| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: burgher virtues reigned, where religion and sacred sentiments and
honor filled the air, the poor prostitute, the disinherited mother was
enabled to bear her trial by visions of Juana, virgin, wife, and
mother, a mother throughout her life. On the threshold of that house
Marana left a tear such as the angels garner up.
Since that day of mourning and hope the mother, drawn by some
invincible presentiment, had thrice returned to see her daughter. Once
when Juana fell ill with a dangerous complaint:
"I knew it," she said to Perez when she reached the house.
Asleep, she had seen her Juana dying. She nursed her and watched her,
until one morning, sure of the girl's convalescence, she kissed her,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: absolute, positive, uncontradictory, undistortable.
Here the bourgeois republicans were concerned in securing their own
position. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so framed that the
National Assembly can constitutionally remove the President, but the
President can set aside the National Assembly only unconstitutionally,
he can set it aside only by setting aside the Constitution itself.
Accordingly, by these provisions, the National Assembly challenges its
own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like the character of
1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to an
unbearably contradictory extreme. The "play of constitutional powers,"
as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: thought no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensi-
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 25
bilities: nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts,
which, aided by the cheerful temper which grew inevitably out of
his physical well-being, did duty very respectably, and to
The Scarlet Letter |
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 Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed
the inclination of Society to another exponent of those
virtues. A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of
medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove his
birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it
is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of
Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged
index of social position.
Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the
hankering after them inherent in the civilised and educated
mind. To the superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may
|
