| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw: | |
TARLETON. | [_to Percival_] You never told me-- |
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PERCIVAL. | I hadnt the least idea-- |
_An embarrassed pause._
PERCIVAL. I assure you if I'd had the faintest notion that my
passenger was a lady I shouldnt have left you to shift for yourself in
that selfish way.
LORD SUMMERHAYS. The lady seems to have shifted for both very
effectually, sir.
PERCIVAL. Saved my life. I admit it most gratefully.
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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 Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and
high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours.
A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which
the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from
her. What remained to tell was--attenuated. He could not romance.
So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to inspire a
son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.
"You must make good friends," she said. "Isn't young Lord Breeze at
your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir
Freddy Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at
Cambridge."
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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 Straight Deal by Owen Wister: who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that, with a
drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have discovered
a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him, that they
were not all England. With two drops of thought it might even have
ultimately struck him that here we came, late, very late, indeed, only
just in time, from a country untouched, unafflicted, unbombed, safe,
because of England's ships, to tired, broken, bleeding England; and that
the sight of us, so jaunty, so fresh, so innocent of suffering and
bereavement, should have been for a thoughtless moment galling to
unthinking brains?
I am perfectly sure that if such considerations as these were laid before
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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 Cavalry General by Xenophon: speech and conduct whereby you will exercise your office most
acceptably to the gods themselves, and with . . ." Cf. Plat.
"Phaedr." 273 E; "Euthr." 14 B.
[3] The Greek phrase is warmer, {theon d' ileon onton}, "the gods
being kindly and propitious." Cf. Plat. "Laws," 712 B.
[4] Lit. "at any moment there will be too few." See "Les Cavaliers
Atheniens," par Albert Martin, p. 308.
But now suppose the complement of cavalry is levied,[5] the duty will
devolve on you of seeing, in the first place, that your horses are
well fed and in condition to stand their work, since a horse which
cannot endure fatigue will clearly be unable to overhaul the foeman or
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