574
PARTISAN REVIEW
which all credit belongs to the nerves, substituting for the real
God
the God of her daydreams, the God of the future and of chance,
a
story-book God with spurs and mustaches. Once again, the hysterical
poet!
I
I
1
:..f
Hysteria! Why does not this physiological mystery provide
the
warp and the woof of a literary work, this mystery which the Academy
of Medicine has not yet solved? Manifested in women by the sensa·
tion of a rising and asphyxiating ball (I don't speak of its principal
symptom), among nervous men it is translated into every sort of
incapacity and also a tendency toward every sort of excess.
v
In brief, this woman is truly great, she is above all pathetic;
and despite the systematic sternness of the author, who has made
every effort to remain absent from his work and to function like the
manager of a Punch and Judy show, every woman of
intellect
will
be grateful to him for having raised the female to such a high posi–
tion, so far from the pure animal and so near to the ideal man, and
for having made her share in that twofold character of the calculating
and the dreamy which makes up the perfect human being.
It is said that Madame Bovary is ridiculous. Quite true, we do
first see her taking for a Walter Scott hero a specimen of gentleman–
shall I say homespun gentleman?-attired in hunting jacket and con–
trasted linen. Next we see her in love with a little law clerk (who
is
unwilling even to undertake a dangerous court action for his mistress) ;
and, finally, there is the poor exhausted creature, like an outlandish
Pasiphae, trapped within the narrow confine of a village, pursuing
the ideal through the shabby inns and dance-halls of the prefecture.
But what does it matter? Let us .admit it, this is Caesar at Carpentras.
She is in pursuit of the Ideal!
I certainly do not say with the Lycanthrope of revolutionary
fame, who abdicated in the struggle with society: "Despite all the
platitudes and all the follies of the present age, don't we still have
cigarette-papers and adultery?" But I do assert that after all, every–
thing taken into account, even on the most exact scales, our world
is the more tough-minded for having been engendered by Christ, who
did not have it in him to cast the first stone at the woman taken in
adultery. Nor do I think that a few cuckolds more or less will speed
up the rotary motion of the spheres, or advance by one second the
final destruction of the universe. It is high time to call a halt to this
