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PARTISAN REVIEW
witnesses the terrible power of sexuality, in human beings and in pea–
cocks, and cannot himself go much further in the direction of passion
than a warm flush of inclination, or if Pecuchet contracts gonorrhea
from his first sexual experience, we arc not exactly being given ex–
amples of the effect of the bourgeois swinishness. When the hailstorm
destroys the fruit which the two beginners have been almost successful
in bringing to maturity, the phenomenon is not cultural but meteor–
ological and, in its context, cosmological. That the agricultural
treatises differ from each other, that "as regards marl, Puvis recom–
mends it, Ravet's handbook opposes it," this cannot fairly be ascribed
to the contemporary corruption of mind-it is of the immemorial
nature of farming: since the time of Cain, farmers have exercised
their moral faculties on just such differences of opinion. Pecuchet
meditates on the inherent contradictions that seem to exist between
fruit and branch: "The authorities recommend stopping all the ducts.
If
not, the sap is injured, and the tree, of course, suffers. For it to
flourish, it would have to bear no fruit at all. Yet those that are
never pruned or manured yield fruit, smaller, indeed, but better
flavored"-this is not an indictment of the stupidity of bourgeois–
democratic pomology but a profound consideration of the nature of
life, cultural as well as arboricultural. In their true goodness of heart
the two friends undertake to rear and educate a pair of brutalized
waifs; they fail not because their educational methods are contempt–
ible but because the human material has become intractable.
A considerable part of the intellectual criticism of the novel de–
pends upon the inversion of the snobbish censorship to which I have
referred. This is the mode of comedy which perceives that if any
abstruse discipline is confronted with an actu.al human being, no mat–
ter how stupid-and, indeed, the stupider the better-, it is the
person who is justified as against the discipline. A draper should not
be adept in arms nor study the arts of logic or language; stilI, when
put in company of the fencing master who can kill a man by demon–
strative reason, or the rhetorician who shows him that
A
is sounded
with the mouth
so,
Monsieur Jourdain is not the greatest fool on the
stage, nor would he be if he had secured Aristotle .as his teacher. In
any vaudeville dialectic the intellectual advantage always rests with
the obtuse or primitive person; the straight man, the patient teacher
who believes in the subject, is always discredited. No discipline which
