624
PARTISAN REVIEW
only because of the pleasures of the
Dictionary
itself, which is the most
elaborate of the collections. But for the understanding of the novel
itself it is almost enough to know that
something
was to follow, that,
reduced as the two friends are, they have not lost their love of mind,
to which they testify by recording the mind's failures.
IV
The pesslmlsm of
Bouvard and Pecuchet
is qualified by
certain other considerations. These are extraneous to the text, but our
sense of the ambiguity of the novel justifies us in going beyond the
text to see if we may gain further understanding from an awareness
of the circumstances of its composition. Indeed, it is virtually impos–
sible not to do something of this sOlt. In the time between his death
and his centenary in 1921 the fame of Flaubert increased to the
point where he was a classic of his language and the subject of an
elaborate scholarship. His novels, which he had written according to
his famous ideal of strict objectivity and stem impersonality, were
read- and even when there was no excuse of ambiguity-more and
more in the light of his personal legend, which seemed to grow ever
greater in its power of appeal.
If
there is such a thing as biographical success, Flaubert achieved
it in its fullest measure, for the last period of his life is as interesting,
both in event and thought, as the early years in which his mind was
formed and the middle years of his decisive productions; .and its
pathos is irresistible. This pathos, I venture to suppose, is similar
in
the effect it has upon the French reader to that which moves the
English reader in the life of Swift. It is the pathos of the man whose
savage pride induces him to have always before
his
mind the idea of
mankind as a whole, and to regard the human actuality with an
angry disgust so intense that it seems to him- and sometimes to others
-like a madness. Those individuals whom he exempts from
his
gen–
eral contempt for the human kind he grapples to himself with hoops
of steel.
If
he is incapable of marriage and even of sexual love in any
conventional sense, he can give to a few women an extreme devotion;
and to many men he can give a friendship of surpassing respect and
loyalty.
It was in his remarkably deep affections that Flaubert was struck
