t at
any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber
the candid _jeunesse_; so that I wonder by the same token on what theory
of the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M.
Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been
moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own
impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn
taken--and quite in spite of the high Fezandie ideals--by the
_invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the assimilation of no
form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience
that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too
directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths
of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which
our good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance:
I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and such
odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly
long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or
"cut," no suggested application at all as garments--application, that
is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or
position--gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almost
terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any
approach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I remember
deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing
how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I remember
above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature
_wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, no
imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed
of the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of the
alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman.
The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes
in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind
of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed
especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which
might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant
impressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did,
harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the
fond fancy that we all