FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
619
is confronted with the simplicity, the intellectual
innocence,
of Bou–
vard and Pecuchet can long maintain its pretense to value.
Then We must have in mind the large part that is played in
the book by the intellectual and quasi-intellectual absurdities which
are as ridiculous as we want to call them, but about which it
is
im–
possible for a sensible man to be seriously troubled. Two of the
amusing episodes of the novel concern themselves with Bouvard and
Pecuchet training their memories by a compound of three mnemonic
systems and hardening their bodies according to Amoros's manual of
gymnastics. Rene Descharmes, in his well known work,
Autour de
Bouvard et Pecuchet,
devotes a long chapter to one of the mnemonic
systems, the most famous one of all, that of Feinagle, and he gives
another chapter to the gymnastic manual. In Descharmes, as in Flau–
bert, the books are very funny. But we can scarcely believe that these
books, and the treatises on hygiene and diet, were the kind of thing
that was making Flaubert "rabid." As long as there have been
printed books there have been mnemonic systems and they have been
absurd; there have always been professors of physical training and
they have always had a grandiose solemnity which may still be ob–
served. Quackery
is
pretty constant in culture, and it is the detritus
of culture, not its essence.
An American scholar ,and critic, Mr. Hugh Kenner, recently de–
scribed
Bouvard and Pecuchet
as "the book into which Flaubert emp–
tied his voluminous notes on human gullibility, groundless learning,
opinions chic,
contradictory authorities, ridiculous enthusiasms, the
swill of the 19th century." But we must think with a certain tender–
ness of some of "the swill of the 19th century" because it has served
as the intellectual aliment of certain of the best poets of our age, the
men whom we must readily exempt from our general condemnation
of our own culture and who have done most to make us aware of
the awfulness of our culture and that of the nineteenth century. When
Bouvard and Pecuchet involve themselves with the study of psychic
and occult phenomena, their researches are no doubt less profound
than those of William Butler Yeats, but not different in kind; and
although they fall short of Yeats's degree of success in practice, still,
on one occasion, they do startle themselves, their audience, and the
reader by demonstrating an actual example of clairvoyance. Nothing
that the delightful Robert Graves tells us about the Druids contradicts
