Their work.
It is desirable to add that, besides the work already mentioned and published before 1870, the two had given a book called Idées et Sensations, setting forth their literary psychology; and that, after the cataclysm, Edmond published a description of their house and its collections, his brother's letters, and an immense Journal des Goncourt in some half-score of volumes, which was, naturally enough, one of the most read books of its time. Naturally, for it appealed to all sorts of tastes, reputable and disreputable, literary-artistic and Philistine, with pairs enough of antithetic or complementary epithets enough to fill this page. Here you could read about Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, about Taine and Renan, about Tourguénieff and Flaubert, as well as about Daudet and Zola, and a score of other more or less interesting people. Here you could read how Edmond as a boy made irruptions into a newly-married cousin's bedroom, and about the interesting sight he saw there; how an English virtuoso had his books bound in human skin; how people dined during the siege of Paris, and a million other things; the whole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind be preferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and general greatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority of other people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, the book would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary or with Walpole's letters.[460] As it is, when it has become a little forgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of the twenty-first century will be able to make endless réchauffés of it. And though not titularly or directly of our subject, it belongs thereto, because it shows the process of accumulation or incubation, and the temper of the accumulators and incubators in regard to the subjects of the novels themselves.
The novels.
To analyse all these novels, or even one of them, at length, would be a process as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable. The "chronicles of wasted grime" may be left to themselves, not out of any mere finical or fastidious superiority, but simply because their own postulates and axioms make such analysis (if the word unfairness can be used in such a connection) unfair to them. For they claimed—and the justice, if not the value, of the claim must be allowed—to have rested their fashion of novel-writing upon two bases. The substance was to be provided by an elaborate observation and reproduction of the facts of actual life, not in the least transcendentalised, inspirited, or in any other way brought near Romance, but considered largely from the points of view which their friend Taine, writing earlier, used for his philosophical and historical work—that of the milieu or "environment," that of heredity, though they did not lay so much stress on this as Zola did—and the like. The treatment, on the other hand, was to be effected by the use of an intensely "personal" style, a new Marivaudage, compared to which, as we remarked above, Flaubert's doctrine of the single word was merely rudimentary. After Jules's death Edmond wrote, alone, La Fille Elisa, which was very popular, La Faustin, and Chérie, the last of which, with Germinie Lacerteux, may form the basis of a short critical examination. Those who merely wish to see if they can like or tolerate the Goncourtian novel had perhaps better begin with Renée Mauperin or Madame Gervaisais. Both have been very highly praised,[461] and the first named of them has the proud distinction of putting "le mot de Cambronne" in the mouth of a colonel who has been mortally wounded in a duel.
Germinie Lacerteux and Chérie taken as specimens.
To return to our selected examples, Germinie Lacerteux is the story of an actual bonne of the brothers, whose story, without "trimmings," is told in the Journal itself.[462] The poor creature is as different as possible, not merely from the usual heroine, but from the grisette of the first half of the century and from the demi-mondaine of Dumas fils, and Daudet, and even Zola. She is not pretty; she is not fascinating in any way; she is neither good- nor ill-natured in any special fashion; she is not even ambitious of "bettering" herself or of having much pleasure, wealth, etc. If she goes to the bad it is in the most commonplace way and with the most unseductive seducer possible. Her progress and her end are, to borrow a later phrase and title metaphorically, merely a tale of the meanest streets; untouched and unconfirmed by the very slightest art; as destitute of any aesthetic attraction, or any evidence of artistic power, as the log-books of a common lodging-house and a hospital ward could be. In Chérie there is nothing exactly improper; it is merely an elaborate study of a spoilt—at least petted—and unhealthy girl in the upper stages of society, who has at last the kindness—to herself, her relations, and the reader—to die. If M. de Goncourt had had the slightest particle of humour, of which there is no trace in any of his works, one might have taken this, like other things perhaps, as a slightly cryptic parody—of the poitrinaire-heroine mania of times a little earlier; but there is no hope of this. The subject was, in the sense attached to the word by these writers, "real"; it could be made useful for combined physiological and psychological detail; and, most important of all, it was more or less repulsive.[463]
The impression produced by them.
For this is what it really comes to in the Goncourts, in Zola, and in the rest, till Guy de Maupassant, not seldom dealing with the same material, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the force of true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any one to say, "It may repel you, but it does not repel me." But this is very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that "One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a vulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading the confession of an unfortunate American that he or she found The Roundabout Papers "depressing." For my part, I have never given up the doctrine that any subject may be deprived of its repulsiveness by the treatment of it. But when you find a writer, or a set of writers, deliberately and habitually selecting subjects which are generally held to be repellent, and deliberately and habitually refusing or failing to pass them through the alembic in the manner suggested—then I think you are justified, not merely in condemning their taste, but in thinking not at all highly of their art. A cook who cannot make his meat savoury unless it is "high" is not a good cook, and if he cannot do without pepper and garlic[464] he is not much better.
The rottenness of their theory.
Dismissing, however, for a moment the question of mere taste, it should be evident that the doctrine of rigid "observation," "document," "experience," and the like is bad in art. Like so many—some optimists would say like all—bad things, it is, of course, a corruption, by excess and defect both, of something good or at least true. It cannot be necessary here, after scores of expressions of opinion on the subject throughout this book, to admit or urge the importance of observation of actual life to the novelist. The most ethereal of fairy-tales and the wildest of extravaganzas would be flimsy rubbish if not corroborated by and contrasted with it: it can be strengthened, increased, varied almost at discretion in the novel proper. I hold it, as may be argued perhaps in the Conclusion, to be the principle and the justification of Romance itself. But, independently of the law just mentioned, that you must not confine your observation to Ugliness and exclude Beauty—it will not do to pull out the pin of your cart, and tilt a collection of observed facts on the hapless pavement of the reader's mind. You are not a reporter; not a compiler of dossiers; not a photographer. You are an artist, and you must do something with your materials, add something of yourself to them, present something not vamped from parts of actual life itself, but reinforcing those parts with aesthetic re-creation and with the sense of "the whole." I find this—to confine ourselves strictly to the famous society so often mentioned in the Journal—eminently in Flaubert, and as far as one can judge from translations, in Tourguénieff; I find it, to a less extent, in Daudet; I find it sometimes even in Zola, especially, but not merely, in his shorter stories; I find it again, and abundantly, in Maupassant. But I never find it in the Goncourts: and when I find it in the others it is because they have either never bowed the knee to, or have for the nonce discarded, the cult of the Naturalist, experimental, documentary idol, in itself and for itself.