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! [What taste! What taste!] 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 [I seek out beauty]); 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)1 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 [Scandinavian fog], in which it seemed to him that France was trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but un mauvais brouillard [a terrible fog]) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to represent the only thing worth representing, la vie vécue, la vraie vérité [life as it is lived, the highest truth]. 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.’2

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.3

‘The delicacies of fine literature,’ that phrase of Pater always comes into my mind when I think of the Goncourts;4 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 Pater’s 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 bas 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 [my brother and I] 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.

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.§

Le public aime les romans faux [the public loves false novels], is another brave declaration in the same preface; ce roman est un roman vrai [this novel is a true novel]. 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 [unpublished], 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.

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 oeuvre entier, writes Edmond de Goncourt,

This unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts’ vision of reality might 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.5 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 fireworks 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

Notes

For his essay ‘The Goncourts’ in Figures of Several Centuries, Symons stitched together three previously printed articles: ‘A Literary Causerie: On Edmond de Goncourt’, Savoy 5 (1896), pp. 85–87, an obituary – ‘M. Edmond de Goncourt’, Athenaeum (25 July 1896), p. 129, and ‘The Goncourts’, Saturday Review 78 (29 December 1894), pp. 701–702. He then added this to The Symbolist Movement in Literature for the 1919 edition.

1. Eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) is renowned for his skill at still life and his genre paintings. Neglected after his death, the enthusiasm of the Goncourt brothers for the realism of his finely detailed studies helped to recuperate his reputation.

2. A translation from the entry in the Goncourts’ journal for the end of April, 1874. Symons alludes to the same entry in his essay on ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’.

3. Symons quotes this same remark in his essay on Verlaine and may allude to it in his essay on Balzac. It can be traced, through the Goncourt brothers’ journals, directly to Théophile Gautier, but is also attributed to the character of Masson in their novel Les Hommes de lettres [Men of Letters] (1860), later called Charles Demailly (1868). As Symons points out, Masson is fairly transparently based upon Gautier.

4. ‘For it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of vocabulary – things, alas! Dying out in the English literature of the present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of the past – that his literary mission is chiefly concerned’: from Walter Pater’s essay ‘Charles Lamb’, in Appreciations (1889), first published in The Fortnightly Review (October 1878).

5. Symons took hashish in the form of pellets (ingested orally) with W.B. Yeats in Paris during December 1896.

* [‘Every great writer from across history can only absolutely make himself recognised if he has a personal style, a style which signs every page, every line, for the literary reader, as if his name was at the bottom of every page and every line’ – from discussion of the relative merits of Jules Simon and Victor Cousin during the Goncourts’ salon, recorded in an entry from their Journals for 27 December 1870.]

† [‘When civilisations arise, when a people springs up, history is drama or gesticulation …. The ages which came before our own century only asked the historian for a man’s personality and the portrait of his genius…. The nineteenth century wants to know what man this politician was, this warrior, this poet, this painter, this great man of science or industry. It demands the soul which lies inside the agent, the heart which beat within the body, and claims them for itself; if it cannot obtain this whole moral being, this entire inner life, it orders us to bring it a trace, a glimpse, a scrap, a relic.’ – from the ‘Preface’ to the first edition of the Goncourts’ Portrait intimes du dix-huitième siècle (1857–58).]

‡ [‘inner history; it is the true novel which posterity may one day call human history’.]

§ [‘Today … as the Novel grows bigger and greater, it is becoming the great form – serious, passionate, living – for literary study and social inquiry; it is becoming, through analysis and psychological research, contemporary Moral history, now that the Novel has taken upon itself the duty of science, it can take responsibility for freedoms and franchises.’]

[‘If we are looking from the outside, a man who is walking inside a house will appear to us successively at each window, and at moments will disappear. These windows are the chapters in the Goncourts’ novels. What’s more there are several windows where the man we’re waiting for never appears.’ – from Jules Lemaître’s essay ‘Edmond et Jules de Goncourt’ in Les Contemporains: études et portraits littéraires 3e series (1898).]

|| [‘Our entire oeuvre … rests upon nervous illness; we took these portraits of illness from ourselves, and, by dissecting ourselves, we achieved a highly keen sensitivity which the infinitely small things of life might injure.’ – adapted from Edmond de Goncourt’s letter to Émile Zola, July 1870.]