FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
607
and development I will seem to be believing my own story, and it can
be made into something serious and even frightening." And he be–
lieved that it was exactly by an excess of evidence that he would
avoid pedantry.
The misgivings of his friends seemed in part justified by the public
response to the book when it was published in the year after Flaubert's
death. At first it was accepted merely as a "document," that is, its
interest seemed to derive less from itself than from its connection with
its author. But as the years passed the first impression was corrected.
With due allowance made for its unfinished, unrevised state, but quite
in its own right,
Bouvard and Pecuchet
was given its place beside the
great works of Flaubert's canon. Its pleasures are granted to be very
different from those of
Madame Bovary
and
A Sentimental Education,
but French readers find in it a peculiar interest and charm consonant
with its nature.
Its nature is singular. We cannot go so far as to say with Ezra
Pound that the novel "can be regarded as the inauguration of a new
form which has no precedents," and in any case, Mr. Pound, after
having said that "neither
Gargantua,
nor
Don Quixote,
nor Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
had furnished the archetype," goes on to show its
clear connection with at least the first-named book. And if it can be
argued that
Bouvard and Pecuchet,
in its character of "a kind of en–
cyclopedia made into farce," has no specific literary genre except per–
haps that which is comprised by
Gargantua,
it is still true that there
are a sufficient number of works sufficiently analogous with it in one
respect or another to constitute, if not a genre, then at least a tradition
in which it may be placed. Yet its singularity must not be slighted.
If
we try to say what was the characteristic accomplishment of
the French novelists of the nineteenth century, we can scarcely help
concluding that it was the full, explicit realization of the idea of so–
ciety as the definitive external circumstance, the main "condition," of
the individual life. American literature of the great age was, as D. H.
Lawrence was the first to see, more profound in this respect than the
French, in that it went deeper into the unconscious life of society; and
in England Dickens in his way and the later Trollope in his were more
truly perceptive of social motives and movements. But the French
achievement was more explicit than either the American or the English,
it made itself available to more people. Almost, we might be moved
