Part 33

The solemn text, "Of him to whom much is given, much is expected," seems to have been ever present to his mind in a rigorous sense, and to have made him dissatisfied with his labors and acts of goodness, however comparatively great; so that the unavoidable consciousness of his superiority was in that respect a cause of disquiet. He suffered so much from this, and from the gloom which perpetually haunted him and made solitude frightful, that it may be said of him, "If in this life only he had hope, he was of all men most miserable." He loved praise when it was brought to him, but was too proud to seek for it. He was somewhat susceptible of flattery. As he was general and unconfined in his studies, he cannot be considered as master of any one particular science; but he had accumulated a vast and various collection of learning and knowledge, which was so arranged in his mind as to be ever in readiness to be brought forth. But his superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was in him true, evident, and actual wisdom. His moral precepts are practical, for they are drawn from an intimate acquaintance with human nature. His maxims carry conviction, for they are founded on the basis of common-sense and a very attentive and minute survey of real life. His mind was so full of imagery that he might have been perpetually a poet; yet it is remarkable that however rich his prose is in this respect, his poetical pieces, in general, have not much of that splendor, but are rather distinguished by strong sentiment and an acute observation, conveyed in harmonious and energetic verse, particularly in heroic couplets.

Though usually grave and even awful in his deportment, he possessed uncommon and peculiar powers of wit and humor; he frequently indulged himself in colloquial pleasantry; and the heartiest merriment was often enjoyed in his company, with this great advantage, that as it was entirely free from any poisonous tincture of vice or impiety, it was salutary to those who shared in it. He had accustomed himself to such accuracy in his common conversation, that he at all times expressed his thoughts with great force and an elegant choice of language, the effect of which was aided by his having a loud voice and a slow deliberate utterance. In him were united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him a most extraordinary advantage in arguing; for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could when he pleased be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and from a spirit of contradiction, and a delight in showing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity: so that when there was an audience, his real opinions could seldom be gathered from his talk; though when he was in company with a single friend, he would discuss a subject with genuine fairness; but he was too conscientious to make error permanent and pernicious by deliberately writing it; and in all his numerous works he earnestly inculcated what appeared to him to be the truth, his piety being constant and the ruling principle of all his conduct.

Such was Samuel Johnson; a man whose talents, acquirements, and virtues were so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age and by posterity with admiration and reverence.

PAUL BOURGET

(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.

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?