rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and
unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant,
thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a book that penetrates
to and speaks to you of your most present and most intimate emotions.
This is of course pure sensualism; but to take a less marked stage. Why
should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in
me, while Shakespeare leaves me cold? The mind that can understand one
can understand the other, but there are affinities in literature
corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual affinities--the same
unreasoned attractions, the same pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those
we have loved most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola,
Flaubert, Goncourt! how I have loved you all; and now I could not, would
not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious; but even a capricious
woman is constant, if not faithful to her _amant de cœur_. And so with
me; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may thrill
me with the old passion, with the first ecstasy--it is Balzac. Upon that
rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often
from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new æstheticisms,
the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the
symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit
and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the
first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought
that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and
sublimity of Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest
heights, and his range is limitless; there is no passion he has not
touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a
place equivalent to the place it occupies in nature; his intense and
penetrating sympathy for human life and all that concerns it enabled him
to surround the humblest subjects with awe and crown them with the light
of tragedy. There are some, particularly those who can understand