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Un Moderne—Paul Bourget, del'enfance au DiscipleRobert J. Niessa

a The University of MichiganPublished online: 06 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Robert J. Niess (1964) Un Moderne—Paul Bourget, de l'enfance auDisciple, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 18:4, 367-369, DOI:10.1080/00397709.1964.10732836

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1964.10732836

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on later publications even in his discussion of the earlier first vogue of Nietz­scheism. Furthermore, this reviewer would have liked more on literaturethan pp . .z6o-~.z9, and the five pages on Spanish American literature withonly twelve quotations are particularly meager. The political chapter VIIis nearly limited to Spain. Some observations appear to be rash, e.g.,that only Nietzsche mediated Greek antiquity to the Hispanic world(p. .z~5), that Darlo had no relation to Nietzsche (p. ~13)-although

he had written in La Nacion about him, according to Rukser himself,and cited him in "Letanla de Nuestro Senor Don Quijote." Likewise,Reyles is finished too quickly. The reference to a "Gruta de Zaratustra"seems to allude to the same Colombian Tertlliia which Donald McGradycalled "La Pagoda de Nietzsche" in the recent Revista rbero-americana,XXIX, No. 55 (196~), 153, when discussing the parody of Silva andNietzscheism in the novel Pax. Whatever the name may have been, McGradyonly confirms the impact of the German thinker whom Rukser calls inconclusion "der grosse Erreger" and whom he justly considers one of the"geistigen Vater der modernen Hispania" (p. 354).

My minor reservations take nothing away from the indelible character ofthis study which calls itself "Ein Beitrag" in its subtitle and is a real contri­bution to Hispanic cultural and intellectual history.

State University of New York at Buffalo GEORGE O. SCHANZER

MICHEL MANsUY: UnModerne-Paul Bourget, de I'enfance aN Disciple. Besancon:Irnprimerie Jacques et Demontrond, 1961. xiv + 573 pp.

OF ALL THE MAJOR AUTHORS and intellectuals of the generation of 1885,the one who to most of us has unquestionably seemed the "deadest" isPaul Bourget. Modern scholarship and criticism have paid comparativelylittle attention to him, and there is not much evidence that he haskept, save for Le Disciple, a large reading public in France or abroad.Compared with him, Maurice Barres and Anatole France have seemedvery much alive, Huysmans is a modern mania, even Pierre Loti has manyreaders, though they may all be in convents.

Why this decline of a man who enjoyed as much popularity and influenceas anyone of his time, a man who perhaps better than any of his contempo­raries understood and in the final analysis represented his generation as wellas any man ever has? Most of us, of course, now find his novels of "highlife" terribly stuffy and dated, most of us do not concede that the problemshe treats are "modern" problems, and we tend to think of him as so mucha man of his time as to be now a real museum piece, unable to transcendthe limits of his age and speak to us in human accents; perhaps most ofall wecannot forget the smug snobbery of L'E.tape, with its attitudes so harshlyout of place in democratic, fluid societies where to "bruler l'etape" is thegoal and the technique of every young fellow from across the tracks.

But if any force can reverse what seems to be a permanent set of ourera against Bourget, M. Mansuy's book will do it. This is a fine intellectual

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Winter z,61 SYMPOSIUM

performance, as revealing of the years of ferment, 1870-1890, as any workI know. Bourget, with all his limitations, turns out to be an astonishinglygood subject for such a book as this: intimately connected with the entiresocial, intellectual and moral life of his time and able to render its atmospherewith more sensitivity and penetration than any of his rivals, Paul Bourgetis his epoch in small-and it was not the least interesting epoch the worldhad ever seen.

M. Mansuy proves equal to the enormous task he set himself, the task of"organizing" Bourget's complex career, with its multifarious interestsand many-faceted accomplishments, and of synthesizing the most tangledskein ofinfluences the late century has to offer. He brings the finest qualitiesof comprehension and judgment to bear on a vast mass of social, personal,philosophic and literary knowledge and creates a study which, far morethan the study of one man's intellectual life, is very nearly a compendiumof an era.

The method employed is, naturally enough, the linear, chronologicalone, given the fact that this is an analyss of an evolution, and M. Mansuyhas brillantly avoided the usual pitfalls of this method, successfully en­twining the external events of Bourget's life with his intellectual evolutionand displaying both against the curtain of the times. To follow him stepby step as he traces Bourget's evolution from colligien to the rich adulatedauthor of Le Disdpte, from democratic anti-Bonapartist to conservativesnob, from poet to analyst, from Kantian and Spinozist to pessimist in themanner of 188S is manifestly beyond the scope of a review. These pagesswarm: with men and women, with ideas, with arguments, with analyses,with events, influences and tendencies. And everywhere Bourget is at thecenter-as he was really-the perfect and authentic dilettante, the newHamlet, the perpetual seeker for truth and certitude and, perhaps, real love.

The high points of the book are, of course, the long, detailed analysesof the Essais de p.rychologie contemporaine and Le Disciple. These are fine exam­ples of M. Mansuy's method: bringing every possible fact to bear, placingeach of these books in a dense matrix of personal events, ideas and externalhappenings, he brilliantly analyzes the origin of each of them in its author'smind and spirit, the reasons for its impact on the public, the true sensewhich Bourget wished his pages to carry. But there are many other finechapters, too: the discussion of Bourget's reaction to the Semaine Sanglanteof 1871 (the event which did more than any other to make of him, ulti­mately, a pessimist and a conservative), the account of his life as a journalist,the analyses of L'I"eparable, Cruelle Enigme, Crime d'amour and AndreCorn/li,r. For any lover of the great years of the Third Republic, the entirebook is a delight, for in its pages the "whole thing" files by and we see,enraccourci, in the life of Bourget the aspirations, the challenges, the debatesand the attitudes of the whole teeming era.

M. Mansuy's scholarly qualities are many and important: amassing areally staggering volume of documents of all kinds, he interprets and syn­thesizes so well that we are never lost on the sea of his facts; he shows anexact sense of perspective, handling the difficult problem of intellectualinfluences, for instance, with great judiciousness-and this with a dervish

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like Bourget; he treats Bourget's private life with gentlemanly modesty,refreshing after so many recent nasty exposes; he draws conclusions thatare simply beyond argument; he even makes us see that Bourget's problemsare not solved problems after all. In short, he has produced a work of realand vital scholarship.

There is, inevitably, one flaw-the failure of Bourget's true personalphysiognomy to appear very clearly. As we read these fine pages, we wishBourget the manwould come a little closer, would speak a little more closely,would prove himself not to be just a thinking machine with a taste for de­bauchery. But M. Mansuy might reply that such a portrait was not his inten­tion, for this is an intellectual biography, concerned with ideas and ethics,not with gossip and anecdotes, and that in any case Bourget did not offerhim that kind of hot humanity we find in Diderot or Balzac or Verlaine,the kind offrailty and fire which make the writing of biography so tempting.And it must be said too that M. Mansuy worked under another handicapthan the complexity, subtlety and chilliness of his hero: be was not allowedto quote directly from Bourget's letters or private papers and so could notmake him speak to us directly and humanly.

But that is only a little flaw, all the rest is good, excellent. And now if anew Jules Huret were to conduct an entpdte on the generation of 188S, I forone would telegraph him, in the manner of Zola's loyal old friend: "Bourgetpas mort I Lettre suit."

The University of Michigan ROBERT j, NIESS

VITTORIO SANTOLI. Fra Germania e Itaii«: scritti di storia letteraria. Firenze:Felice Le Monnier, 196z. xxvi + 346 pp.

WHAT HAPPENS when an Italian endowed with acumen, wit, and unusualphilological training takes to scrutinizing the literary heritage of his trans­Alpine neighbors? In this case, the Italian is Vittorio Santoli-a man fromthe rigorous critical school of Benedetto Croce, Cesare De Lollis, and MicheleBarbi, The results of such a scrutiny are likely to be refreshingly unconven­tional, highly stimulating, and even surprising.

Santoli's criticism is pervaded by a watchful awareness of the many hiddenrelationships obtaining between the various branches of Western civiliza­tion. To single out only one of the noteworthy aspects of his scholarlybackground, mention must be made of his great skill in applying the finesttools of Romance philology to the broadening and enrichment of Germanicphilology. He has crossed well established frontiers and penetrated intospheres that seem remote and perhaps unrelated to his proper field of studies.Thus he has explored and assimilated the most important findings made inother areas oflearning. W6lfHin's KJinstgeschichtliche Gnmdbegriffe and LionelloVenturi's Gwto dei primitivi inspired him to employ purely technical cate­gories in his own field of literary criticism. Such an approach has suppliedalmost limitless possibilities for a far more penetrating and interpretivescheme of organization by periods in literary history than the one used bythe philologists of the old school.

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