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Each stroke of the pen, or rather each turn of the scalpel, amazes us by its keen penetration. As we at last close the book and meditate on what we have read, it is little by little borne in upon us that though due tribute is paid to the charming traits of the American woman, yet the general outcome of M. Bourget's analysis is truly damnatory.
Mark Twain in the late 1800's felt obliged to rebut some of Bourget's prejudice: "What Paul Bourget thinks of us." The mixture of blood would there have dissolved the admirable Anglo-Saxon energy which the struggle against a nature at once very rich and very mutinous has exalted to such surprising splendor.
In Paul Bourget's report for this year we find numerous cases, of which this is a type; Jeanne Chaix, eldest of six children; mother insane, father chronically ill.
Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could safely be labelled "American" not a single human detail, inside or outside.
Huysmans, in his admirable essay on Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de réellement obscènes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism.
One of the dicta in M. Bourget's "Outre Mer" to which I cannot but take exception is that which insists on the essential similarity and monotony of all the cities of the United States.
Romain Rolland's Au-Dessus de la Melee, written in exile in Switzerland; Barbusse's terrible Le Feu; Duhamel's bitter Civilization; Bourget's strangely fascinating novel The Meaning of Death.
Whatever may be the cause of it better food, a different legislation or climate, or contact with other nations the suggestive fact remains, that the more objectionable idiosyncrasies of the Maltese, Corsicans and Sicilians become diluted on African soil. Can it be the mere change from an island to a continent? There may be some truth in Bourget's "oppression des iles."
As to immorality, it is not people like Mendeleyev but poets, abbots, and personages regularly attending Embassy churches, who have the reputation of being perverted debauchees, libertines, and drunkards. In short, I cannot understand Bourget's crusade.
W.S. Caine's likening them to "international exhibitions a week before their opening" will strike many visitors as very apposite. It is only to the indiscriminate and unhedged form of M. Bourget's statement that objection need be made.
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