| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as
corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault.
The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.
They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want
of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they
have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of
seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much,
and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own
stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public
should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide
difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his
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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 Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare: Near twenty years ago in Genoa,
Where we were lodgers at the Pegasus.
TRANIO.
'Tis well; and hold your own, in any case,
With such austerity as 'longeth to a father.
PEDANT.
I warrant you. But, sir, here comes your boy;
'Twere good he were school'd.
[Enter BIONDELLO.]
TRANIO.
Fear you not him. Sirrah Biondello,
The Taming of the Shrew |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: investigation; for in such a man there ought to be no direct
antagonism of thought and action.
Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already
ceased to be Desplein's house surgeon, saw the great man's cab
standing at the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du
Petit-Lion, whence his friend jesuitically crept along by the
wall of Saint-Sulpice, and once more attended mass in front of
the Virgin's altar. It was Desplein, sure enough! The master-
surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper by chance. The
mystery was greater than ever; the regularity of the phenomenon
complicated it. When Desplein had left, Bianchon went to the
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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 Protagoras by Plato: manner of the Sophists, showing, as Alcibiades says, that he is only
pretending to have a bad memory, and that he and not Protagoras is really a
master in the two styles of speaking; and that he can undertake, not one
side of the argument only, but both, when Protagoras begins to break down.
Against the authority of the poets with whom Protagoras has ingeniously
identified himself at the commencement of the Dialogue, Socrates sets up
the proverbial philosophers and those masters of brevity the
Lacedaemonians. The poets, the Laconizers, and Protagoras are satirized at
the same time.
Not having the whole of this poem before us, it is impossible for us to
answer certainly the question of Protagoras, how the two passages of
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