| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and
treatment it is perfect, absolutely. The ethical effect of art,
its importance to culture, and its place in the formation of
character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have
art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely aesthetic
point of view. Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely
artistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of
art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value of
appearances, the relation of the visible arts to the external
world, and the relation of fiction to fact. He first perhaps
stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
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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 Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: She recounted to him some incidents of her call upon
Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big
kitchen apron--how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be;
how her affection for her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife,
disclosed itself to be not even skin-deep; how the children
leaped upon the candy as if they had never seen any before;
and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and soul on
Theron's side at the Conference.
To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at
all interested. He hardly looked at her during
her narrative, but reclined in the easy-chair with his
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: friendship once so charming and comforting. His privation had two
faces, and the face it had turned to him on the occasion of his
last attempt to cultivate that friendship was the one he could look
at least. This was the privation he inflicted; the other was the
privation he bore. The conditions she never phrased he used to
murmur to himself in solitude: "One more, one more - only just
one." Certainly he was going down; he often felt it when he caught
himself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice to that
inanity. There was proof enough besides in his being so weak and
so ill. His irritation took the form of melancholy, and his
melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite failed.
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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 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: -- for of the Isosceles I take no account. But as we ascend
in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being
discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because
voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of
voice-discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among
the Aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture
we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders,
the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent
with those of hearing, so that an Isosceles can easily feign the voice
of a Polygon, and, with some training, that of a Circle himself.
A second method is therefore more commonly resorted to.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
