FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
621
cipled hostility to science as such-quite to the contrary, indeed. He
takes note of the ridiculous statements that science can make, but
much of the confusion that Bouvard and Pecuchet experience is the
result of their own ineptitude or ignorance rather than of the inade–
quacy of science itself.
It
is not the fault of botany-although it may
be the fault of a particular elementary textbook of botany-that they
believe that all flowers have a pericarp, but look in vain for it when
confronted by buttercups and wild strawberry.
Medicine, of course, is the natural prey of the comic- the treat–
ment it receives in
Bouvard and Pecuchet
adds nothing in point of
comic method to the classic one established by Moliere. And this can
serve to remind us of the extent to which the seventeenth and eight–
eenth centuries figure in the novel. These have become sacred eras,
and persons of sensibility believe that either of them can show a virtue
for every vice of the nineteenth century. Yet Flaubert represents them
as being the seedground of literary stupidity.
Think of devices which can captivate,
says Boileau.
By what means think of these devices?
In all your speeches passion should be found,
Go seek the heart, and warm it till it bound.
How "warm the heart"?
The rules are not enough; genius is also necessary.
And genius is not enough. Corneille, according to the Academie
Fran«aise, understands nothing of the theatre. Geoffroy depreciated
Voltaire. Racine was jeered at by Subligny. Laharpe bellowed at the
name of Shakespeare.
What we may call the primary or elemental religious experience
of Bouvard and Pecuchet is treated by Flaubert with considerable
seriousness and sympathy; it is the theological developments which
follow upon that experience that he mocks. This theology cannot be
said to be peculiar to the nineteenth century or to the bourgeois de–
mocracy.
Again, when it comes to philosophy, it is not merely the phil–
osophy of the nineteenth century that brings Bouvard and Pecuchet to
their despair.
It
is philosophy in general, what anyone except a logical
positivist would say were the genuine problems of philosophy. These
take, it is true, a specifically modern form, in part because Flaubert
