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 to the
disparagement 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