Flaubert and the Authors of the French Renaissance 1

flaubert would have been the first to look with a sardonic eye at this title. Evidence on his reading is necessarily incomplete, and any mind tinged with his own encyclopaedomania will be aware of the gaps in what we can deduce. Moreover, a critical discussion of his sporadically adumbrated reactions could not but have appeared HHHénaurme to one who so often scarified the profession of the critic. From his early notebook (‘Voici les choses fort bêtes: 1° la critique littéraire quelle qu’elle soit, bonne ou mauvaise’) ² or the first Education to Bouvard et Pécuchet, there echoes the theme of the insufficiency of aesthetic theories: because first, they use abstract terms in undefined or tautological ways; second, they lay down ‘norms’ to which every work of art must be fitted; third, they concentrate either on peripheral circumstances or sweeping parallels, rather than on investigating what is irreductibly individual; finally and above all, they cannot explain the genesis of a masterpiece: Bouvard, in his search for the creative principle, is driven back to the fundamental advice: ‘inventez des ressorts qui puissent m’attacher’, and retorts with the naive but still more basic question: ‘Comment inventer des ressorts?’ To Flaubert, in fact, past criticism serves mainly to 44provide instructive and amusing evidence of the frame of mind of the times in which it was written. He would certainly have read with joy the article in which A.M. Boase analyses through anthologies of poetry ‘the whirligig of taste’. ¹