on these two points Mr Harris has made so sure a stroke,
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