FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
615
mind of each. It is not until they meet each other that they really
begin their intellectual life. Although they are always at one in their
enthusiasm, they take sufficiently different views of questions to create
between them a degree of dialectic; Flaubert, like Plato, conceived of
friendship as one of the conditions of thought. Love and logic go
together.
Not imbeciles, then, but certainly not without folly. Wherein
does the folly of Bouvard and Pecuchet lie? In part their error is
the same .as that of their prototype, Monsieur Jourdain- they want to
learn too quickly. They do not know the true mode of thought, they
have no patience. They would not understand what many of the
great researchers meant when they said that they stared at the facts
until the facts spoke to them. They are committed to the life of the
mind in general, but not, in the way of the true scholar, in particular.
They are perhaps too thoroughly Whole Men; they lack the degree
of benign limitation which permits an intense preoccupation, making
a single subject seem the satisfaction of the demands of a whole tem–
perament. And then we must remember their age; they are forty–
seven when they begin, they have no time for patience-they are
about the same age as Faust was when he expressed his sense of the
inadequacy of all the disciplines. They are Faustian; they must try
everything, and to no intellectual moment are they able to say their
((Verweile doch!"
But their measure of folly is not what makes Bouvard and Pe–
cuchet comic characters. They are comic through the operation of the
censorship which the race exercises over those who address them–
selves to the large enterprises of the spirit. This censorship undertakes
to say who may engage upon what high adventures.
It
decides who,
by reason of age or degree of pulchritude or social class, may be
permitted to fall in love, or have surpassing ambitions, or think great
thoughts. Whether or not we are ourselves engaged in any of the
great spiritual enterprises, we feel it our duty to protect their decorum
and their
decor
by laughing at anyone who does not conform to the
right image of the lover, the hero, or the thinker. This would be a
more disagreeable human trait than
in
fact it is if we were not at the
same time prepared to discover that some of the people whom we
debar from their desires have their own special virtues. Leopold
Bloom, although he has no ashplant and no irony and does not an-
