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Hugo is supposed to have said that Germany's inferiority was measured by its superiority in music. "The elder Dumas detested," Berlioz says, "even bad music." The journal of the Goncourts calmly reflects the almost universal scorn of literary men for music.
The people who saw her in her old age Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts have left us copious records of her odd appearance, her perpetual cigarette smoking, and her whimsical life at Nohant. But then she was only an "extinct volcano;" she must have been much more interesting in full eruption.
And, if the resemblances are closer between works of the de Goncourts less known, such as Charles Demailly, or Manette Salomon and the Lost Illusions, Peter Grassou, the Muse of the County, yet the means employed by the two brothers to endow with life and form Renee Mauperin and Germinie Lacerteux, fixing a background, stamping the outlines, filling in details, adding particularities, all this was Balzacian method, insufficient forsooth, in the domain of psychology, but furnishing idiosyncrasy in plentiful variations.
In 1878, 1879 and 1880 they accepted la Serre, the surprising symphony in blue and white which shows Mr George Moore in boating costume, the portrait of Antonin Proust, and the scene at the Père Lathuile restaurant, in which Manet's nervous and luminous realism has so curious a resemblance to the art of the Goncourts.
Rev., May, 1898, p. 307; J. Royce, ibid., March, 1898; Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, etc. Joly, Psychologie des grands hommes. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin. Such, according to Binet and Passy, seem to be the cases of the Goncourts, Pailleron, etc. See "Psychologie des auteurs dramatiques," in L'année psychologique, I, 96.
But he was satisfied to take one family under the Second Empire, the Rougon-Macquarts these names were not at first in the form we now know them. A friend and admirer of Flaubert, he followed, broadly speaking, his method of proceeding and work; though an admirer of the Goncourts, he did not favour their preference for the rare case or the chiselled epithet.
Before even the de Goncourts he had admired Chinese porcelain and Japanese prints and his own exquisite intuition strengthened by Japanese example had shown that his impression of life was more valuable than any mere transcript of it.
David went no more to the 'Trois Rats, and when, in obedience to Lenain's recommendation, he had bought and begun to read a novel of the Goncourts, he threw it from him in a disgust beyond expression.
She is a very well-read woman is the mother; she keeps up to date in French literature as well as in English, and can talk by the hour about the Goncourts, and Flaubert, and Gautier. Yet she is always hard at work; and how she imbibes all her knowledge is a mystery. She reads when she knits, she reads when she scrubs, she even reads when she feeds her babies.
Beginning with Flaubert in his "Madame Bovary," and passing through the whole line of their studies in morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the Goncourts, as the "Bel-Ami" of Maupassant, and as all the books of Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or those of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master, Zola has made me think of in his frankness.
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