| 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: up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is
the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual
cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether. These
guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of
arable or pasture land, and make themselves responsible for a
certain average produce. They are bodies small enough as a rule
to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough to
supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from
townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but
the ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them
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 Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: gap; it was tumbledown and plainly very old, but built of big
stones very well laid; and there is no native alive to-day upon
that island that could dream of such a piece of building. Along
all the top of it was a line of queer figures, idols or scarecrows,
or what not. They had carved and painted faces ugly to view, their
eyes and teeth were of shell, their hair and their bright clothes
blew in the wind, and some of them worked with the tugging. There
are islands up west where they make these kind of figures till to-
day; but if ever they were made in this island, the practice and
the very recollection of it are now long forgotten. And the
singular thing was that all these bogies were as fresh as toys out
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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 The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: the other; Order rescues us from confusion and lands us in
Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is presently found
to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically balanced
application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the
same weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of
running after panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of
morals, ideals. One generation sets up duty, renunciation,
self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the
women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact
that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal,
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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 Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: "You need have no fear for me, Grandpapa."
Here the conversation ceased, Eustacia's moral training
never exceeding in severity a dialogue of this sort,
which, if it ever became profitable to good works,
would be a result not dear at the price. But her thoughts
soon strayed far from her own personality; and, full of a
passionate and indescribable solicitude for one to whom
she was not even a name, she went forth into the amplitude
of tanned wild around her, restless as Ahasuerus the Jew.
She was about half a mile from her residence when she
beheld a sinister redness arising from a ravine a little
Return of the Native |
