A CRUEL ENIGMA BY PAUL BOURGET

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3G4+ PAUL BOUEGET. A Pout of merit, an acute, clear-sighted critic, and an accomplished and successful novelist, JI. Paul Bourget occupies an important position among the brilliant crowd of modern French textit{litterateurs, upon the younger generation especially of whom he exercises an acknowledged and a constantly widening influence. Nor will this influence appear other than natural if it be borne in mind that, gifted with no mean qualifications for the task, 51. Bourget has made a deep and particular study of just those problems which, to this self-conscious, introspective age of ours, are possessed of an all-absorbing interest. Complex as his nature undoubtedly is, and many-sided as its accomplishment might, to a first and superficial view, appear, he is in all his writings primarily a critic, while his criticism has, moreover, uniformly occupied itself with the same objects, with the hidden movements of the mind, that is to say, considered in their bearings upon external manifestation, with all the varied promptings which underlie the surface of conduct. For the prosecution of such psychological studies, M. Bourget is in every needful particular well fitted. He possesses keen insight, and a remarkable power of sympathetically appreciating the play and counter-play of motives, passions, and delicate shades of feeling; while he is also endowed with that tact, subtlety, refinement, and, above all, exact lucidity of expression, by which a writer is enabled to convey his divinings unimpaired to the reader. This flexibility of sympathy, with its answeringflexibility of language, enabling to the expression alike of widely sundered and of delicately blending diversities of thought and emotion, correspond to, and are, perhaps, partly the outcome of, a richly varied life-experience. Just as M. Bourget ha...