II

A most authoritative critic, M. Brunetière, has laid it down that there

is more truth, more fidelity to the facts of actual life, in any single

romance by Ponson du Terrail or by Gaboriau than in all the works of the

Goncourts put together, and so long as we leave truth undefined, this

opinion may be as tenable as any other. But it may be well to observe at

the outset that the creative work of the Goncourts is not to be

condemned or praised _en bloc_, for the simple reason that it is not a

spontaneous, uniform product, but the resultant of diverse forces

varying in direction and intensity from time to time. They themselves

have recorded that there are three distinct stages in their intellectual

evolution. Beginning, under the influence of Heine and Poe, with purely

imaginative conceptions, they rebounded to the extremest point of

realism before determining on the intermediate method of presenting

realistic pictures in a poetic light. Pure imagination in the domain of

contemporary fiction seemed to them defective, inasmuch as its processes

are austerely logical, while life itself is compact of contradictions;

and their first reaction from it was entirely natural, on their own

principles. It remains to be seen what sense should be attached to the

formula--_la recherche du vrai en littérature_--in which they summarized

their position as regards their predecessors.

Obviously we have to deal with a question of interpretation. The

Goncourts did not--could not--pretend that they were the first to

introduce truth into literature: they merely professed to have attained

it by a different route. The innovation for which they claimed credit is

a matter of method, of technique. Their deliberate purpose is to

surprise us by the fidelity of their studies, to captivate and convince

us by an accumulation of exact minutiæ: in a word, to prove that truth

is more interesting than fiction. So history should be written, and so

they wrote it. First and last, whatever form they chose, they remained

historians. Alleging the example set by Plutarch and Saint-Simon, they

make their histories of the eighteenth century a mine of anecdote, a

pageant of picturesque situations. State-papers, blue-books, ministerial

despatches, are in their view the conventional means used for

hoodwinking simpletons and forwarding the interests of a triumphant

faction. The most valuable historical material is, as they believed, to

be sought in the autograph letter. They held that the secret of the

craftiest intriguer will escape him, despite himself, in the expansion

of confidential correspondence. The research for such correspondence is

to be supplemented by the study of sculpture, paintings, engravings,

furniture, broadsides, bills--all of them indispensable for the

reconstruction of a past age and for the right understanding of its

psychology. But these means are simply complementary. The chief vehicle

of authentic truth is the autograph letter, and, though they professed

to hold the historical novel in abhorrence, they applied their

historical methods to their records of contemporary life. Thus we

inevitably arrive at the famous theory of the _document humain_--a

phrase received with much derision when first publicly used in the

preface to _La Faustin_, and a theory conscientiously adopted by many

later novelists. And here, again, it is important to realize the

restricted extent of the authors' claim.

The Goncourts draw a broad, primary distinction between ancient and

modern literature: the first deals mainly with generalities, the second

with details. They then proceed to establish an analogous distinction

between novels written before and after Balzac's time, the modern novel

being based on _des documents racontés, ou relevés d'après nature_,

precisely as formal history is based on _des documents écrits_. But they

make no pretence of having initiated the revolution; their share was

limited to continuing Balzac's tradition, to enlarging the field of

observation, and especially to multiplying the instruments of research.

They declared that Gautier had, so to say, endowed literature with

vision; that Fromentin, in describing the silence of the desert, had

revealed the literary value of hearing; that with Zola, Loti--and they

might surely have added Maupassant--a fresh sense was brought into play:

_c'est le nez qui entre en scène_. Their personal contribution was their

nervous sensibility: _les premiers nous avons été les écrivains des

nerfs_. And they were prouder of this morbid quality than of their

talent. They were ever on the watch for fragments of talk caught up in

drawing-rooms, in restaurants, on omnibuses: ever ready to take notes at

death-beds, church, or taverns. Their life was one long pursuit of

_l'imprévu, le décousu, l'illogique du vrai_. These observations they

transcribed at night while the impression was still acute, and these

they utilized more or less deftly as they advanced towards what they

rightly thought to be the goal of art: the perfect adjustment of

proportion between the real and the imagined.

It would seem that we are now in a position to judge the Goncourts by

their own standard. _Le dosage juste de la littérature et de la

vie_--this formula recurs in one shape or another as a leading

principle, and it is supplemented by other still more emphatic

indications which should serve to supply a test. Unhappily, with the

Goncourts these indications are unsystematic and even contradictory. The

elder brother has naturally no hesitation in saying that the highest

gift of any writer is his power of creating on paper real beings--_comme

des êtres créés par Dieu, et comme ayant eu une vraie vie sur la

terre_--and he is bold enough to add that Shakespeare himself has failed

to create more than two or three personages. He protests energetically

against the academic virtues, and insists on the importance of forming a

personal style which shall reproduce the vivacity, brio, and feverish

activity of the best talk. It is, then, all the more disconcerting to

learn from another passage in the _Journal_ that the creation of

characters and the discovery of an original form of expression are

matters of secondary moment. The truth is that if the Goncourts had, as

they believed, something new to say, it was inevitable that they should

seek to invent a new manner of utterance. Renan was doubtless right in

thinking that they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects;

but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of

concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable

impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose

relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against

them in the matter of verbal audacities by every prominent critic, from

Sainte-Beuve in one camp to Pontmartin in the other, are so many

testimonies to the fact that they were innovators--_apporteurs du

neuf_--and that their intrepidity cost them dear. Still their boldness

in this respect has been generally exaggerated. Setting out as imitators

of two such different models as Gautier and Jules Janin, they slowly

acquired an individual manner--the manner, say, of _Germinie Lacerteux_

or _Manette Salomon_--but they never attained the formula which they had

conceived as final. It was not given to them to realize their

ambition--to write novels which should not contain a single bookish

expression, plays which should reveal that hitherto undiscoverable

quantity--colloquial speech, raised to the level of consummate art. The

famous _écriture artiste_ remained an unfulfilled ideal. The expression,

first used in the preface to _Les Frères Zemganno_, merely foreshadows a

possible development of style which shall come into being when realism

or naturalism, ceasing to describe the ignoble, shall occupy itself with

the attempt to render refinements, reticences, subtleties, and

half-tones of a more elusive order. It is an aspiration, a counsel of

perfection offered to a younger school by an artist in experiment, who

declares the quest to be beyond his powers. It is nothing more.

Leaving on one side these questions of style and manner, it may safely

be said that in the novels of the Goncourts the characters are less

memorable, less interesting as individuals than as illustrations of an

epoch or types of a given social sphere. Charles Demailly, Madame

Gervaisais, Manette Salomon, Renée Mauperin, Soeur Philomène, are not so

much dramatic creations as figures around which is constituted the life

of a special _milieu_--the world of journalism, of Catholicism seen from

two opposite points of view, of artists, of the _bourgeoisie_, as the

case may be. There are in the best work of the Goncourts astonishingly

brilliant scenes; there is dialogue vivacious, witty, sparkling, to an

extraordinary degree. And this dialogue, as in _Charles Demailly_, is

not only supremely interesting, but intrinsically true to nature. It

could not well be otherwise, for the speeches assigned to Masson,

Lampérière, Remontville, Boisroger, and Montbaillard are, as often as

not, verbatim reports of paradoxes and epigrams thrown off a few hours

earlier by Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, Saint-Victor, Banville, and

Villemessant. But these flights, true and well worth preserving as they

are, fail to impress for the simple reason that they are mere exercises

in bravura delivered by men much less concerned with life than with

phrases, that they are allotted to subordinate characters, and that they

rather serve to diminish than to increase the interest in the central

figures. The Goncourts themselves are much less absorbed in life than in

writing about it: just as landscapes reminded them of pictures, so did

every other manifestation of existence present itself as a possible

subject for artistic treatment. They had been called the detectives of

history; they became detectives, inquisitors in real life, and, much as

they loathed the occupation, they never rested from their task of spying

and prying and "documentation." As with _Charles Demailly_, so with

their other books: each character is studied after nature with a grim,

revolting persistence. Their aunt, Mlle. de Courmont, is the model of

Mlle. de Varandeuil in _Germinie Lacerteux_; Germinie herself is drawn

from their old servant Rose, who had loved them, cheated them, blinded

them for half a lifetime; the Victor Chevassier who figures in _Quelques

créatures de ce temps_ is sketched from their father's old political

ally, Colardez, at Breuvannes; the original of the Abbé Blampoix in

_Renée Mauperin_ was the Abbé Caron; the painter Beaulieu and that

strange Bohemian Pouthier are both worked into _Manette Salomon_. And

the novel entitled _Madame Gervaisais_ is an almost exact transcription

or record of the life of the authors' aunt, Mme. Nephthalie de Courmont:

a report so literal that in three hundred pages there are but two

trifling departures from the strictest historical truth.

Mommsen himself has not excelled the Goncourts in conscientious

"documentation"; and yet, for all their care, their personages do not

abide in the memory as living beings. We do not see them as individuals,

but as types; and, strangely enough, the authors, despite the remarkable

skill with which they materialize many of their impressions, are

content to deliver their characters to us as so many illustrations of a

species. Thus Marthe Mance in _Charles Demailly_ is _un type,

l'incarnation d'un âge, de son sexe et d'un rôle de son temps_;

Langibout is _le type pur de l'ancienne école_; Madame Gervaisais, too,

is _un exemple et un type_ of the intellectual _bourgeoise_ of

Louis-Philippe's time; Madame Mauperin is _le type_ of the modern

_bourgeoise_ mother; Renée is the type of the modern _bourgeoise_ girl;

the Bourjots "represent" wealth; Denoisel is a Parisian--_ou plutôt

c'était le Parisien_. The Goncourts, in their endeavour to be more

precise, resort to odd combinations of conflicting elements. Within some

twenty pages Renée Mauperin is _une mélancolique tintamarresque_; the

adjectives _bourgeoise_ and _diabolique_ are used to characterize the

same thing; the Abbé Blampoix is at once "priest and lawyer, apostle and

diplomatist, Fénelon and M. de Foy." And the same types constantly

reappear. The physician Monterone in _Madame Gervaisais_ is simply an

Italian version of Denoisel in _Renée Mauperin_; the Abbé Blampoix has

his counter-part in Father Giansanti; Honorine is Germinie, before the

fall; Nachette and Gautruche might be brothers. The procedure, too, is

almost invariable. The antecedents of each personage are given with

abundant detail. We have minute information as to the family history of

the Mauperins, the Villacourts, Germinie, Couturat, and the rest; and

the mention of Father Sibilla involves a brief account of the order of

Barefooted Trinitarians from January, 1198, to the spring of 1853! There

is a frequent repetition of the same idea with scarcely any verbal

change: _un dos d'amateur_ in _Renée Mauperin_ and _le dos du cocher_ in

_Germinie Lacerteux_. And the possibilities of the human back were

evidently not exhausted, for at Christmas, 1882, Edmond de Goncourt

makes a careful note of the _dos de jeune fille du peuple_.

It is by no means an accident that the most frequent theme of the

brothers is illness: the insanity of Demailly, the tortures of Germinie,

the consumption of Madame Gervaisais, the decay of Renée Mauperin, the

record of pain in _Soeur Philomène_, in _Les Frères Zemganno_, and in

other works of the Goncourts. Emotion in less tragic circumstances they

rarely convey; and when they attempt it they are prone to stumble into

an unimpressive sentimentalism. Their strength lay in pure observation,

not in the philosophic or psychological presentment of nature. For their

fine powers to have full play, it was necessary that they should deal

with things seen: in other words, that feeling should take a concrete

shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own

impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in

them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the

transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied

them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted

province: delicate observers of externals, noting and remembering with

unmatched exactitude every detail of gesture, attitude, intonation, and

expression. The description of landscape--of the Bois de Vincennes in

_Germinie Lacerteux_, the Forest of Fontainebleau in _Manette Salomon_,

or of the Trastevere quarter in _Madame Gervaisais_--commonly affords

them an occasion for a triumph; but the description of prolonged malady

gives them a still greater opportunity. Nor is this due simply to the

fact that they, who had never known what it was to enjoy a day of

perfect health, spoke from an intimate knowledge of the subject. Each

landscape preserves at least its abstract idiosyncrasy; illness is an

essentially "typical" state in which individual characteristics diminish

till they finally disappear. And it is especially in the portraiture of

types, rather than of individuals, that the genius of the Goncourts

excels.

In their own opinion, their initiative extended over a vast field and in

all directions. They seriously maintained that they were the first to

introduce the poor into French fiction, the first to awaken the

sentiment of pity for the wretched; they admitted the priority of

Dickens, but they apparently forgot that they had likewise been

anticipated by George Sand--that George Sand whose merits it took them

twenty years to recognise. They forgot, too, that compassion is

precisely the quality in which they were most lacking. Gavarni had

killed the sentiment of pity in them, and had communicated to them his

own mocking, sardonic spirit of inhumanity, his sinister delight in

every manifestation of cruelty, baseness, and pain. In their most candid

moods they confessed that they were all brain and no heart, that they

were without real affections; and their writings naturally suffer from

this unsympathetic attitude. But when every deduction is made, it is

impossible to deny their importance and significance. For they represent

a distinct stage in an organized movement--the reaction against

romanticism in the novel and lyrism in the theatre. And there is some

basis for their bold assertion that they led the way in every other

development of the modern French novel. They believed that they had

founded the naturalistic school in _Germinie Lacerteux_, the

psychological in _Madame Gervaisais_, the symbolic in _Les Frères

Zemganno_, and the satanic in _La Faustin_. It is unnecessary to

recognise all these claims in full: to discuss them at all, even if we

deny them, is to admit that the Goncourts were men of striking

intellectual force, of singular ambition, of exceptionally rich and

diverse gifts amounting, at times, to unquestionable genius. If they

were unsuccessful in their attempt to create an entire race of beings as

real as any on the planet, their superlative talent produced, in the

form of novels, invaluable studies of manners and customs, a brilliant

series of monographs on the social history of the nineteenth century.

And Daudet and M. Zola, and a dozen others whom it would be invidious to

name, may be accounted as in some sort their literary descendants.

It is not unnatural that Edmond de Goncourt should have ended by

disliking the form of the novel, which he came to regard as an exhausted

convention. His pessimism was universal. Art was dying, literature was

perishing daily. The almost universal acceptance of Ibsen and of Tolstoi

was in itself a convincing symptom of degeneration, if the vogue of the

latter writer were not indeed the result of a cosmopolitan plot against

the native realistic school. It was some consolation to reflect that,

after all, there was more "philosophy" in Beaumarchais than in Ibsen;

that the name of Goncourt was held in honour by Scandinavians and Slavs.

Yet it could not be denied that, the world over, aristocracy of every

kind was breaking down. To the eyes of the surviving Goncourt all the

signs of a last great catastrophe grew visible. Mankind was ill,

half-mad, and on the road to become completely insane. There were

countless indications of intellectual and physical decadence. Sloping

shoulders were disappearing; the physique of the peasant was not what

it had been; good food was practically unattainable; in a hundred years

a man who had once tasted genuine meat would be pointed out as a

curiosity. The probability was, that within half a century there would

not be a man of letters in the world; the reporter, the interviewer,

would have taken possession. As it was, the younger generation of

readers no longer rallied to the Goncourts as it had rallied when

_Henriette Maréchal_ was first replayed. The weary old man buried

himself in memoirs, biographies, books of travel; then turned to his

first loves--to Poe and Heine--and found that "we are all commercial

travellers compared to them." But, threatened as he was by blindness,

despairing as were his presentiments of what the future concealed, his

confidence in the durability of his fame and his brother's fame was

undimmed. There would always be the select few interested in two such

examples of the _littérateur bien né_. There would always be the

official historians of literature to take account of them as new,

perplexing, elemental forces. There would always be the curious who must

turn to the Goncourts for positive information. "Our romances," as the

brothers had noted forty years earlier, "will supply the greatest number

of facts and absolute truths to the moral history of this century." And

Edmond de Goncourt clung to the belief, ending, happily and

characteristically enough, by conceiving himself and his brother to be

"types," and the best of all types: _le type de l'honnête homme

littéraire, du persévérant dans ses convictions, et du contempteur de

l'argent_. The praise is deserved. It is a distinction of which greater

men might well be proud.