| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: Sleep hidden in the lyre's silent strings
Till thou hast found the old Castalian rill,
Or from the Lesbian waters plucked drowned Sappho's golden quid!
Enough, enough that he whose life had been
A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame,
Could in the loveless land of Hades glean
One scorching harvest from those fields of flame
Where passion walks with naked unshod feet
And is not wounded, - ah! enough that once their lips could meet
In that wild throb when all existences
Seemed narrowed to one single ecstasy
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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 Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function
in the allegorical scheme become plain.
One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless
he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In
the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages
are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil.
In the modern humanitarian order as adopted by Wagner, Man is the
highest. In The Rhine Gold, it is pretended that there are as yet
no men on the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The
danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at
least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary,
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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 Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: would cry out, 'God be praised I' and would weep aloud for joy, telling
them they had heard nothing of it; and such was the joy of the people
that it was, as it were, life to them from the grave. I could almost set
down as many extravagant things done in the excess of their joy as of
their grief; but that would be to lessen the value of it.
I must confess myself to have been very much dejected just before
this happened; for the prodigious number that were taken sick the
week or two before, besides those that died, was such, and the
lamentations were so great everywhere, that a man must have seemed
to have acted even against his reason if he had so much as expected to
escape; and as there was hardly a house but mine in all my
A Journal of the Plague Year |
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 Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: fugitives vanished into Immensity; how there were no more trains
how Botley stared unsympathetically with a palpable disposition
to derision, denying conveyances how the landlord of the Heron
was suspicious, how the next day was Sunday, and the hot summer's
day had crumpled the collar of Phipps and stained the skirts of
Mrs. Milton, and dimmed the radiant emotions of the whole party.
Dangle, with sticking-plaster and a black eye, felt the absurdity
of the pose of the Wounded Knight, and abandoned it after the
faintest efforts. Recriminations never, perhaps, held the
foreground of the talk, but they played like summer lightning on
the edge of the conversation. And deep in the hearts of all was a
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