Paul Bourget  

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Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (September 2, 1852–December 25, 1935), was a French novelist and critic.

Paul Bourget was one of the leading and most influential theorists of the decadent movement in France. His Essais de la psychologie contemporaine, 1883 and Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine included a famous essay on the Goncourt brothers as well as one on Baudelaire. Some of his novels survived into the 20th century: the 1886 Un crime d'amour was published in 1953 by American publisher Ace[1]. He also published Théorie de la Décadence.

Contents

Bourget on Baudelaire

"He has realized that he arrived late in an aging civilization. And instead of deploring this tardy arrival, like La Bruyère and Musset, he would have been delighted - I almost said honored by it. He was a man for times of decadence, and he turned himself into a theoretician of decadence. This may well be the most disquieting trait of this disquieting figure, and the one most disturbingly seductive to a contemporary soul. --Paul Bourget, 1881.

Notes

by Havelock Ellis, in an intro to A Rebours by Huysmans

Some fifteen years later, Bourget, again in an essay on Baudelaire ("Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine"), continued the exposition of the theory of decadence, elaborating the analogy to the social organism which enters the state of decadence as soon as the individual life of the parts is no longer subordinated to the whole. "A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word." It was at this time (about 1884) that the term "decadent" seems first to have been applied by Barrès and others to the group of which Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarmé were the most distinguished members, and in so far as it signified an ardent and elaborate search for perfection of detail beyond that attained by Parnassian classicality it was tolerated or accepted. Verlaine, indeed, was for the most part indifferent to labels, neither accepting nor rejecting them, and his work was not bound up with any theory. But Huysmans, with the intellectual passion of the pioneer in art, deliberate and relentless, has carried both the theory and the practice of decadence in style to the farthest point. In practice he goes beyond Baudelaire, who, however enamoured he may have been of what he called the phosphorescence of putrescence, always retained in his own style much of what is best in the classic manner. Huysmans' vocabulary is vast, his images, whether remote or familiar, always daring--"dragged," in the words of one critic, "by the hair or by the feet, down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax,"--but a heart-felt pulse of emotion is restrained beneath the sombre and extravagant magnificence of this style, and imparts at the best that modulated surge of life which only the great masters can control. --Intro, Against the Grain (A Rebours), Havelock Ellis

Works

Poésies

Essais

Romans

Nouvelles

Autres œuvres

A Classer



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