A volume entitled 'Idées et Sensations,' and their Journal and letters, complete the list of the more important of their works outside the field of fiction. The Journal will always be valuable as an almost complete document of the literary history of France in their time, made up as it is of impressions of and from the most important writers of the day, with whom they were on terms of intimate friendship, including Flaubert, Gautier, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Hugo, Saint-Victor, Michelet, Zola, and George Sand. In fiction the De Goncourts were less prolific, but it is to their novels mainly that they owe their reputation for individuality, and as true "path-breakers" in literature. They have been called the initiators of modern French realism. Their friend Flaubert perhaps better deserves the title. Their determination to see for themselves all that could be seen, the result of which gave real worth to their historical work, even where their prejudice robbed it of weight, was what put the stamp of character upon their novels. How much importance they attached to correct and comprehensive observation may be gathered from their remark, "The art of learning how to see demands the longest apprenticeship of all the arts." They took life as they found it, examined it on every side,—rarely going far under the surface,—and then sought to reproduce it on their pages as the artist would put it on canvas. Capable of terseness, of suggestiveness, quick to note and communicate the vital spark, they were yet rarely content with it alone. Every minute particle of the body it vivified, they insisted on adding to their picture. Nothing was to be taken for granted; as nothing was accepted by them at second hand, so nothing was left to the imagination of the reader until their comprehensive view was his. It was in this way that they were realists. They did not seek out and expose to public view the grossness and unpleasantness of life. Their own preference was for the beautiful, and in their own lives they indulged their refined tastes. But they looked squarely at the world about them, the ugly with the beautiful, the impure with the pure, and they did not hesitate to describe one almost as faithfully as the other.
Curiously, the discrimination against the masses and the bias that mar their history do not appear in their fiction. "They began writing history which was nothing but romance," says one of their critics, "and later wrote romance which in reality is history." Indeed, their novels are little more than sketches of what occurred around them. 'Madame Gervaisais' is a character study of the aunt of strong literary predilections who influenced Edmond; 'Germinie Lacerteux' is the biography of their servant, at whose death, after long and faithful service, they discovered that she had led a life of singular duplicity; 'Sœur Philomène' is a terribly true glimpse of hospital life, and 'Manette Salomon,' with its half-human monkey drawn from the life, is transferred without change from the Parisian studios under the Empire. 'Renee Mauperin' comes nearest to the model of an ordinary novel; but no one can read of the innocent tomboy girl struck down with fatal remorse at the consequences of her own natural action, on learning of her brother's dishonor, without feeling that this picture too was drawn from the life. Several of their stories were dramatized, but with scant success; and a play which they wrote, 'Henriette Maréchal' and had produced at the Comédie Française through the influence of Princess Mathilde, their constant friend and patroness, was almost howled down,—chiefly however for political reasons.
After the death of Jules de Goncourt, his brother wrote several books of the same character as those which they produced in union, the best known of which are 'La Fille Élisa,' and 'Chérie,' a study of a girl, said to have been inspired by the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. The best critics in France, notably Saïnte-Beuve, have given the brothers Goncourt a very high place in literature and conceded their originality. English reviewers have been less ready to exalt them, mainly on account of the offensive part of their realism. They have objected also to their superficiality as historians, and to their sympathy with the sentimental admirers of such types as Marie Antoinette; but they too have been ready to praise the brothers as leaders of a new fashion, and especially for their devotion to style. In this respect the Goncourts have few rivals in French literature. Balzac himself was not more finical in the choice of words, or more unsparing of his time and energy in writing and re-writing until his exact meaning, no more or less, had been expressed; and they covered up the marks of their toil better than he. In a letter to Zola, Edmond de Goncourt said:—"My own idea is that my brother died of work, and above all from the desire to elaborate the artistic form, the chiseled phrase, the workmanship of style." He himself spent a long life at this fine artistry, and died in Paris in July, 1896.
TWO FAMOUS MEN
From the Journal of the De Goncourts
March 3D [1862].—We took a walk and went off to find Théophile Gautier.... The street in which he lives is composed of the most squalid countrified buildings, of court-yards swarming with poultry, fruit shops whose doors are ornamented with little brooms of black feathers: just such a suburban street as Hervier might have painted.... We pushed open the door of a house, and found ourselves in the presence of the lord of epithet. The furniture was of gilded wood, covered with red damask, after the heavy Venetian style; there were fine old pictures of the Italian school; above the chimney a mirror innocent of quicksilver, on which were scraped colored arabesques and various Persian characters,—such a picture of meagre sumptuousness and faded splendor as one would find in the rooms of a retired actress, who had come in for some pictures through the bankruptcy of an Italian manager.
When we asked him if we were disturbing him, he answered: "Not at all. I never work at home. I get through my 'copy' at the printing-office. They set up the type as I write. The smell of the printers' ink is a sure stimulant to work, for one feels the 'copy' must be handed in. I could write only a novel in this way now; unless I saw ten lines printed I could not get on to the next ten. The proof-sheet serves as a test to one's work. That which is already done becomes impersonal, but the actual 'copy' is part of yourself; it hangs like filaments from the root of your literary life, and has not yet been torn away. I have always been preparing corners where I should do my work, but when installed there I found I could do nothing. I must be in the midst of things, and can work only when a racket is going on about me; whereas, when I shut myself up for work the solitude tells upon me and makes me sad."
From there Gautier got on the subject of the 'Queen of Sheba.' We admitted our infirmity, our physical incapacity of taking in musical sound; and indeed, a military band is the highest musical enjoyment of which we are capable. Whereupon Gautier said, "Well, I'm delighted to hear that: I am just like you; I prefer silence to music. I do know bad music from good, because part of my life was spent with a singer, but both are quite indifferent to me. Still it is curious that all the literary men of our day feel the same about music. Balzac abhorred it, Hugo cannot endure it, Lamartine has a horror of it. There are only a few painters who have a taste for it."
Then Gautier fell to complaining of the times. "Perhaps I am getting an old man, but I begin to feel as if there were no more air to breathe. What is the use of wings if there is no air in which one can soar? I no longer feel as if I belonged to the present generation. Yes, 1830 was a glorious epoch, but I was too young by two or three years; I was not carried away by the current; I was not ready for it. I ought to have produced a very different sort of work."