| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: and then what the end will be you soothsayers only can predict.
EUTHYPHRO: I dare say that the affair will end in nothing, Socrates, and
that you will win your cause; and I think that I shall win my own.
SOCRATES: And what is your suit, Euthyphro? are you the pursuer or the
defendant?
EUTHYPHRO: I am the pursuer.
SOCRATES: Of whom?
EUTHYPHRO: You will think me mad when I tell you.
SOCRATES: Why, has the fugitive wings?
EUTHYPHRO: Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of life.
SOCRATES: Who is he?
|
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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: than an appreciation of Far Eastern artistic feeling. The truth is,
the foreigners brought to the subject their own Western criteria of
merit, and judged everything by these standards. Such works
naturally commended themselves most as had least occasion to deviate
from their canons. The simplest pictures, therefore, were
pronounced the best. Paintings of birds and flowers were thus
admitted to be fine, because their realism spoke for itself. Of the
exquisite poetic feeling of their landscape paintings the foreign
critics were not at first conscious, because it was not expressed in
terms with which they were familiar.
But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very
|
