18
PARTISAN REVIEW
divergent, arrived at identical interpretations of the happenings of
their own time.
When we do this, we become aware that Marx and Flaubert
started from very similar assumptions and that they were actuated
by moral aims almost equally uncompromising. Both implacably
hated the bourgeois, and both were resolved at any cost of worldly
success to keep outside the bourgeois system. And Marx, like Flaubert,
shared to some degree the romantic bias in favor of the past. Karl
Marx can, of course, hardly be said to have had a very high opinion
of any period of human history; but in comparison with the cap-
italist nineteenth century he betrayed a certain tenderness for Greece
and Rome and the Middle Ages. He pointed out that the slavery of
the ancient world had at least purchased the "full development" of
the masters and that a certain Antipatcr of Thessalonica had joyfully
acclaimed the invention of the water wheel for grinding corn because
it would set free the female slaves who had formerly had to do this
work, whereas the bourgeois economists had seen in machinery only
a means for making the workers work faster and longer in order "to
transform a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts into 'eminent cot-
ton spinners,' 'extensive sausage makers' and 'influential blacking
dealers'." And he had also a soft spot for the feudal system before
the nobility had revolted against the Crown and while the rights of all
classes, high and low, were still guaranteed by the king. Furthermore,
the feudal lords, he insisted, had spent their money laVIShlywhen they
had it, whereas it was of the essence of capitalism that the capitalist
saved his money and invested it, only to save and reinvest the profits.
Karl Marx's comment on his time was
The Communist Jvlani-
festo.
What is the burden of the great social novel of Flaubert?
Frederic Moreau, the hero of
L'Education Sentimentale,
is a sensitive
and intelligent young man with an income; but he has no stability
of purpose and is capable of no emotional integrity. He becomes so
aimlessly, so will-Iessly,involved in love affairs with different types of
women that he is unable to make anything real out of any of them:
they trip each other up until in the end he is left with nothing. He is
most in love from the very beginning with the virtuous wife of a
sort of glorified drummer, who is engaged in more or less shady
business enterprises; but, what with his timidity and her virtue, he
never gets anywhere with her-even though she loves him in return
-and leaves her in the hands of the drummer. Flaubert makes it plain
to us, however, that Frederic and the vulgar husband at bottom re-
present the same thing: Frederic is only the more refined as well as
the more incompetent side of the middle-class mediocrity of which
the promoter is the more flashy and active.
And so in the case of the other characters, the representatives
