20
PARTISAN REVIEW
coming a great hero of the bourgeois. But Dussardier himself is un-
happy. The boy he had knocked down had wrapped the tricolor
around him and shouted to the National Guard: "Are you going to
fire on your brothers?" Dossardier isn't at all sure that he oughtn't
to have been on the other side. His last appearance is at the climax
of the story, constitutes, indeed, the climax: he turns up in a prole-
tarian street riot, which the cavalry and police are putting down.
Dussardier refuses to move on, crying
«Vive la Republique!";
and
Frederic comes along just in time to see one of the policemen kill him.
Then he recognizes the policeman: it is the socialist, Senecal.
L'Education Sentimentale,
unpopular when it first appeared, is
likely, if we read it in our youth, to prove baffling and even repellent.
It sounds as if it were going to be a love story, but the love affairs
turn out so consistently to be either unfulfilled or lukewarm that we
find ourselves irritated or depressed. Is it a satire? It is too real for a
satire. Yet it does not seem to have the kind of vitality which we are
accustomed to look for in a novel .
Yet, although we may rebel, as we first read it, against
L' Educa-
tion Sentimentale,
we find afterwards that it has stuck in our crop.
If it is true, as Bernard Shaw has said, that
Das K apital
makes us see
the nineteenth century "as if it were a cloud passing down the wind,
changing its shape and fading as it goes," so that we are never after-
ward able to forget that "capitalism, with its wage slavery, is only
a passing phase of social development, following primitive commu-
nism, chattel slavery and feudal serf~o.minto the past"-so Flaubert's
novel plants deep in our mind an idea which we never get' quite rid of
-the suspicion that our middle class society of business men, bankers
and manufacturers, and people who live on or deal in investments, so
far from being redeemed by its culture, has ended by cheapening and
invalidating culture: politics, science and art-and not only these
but the ordinary human relations, love, friendship and loyalty to
cause-till the whole civilization has seemed to dwindle.
But fully to appreciate the book, one must have had time to see
something of life and to have acquired a certain interest in social as
distinct from personal questions. Then, if we read it again, we are
amazed to find that the tone no longer seems really satiric and that
.we are listening to a sort of muted symphony of which the timbres had
been inaudible before. There are no hero, no villain, to arouse us,
no clowns to amuse us, no scenes to wring our hearts. Yet the effect
is deeply moving. It is the tragedy of nobody in particular, but of the
poor human race itself reduced to such ineptitude, such cowardice,
such commonness, such weak irresolution-arriving,
with so many
fine notions in its head, so many noble words on its lips, at a failure
which is all the more miserable because those who have failed are
