He had felt after the thing, and here
it was,--the one irresistible poetry there had ever been, with the
magic word spoken in due time, transforming his own age and the world
about him, presenting its everyday touch, the very trick one knew it
by, as an additional grace, asserting the latent poetic rights of the
transitory, the fugitive, the contingent. Poetry need no longer mask
itself in the habit of a bygone day: Gaston could but pity the people
of bygone days for not being above-ground to read. Here, was a
discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed
in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative
regeneration of the world. It was a manner, a habit of thought,
which would invade ordinary life, and mould that to its intention.
In truth, all the world was already aware, and delighted. The
"school" was soon to pay the penalty of that immediate acceptance,
that intimate fitness to the mind of its own time, by sudden [58] and
profound neglect, as a thing preternaturally tarnished and tame, like
magic youth, or magic beauty, turned in a moment by magic's own last
word into withered age.
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