“See—a Periwinkle!”
And Rousseau, now old Jean-Jacques, amazed the company by an almost incredible exhibition of sensibility.
“Une pervenche! Where—where?” he called out, throwing himself down on his knees to look for the flower, with eyes bathed in tears.
If this is not quite the exact tale, it matters, as I said above, very little. It is the story, in its essence. The age of sensibility ‹praise be to our fate!› is no longer with us; but there is something permanently true in the picture it sets forth. To the philosophe of mature years the mere word pervenche suddenly recalled, in a poignantly intimate manner, the first love of his spring-time. Veteris vestigia flammae!
And we are not to wonder that the echo from a world irremediably lost should have affected the morose, self-centred reprobate in an uncontrollable manner. I venture to think that, with the least sentimental of us, the sudden rediscovery, of some long forgotten youthful impression can hardly fail to evoke, however transiently, a certain dreamy emotion: half pleasure, half melancholy.
Now, in the case of the Master of the House—and he is thankful to realize it—early memories of delight in flowers and such things are associated, not with the troublous times of young manhood’s protean heart affairs, not with the Sturm und Drang days of the dawning moustache, but rather with the quaintly fanciful inner life of boyhood. They come back borne upon the colours and odours of such early friends as Lilac and Acacia; common Wallflower—Giroflée, our Gillyflower; wild Violet and Primrose—gallicé “Coucou”; Hollyhock or rather Rose-trémière; Lily-of-the-Valley; Muguet.... It is the old French name that most readily slips from my pen.
Owing perhaps to a childhood spent almost wholly in France, and to the completeness of the break that necessarily ensued when the English born but French nurtured boy was at last allowed back to his own and proper land, all these memories seem to belong to a world utterly apart—to something rather fantastic, unconnected with later life and interests. Moreover, being of childhood and of a time when the world seemed uniformly kind, they retain an allurement all their own. One pleasant recollection of those far-off days does not hook on to others, bitter, regretful, or let it be even merely ruffling ... inevitable chain of responsible experiences!
Our early memories are like works of art: they have a way of perpetuating in beauty things that perhaps were not really beautiful in themselves. About them there is an unconscious selection which, having been made by a mind still essentially serene, has contrived a subtle harmony of all the elements. Upon the pictures of its store, a child’s memory lays an emphasis strangely different to that which the critical powers of later growth would set. And it is this quaint insistence on certain “odd corners of things” which ‹among other reasons› makes them so dearly personal and private to the older mind.