Bourget's Essais De Psychologie Contemporaine

CONTEMPORARY French literature is singularly poor in literary criticism. M. Zola and some of his disciples of the naturalist school have produced a number of critical essays, which are, however, little more than self-panegyrics. M. F. Brunelière, who holds the sceptre of criticism in the leading French review, delights more in commerce with the authors of the past than in the appreciative study of the literature of the present. M. Paul Bourget has therefore the field almost all to himself. M. Bourget’s book is remarkable in many respects ; it is one of the most original and modern books that has been produced in France for some time past. M. Bourget, it will be observed, repudiates the title of critic ; doubtless because he is convinced of the uselessness of criticism as the term is generally understood. He does not analyze artistic processes, discuss talents, paint characters, or amass anecdotes. His ambition has been to paint the intellectual and moral situation of the end of the nineteenth century, to draw up some notes that will help the historian of the future to paint the moral life of to-day ; and one of the chief elements of this moral life M. Bourget, who is essentially a man of letters, considers to be literature. Nay, more : in presence of the evident diminution of traditional and local influences, literature is the most important of the elements of moral life, inasmuch as the book is the great initiator.

In order to carry out his plan, M. Bourget has chosen five writers whom he considers to be eminent and typical revealers of the moral state of his contemporaries, and initiators of sentiments and habits of thought that have been imitated by the young generation. The five writers studied by M. Bourget are Baudelaire, Renan, Flaubert, Taine, and Stendhal. The intention of M. Bourget is excellent; the choice of his prototypes or generators of sentiments is perhaps less happy. Has Baudelaire really exercised the influence that M. Bourget attributes to him ? Have Baudelaire’s peculiar conceptions of love, his refined pessimism, his delight in decadence, really penetrated into the moral atmosphere of the epoch ? M. Bourget meets our objection. Like M. Renan, M. Bourget is a literary aristocrat; he is refined, subtle, exquisitely delicate and complex, and he disdains the crowd. It suffices him that Baudelaire or any other of his types has an influence over a small group, provided that group be one of distinguished intellects, — poets of to-morrow, novelists and essayists of the future. Indirectly and through them the psychological singularities that he notes doubtless penetrate to the wider public. Nevertheless, in his studies of Baudelaire and Flaubert M. Bourget has perhaps hardly made allowance enough for the spirit of charlatanism, of braggadocio and staginess, which was so prominent in the literary generation of 1830. In his studies of Renan, Taine, and Stendhal M. Bourget has analyzed, winnowed, and classified the souls of his subjects with rare finesse, clearness, and logic, and always with a sharp appreciation of their intellectual pessimism. M. Bourget seems to take extreme delight in analyzing the charms and seductions of decadence ; the praise of decadence is the dominant note of the book. Art for M. Bourget is reduced to “ the science of tasting life bitterly or sweetly ; ” and we shall doubtless not be far wrong in attributing to him all the moral peculiarities inherent in that decadence which he so ingeniously analyzes. “ The great argument against decadences,” says M. Bourget, “ is that they have no morrow and that they are always crushed by barbarism. But is it not, as it were, the fatal lot of the exquisite and rare to fail before brutality ? We are right in avowing a failure of that sort, and in preferring the defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of the violent Macedonian.” Listen, too, to the conclusion of the volume. M. Bourget has been analyzing Stendhal’s Rouge et Noir.

“ Do you see, at the extremity of this work, the most complete that the author has left, the breaking of the tragic dawn of pessimism? This dawn of blood and tears is rising, and like the brightness of daybreak it tints with its red colors the loftiest minds of our age, those that tower up like mountains, those towards whom the eyes of the men of to-morrow are rising, — religiously. I have examined a poet, Baudelaire ; a historian, M. Renan; a novelist, Gustave Flaubert ; a philosopher, M. Taine ; I have just examined one of those composite artists in whom the critic and the imaginative writer are closely united, and I have found, in these five Frenchmen of such high value, the same philosophy of disgust of the universal nothingness. Sensual and depraved in the first, subtilized and sublimated in the second, reasoned out and furious in the third, reasoned out also but resigned in the fourth, this philosophy becomes as sombre but more courageous in the author of Rouge et Noir. Is it right, this formidable nausea of the most magnificent intellects in presence of the vain efforts of life? Has man, in civilizing himself, really done nothing more than complicate his barbarity and refine his misery? I imagine that those of our contemporaries whom these problems preoccupy are like myself, and that to this agonizing question they reply sometimes with a cry of pain, sometimes with a cry of faith and hope. Another solution is to gird up one’s soul, like Stendhal, and to oppose to the uneasiness of doubt the virile energy of the man who sees before him the black abyss of destiny, who does not know what this abyss conceals, — and who is not afraid ! ”

The influence of M. Bourget’s five initiators of sentiments is evidently negative, and as such M. Bourget understands it. They are contributing to produce an epoch of decadence, and an epoch of refined sensibility and polished indifference, an epoch when the civilized man enjoys the capital of faculties amassed by the discipline of stable societies without troubling himself as to how he came by them or exerting himself to increase that capital. And so M. Bourget shows us the high society of the present day, the society that is recruited from amongst the most refined representatives of delicate culture, arrived at that perhaps culpable but certainly delicious hour when dilettantism replaces action, — an hour of curiosity that prefers to be sterile, an hour of the exchange of ideas and manners, the hour of cosmopolitanism. A fatal evolution is attracting the provinces towards the great towns, and over the great towns there floats, like Swift’s Laputa, a vague and superior city, the fatherland of supreme curiosities, of vast general theories, of erudite criticism, and of comprehensive indifference.

The Essais de Psychologic Contemporaine are full of ingenious formulations of ideas and sentiments that are in the air, so to speak ; of aspirations, tendencies, — vague tendencies that influence the life of the present generation. M. Bourget in these studies brings more of his own thought than he borrows from his subjects, strewing his pages with many ideas that strike one and provoke thought, though not always approval. The book is brilliant, refined, often overrefined, and it represents a sum of original thought and novelty of view that recommends it for very high praise and more than passing attention. M. Bourget, whom we have hitherto known as a graceful and elegant though hardly a profound poet, has revealed himself in these essays a thinker in sympathy with the most advanced of his contemporaries and a writer of prose of rare purity.