| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: dangerous if not watched. Like a child, the Creole woman must have her
way immediately; like a child, she would burn a house to boil an egg.
In her soft and easy life she takes no care upon her mind; but when
impassioned, she thinks of all things. She has something of the
perfidy of the Negroes by whom she has been surrounded from her
cradle, but she is also as naive and even, at times, as artless as
they. Like them and like the children, she wishes doggedly for one
thing with a growing intensity of desire, and will brood upon that
idea until she hatches it. A strange assemblage of virtues and
defects! which her Spanish nature had strengthened in Madame
Evangelista, and over which her French experience had cast the glaze
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: the last to be resolved into the two first; or are the two first to be
included in the last? The subject was puzzling to them: they could not
say that friendship was only a quality, or a relation, or a virtue, or a
kind of virtue; and they had not in the age of Plato reached the point of
regarding it, like justice, as a form or attribute of virtue. They had
another perplexity: 8) How could one of the noblest feelings of human
nature be so near to one of the most detestable corruptions of it?
(Compare Symposium; Laws).
Leaving the Greek or ancient point of view, we may regard the question in a
more general way. Friendship is the union of two persons in mutual
affection and remembrance of one another. The friend can do for his friend
Lysis |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: "Mag, yer a bloomin' good-looker," he remarked, studying her
face through the haze. The men made Maggie fear, but she blushed
at Pete's words as it became apparent to her that she was the apple
of his eye.
Grey-headed men, wonderfully pathetic in their dissipation,
stared at her through clouds. Smooth-cheeked boys, some of them
with faces of stone and mouths of sin, not nearly so pathetic as
the grey heads, tried to find the girl's eyes in the smoke wreaths.
Maggie considered she was not what they thought her. She confined
her glances to Pete and the stage.
The orchestra played negro melodies and a versatile drummer
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
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 Odyssey by Homer: ballad manner follows the recognition of the romantic vein
in Homer, and, as a result, came Mr. Worsley's admirable
Odyssey. This masterly translation does all that can be
done for the Odyssey in the romantic style. The smoothness
of the verse, the wonderful closeness to the original,
reproduce all of Homer, in music and in meaning, that can
be rendered in English verse. There still, however, seems
an aspect Homeric poems, and a demand in connection with
Homer to be recognised, and to be satisfied.
Sainte-Beuve says, with reference probably to M. Leconte de
Lisle's prose version of the epics, that some people treat
The Odyssey |
