 |
|
Paul Bourget (1852–1935) "I
suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American,
because whenever he can't strike up any other way
to put in his time he can always get away with a
few years trying to find out who his grandfather
was!" French
author Paul Bourget, while visiting a
decadent gilded age Newport Rhode Island in 1893,
remarked, "In America all men in society have
been and still are business men. They were not born
to social station; they have achieved it." The newness
of this wealth was a complexity to Bourget: "These
millionaires do not entirely accept themselves...They
do not admit that they are thus different from the
Old World, or if they admit it, it is to insist that
if they chose they could equal the Old World, or,
at least, enjoy it."
In
1895 after finishing his tour of America Paul Bourget
penned his views in his book, Outre-Mer: Impressions
of America. The novel provoked the ire of Mark
Twain who found Bourgets sweeping judgements of America
distastefull. Bourget's quintessentially French
interpretations of America were the target of Twain's
1897 essay: What Paul Bourget thinks of us.
The
essence of Twain's essay was this: While the foreign
writer can register and describe exterior scenes
and events, he continued, only "the native novelist" can
provide an accurate representation of the nation's
interior experience, "its soul, its life, its speech,
its thought." Literary creativity, according to Twain,
depends on the unconscious accumulation of local
knowledge, for the writer is ultimately less a creator
than an "Observor of Peoples." Hence, Twain
found Bourget's views of America distasteful in so
much as Bourget was not a native novelist.
The
criticism which Mark Twain directed at Paul Bourget's
'Outre Mer', and the subsequent controversy incident
thereto, forced into light the racial and temperamental
dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American
worldview. Mr. Clemens once remarked that, of all
continental peoples, the French were most alien to
the spirit of his humour. In 'Le Figaro', at the
time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference
in taste once more comes to light: "It is as difficult
for a Frenchman to understand Mark Twain as for a
North American to admire La Fontaine”.
|