PREFACE
a while desperately thrown it up—as a climax to his struggle, some time prolonged, with "the awful nonsense he found himself expected and paid, and thence quite obliged, to talk." It was in these simple terms his predicament was named to me—not that I would have had a word more, not indeed that I hadn't at once to turn my back for very joy of the suppressed details: so unmistakably, on the spot, was a splendid case all there, so complete, in fine, as it stood, was the appeal to fond fancy; an appeal the more direct, I may add, by reason, as happened, of an acquaintance, lately much confirmed, on my own part, with the particular temple of our poor gentleman's priesthood. It struck me, at any rate, that here, if ever, was the perfect theme of a nouvelle—and to some such composition I addressed myself with a confidence unchilled by the certainty that it would nowhere, at the best (a prevision not falsified) find "acceptance." For the rest I must but leave "The Birthplace" to plead its own cause; only adding that here afresh and in the highest degree were the conditions reproduced for that mystic, that "chemical" change wrought in the impression of life by its dedication to an esthetic use, that I lately spoke of in connexion with "The Coxon Fund." Beautiful on all this ground exactly, to the projector's mind, the process by which the small cluster of actualities latent in the fact reported to him was to be reconstituted and, so far as they might need, altered; the felt fermentation, ever interesting, but flagrantly so in the example before us, that enables the sense originally communicated to make fresh and possibly quite different terms for the new employment there awaiting it. It has been liberated (to repeat, I believe, my figure) after the fashion of some sound young draught-horse who may, in the great meadow, have to be re-captured and re-broken for the saddle.
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