Laudator Temporis Acti

Ezra Pound, "Paris Letter: August, 1922," The Dial 73 (July-December, 1922) 332-337 (at 332-333):

If a reader cannot understand a masterpiece solely by looking at it or reading it 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 marvellously 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.