I was glad to
find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of
art were very different--at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had
attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies--from those in which the
moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have recognised
her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine, some
landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the sky, in
the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and as
incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it enraged
my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one ought to set
before children, and that children shewed their own innate good taste in
admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire
when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded
aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded vision could not
fail to discern, without needing to have their equivalent in experience of
life stored up and slowly ripening in one's heart.
It was along the 'Meseglise way,' at Montjouvain, a house built on the
edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that M.
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