Why, the door opens, and she cries, "_Je
t'aime_."

But it was the idea of the new aestheticism--the new art corresponding to
modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life--that captivated me,
that led me away, and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by the
naturalists. I had read the "Assommoir," and had been much impressed by its
pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the
immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the
different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new--the washhouse, for
example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of
side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is broken off short,
it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again
taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness; it is worked up to
_crescendo_, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is
given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the
narrative, sometimes widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but
never stagnating in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did not
then recognise as the weak point, being little more than a boiling down of
Chateaubriand and Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its
novelty, its richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that
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