| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of
the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an
immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the
extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,
navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: that her daughter should be reading Byron in the dining-room late at
night alone with a strange young man. She blessed a disposition that
was so convenient, and felt tenderly towards her mother and her
mother's eccentricities. But Ralph observed that although Mrs. Hilbery
held the book so close to her eyes she was not reading a word.
"My dear mother, why aren't you in bed?" Katharine exclaimed, changing
astonishingly in the space of a minute to her usual condition of
authoritative good sense. "Why are you wandering about?"
"I'm sure I should like your poetry better than I like Lord Byron's,"
said Mrs. Hilbery, addressing Ralph Denham.
"Mr. Denham doesn't write poetry; he has written articles for father,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: It is the faith within the fear
That holds us to the life we curse; --
So let us in ourselves revere
The Self which is the Universe!
Let us, the Children of the Night,
Put off the cloak that hides the scar!
Let us be Children of the Light,
And tell the ages what we are!
Three Quatrains
I
As long as Fame's imperious music rings
|
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 Lesser Hippias by Plato: Menexenus would be at the end of the Phaedrus. The satirical opening and
the concluding words bear a great resemblance to the earlier dialogues; the
oration itself is professedly a mimetic work, like the speeches in the
Phaedrus, and cannot therefore be tested by a comparison of the other
writings of Plato. The funeral oration of Pericles is expressly mentioned
in the Phaedrus, and this may have suggested the subject, in the same
manner that the Cleitophon appears to be suggested by the slight mention of
Cleitophon and his attachment to Thrasymachus in the Republic; and the
Theages by the mention of Theages in the Apology and Republic; or as the
Second Alcibiades seems to be founded upon the text of Xenophon, Mem. A
similar taste for parody appears not only in the Phaedrus, but in the
|
