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Updated: July 14, 2025
You, Raoul de Goncourt, I shall punish as you deserve for being in such bad company. You are getting fat and wheezy. I shall take my time with you until your fat melts and your lungs pant and wheeze like leaky bellows. You, de Villehardouin, I have not decided in what manner I shall kill." And then I saluted Pasquini, and we were at it. Oh, I was minded to be rarely devilish this night.
Now it is difficult to keep asunder the names of Goncourt and Degas. To us they are too often unwisely bracketed. The style of the painter has been judged as analogous to the novelist's; yet, apart from a preference for the same subjects for the "modernity" of Paris, there is not much in Degas that recalls Goncourt's staccato, febrile, sparkling, "decomposed", impressionistic prose.
"Pasquini is mine," I answered. "He shall be first to-morrow." "Are there others?" Lanfranc demanded. "Ask de Goncourt," I grinned. "I imagine he is already laying claim to the honour of being the third." At this, de Goncourt showed distressed acquiescence. Lanfranc looked inquiry at him, and de Goncourt nodded. "And after him I doubt not comes the cockerel," I went on.
But perhaps the collector never really reveals himself except to a fellow-collector, and to appreciate the strength and humanity of the passion it is necessary to have seen Duret and Goncourt explaining a new Japanesery which one of them has just acquired.
Edmond de Goncourt, a minute observer of the feminine mind, refers in Chérie to "those innocent and triumphant gaieties which scatalogic stories have the privilege of arousing in women who have remained still children, even the most distinguished women."
Hearn does not mention the name of Goncourt in his letters, and yet it is a certain side of the brothers, the impressionistic side, that his writings resemble. But he had not their artistry. Nor could he, like Maupassant, summon tangible spirits from the vasty deep, as did the Norman master in Le Horla.
"The servant, in our society of equality," wrote Goncourt, recalling somewhat earlier days when she was often admitted to a place in the family life, "has become nothing but a paid pariah, a machine for doing household work, and is no longer allowed to share the employer's human life."
The brothers de Goncourt, for example, wrote an account of Clairon which is a book of the first interest, while I defy any one to get through two pages of most of the fustian she was compelled to act! The reason for this is very easily formulated. Great acting is human and universal.
Only accidentally can it be described as his mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life, or in the gracious phrase of De Goncourt, fouiller les entrailles de la vie. Of the confident, self-supporting realism of Esther Waters, for instance, how little is there in any of his work, even in that most gloomily photographic portion of it which we are now to describe?
The realism of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt does not, to be sure; but most assuredly the realism of Mr. Meredith does. You will find far less shrinking from the commonplace in many passages of the romantic Fenimore Cooper than in the pages of Mr. Meredith. Whether or not realistic fiction shrinks from the unpleasant depends also on the particular nature of the realist.
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