Is not such music as this enough?  Of course but I am a sensualist in literature.  I may see perfectly well that this or that book is a work of genius, but if it doesn’t “fetch me,” it doesn’t concern me, and I forget its very existence.  What leaves me cold to-day will madden me to-morrow.  With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same caprices—­those of the flesh?  Now we enter on very subtle distinctions.  No doubt that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment of a work of art.  And it will be noticed that these two forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in 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 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,