lously clear and condensed. More and more we come to consider Flaubert as the great tragic writer, not the vaunted and perfect stylist. I mean that he is the tragedian of democracy, of modernity. We are not, most of us, faced with the problem of whether or no we should kill General Pershing in his bath; at most an undignified puerile desire to kick Lloyd or Woodrow dans le derrière, follows the morning editorial. More than Dostoevsky, Flaubert presents the inevitable and quotidian. A tragedy that can be avoided by a single flash of common sense, or by a momentary outbreak of the Dickensian Christmas spirit, is good only for one reading. Flaubert with his "generalization," his avoidance of the anecdotal, and accidental, has in each of his four works on temporary subjects given everyman; nothing that any character will do will alter his case; the whole thing is there and stays as long as human limitations are human limitations.
I doubt if this impression is strengthened by reading the biography of the ten years after 1870, the years during which Bouvard was written. Civilization, as Flaubert had known it, appeared to be foundering; Gautier died, as Flaubert wrote, "suffocated by modern stupidity," and Flaubert thinking of Gautier feels "as if a tide of filth" were rising around him and submerging him. This tide of immondices must be considered as messy thought, general muddle. "We pay for the long deceit in which we have lived, everything was false, false army, false politics, and false credit." "The present is abominable, and the future ferocious." So run the phrases of his correspondence.
And the old man's last stand against this tide is his "dictionnaire des idées recues," his encyclopedia en farce; his gargantuan collection of imbecilities, of current phrases ("Bossuet is the eagle of Meaux") and his "Album" of citations ("The Loire floods are due to the excesses of the Press, and the lack of sabbath observance," Bishop of Metz, in his Mandements Dec. 1846). Thus Flaubert goes about making his immense diagnosis of the contemporary average mind. And this average mind is our king, our tyrant, replacing Oedipus and Agamemnon in our tragedy.
It is this human stupidity that elects the Wilsons and Ll. Georges and puts power into the hands of the gun-makers, demanding that they blot out the sunlight, that they crush out the individual and the perception of beauty. This flabby blunt-wittedness is the tyrant.
