But France is a greater enthusiast than our now country.  The fairness and the golden hair are here so much a matter of orthodoxy, that they are not always mentioned; they are frequently taken for granted.  Not so in France; the French go out of their way to make the exceptional fairness of their children the rule of their literature.  No French child dare show his face in a book—­prose or poetry—­without blue eyes and fair hair.  It is a thing about which the French child of real life can hardly escape a certain sensitiveness.  What, he may ask, is the use of being a dark-haired child of fact, when all the emotion, all the innocence, all the romance, are absorbed by the flaxen-haired child of fiction?  How deplorable that our mothers, the French infants may say, should have their unattained ideals in the nurseries of the imagination; how dismal that they should be perpetually disillusioned in the nurseries of fact!  Is there then no sentiment for us? they may ask.  Will not convention, which has been forced to restore the advantage to truth on so many other points, be compelled to yield on this point also, and reconcile our aunts to the family colouring?

All the schools of literature are in a tale.  The classic masters, needless to say, do not stoop to the colouring of boys and girls; but as soon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair ever in it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue, and no cheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses.  Victor Hugo, who discovered the child of modern poetry, never omits the touch of description; the word blond is as inevitable as any epithet marshalled to attend its noun in a last-century poet’s dictionary.  One would not have it away; one can hear the caress with which the master pronounces it, “making his mouth,” as Swift did for his “little language.”  Nor does the customary adjective fail in later literature.  It was dear to the Realist, and it is dear to the Symbolist.  The only difference is that in the French of the Symbolist it precedes the noun.

And yet it is time that the sweetness of the dark child should have its day.  He is really no less childlike than the other.  There is a pretty antithesis between the strong effect of his colouring and the softness of his years and of his months.  The blond human being—­man, woman or child—­has the beauty of harmony; the hair plays off from the tones of the flesh, only a few degrees brighter or a few degrees darker.  Contrast of colour there is, in the blue of the eyes, and in the red of cheek and lip, but there is no contrast of tone.  The whole effect is that of much various colour and of equal tone.  In the dark face there is hardly any colour and an almost complete opposition of tone.  The complete opposition, of course, would be black and white; and a beautiful dark child comes near to this, but for the lovely modifications, the warmth of his white, and of his black alike, so that the one tone, as well as the other, is softened towards brown.  It is the beauty of contrast, with a suggestion of harmony—­as it were a beginning of harmony—­which is infinitely lovely.