"--of a body of work planned and executed under more or less
definite schedules--something if not much more of the critical kind
than usual may be given, either here or in the Conclusion.[456] But we
shall, I think, learn far better things as to M. Zola and those about
him by considering what they--at least what he, his would-be teachers,
and his greatest disciple--actually did, than by inquiring what they
meant, or thought they meant, to do, or what other people thought about
them and their doings.

Let us therefore, in the first place and as usual, stick to the history,
though even this may require more than one mode and division of dealing.

[Sidenote: "Les deux Goncourt."]

The body of Naturalist or Experimental novels which, beginning in the
'sixties of the century, extended to, and a little over, its close, has
long been, and will probably always continue to be, associated with the
name of Emile Zola. But the honour or dishonour of the invention and
pioneering of the thing was claimed by another, for himself and a third
writer, that is to say, by Edmond de Goncourt for himself and his
brother Jules. The elder of the Goncourts--the younger died in early
middle age, and knowledge of him is in a way indirect, though we have
some letters--might be said to have, like Restif, a _manie de
paternite_, though his children were of a different class. He thought he
invented Naturalism; he thought he introduced into France what some
unkind contemporaries called "Japon_i_aiserie";[457] he certainly had a
good deal to do with reviving the fancy for eighteenth-century art,
artists, _bric-a-brac_ generally, and in a way letters; and he ended by
fathering and endowing an opposition Academy. It was with art that "Les
deux Goncourt"[458] (who were inseparable in their lives, and whom
Edmond--to do him the justice which in his case can rarely be done
pleasantly--did his best to keep undivided after Jules's death) began
their dealings with eighteenth-century and other artists[459]--perhaps
the most valuable of all their work. But it was not till the Second
Empire was nearly half-way through, till Jules was thirty and Edmond
thirty-eight, that they tried fiction (drama also, but always
unsuccessfully), and brought out, always together and before 1870 (when
Jules died), a series of some half-dozen novels: _Charles Demailly_
(afterwards re-titled) (1860), _Soeur Philomene_ (next year), _Renee
Mauperin_ (1864), _Germinie Lacerteux_ (next