PAUL BOURGET.
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.
It is evident that the wielder of such exceptional powers must be obvious to peculiar dangers with which the mere dead-level narrator of outer phenomena has little or no acquaintance. To the very fulness of these powers, and to their supremely overmastering presence are due faults from which less gifted writers are shielded by their mediocrity as by a wall. It would be possible, did space and inclination serve, to point out instances of affectation both of idea and of expression in M. Bourget's writings. As in the case of some of our own premier authors—George Eliot, for instance, and Mr. George Meredith—his thought is not invariably worthy of the richness of its setting, while his analysis is occasionally pushed so far as to be superfluous, not to say absurd. The charge of "literary dandyism" brought against him by M. Jules Lemaitre is not destitute of foundation. It must be acknowledged that his subtlety borders at times on pedantry, and his refinement on conceit. Having said this, it is only fair to add that these flaws do not enter excessively into the texture of his work; indeed, they rather serve, by force of sufficiently rare and sharply defined contrast, to throw into relief its general sterling excellence. And such imperfections should not be allowed to weigh overmuch with us in attempting to estimate the worth of our author's achievement. It is notorious that—si parva licet componere magnis—there are spots on the sun.
Conversant as he is with the entire gamut of human feeling, M. Bourget has in all his novels—with the single exception of the last of them, "André Cornélis"—elected to direct exclusive attention to the passion of love. His treatment of this theme is as characteristic as it is fresh. It is, further, in complete harmony with what appears to be his doctrine of life. Accuracy of vision, assisted, doubtless, by the breadth of cosmopolitan experience, has produced in him a result not uncommon with men of his calibre. In spite of his own protestation to the contrary, it has, in fact, made him a pessimist. Like Flaubert, with whom he has some affinity, and one of the most striking of whose phrases he, in the course of the following pages, unconsciously adopts, he discerns too clearly to be greatly pleased with what he sees. The pessimism of the two men was, however, arrived at by somewhat different routes. Setting aside any origins of a purely physical nature, it arose with Flaubert mainly from the inconsistency of his external surroundings with his inward ideals, and denoted simply that his objective world and his subjective world were at strife. M. Bourget's dissatisfaction flows from the unpleasing result of his analyses of the inward feelings themselves. He probes them and penetrates them throughout their complex ramifications and windings until he reaches some ultimate fact or some irreducible instinct, from which he draws the moral of an unbending necessity. And here he finds the aspirings of his imagination and the decrees of destiny at daggers drawn.
In these considerations we have a key to the proper interpretation of the present volume. "Love," its author has said elsewhere, "has, like death, remained irreducible to human conventions. It is wild and free in spite of codes and modes. The woman who disrobes to give herself to a man, lays aside her entire social personality with her garments. For him she again becomes what he, too, becomes again for her—the natural, solitary creature to whom no protection can guarantee happiness, and from whom no decree can avert woe." These lines sum in brief the teaching of the book. Its author has, after his own fashion, made an uncompromising analysis of the passion that he undertakes to describe, and, stripping from it all the adventitious grace and mysticism and sentiment with which society is wont to shroud it, has found it to consist, in the last resort, of a single and simple fact: the physical, fleshly desire of man for woman and woman for man. Hence it is that Theresa, while receiving, and rejoicing exceedingly in, Hubert's loftier and more ideal affection, betrays it at the first opportunity for the sensual brutishness of a hard-living roué, and hence, too, it is that the pure-souled Hubert, even while he scorns his mistress for her treachery and loathes himself for his weakness, returns loveless and despairing to her arms.
The book is a pitiless study of the inevitable. We are made to feel that, given the particular primary conditions, the results specified could not but follow. It would almost seem that in the modern scientific conception of the universal reign of Law, and the comparatively remote possibilities of modifying its operation, we are approximating to a renewed, but far more vividly realised, enthronement of the old Greek idea of that Necessity against which the gods themselves were believed to strive in vain, and M. Bourget is too completely a man of his century not to reflect faithfully one of the most striking phases of latter-day thought. The contemplation of a fatalistic ordering of the moral world cannot be otherwise than exceptionally painful to one who, like M. Bourget, is as sensitive to moral and spiritual, as he is to physical and natural beauty. His nobler nature is wounded by the hard sequence of inevitable law, and would fain have a deeply different moulding of circumstance, but for all that the true novelist can tell us only what he sees, and what he believes to be true, and so it comes to pass that in M. Bourget's novels, with, perhaps, a single exception, we find the eternal contrast between the "might be" and the "must be" consistently indicated. In his "L'Irréparable" and its companion tale, "Deuxième Amour," in "Crime d'Amour" and in "Cruelle Enigme," the topic which engrosses him is still the same. In all alike we are sensible of the antagonism between the cherished aspirations of the moralist and the conclusions which the psychologist finds himself unwillingly compelled to draw. And not in them only, but throughout his other writings also, we can trace the spirit-workings of the man to whom life in its entirety, no less than certain sorrowful phases of it is "a cruel enigma."
JULIAN CRAY.