he new conception of what the real truth of things consists
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 for this new, curious manner of narrative has
been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaitre. _Un homme qui marche a
l'interieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparait
successivement a chaque fenetre, et dans les intervalles nous echappe.
Ces fenetres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore_, he
adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenetres ou l'homme que nous attendions
ne passe point_. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubt
the Goncourts, in their passion for the _inedit_, 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, _repose sur la maladie nerveuse; les
peintures de la maladie, nous les avons tirees de nous-memes, et, a
force de nous dissequer, nous sommes arrives a une sensitivite
supra-aigue que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie_. This
unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as
certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision
of reality might almost 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. 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 i