I
The partnership of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is probably the most
curious and perfect example of collaboration recorded in literary
history. The brothers worked together for twenty-two years, and the
amalgam of their diverse talents was so complete that, were it not for
the information given by the survivor, it would be difficult to guess
what each brought to the work which bears their names. Even in the light
of these confidences, it is no easy matter to attempt to separate or
disengage their literary personalities. The two are practically one.
_Jamais âme pareille n'a été mise en deux corps._ This testimony is
their own, and their testimony is true. The result is the more
perplexing when we remember that these two brothers were, so to say, men
of different races. The elder was a German from Lorraine, the younger
was an inveterate Latin Parisian: "the most absolute difference of
temperaments, tastes, and characters--and absolutely the same ideas, the
same personal likes and dislikes, the same intellectual vision." There
may be, as there probably always will be, two opinions as to the value
of their writings; there can be no difference of view concerning their
intense devotion to literature, their unhesitating rejection of all that
might distract them from their vocation. They spent a small fortune in
collecting materials for works that were not to find two hundred
readers; they passed months, and more months, in tedious researches the
results of which were condensed into a single page; they resigned most
of life's pleasures and all its joys to dedicate themselves totally to
the office of their election. So they lived--toiling, endeavouring,
undismayed, confident in their integrity and genius, unrewarded by one
accepted triumph, uncheered by a single frank success or even by any
considerable recognition. The younger Goncourt died of his failure
before he was forty; the elder underwent almost the same monotony of
defeat during nearly thirty years of life that remained to him. But both
continued undaunted, and, if we consider what manner of men they were
and how dear fame was to them, the constancy of their ambition becomes
all the more admirable.
[Illustration: Edmond de Goncourt]
Despising, or affecting to despise, the general verdict of their
contemporaries, they loved to declare that they wrote for their own
personal pleasure, for an audience of a dozen friends, or for the
delight of a distant posterity; and, when the absence of all
appreciation momentarily weighed them down, they vainly imagined that
the acquisition of a new _bibelot_ consoled them. No doubt the passion
of the collector was strong in them: so strong that Edmond half forgot
his grief for his brother and his terror of the Commune in the pursuit
of first editions: so strong that the chances of a Prussian bomb
shattering his storehouse of treasures--the _Maison d'un artiste_--at
Auteuil saddened him more than the dismemberment of France. But, even
so, the idea that the Goncourts could in any circumstances subordinate
literature to any other interest was the merest illusion. Nothing in the
world pleased them half so well as the sight of their own words in
print. The arrival of a set of proof-sheets on the 1st of January was to
them the best possible augury for the new year; the sight of their names
on the placards outside the theatres and the booksellers' shops
enraptured them; and Edmond, then well on in years, confesses that he
thrice stole downstairs, half-clad, in the March dawn, to make sure that
the opening chapters of _Chérie_ were really inserted in the _Gaulois_.
These were their few rewards, their only victories. They were fain to be
content with such small things--_la petite monnaie de la gloire_. Still
they were persuaded that time was on their side, and, assured as they
were of their literary immortality, they chafed at the suggestion that
the most splendid renown must grow dim within a hundred thousand years.
Was so poor a laurel worth the struggle? This was the whole extent of
their misgiving.
Baffled at every point, the Goncourts were unable to account for the
unbroken series of disasters which befell them; yet the explanation is
not far to seek. For one thing, they attempted so much, so continuously,
in so many directions, and in such quick succession, that their very
versatility and diligence laid them under suspicion. They were not
content to be historians, or philosophers, or novelists, or dramatists,
or art critics: they would be all and each of these at once. In every
branch of intellectual effort they asserted their claims to be regarded
as innovators, and therefore as leaders. Within a month they published
_Germinie Lacerteux_ and an elaborate study on Fragonard; and, while
they plumed themselves (as they very well might) on their feat, the
average intelligent reader joined with the average intelligent critic in
concluding that such various accomplishment must needs be superficial.
It was not credible that one and the same pair--_par nobile
fratrum_--could be not only close observers of contemporary life, but
also authorities on Watteau and Outamaro, on Marie Antoinette and Mlle.
Clairon. To admit this would be to emphasize the limitations of all
other men of letters. Again, the uncanny element of chance which enters
into every enterprise was constantly hostile to the Goncourts. They not
only published incessantly: they somehow contrived to publish at
inopportune moments--at times when the public interest was turned from
letters to politics. Their first novel appeared on the very day of
Napoleon III's _Coup d'état_, and their publisher even refused to
advertise the book lest the new authorities should see in the title of
_En 18_--a covert allusion to the 18th Brumaire. It would have been a
pleasing stroke of irony had the Ministry of the 16th of May been
supported by the country as it was supported by Edmond de Goncourt, for
that Ministry intended to prosecute him as the author of _La Fille
Élisa_. _La Faustin_ was issued on the morning of Gambetta's downfall;
and the seventh volume of the _Journal des Goncourt_ had barely been
published a few hours when the news of Carnot's assassination reached
Paris. Lastly, the personal qualities of the brothers--their ostentation
of independence, their attitude of supercilious superiority, and, most
of all, their fatal gift of irony--raised up innumerable enemies and
alienated both actual and possible friends. They gave no quarter and
they received none. All this is extremely human and natural; but the
Goncourts, being nervous invalids as well as born fighters, suffered
acutely from what they regarded as the universal disloyalty of their
comrades.
They could not realize that their writings contained much to displease
men of all parties, and, living at war with literary society, they
sullenly cultivated their morbid sensibility. The simplest trifle stung
them into frenzies of inconsistency and hallucination. To-day they
denounced the liberty of the press; to-morrow they raged at finding
themselves the victims of a Government prosecution. Withal their
ferocious wit, there was not a ray of sunshine in their humour, and,
instead of smiling at the discomfiture of a dull official, they brooded
till their imaginations magnified these petty police-court proceedings
into the tragedy of a supreme martyrdom. Years afterward they
continually return to the subject, noting with exasperated complacency
that the only four men in France who were seriously concerned with
letters and art--Baudelaire, Flaubert, and themselves--had been dragged
before the courts; and they ended by considering their little lawsuit as
one of the historic state trials of the world. Henceforth, in every
personal matter--and their art was intensely personal--they lost all
sense of proportion, believing that there was a vast Semitic plot to
stifle _Manette Salomon_ and that the President had brought pressure on
the censor to forbid an adaptation of one of their novels being put upon
the boards. Monarchy, Empire, Republic, Right, Centre, Left--no shade of
political thought, no public man, no legislative measure, ever chanced
to please them. They sought for the causes of their failure in others:
it never occurred to them that the fault lay in themselves. Their minds
were twin whirlpools of chaotic opinions. Revolutionaries in arts and
letters as they claimed to be, they detested novelties in religion,
politics, medicine, science, abstract speculation. It never struck them
that it was incongruous, not to say absurd, to claim complete liberty
for themselves and to denounce ministers for attempting to extend the
far more restricted liberty of others. And as with the ordering of their
lives, so with their art and all that touched it. Unable to conciliate
or to compromise, they were conspicuously successful in stimulating the
general prejudice against themselves. They paraded their
self-contradictions with a childish pride of paradox. In one breath they
deplored the ignorance of a public too uncultivated to appreciate them;
in another breath they proclaimed that every government which strives to
diminish illiteracy is digging its own grave. Priding themselves on the
thoroughness of their own investigations, they belittled the results of
learning in others, mocked at the superficial labour of the
Benedictines, ridiculed the inartistic surroundings of Sainte-Beuve and
Renan, and protested that antiquity was nothing but an inept invention
to enable professors to earn their daily bread. Not content with
asserting the superiority of Diderot to Voltaire, they pronounced the
Abbé Trublet to be the acutest critic who flourished during that
eighteenth century which they had come to consider as their exclusive
property. Resolute conservatives in theory, piquing themselves on their
descent, their personal elegance, their tact and refinement, these
worshippers of Marie Antoinette admired the talent shown by Hébert in
his infamous _Père Duchêne_, and then went on to lament the influence of
socialism on literature. They were _papalini_ who sympathized with
Garibaldi; they looked forward to a repetition of '93, and almost
welcomed it as a deliverance from the respectable uniformity of their
own time; they trusted to the working men--masons, house-painters,
carpenters, navvies--to regenerate an effete civilization and to save
society as the barbarians had saved it in earlier centuries. Whatever
the value of these views, they can scarcely have found favour among
those who rallied to the Second Empire and who imagined that the
Goncourts were a pair of firebrands: whereas, in fact, they were
petulant, impulsive men of talent, smarting under neglect.
If we were so ingenuous as to take their statements seriously, we might
refuse to admit their right to find any place in French literature. For,
though it would be easy to quote passages in which they contemn the
cosmopolitan spirit, it would be no less easy to set against these their
assertions that they are ashamed of being French; that they are no more
French than the Abbé Galiani, the Prince de Ligne, or Heine; that they
will renounce their nationality, settle in Holland or Belgium, and there
found a journal in which they can speak their minds. These are wild,
whirling words: the politics of literary men are on a level with the
literature of politicians. On their own showing, it does not appear that
the Goncourts were in any way fettered. The sum of their achievement, as
they saw it, is recorded in a celebrated passage of the preface to
_Chérie_: "_La recherche du vrai en littérature, la résurrection de
l'art du XVIIIe siècle, la victoire du japonisme._" These words are the
words of Jules de Goncourt, but Edmond makes them his own. If the
brothers were entitled to claim--as they repeatedly claimed--to be held
for the leaders of these "three great literary and artistic movements of
the second half of the nineteenth century," it is clear that they were
justified in thinking that the future must reckon with them. It is
equally clear that, if their title proves good, their environment was
much less unfavourable than they assumed it to be.
The conclusion is that their sublime egotism disabled them from forming
a judicial judgment on any question in which they were personally
concerned. They never attempted to reason, to compare, to balance; their
minds were filled with the vapour of tumultuous impressions which
condensed at different periods into dogmas, and were succeeded by fresh
condensations from the same source. But, amid all changes, their
self-esteem was constant. They had no hesitation in setting Dunant's
_Souvenir de Solférino_ above the _Iliad_; but when Taine implied that
he was somewhat less interested in _Madame Gervaisais_ than in the
writings of Santa Teresa, they were startled at his boldness. And, to
define their position more precisely, Edmond confidently declares (among
many other strange sayings) that the fifth act of _La Patrie en Danger_
contains scenes more dramatically poignant than anything in Shakespeare,
and that in _La Maison d'un Artiste au XIXe Siècle_ he takes under his
control--though he candidly avows that none but himself suspects it--a
capital movement in the history of mankind. These are extremely high
pretensions, repeatedly renewed in one form or another--in prefaces,
manifestos, articles, letters, conversation, and, above all, in nine
invaluable volumes which consist of extracts from a diary covering a
period of over forty years. This extraordinary record incidentally
embodies the rough sketches of the Goncourts' finished work, but its
interest is far wider and more essentially characteristic. Other men
have written confessions, memoirs, reminiscences, by the score: mostly
books composed long after the events which they relate, recollections
revised, reviewed in the light of after events. The Goncourts are
perhaps alone in daring to unbosom themselves with an absolute sincerity
of their emotions, intentions, aims. If they come forth damaged from
such a trial, it is fair to remember that the test is unique, and that
no other writers have ever approached them in courage and in what they
most valued--truth: _la recherche du vrai en littérature_.