Book excerpt: ♥♥ A CRUEL ENIGMA BY PAUL BOURGET ♥♥ Nor will this influence appear other than natural if it is 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 all-absorbing interest. ♥♥ A CRUEL ENIGMA BY PAUL BOURGET ♥♥ 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. ♥♥ A CRUEL ENIGMA BY PAUL BOURGET ♥♥ 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... ♥♥ A CRUEL ENIGMA BY PAUL BOURGET ♥♥