(1852-)
French by birth, born at Amiens of a Russian father and an English
mother, Paul Bourget inherited Anglo-Saxon as well as Gallic intuitions.
He is very proud of the cosmopolitan spirit which exempts him from the
usual French provincialism, and has sought to develop it by travel and
study. He endeavors to know intimately the phases of life which he
wishes to describe, and then to treat them in the light of a large
knowledge of many peoples. Yet he feels a somewhat bitter realization
that so general a view as his own has necessarily an element of
weakness. He lacks convictions and prejudices to express with
whole-hearted strength, and hence is always a dilettante.
[Illustration: Paul Bourget]
His student life was passed at the Lycée of Clermont, and later at the
Collège de Sainte-Barbe at Paris, where his scholarship was rewarded by
several prizes. But his voracious reading of French and English poetry,
fiction, and philosophy has probably done more for him than scholastic
training. Like so many other novelists, he began his literary life with
journalism; and in 1872 became collaborator on the Renaissance, living
frugally meantime, and studying Paris from her cafés and boulevards as
any poor man may.
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."