Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, volume 05 — Selected excerpts

(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."

THE AMERICAN FAMILY

From 'Outre-Mer' As the American marriage appears to be above all a partnership, so the American family appears to be more than anything else an association,--a sort of social camp, the ties of which are more or less strong according to individual sympathies, such as might exist between people not of the same blood.

I am certain, not from anecdotes but from experience, that the friendship of brother and brother, or sister and sister, is entirely elective.

So it is with the relations between father and son, mother and daughter.

A young Frenchman much in love with a New York girl said to me, in one of those moments when the coldness of the woman you love drives you to be cruelly frank:-- "She has so little heart that she went to the theatre five weeks after her mother's death, and no one resented it."

I knew that he was telling the truth.

But what did it prove?

What do the inequalities permitted by the laws of inheritance prove?

Nothing, if not that our natural characteristics, instincts, sensibilities, are not the same as those of the people of this country.

They have much less power of self-giving, much more of personal reaction; and especially a much stronger will.

Their will rules their hearts as well as their minds.

This seems to us less tender.

But are we good judges?

We must continually keep in mind this general want of association in family life if we would in any degree understand the sort of soul-celibacy, if we may use the term, which the American woman keeps all through her married life.

No more in this second period of her life than in the first does love bear that preponderating part which seems to us Frenchmen an essential characteristic of the lot of woman.

When a Parisian woman of forty reviews her life, the story that memory tells her is the story of her emotions.

To an American woman of the same age it is more often the story of her actions,--of what she calls, by a word I have before cited, her experiences.

She gained, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, a conception of her own self which was imposed upon her neither by her traditions--she has none; nor by the instructions of her parents--they never gave her any; nor even by her own nature--for it is characteristic of these easily "adaptable" minds that their first instincts are chaotic and undetermined.

They are like a blank check, which the will undertakes to fill out.

But whatever the will writes upon it, is written in letters that will never be effaced.

Action, action, always action,--this is the remorseless but unchanging device of such a woman.

Whether she seeks for a place in society, or is ambitious for artistic culture, or addicts herself to sport, or organizes "classes," as they say, for reading Browning, Emerson, or Shakespeare, with her friends; whether she travels to Europe, India, or Japan, or gives an "at home" to have some young girl among her friends "pour" tea for her, be sure that she will be always and incessantly active, indefatigably active, either in the lines of "refinement" or of "excitement."

With what impressiveness these women utter both these words!

which we must not weary of returning to; for they perhaps sum up the entire American soul.

They are bandied about in conversation like two formulae, in which are revealed the persistence of this creature, who, born of a stern race, and feeling herself fine, wills to become finer and ever finer; who, reared amid democratic surroundings, wills to become distinguished and ever more distinguished; who, daughter of a land of enterprise, loves to excite continually in herself the sensation of over-strained nerves.

When you see ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty like this, the character of eccentricity, which you first found in them by comparison with the women of Europe, disappears.

A new type of feminine attractiveness is revealed to you, less affecting than irritating, enigmatic and slightly ambiguous by its indefinable blending of supple grace and virile firmness, by the alliance of culture and vigor, by the most thrilling nervous sensitiveness and the sturdiest health.

The true place of such a creature in this society appears to you also, and the profound reason why these men, themselves all action, leave these women free thus to act with total independence.

If it is permitted to apply an old legal term to creatures so subtle, so delicate, these women are the delegates to luxury in this utilitarian civilization.

Their mission is to bring into it that which the American has not time to create, and which he desires to have:--the flower of elegance, something of beauty, and in a word, of aristocracy.

They are the nobility in this land of business, a nobility developed by the very development of business; since the money which is made in the offices comes at last to them, and manipulated by their fingers, is transfigured, blossoming into precious decorations, made intellectual in plays of fancy,--in fact, _unutilized_.

A great artist, foremost of this epoch by the ardor of his efforts, the conscientiousness of his study, and the sincerity of his vision,--John Sargent,--has shown what I have tried to express, in a portrait I saw in an exhibition; that of a woman whose name I do not know.

It is a portrait such as the fifteenth-century masters painted, who back of the individual found the real, and back of the model a whole social order.

The canvas might be called 'The American Idol,' so representative is it.

The woman is standing, her feet side by side, her knees close together, in an almost hieratic pose.

Her body, rendered supple by exercise, is sheathed--you might say molded--in a tight-fitting black dress.

Rubies, like drops of blood, sparkle on her shoes.

Her slender waist is encircled by a girdle of enormous pearls, and from this dress, which makes an intensely dark background for the stony brilliance of the jewels, the arms and shoulders shine out with another brilliance, that of a flower-like flesh,--fine, white flesh, through which flows blood perpetually invigorated by the air of the country and the ocean.

The head, intellectual and daring, with a countenance as of one who has understood everything, has for a sort of aureole the vaguely gilded design of one of those Renaissance stuffs which the Venetians call _soprarisso_.

The rounded arms, in which the muscles can hardly be seen, are joined by the clasped hands,--firm hands, the thumb almost too long, which might guide four horses with the precision of an English coachman.

It is the picture of an energy at once delicate and invincible, momentarily in repose; and all the Byzantine Madonna is in that face with its wide-open eyes.

Yes, this woman is an idol, for whose service man labors, which he has decked with the jewels of a queen, behind each one of whose whims lie days and days spent in the ardent battle of Wall Street.

Frenzy of speculations in land, cities undertaken and built by sheer force of millions, trains launched at full speed over bridges built on a Babel-like sweep of arch, the creaking of cable cars, the quivering of electric cars, sliding along their wires with a crackle and a spark, the dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high, immense wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal slaughter-houses,--all the formidable traffic of this country of effort and struggle, all its labor,--these are what have made possible this woman, this living orchid, unexpected masterpiece of this civilization.

Did not the very painter consecrate to her his intense toil?

To be capable of such a picture, he must have absorbed some of the ardor of the Spanish masters, caught the subtlety of the great Italians, understood and practiced the curiosities of impressionism, dreamed before the pictures in basilicas like Ravenna, and read and thought.

Ah, how much of culture, of reflection, before one could fathom the secret depths of one's own race!

He has expressed one of the most essential characteristics of the race,--the deification of woman, considered not as a Beatrice as in Florence, nor as a courtesan as at Milan, but as a supreme glory of the national spirit.

This woman can do without being loved.

She has no need of being loved.

What she symbolizes is neither sensuality nor tenderness.

She is like a living object of art, the last fine work of human skill, attesting that the Yankee, but yesterday despairing, vanquished by the Old World, has been able to draw from this savage world upon which fate has cast him a wholly new civilization, incarnated in this woman, her luxury and her pride.

Everything is illuminated by this civilization, at the gaze of these fathomless eyes, in the expression of which the painter has succeeded in putting all the idealism of this country which has no ideal; all that which perhaps will one day be its destruction, but up to the present time is still its greatness,--a faith in the human Will, absolute, unique, systematic, and indomitable.

Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

THE ARISTOCRATIC VISION OF M.

RENAN

From the 'Study of M. Renan' The sentiments I have tried to analyze are evidently of a rare order, and presuppose an exceptional culture.

Delicate flowers will not grow in the winds and fitful sunshine of the public road.

Their perfumed corollas expand only in the mellowed air of hot-houses.

Science is a kind of hot-house which guards superior minds from the brutalities of real life.

The author of 'Dialogues philosophiques' is an exceptional person.

He is a superior man, to me a term very strong in its simplicity; one might say almost that he is _the_ superior man.

Moreover, a certain air of imperceptible irony and transcendental disdain shows that he is conscious of this superiority.

Disregard of vulgar opinion is very evident in his pages.

The reserved elegance of a style which never emphasizes any special intention; the subtle arguments which never take the imperative tone; a strength of feelings, none of which are exaggerated for the sake of sympathy,--all would reveal his aristocratic ideal, even if he had not often declared that there is one domain for the initiated and another for the simple.

His political work on 'Reforme intellectuelle et morale' contains the strongest argument of the last hundred years against the very principle of democracy, natural equality.

His two symbolic dramas--'Caliban' and 'Eau de Jouvence'--may be summed up in this reflection of the prior of Chartreux, seated in his stall while the organ plays alone, and the crowd presses around the crowned Caliban: "A11 civilization is the work of aristocrats."

This truth the demagogue Caliban himself recognizes, since as soon as possessed of the palace and power of Prospero, he assumes aristocratic ways; and M. Renan, always desirous of correcting by a smile even his dearest affirmations, carefully adds that the monster of the island became a very fair prince.

Prospero proclaims that material work is the slave of spiritual work.

Everything must aid him who prays,--that is, who thinks.

Democratic minds, which do not admit individual subordination to a general achievement, consider this a monstrous doctrine.

Finally, the 'Dialogues philosophiques,' in the part entitled 'Dreams,' contain a complete plan for the subjection of the greatest number by a chosen few....

Is it bold to consider his feeling for his native soil the germ of his aristocratic ideal?

Other determining circumstances unite with it, all of which may be summed up in the term "superior man," which seems simple enough, but which may be decomposed into a series of complex characters.

The superior man differs from the man of genius, who may be unintelligent enough, and from the man of talent, who is often a mere specialist, in an ability to form general ideas about everything.

If this power of generalizing is not combined with equal creative power, the superior man remains a critic.

But if he possesses both, he is an exceptional being and the highest conceivable type, that of conscious genius.

Caesar is an example of this in politics; Da Vinci in painting; and the great Goethe in literature.

Even if he does not reach these heights, the superior man is one of the most useful instruments of society.

For universal comprehension usually includes a universal aptitude.

Is not this demonstrated in England, where favorable conditions have developed many examples?

What are great political characters like Disraeli and Macaulay, who could apply an ever-ready intelligence to literary composition and parliamentary struggles, to financial interests and diplomatic difficulties, but superior men?

Conceive such a one thrown into the democratic current by chances of birth, and you will realize the contrasts of environment and character which have led M. Renan to the conception of an ideal so unusual.

Democracy seems at a first glance very favorable to talent, for it opens all doors to all efforts.

But at the same time it strengthens the hard law of competition.

Therefore it requires a greater specialization.

Then, democracy is founded upon equality, of which the logical consequence is universal suffrage.

It needs little analysis to know that universal suffrage is hostile to the superior man.

The mental attitudes resulting from advanced study are usually--multiplicity of points of view; a taste for nice distinctions; a disdain for absolute statement;

and search for intricate solutions;--all of which are refinements antagonistic to the popular love of positive assertion.

Therefore a superior man finds the morals of a democracy unfavorable to his development, while its laws hold him back from public affairs.

So, many distinguished minds in France to-day are excluded from government; or if they have triumphed over the ostracism to which their divorce from common passions condemns them, it is because they disguise this divorce under professions which are void of intellectual impartiality.

The superior man exiled in what Sainte-Beuve calls "the ivory tower" watches the drama of national life as one who sees its future possibilities.

Is it necessary to recall that one of this class of élite has shown a veritable gift of prophecy?

To cite only one example, were not the disasters of 1870 predicted with surprising exactness in the 'France nouvelle' of Prévost-Paradol, victim like Renan of universal suffrage?

It is evident that a strange melancholy oppresses these lofty minds, weighed down under the conviction of their ideal strength and their real weakness.

The insolent triumph of the mediocre adds to this sadness.

But it is not quite without sweetness.

It has something of the pleasure extolled by Lucretius in the famous verses on those temples of the calm faith from which the sage regards the wild struggle of the passions.

But the superior man of to-day will never know the full enjoyment which the nervous systems of the ancients permitted them.

The mind can do a great deal, but it is powerless to remodel our native faculties.

Whether we hate or venerate the democracy, we are its sons and inherit its imperious need of combat.

The obscure and revolutionary nineteenth century is in our blood, and prohibits the inner immobility, the mental quiet, celebrated by the Epicureans of Greece and Rome.

There is agitation in our serenities, as in our submissions.

Catholics or atheists, monarchists or republicans, all the offspring of this age of anguish have the anxious look, the quaking heart, the trembling hands of the great battle of the time.

Even those who try to stand aloof share the common anxiety.

They too are revolutionists like the others, but they oppose human stupidity, and their mute rebellion is called disdain.

It would be interesting to study among contemporary scholars the different forms of this disdain.

Does not the exaggeration of technical beauties, which is a feature of the school of poets ironically called Parnassians, proceed from this sentiment of _Odi profanum vulgus_?

Did

not Gustave Flaubert compose 'Bouvard et Péchuchet' under this inspiration?

Would Taine have undertaken his 'Histoire des origines de la France contemporaine' if he had not been tormented by a longing to understand the democratic tide which was sweeping him away?

But no writer has felt more strongly than M. Renan the antithesis of the superior man and democracy.

One must read and re-read those pages of the 'Dialogues' where Theoctiste imagines the victory of a future oligarchy, to appreciate the intensity of passion employed in the examination of these problems.

He conceives that the learned will secure formidable destructive agents, requiring the most delicate calculations and much abstract knowledge.

Then, exulting in their power, the dreamer exclaims:--"Thus the forces of humanity would some day be held in a few hands, and would be possessed by a league which could rule the existence of the planet and terrorize the whole world.

If those most endowed with reason had ability to destroy the planet, their sovereignty would be established.

The privileged class would reign by absolute terror, since they would have the existence of all in their hands.

They would be almost gods, and then would be realized the theological state dreamed by the poet for primitive humanity: 'Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor.'

" We must not attach more reality to this tragic fancy than the author intended, but it shows an incurably wounded heart; and proves that the scholar who drew this gloomy picture has no great tenderness for the favorite Utopias of the age.

An open break is possible between democracy and science, the two great forces of modern society.

Certainly while the tendency of the first is to level, that of the second is to create differences.

"Knowledge is power," said the inductive philosopher.

To know ten times as much as another is to be ten times as capable; and as intellectual inequality forbids a uniform degree of information, there is increasing opposition between democratic tendencies and the social results of science.

There are several solutions, as in nearly all the complicated problems as to the future.

In formulating the hypothesis of the 'Dialogues,' M. Renan indicates one of them.

Another may be simply an application of science to the organization of societies.

An unprejudiced consideration of the principles upon which our nineteenth-century society is founded proves their Cartesian character, very different already from modern philosophy.

But there is a secret movement of minds.

The conceptions of Darwin and Herbert Spencer permeate the new ones.

We must have faith in the worth of the doctrines which will eventually overthrow politics, as well as natural science and literature.

A time is coming when a society will not seem to the philosophers of evolution as it did to the last inheritors of the classic spirit.

It will appear, not the operation of a logical contract, but the action of a confederation of organisms of which the cell is the unit.

This is very different from the reigning idea.

It is exclusive of any difference between democrat and aristocrat, for such difference means an arbitrary classification of the different social elements.

If this consoling vision is not a simple chimera, it may be remembered that the great scorners like M. Renan are active workmen for its accomplishment, in that they formulate it very exactly, and face the coming conflict with sorrowfully keen relief.

These summary notes upon one of our most remarkable men only indicate the three or four states of conscience which he represents to the young people who read his books and meditate upon their eloquent, disquieting pages.

No other author offers more that is fresh in thought and feeling, for no other employs greater sincerity in thought and in exposition of sentiment.

Whoever studies the springs of moral life in the rising generation, meets everywhere his influence.

Not before a hundred years hence can his achievement be measured.

If there are any who do not worship sincerity and reverence, they should devote themselves to the books of M. Renan; for no one has practiced these qualities with greater constancy than he, who on the first page of his 'Vie de Jésus' invokes the pure spirit of the venerated Dead, and who prayed to him in a melancholy petition to the unattainable--"O good Genius, reveal to me whom you love, the truths which govern death, keep one from fearing and make one almost love it!"