A CRUEL ENIGMA
BY PAUL BOURGET
AUTHOR OF "A LOVE CRIME"
TRANSLATED WITHOUT ABRIDGMENT FROM THE 18TH FRENCH EDITION
BY JULIAN CRAY
LONDON:
VIZETELLY & CO., 42, CATHERINE ST., STRAND
BRENTANOS: NEW YORK, WASHINGTON AND CHICAGO
1887
PAUL BOURGET.
A poet of merit, an acute, clear-sighted critic, and an accomplished andsuccessful novelist, M. Paul Bourget occupies an important positionamong the brilliant crowd of modern French littérateurs, upon theyounger generation especially of whom he exercises an acknowledged and aconstantly widening influence. Nor will this influence appear other thannatural if it be borne in mind that, gifted with no mean qualificationsfor the task, M. Bourget has made a deep and particular study of justthose problems which, to this self-conscious, introspective age of ours,are possessed of an all-absorbing interest. Complex as his natureundoubtedly is, and many-sided as its accomplishment might, to a firstand superficial view, appear, he is in all his writings primarily acritic, while his criticism has, moreover, uniformly occupied itselfwith the same objects, with the hidden movements of the mind, that is tosay, considered in their bearings upon external manifestation, with allthe varied promptings which underlie the surface of conduct.
For the prosecution of such psychological studies, M. Bourget is inevery needful particular well fitted. He possesses keen insight, and aremarkable power of sympathetically appreciating the play andcounter-play of motives, passions, and delicate shades of feeling; whilehe is also endowed with that tact, subtlety, refinement, and, above all,exact lucidity of expression, by which a writer is enabled to convey hisdivinings unimpaired to the reader. This flexibility of sympathy, withits answering flexibility of language, enabling to the expression alikeof widely sundered and of delicately blending diversities of thought andemotion, correspond to, and are, perhaps, partly the outcome of, arichly varied life-experience. Just as M. Bourget has made himselfequally at home in London and in Florence, in Paris and in Morocco, sois he equally at ease and equally successful whether he be engaged inindicating some of the consequences wrought by cosmopolitan existence inthe characters of Stendhal, Tourgéniev, and Amiel; in analysing theconceptions of modern love presented in the writings of Baudelaire andM. Alexandre Dumas; in measuring the modifications produced by sciencein the imaginations and diverse sensibilities of Flaubert, M. Leconte deLisle, and M. Taine; or, finally, in living the life of his ownfictitious characters, and portraying for us a Hubert or a Theresa deSauve.
It is evident that the wielder of such exceptional powers must beobvious to peculiar dangers with which the mere dead-level narrator ofouter phenomena has little or no acquaintance. To the very fulness ofthese powers, and to their supremely overmastering presence are duefaults from which less gifted writers are shielded by their mediocrityas by a wall. It would be possible, did space and inclination serve, topoint out instances of affectation both of idea and of expression in M.Bourget's writings. As in the case of some of our own premierauthors—George Eliot, for instance, and Mr. George Meredith—histhought is not invariably worthy of the richness of its setting, whilehis analysis is occasionally pushed so far as to be superfluous, not tosay absurd. The charge of "literary dandyism" brought agai