Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/400



August, 1922

F a reader cannot understand a masterpiece solely by looking at it or reading or hearing it, no amount of philology or of biographical data will help him. There is a legitimate art of biography, and were it not for the unfortunate occurrence of Ste-Beuves and their followers this art might be kept properly in its own territory. Second-rate minds of this type cannot endure the idea of any one's having a more interesting mentality than their own; they must be for ever proving that the "great author" had wash lists, tonsilitis, and carpet-slippers. The actual production of the work of art is usually the one thing which distinguishes its maker from let us say six dozen other old gentlemen with checquered waistcoats, and the only possible means for proving his temperamental and cerebral difference. But the work itself may give the skilled reader a fairly good idea of the author, and one is not in the least surprised to find that Flaubert when over fifty, impoverished himself to save a nephew-in-law from bankruptcy. It is the kind of thing a man who wrote as Flaubert wrote, would do, and René Descharmes in his Autour de Bouvard et Pécuchet (Librairie de France; 99, Bd. Raspail) has treated a subject of both literary and biographic interest, without falling into the Ste-Beuvian slough. Flaubert’s last book is unfinished, and such knowledge as can be gathered regarding his state of mind while at work on it, aids in the more or less useless but by no means uninteresting conjecture as to how he would have completed it. Descharmes shows that the actions ascribed to the protagonists would have filled up at least thirty years, and this gives us the measure of how little Flaubert had revised or pulled together his separate chapters. He presumably intended his old chaps to remain at some more uniform age. Descharmes has examined their alleged reading, Amoros' gymnastics, Feinaigle's mnemotechnic, et cetera, and shows that Flaubert in no way exaggerated the probable effects of the diet.

Perhaps the chief use of such a book as Descharmes' is that it sends one back to the text, that series of island paragraphs marvel-