| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: as a hair's width, that edged the hill tops. And he whispered in the
darkness to his fellows: 'The dawn is coming.' But they, with fast-closed
eyelids murmured, 'He lies, there is no dawn.'
"Nevertheless, day broke."
The stranger was silent. The fire burnt up in red tongues of flame that
neither flickered nor flared in the still night air. Peter Halket crept
near to the stranger.
"When will that time be?" he whispered; "in a thousand years' time?"
And the stranger answered, "A thousand years are but as our yesterday's
journey, or as our watch tonight, which draws already to its close. See,
piled, these rocks on which we now stand? The ages have been young and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: water in a copper. I placed my hand on one of the panes of glass,
but the heat was so great that I quickly took it off again.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Near the Island of Santorin, sir," replied the Captain.
"I wished to give you a sight of the curious spectacle of
a submarine eruption."
"I thought," said I, "that the formation of these new islands was ended."
"Nothing is ever ended in the volcanic parts of the sea,"
replied Captain Nemo; "and the globe is always being worked by
subterranean fires. Already, in the nineteenth year of our era,
according to Cassiodorus and Pliny, a new island, Theia
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: "You seem to go pretty often to the F----s'."
I said that I was very fond of the eldest daughter.
"Oh, do you want to marry her?"
"Yes."
"Is she a good girl? Well, mind you don't make a mistake, and
don't be false to her," he said with a curious gentleness and
thoughtfulness.
I left him at once and ran back home, delighted, along the
Arbat. I was glad that I had told him the truth, and his
affectionate and cautious way of taking it strengthened my
affection both for him, to whom I was boundlessly grateful for his
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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 The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical
complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of
the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the
perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The
Valkyries, and Siegfried.
SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT
The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a
type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own
impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear,
sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral
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