| 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: tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of
Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have
assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be
published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and
Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history
of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: not spring from within through some spirit informing it. But
wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and
under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in ROMEO
AND JULIET, in the WINTER'S TALE, in Provencal poetry, in the
ANCIENT MARINER, in LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, and in Chatterton's
BALLAD OF CHARITY.
We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's LES
MISERABLES, Baudelaire's FLEURS DU MAL, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and
tapestries and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris,
belong to him no less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at
last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a
sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent
with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in
just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the
drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole
situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was
already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be
in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form,
actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form
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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 A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: Americans and not all English do in their enunciation conform to these
types.
One May afternoon in 1919 I stopped at Salisbury to see that beautiful
cathedral and its serene and gracious close. "Star-scattered on the
grass," and beneath the noble trees, lay New Zealand soldiers, solitary
or in little groups, gazing, drowsing, talking at ease. Later, at the inn
I was shown to a small table, where sat already a young Englishman in
evening dress, at his dinner. As I sat down opposite him, I bowed, and he
returned it. Presently we were talking. When I said that I was stopping
expressly to see the cathedral, and how like a trance it was to find a
scene so utterly English full of New Zealanders lying all about, he
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