nchant 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 coeur_. 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 ecstacy--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 aestheticisms,
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 are capable of understanding neither and can read but one, who
will object to any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist and the
Novelist; but I confess that I--if the inherent superiority of verse over
prose, which I admit unhesitatingly, be waived--that I fail, utterly fail
to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet's
thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be
greater than the novelist's. On these points we will cry quits, and come at
once to the vital question--the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is
Eugenie Grandet inferior to Desdemona? Is her father inferior to Shylock?
Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the apothecary in the
"Cousine Bet