| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: Mr. Kelvil.
KELVIL. Still our East End is a very important problem.
LORD ILLINGWORTH. Quite so. It is the problem of slavery. And we
are trying to solve it by amusing the slaves.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Certainly, a great deal may be done by means of
cheap entertainments, as you say, Lord Illingworth. Dear Dr.
Daubeny, our rector here, provides, with the assistance of his
curates, really admirable recreations for the poor during the
winter. And much good may be done by means of a magic lantern, or
a missionary, or some popular amusement of that kind.
LADY CAROLINE. I am not at all in favour of amusements for the
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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 Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: This means of defence seems to be pretty frequent among Spiders.
Our own big House Spider, Tegenaria domestica, encloses her eggs in
a globule strengthened with a rind of silk and of crumbly wreckage
from the mortar of the walls. Other species, living in the open
under stones, work in the same way. They wrap their eggs in a
mineral shell held together with silk. The same fears have
inspired the same protective methods.
Then how comes it that, of the five mothers reared in my cages, not
one has had recourse to the clay rampart? After all, sand
abounded: the pans in which the wire-gauze covers stood were full
of it. On the other hand, under normal conditions, I have often
The Life of the Spider |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: drive Sylvie in extreme devotion to the Church, and put Pierrette in a
convent. They might therefore lose eighteen months' labor in flattery
and meannesses of all sorts. Their minds were suddenly filled with a
bitter, silent hatred to the priest and his sister, though they felt
the necessity of living on good terms with them in order to track
their manoeuvres. Monsieur and Mademoiselle Habert, who could play
both whist and boston, now came every evening to the Rogrons. The
assiduity of the one pair induced the assiduity of the other. The
colonel and lawyer felt that they were pitted against adversaries who
were fully as strong as they,--a presentiment that was shared by the
priest and his sister. The situation soon became that of a battle-
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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 Lysis by Plato: the dog of Egypt, I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of
Darius, or even to Darius himself: I am such a lover of friends as that.
And when I see you and Lysis, at your early age, so easily possessed of
this treasure, and so soon, he of you, and you of him, I am amazed and
delighted, seeing that I myself, although I am now advanced in years, am so
far from having made a similar acquisition, that I do not even know in what
way a friend is acquired. But I want to ask you a question about this, for
you have experience: tell me then, when one loves another, is the lover or
the beloved the friend; or may either be the friend?
Either may, I should think, be the friend of either.
Do you mean, I said, that if only one of them loves the other, they are
Lysis |
