FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
611
knowledge of the practical arts, would be to have the inspiration for
those scenes
in
which Bouvard and Pecuchet undertake to deal with
practical life, to grow their own food and to preserve it, to make
their own cordial
(Bouvanne
it is to be called!).
Bouvard and
Pecuchet
in its despair that anything at all can be done is the nega–
tion of the morning confidence and hope of the
Encyclopedie.
Which brings us to the third book of
Gulliver's Travels.
The
Voyage to Laputa,
in
which Swift satirizes the scientific theories of
his day, may be thought of as the ambivalent prolegomenon to the
Encyclopedie-ambivalent
because Swift was Baconian in his con–
ception of the practical
aim
of science but anti-Baconian in his con–
tempt for any kind of scientific method he knew of, even Bacon's
positivism. In the expression of his scorn he provides a striking prece–
dent for
Bouvard and Pecuchet,
which had for its explanatory sub–
title, "The failings of the methods of science." The analogy that may
be drawn between Flaubert's book and Swift's go considerably beyond
what is suggested merely by the Voyage to Laputa-it leads us, in–
deed, to the personal similarity between Flaubert and Swift. But this
may better be observed in a later place.
Mr. Pound, having particularly in mind the encyclopedic nature
of
Bouvard and Pecuchet,
finds
Don Quixote
to be a very different
kind of thing-"Cervantes parodied but a single literary folly, the
chivalric folly." Yet it is not the parody of the chivalric idea that in
itself makes
Don Quixote
what it is, but rather the complex drama
that results from putting an elaborate idea to the test in the world
of actuality. Flaubert said of Madame Bovary that she was the sister
of Don Quixote; Bouvard and Pecuchet are at least consanguineous
enough to be cousins. And their idea, despite its encyclopedic muta–
tions, is, after all, as much a unity as Don Quixote's: they believe
that the world yields to mind. And if
Don Quixote,
then certainly
Candide,
which also tests an idea in the laboratory of the world.
The conclusion of
Bouvard and Pecuchet,
"Let us return to copying,"
has not become proverbial only because its proverbial possibilities have
been pre-empted by "Let us cultivate our garden."
Then the second act of
The Bourgeois Gentleman,
in which
Monsieur Jourdain receives instruction from the professors of the
sciences, arts, and graces, may be thought of as a small encyclopedia
in the form of a farce and as the model for this history of the bour-
