My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May, 1892. I remember my
immense curiosity about that "House Beautiful," at Auteuil, of which I
had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown
at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to
some friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with
the usual loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck.
He was wearing a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could
see the fine sweep of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I
thought him the most distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever
seen; for he had at once the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and
of that delicate artistic genius which, with him, was so intimately
a part of things beautiful and distinguished. He had the eyes of an
old eagle; a general air of dignified collectedness; a rare, and a
rarely charming, smile, which came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the
instinctive pleasure of having said a witty or graceful thing to which
one's response had been immediate. When he took me indoors, into that
house which was a museum, I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the
tenderness with which he handled his treasures, touching them as if he
loved them, with little, unconscious murmurs: _Quel goût! quel goût!_
These rose-coloured rooms, with their embroidered ceilings, were filled
with cabinets of beautiful things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the
miraculous "Plongeuses"!), always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le
beau_); albums had been made for him in Japan, and in these he inserted
prints, mounting others upon silver and gold paper, which formed a sort
of frame. He showed me his eighteenth-century designs, among which I
remember his pointing out one (a Chardin, I think) as the first he had
ever bought; he had been sixteen at the time, and he bought it for
twelve francs.
When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me
all of his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions
of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me,
of the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother
with a serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and
appropriate; and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain
of the _brouillard Scandinave,_ in which it seemed to him that France
was trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais
brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to
represent the only thing worth representing, _le vie vécue, la vraie
vérité._ As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing,
_l'optique:_ out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have
all seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of
expressing it. "There is a true thing I have said in my journal," he
went on. "The thing is, to find a lorgnette" (and he put up his hands
to his eyes, adjusting them carefully) "through which to see things.
My brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it
from us."
How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most
essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing,
literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in
the invention of this that they have invented that "new language" of
which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.
You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles
Demailly:_ "I am a man for whom the visible world exists." Well, that
is true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.
"The delicacies of fine literature," that phrase of Pater always comes
into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to
me the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in
their manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of
their books, to _Madame Gervaisais,_ to _L'Art du XVIIIe
Siècle,_ to _Chérie;_ with a passing objection to what he called the
"immodesty" of this last book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion
that "that was how it seemed to him a book should be written." I
repeated this once to Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what
Patera work was like; and he lamented that his ignorance of English
prevented him from what he instinctively realised would be so intimate
an enjoyment. Pater was of course far more scrupulous, more limited, in
his choice of epithet, less feverish in his variations of cadence; and
naturally so, for he dealt with another subject-matter and was careful
of another kind of truth. But with both there was that passionately
intent preoccupation with "the delicacies of fine literature"; both
achieved a style of the most personal sincerity: _tout grand écrivain
de tous les temps,_ said Goncourt, _ne se reconnaît absolument qu'à
cela, c'est qu'il a une langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque
page, chaque ligne, est signée, pour le lecteur lettré, comme si son
nom était au has de cette page, de cette ligne:_ and this style, in
both, was accused, by the "literary" criticism of its generation, of
being insincere, artificial, and therefore reprehensible.
It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid
attributing to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne
his name alone. That is an error which he himself would never have
pardoned. _Mon frère et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and
in his journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity;
for the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in
even that excessively specialised world of their common observation,
a yet more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no
doubt, was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for
the qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live.
It has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details
of human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the
document, the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to
the curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have
been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to deliberate
eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see
in the handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics
of his style. Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a
certain elegant stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the
"continual slight novelty" of its form to be quite clear at a glance:
very personal, very distinguished writing.
It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius,
but are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our
century. They have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new
weaknesses and the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum
up in themselves certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at
things, notions of literary duty and artistic conscience, which have
only lately become at all actual, and some of which owe to them their
very origin. To be not merely novelists (inventing a new kind of
novel), but historians; not merely historians, but the historians of
a particular century, and of what was intimate and what is unknown in
it; to be also discriminating, indeed innovating critics of art, but
of a certain section of art, the eighteenth century, in France and in
Japan; to collect pictures and _bibelots,_ beautiful things, always
of the French and Japanese eighteenth century: these excursions in so
many directions, with their audacities and their careful limitations,
their bold novelty and their scrupulous exactitude in detail, are
characteristic of what is the finest in the modern conception of
culture and the modern ideal in art. Look, for instance, at the
Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les civilisations commencent, quand
les peuples se forment, l'histoire est drame ou geste.... Les siècles
qui out précédé notre siècle ne demandaient à l'historien que le
personnage de l'homme, et le portrait de son génie.... Le XIXe siècle
demande l'homme qui était cet homme d'État, cet homme de guerre, ce
poète, ce peintre, ce grand homme de science ou de métier. L'âme qui
était en cet acteur, le cœur qui a vécu derrière cet esprit, il les
exige et les réclame; et s'il ne peut recueillir tout cet être moral,
toute la vie intérieure, il commande du moins qu'on lui en apporte
une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._ From this theory, this
conviction, came that marvellous series of studies in the eighteenth
century in France (_ La Femme au XVIIIe Siècle, Portraits intimes du
XVIIIe Siècle, La du Barry,_ and the others), made entirely out of
documents, autograph letters, scraps of costume, engravings, songs,
the unconscious self-revelations of the time, forming, as they justly
say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman vrai que la postérité appellera
peut-être un jour l'histoire humaine._ To be the bookworm and the
magician; to give the actual documents, but not to set barren fact by
barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in documents, to make them more
living and more charming than the charm of life itself: that is what
the Goncourts have done. And it is through this conception of history
that they have found their way to that new conception of the novel
which has revolutionised the entire art of fiction.
_Aujourd'hui,_ they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie
Lacerteux, que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la
grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et
de l'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche
psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le
Roman s'est imposé les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer
les libertés et les franchises. Te public aime les romans faux,_ is
another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est un roman
vrai._ But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood by
_un roman vrai?_ The old notion of the novel was that it should be
an entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own
sake; a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to
produce as nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing
having been omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on
oath; in a word, it is the same as the old notion of history, _drame
ou geste._ That is not how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they
conceive it should be rendered. As in the study of history they seek
mainly the _inédit,_ caring only to record that, so it is the _inédit_
of life that they conceive to be the main concern, the real "inner
history." And for them the _inédit_ of life consists in the noting of
the sensations; it is of the sensations that they have resolved to
be the historians; not of action, nor of emotion, properly speaking,
nor of moral conceptions, but of an inner life which is all made up
of the perceptions of the senses. It is scarcely too paradoxical to
say that they are psychologists for whom the soul does not exist. One
thing, they know, exists: the sensation flashed through the brain,
the image on the mental retina. Having found that, they bodily omit
all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their instinct of
selection, of retaining all that really matters. It is the painter's
method, a selection made almost visually; the method of the painter who
accumulates detail on detail, in his patient, many-sided observation
of his subject, and then omits everything which is not an essential
part of the _ensemble_ which he sees. Thus the new conception of what
the real truth of things consist in has brought with it, inevitably,
an entirely new form, a breaking up of the plain, straightforward
narrative into chapters, which are generally quite disconnected, and
sometimes of less than a page in length. A very apt image of this new,
curious manner of narrative has been found, somewhat maliciously, by
M. Lemaître. _Un homme qui marche à l'intérieur d'une maison, si nous
regardons du dehors, apparaît successivement à chaque fenêtre, et dans
les intervalles nous échappe. Ces fenêtres, ce sont les chapitres de
MM. de Goncourt. Encore,_ he adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenêtres
où l'homme que nous attendions ne passe point._ That, certainly, is
the danger of the method. No doubt the Goncourts, in their passion
for the _inédit,_ leave out certain things because they are obvious,
even if they are obviously true and obviously important; that is the
defect of their quality. To represent life by a series of moments,
and to choose these moments for a certain subtlety and rarity in
them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these the only perils
which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There are others,
essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first of all,
as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal,_ which will
remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of human
history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing life
through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre œuvre entier,_ writes
Edmond de Goncourt, _reposa sur la maladie nerveuse; les peintures
de la maladie, nous les avons tirées de nous-mêmes, et, à force de
nous disséquer, nous sommes arrivés à une sensitivité supra-aiguë
que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie._ This unhealthy
sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as certain
shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision of
reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of
things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening
the acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one
derives from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and
fragrant way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the
notion of time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the
subtler poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it,
fleetingly, like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like
Flaubert, like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world
of the Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fire-works
at Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in
mirrors. It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is
choice, there is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.
Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
Goncourts, with those of Théophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things
as an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might
see them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate
attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way
in which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a
picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no
sacrifice, from no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction,
archaism, barbarous epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as
it tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase
should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive,
super-subtle in expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity
in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a
passionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of
a delicately depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer
sort of French critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language;
that the language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless
French of the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most
wonderful of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a
new vision of things, they have invented a new language.
1894, 1896.