complexities he loves.  His first novel, ‘L’Irreparable,’ lacks movement and is sometimes tedious in its over-elaboration.  In ’Une Cruelle Enigme’ 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.”