His first book, 'La Vie Inquiète' 'Restless Life', a collection of poems sad in tone, dainty in touch, echoed the French verses which he loved best, but offered nothing very original. They show a tinge of Baudelaire's fantastic love of morbid phases of life and beauty, and also of Leconte de Lisle's exquisite phrasing. But Bourget lacks poetic ardor, and in metre is always a little artificial. Although he went on writing poetry for some years, he found few readers until he turned to prose. When the 'Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine' appeared in 1883, the public were delighted with their original charm. Taking five authors whom he knew and loved particularly,--Baudelaire, Renan, Flaubert, Taine, and Stendhal,--he wrote a brilliant, profoundly psychologic exposition of their minds and temperaments. The scientific explanation was fervid with his own emotion over these strong influences in his life, and thus comes indirectly as an interpretation of himself. These studies, which he calls "a few notes made to help the historian of the modern moral life in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century," stand, as criticism, between Brunetière's formal structure and Lemaître's appreciations. They have been very popular, and Bourget has since written another volume of 'Nouveaux Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,' and other books of critical sketches called 'Études et Portraits.'
Certain qualities of his talent show forcibly in 'Sensations d'Italie,' a delightful appreciation of beauty and sensuous charm. The reader feels the author's joy in close analysis, and his sensitive discriminations. In 'Outre-Mer,' especially interesting to Americans as a study of the United States, which he visited in 1894, he shows the same receptivity to new feelings and new ideas. The book is often ludicrously inaccurate, and fundamentally incomplete in that it ignores the great middle class of our people, yet it is full of suggestive comments on American character.
Most people know Bourget best as a novelist. As in criticism, his method is psychologic dissection. Taking a set of men and women who are individually interesting, he draws their environment with careful detail and shows the reactions of their characters upon each other. His subtlety of analysis comes out strongly in his pictures of women, whose contradictory moods and emotional intuitions offer him the refined complexities he loves. His first novel, 'L'Irréparable,' lacks movement and is sometimes tedious in its over-elaboration. In 'Une Cruelle Énigme' his strength is more evident. It is the story of a young and high-minded man who discovers that the woman he loves is unworthy, yet finds that he loves her notwithstanding. "Why this love?" asks the author at the end of the book. "Why and whence does it come? The question is without an answer, and like the falsity of woman, like the weakness of man, like life itself, a cruel, cruel riddle." 'Une Crime d'Amour,' one of his most popular novels, deals with a woman who, being married to an uncongenial husband, falls in love with a brilliant, heartless society man, with the usual result. The crime is the hero's inability to understand the meaning of genuine love. 'Mensonges' (Lies) is a striking picture of the endless falsities of a Parisian woman of innocent Madonna-like beauty. It was dramatized and played at the Vaudeville in 1889, but without much success. 'Le Disciple' is an elaborate attempt to prove that present scientific theories tend to corrupt manners and to encourage pessimism. In 'Cosmopolis,' a study of foreign life in Italy, Bourget shows that the same passions dominate men, whatever their training.
From Dumas fils Bourget has learned to be a moralist with a conscious wish to present society with object lessons. He himself says, "A writer worthy to hold a pen has, as his first and last requirement, to be a moralist. The moralist is the man who shows life as it is, with its profound lessons of secret expiation which are everywhere imprinted. To have shown the rancor of vice is to have been a moralist."
Like most French novelists, he lacks humor. In their search for happiness his characters suffer a great deal and know only temporary ecstasy. They are often witty, but never genial.
His critics have said that his genius proves its own limitation, for his analytic curiosity is apt to desert what is primitive and broadly human in search of stimulus from the abnormal and out-of-the-way, and there is lack of synthesis in his wealth of detail. His literary brethren are fond too of deriding his ardent appreciation of luxury and wealth. He dwells upon niceties of toilet or the decorations of a dinner-table with positive enjoyment. All social refinements are very dear to him, and the moral struggles of fashionable men and women far more interesting than the heart-aches of the working classes.
He is often called a pessimist, for his "heavy sadness of disillusion"; but he is never bitter. Finding the universe incomprehensible, he stands baffled and passive, with a tender sympathy, almost an envy, for those who still have faith. He is above all interesting as a sane and characteristic product of the latest social conditions. His is the tolerant, somewhat negative point of view of the man who has found no new creed, yet disbelieves the old. Clarens says that Bourget suffers from "the atrocious modern uneasiness which is caused by regret that one can no longer believe, and dread of the moral void."