| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: fashioned Flemish interiors rejoice the eye with their mellow tints,
and the feelings with their genuine heartiness. There, work implies no
weariness, and the pipe is a happy adaptation of Neapolitan "far-
niente." Thence comes the peaceful sentiment in Art (its most
essential condition), patience, and the element which renders its
creations durable, namely, conscience. Indeed, the Flemish character
lies in the two words, patience and conscience; words which seem at
first to exclude the richness of poetic light and shade, and to make
the manners and customs of the country as flat as its vast plains, as
cold as its foggy skies. And yet it is not so. Civilization has
brought her power to bear, and has modified all things, even the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: he was looked at with great admiration for about half the
evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of
his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above
his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large
estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most
forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to
be compared with his friend.
Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the
principal people in the room; he was lively and unreserved,
danced every dance, was angry that the ball closed so early,
and talked of giving one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable
Pride and Prejudice |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: That which most forces itself upon us as the result of a close personal
study of those sections of modern European societies in which change and
adaptation to the new conditions of life are now most rapidly progressing,
is, not merely that equally large bodies of men and women are being rapidly
modified as to their sexual and social ideals and as to their mode of life,
but that this change is strictly complementary.
If the ideal of the modern woman becomes increasingly one inconsistent with
the passive existence of woman on the remuneration which her sexual
attributes may win from man, and marriage becomes for her increasingly a
fellowship of comrades, rather than the relationship of the owner and the
bought, the keeper and the kept; the ideal of the typically modern man
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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 The Message by Honore de Balzac: me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
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