| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of
July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these
aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart.
Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of
the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But
even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration
period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to
lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate
their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the
exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their
 The Communist Manifesto |
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 Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities of
locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which
our modern scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and
perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the 'plague spot of all
Greek states,' as one of their own writers has called it, was the
terrible insecurity to life and property which resulted from the
factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all
times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in
the middle ages of Europe.
These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how
it was that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek
|