| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: now and then from a nude woman standing on a table, you think you can
copy nature; you fancy yourselves painters, and imagine that you have
got at the secret of God's creations! Pr-r-r-r!--To be a great poet it
is not enough to know the rules of syntax and write faultless grammar.
Look at your saint, Porbus. At first sight she is admirable; but at
the very next glance we perceive that she is glued to the canvas, and
that we cannot walk round her. She is a silhouette with only one side,
a semblance cut in outline, an image that can't turn nor change her
position. I feel no air between this arm and the background of the
picture; space and depth are wanting. All is in good perspective; the
atmospheric gradations are carefully observed, and yet in spite of
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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 Octopus by Frank Norris: in the cloister garden.
The stars were out, strewn thick and close in the deep blue of
the sky, the milky way glowing like a silver veil. Ursa Major
wheeled gigantic in the north. The great nebula in Orion was a
whorl of shimmering star dust. Venus flamed a lambent disk of
pale saffron, low over the horizon. From edge to edge of the
world marched the constellations, like the progress of emperors,
and from the innumerable glory of their courses a mysterious
sheen of diaphanous light disengaged itself, expanding over all
the earth, serene, infinite, majestic.
The little garden revealed itself but dimly beneath the brooding
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