24
PARTISAN REVIEW
and trimming, in order to win the election. The audience would not
have it; and the leading actor, in the role of the candidate came off
the stage in tears. One can hardly blame them: reading the play
today, in spite of some amusing and mordant scenes, it proves too
horrible to take even from Flaubert.
Then he embarked on
Bouvard et Pecuchet,
which occupied
him-with only one period of lelief, when he indulged his suppressed
kindliness and idealism in the relatively human
Trois Contes-for
most of the rest of his life. Here two copyists retire from their
profession and set out to cultivate the arts and sciences. They make
a mess of them all. The book contains an even more withering version
of the events of 1848, in which the actors and their political at-
titudes are reduced to the scale of performing fleas. When Bouvard
and Pecuchet find that everything has "cracked up in their hands,"
they go back to copying again. Flaubert did not live to finish the
book; but the reader was to have been supplied in the second part
with a sort of encyclopedia made up entirely of absurd statements
and foolish sentiments extracted from the productions which
Bouvard and Pccuchet were to copy.
Bouvard et Pewchet
has always mystified Flaubert's critics, who
have usually taken it as a caricature of the bourgeois like
L' Education
Sentimentale,-in
which case, what would have been the point of
doing the same thing over again with everything simply smaller and
drier? M. Rene Dumesnil, the Flaubert expert, believes that
Bouvard
et Pecuchet
was to have had a larger application. The encyclopaedia
of silly ideas was to have been not merely a credo of the bourgeois: it
was to have contained also the ineptitudes of great men, of writers
whom Flaubert admired, and even selections from Flaubert himself.
The disastrous experiments of the two copyists were to lead to a
general exposure of all human stupidity and ignorance--eertainly,
in the first part of the book, Flaubert caricatures his own notions
about politics and society along with those of everybody else. Bouvard
and Pecuchet were to realize the stupidity of their neighbors and to
learn their own limitations and to be left with a profound impression
of the general incompetence of the human race. They were themselves
to compile the monument to human inanity.
If this theory is true-and Flaubert's manuscripts bear it out-
Flaubert had lifted the onus of blame from the bourgeois and for the
first time written a satire on humanity itself of the type of
Gulliver's
Travels.
The bourgeois has ceased to preach to the bourgeois: as the
first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the nineteenth century,
he shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of humanity, for he is
unable to believe in, or even to conceive, any non-bourgeois way out.
