| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: taken to remove those prejudices, by an entire change in the
methods of education, that (with honour I mention it to our polite
innovators) the young gentlemen, who are now on the scene, seem to
have not the least tincture left of those infusions, or string of
those weeds, and by consequence the reason for abolishing nominal
Christianity upon that pretext is wholly ceased.
For the rest, it may perhaps admit a controversy, whether the
banishing all notions of religion whatsoever would be inconvenient
for the vulgar. Not that I am in the least of opinion with those
who hold religion to have been the invention of politicians, to
keep the lower part of the world in awe by the fear of invisible
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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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: humanity simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it
betokens the highest powers of generalized observation that he
produces the results he does. In his drawings, man is shown, not as
he might look in the primitive, or privitive, simplicity of his
ancestral Garden of Eden, but as he does look in the ordinary wear
and tear of his present garments. Civilization has furnished him
with clothes, and he prefers, when he has his picture taken, to keep
them on.
In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a
realist; it is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal.
But by ideal is not meant here conventional. That term of reproach
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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 Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: Dulloo, I mean--found his reward in the pretty things that Miss
Youghal said to him when she went out riding. Her parents were
pleased to find she had forgotten all her foolishness for young
Strickland and said she was a good girl.
Strickland vows that the two months of his service were the most
rigid mental discipline he has ever gone through. Quite apart from
the little fact that the wife of one of his fellow-saises fell in
love with him and then tried to poison him with arsenic because he
would have nothing to do with her, he had to school himself into
keeping quiet when Miss Youghal went out riding with some man who
tried to flirt with her, and he was forced to trot behind carrying
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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 Apology by Xenophon: their votes against him. Yet even so I look upon the lot of destiny
which he obtained as providential,[58] chancing as he did upon the
easiest amidst the many shapes of death,[59] and escaping as he did
the one grievous portion of existence. And what a glorious chance,
moreover, he had to display the full strength of his soul, for when
once he had decided that death was better for him than life, just as
in the old days he had never harshly opposed himself to the good
things of life morosely,[60] so even in face of death he showed no
touch of weakness, but with gaiety welcomed death's embrace, and
discharged life's debt.
[58] Lit. "dear to the gods"; "highly favoured."
The Apology |
