| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: to go that way.'
'The common people too, the working people?'
'All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and
aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation
breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and
tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of
bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the
mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their
real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making
mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world
is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin,
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss
Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old
names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to
stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom
you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in
kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.
They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his
key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his
reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with
a good woman living in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily
hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his
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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 Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: an Englishman, very bald, with a red nose, and long yellow teeth. He
received me with cold politeness, and asked in very good French what
my business was."
"Did you propose to him Luigia?"
"That was what I went for,--in the character, be it understood, of a
Swedish nobleman. He asked if her talent was known. 'Absolutely
unknown,' I replied. 'It is risky,' said Sir Francis; 'nevertheless
arrange to let me hear her.' I told him that she was staying with her
friend Madame de Saint-Esteve, at whose house I could take the liberty
to invite him to dinner."
"When?" asked Jacqueline.
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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 La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: vendangeoir--a vintage-house belonging to townsfolk in Tours, from
which Saint-Cyr is separated by the vast river-bed of the Loire. The
owners only came over for the day for a picnic, or at the vintage-
time, sending provisions across in the morning, and scarcely ever
spent the night there except during the grape harvest; but the English
settled down on Touraine like a cloud of locusts, and La Grenadiere
must, of course, be completed if it was to find tenants. Luckily,
however, this recent appendage is hidden from sight by the first two
trees of a lime-tree avenue planted in a gully below the vineyards.
There are only two acres of vineyard at most, the ground rising at the
back of the house so steeply that it is no very easy matter to
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