A Cruel Enigma

A poet of merit, an acute, clear-sighted critic, and an accomplished and successful novelist, M. Paul Bourget occupies an important position among the brilliant crowd of modern French littérateurs , upon the younger generation especially of whom he exercises an acknowledged and a constantly widening influence. Nor will this influence appear other than natural if it be borne in mind that, gifted with no mean qualifications for the task, M. Bourget has made a deep and particular study of just those problems which, to this self-conscious, introspective age of ours, are possessed of an all-absorbing interest. Complex as his nature undoubtedly is, and many-sided as its accomplishment might, to a first and superficial view, appear, he is in all his writings primarily a critic, while his criticism has, moreover, uniformly occupied itself with the same objects, with the hidden movements of the mind, that is to say, considered in their bearings upon external manifestation, with all the varied promptings which underlie the surface of conduct.
For the prosecution of such psychological studies, M. Bourget is in every needful particular well fitted. He possesses keen insight, and a remarkable power of sympathetically appreciating the play and counter-play of motives, passions, and delicate shades of feeling; while he is also endowed with that tact, subtlety, refinement, and, above all, exact lucidity of expression, by which a writer is enabled to convey his divinings unimpaired to the reader. This flexibility of sympathy, with its answering flexibility of language, enabling to the expression alike of widely sundered and of delicately blending diversities of thought and emotion, correspond to, and are, perhaps, partly the outcome of, a richly varied life-experience. Just as M. Bourget has made himself equally at home in London and in Florence, in Paris and in Morocco, so is he equally at ease and equally successful whether he be engaged in indicating some of the consequences wrought by cosmopolitan existence in the characters of Stendhal, Tourgéniev, and Amiel; in analysing the conceptions of modern love presented in the writings of Baudelaire and M. Alexandre Dumas; in measuring the modifications produced by science in the imaginations and diverse sensibilities of Flaubert, M. Leconte de Lisle, and M. Taine; or, finally, in living the life of his own fictitious characters, and portraying for us a Hubert or a Theresa de Sauve.