PAUL BOURGET.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7864, 15 May 1891, Page 2

PAUL BOURGET.

lb was remarked recently in the St. James's Gazette that of late years a veritable " literary aristocracy " has established itself in France. Not only are th<» gains of leading French writers greater and more constant than ever before, bub they are actually becoming, these UUratexirs, the heads of dynasties invested with all pr-stiore, privilege, and power. There is the Hugo dyna.ty and the Daudet dynasty, whose respective representatives in tbe second and third generation were lately joined in wedlock amid a scene of pomp and circumstance related at great length by the next morning's Parisian journals. There is the Dumas dynasty, one of whose daughters has done an " aristocrat" of the ordinary unliterary kind the perhaps unmerited honour of espousing him. There is the Goncourt dynasty, which up to the present has consisted of two brothers only (one deceased), but which stands none the less eminent on that account. The Zola dynasty will doubtless within a few years' time be as solidly built up as is its founder's most documents novel, or, to speak of more substantial things, his bank account. And even now one may discern the first glimmerings of a Bourget dynasty in the proximate future ; for has not the author of "Menaonges" recently accomplished the chief duty of a potentate towards his subjects by entering upon the married state ? _ . Within ten years time Paul Bourget has risen from the plebeiau obscurity of scribbling vague 6tudcs for unheard of Latin Quarter publications to the patrician splendour of coming out with his romances in feuUleton form in the Figaro, VU Parisienne, and Nouvelle Revue, and having them subsequently run through dozens and scores of lemoncoloured editions as issued in book form by his faithful A. Lemerre. Everything now is open to M. Bourget, He has gained social distinction, the thing upon which apparently he had most set his heart; and what though a few scoffer., sneer and dub him "romancier pour baronnes israelites." He is a great man in certain salons, whether '* Israelites " or not. And had there been any other height of superiority and pre-eminence for which he should have panted, most assuredly, as a fashionable man of letters in the Paris of thi3 fin de siecle, he would have been enabled to attain it. One is tempted to believe that M. Boulanger's decline dates from the day when he published an extraordinary composition, which only his bitterest enemies have not forgotten, and which was entitled "L'lnvasion Allemande." For then it was French people discovered he couldn't write. Is Bourget "snobbish, as so many amiable friends of his have asserted ? Probably this legend as to the snobbism of Bourget took its rise, during the earlier years of his career, from the fact that he has a foible for correctly knotted scarves and varnished boots. It is a case so unparalleled in French letters since the days of Alfred de Musset, a thing so foreign to tha principles and practice of all the other literary leaders of a Third Republic styled "Athenian" by men who, in Athens, would probably themselves have been styled " Boeotian," that one cannot wonder it has called forth reprobation. M. Bourget is likewise reproached in Paris, with what is termed his Anglomaniao But this slight English veneer of M. Bourget's, In respect of literary style and feeling as well as personal deportment and address, is at bottom the effect of a genuine predilection. And how can anything that is genuine be deservedly set down as snobbish ? The author of " Etudes et Portraits "—a volume containing some of the best, most significant and sympathetic sketches of English life, literature, and manners ever done by a French writer —is attracted quite sincerely to things English because he has the good sense fully to perceive the importance of the Anglo-Saxon element in modern civilisation.'He likes Oxford, and has charmingly depicted itsaspects, because in Alma Mater he recognises the most venerable of temples erected to the immortal deity, intellect. He likes London because in London may still be found that solidity of magnificence and perfection of ton which Paris once may have possessed, in the days when Balzac wrote novels and there was a Faubourg Saint-Germain, but has lost long since, to all appearances beyond recall. Finally, he likes English letters, is fond of Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Swinburne. Rossetti, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats, because—well, because he is Paul Bourget, a man of careful culture and refined intelligence and taste. Of course, one is quite prepared to acknowledge that he may have begun liking all theseEnKlish people and thiugson account of having derived from M. Tame, bis great llterarv and philosophic chief, what might familiarly be termed-a "tip" in that direction; but equally certain it is tbac he has gone on liking them purely for their sake and his own.

On both sides of the Channel certain authorized literary critics have been heard to express surprise at the power of Bourget's latest novel but two, "Le Disciple," and at the poignancy as well as piquancy of his collection of physio-patho-psychological studies under the title " La Physiologic de rAmour." Further and greater surprises In this respect may be in store for the critical world ; for underlying Bourget's talent there is a foundation deep enough and broad enough for many new and superior ** Disciples " and "Physiologies." A few months since in Paris, speaking with an oracle of the literary &ra-$-ri«s—one of those men who know everything, and seem as though they might do anything, but who drown it all nightly in their mugs oil Munich

beer—the present writer alluded to Bourget's singular firmness of grasp on all subjects of metaphysical speculation. " Parbleu !" was the reply; iit "J » dix an. dephilosophis la-dedans (" ten years of grind at ' the moral sciences >. HO other French novelist of the day » "grounded" like Bourget. Indeed, one of the reasons for a certam wealcnesa in his power of telling a story has been his slowness in disengaging himself from the tolls ot other men's thought. Most accomplished as a critic—ingenious, elegant, profound to a cprtain extent, and quite sufficiently Rincere—Paul Bourget, as a novelist;, has been hitherto somewhat lacking iv depth and truth, simply because he has not looked hard enough at real life with iiis own eyes for the purpose of setting down his own thoughts about it in words alto* gether bis own. But it is perhaps no bad fault in a young writer to be thus literary to excess. To grow out of the learning one has had is easier than to grow into the learning one has not yet acquired.—St. James's Gatette.