the very qualities which set my admiration in a blaze wilder than wildfire,
being precisely those that had won the victory for the romantic school
forty years before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the new
art; I was deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an
outer skin, a nearness, _un approchement_; in a word, by a
substitution of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of
the romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal,
that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great
divisions--the only possible divisions---are: those who have talent, and
those who have no talent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies; it is
not well to know at once of the limitations of life and things. I should be
less than nothing had it not been for my enthusiasms; they were the saving
clause in my life.

But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of my day, and at the cost
of that of other days, I did not fall into the fatal mistake of placing the
realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of
intellectual vision as the great Balzac; I felt that that vast immemorial
mind rose above them all, like a mountain above the highest tower.

And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced me to Balzac; for
mention is made in the wonderful preface to "Les Fleurs du Mal" of
Seraphita: Seraphita, Seraphitus; which is it?--woman or man? Should
Wilfred or Mona be the possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily
and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up
and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white
feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure,
strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision,
a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the
apocalypse, the colour of heaven; the closing of the stupendous allegory