s of the day,
with whom they were on terms of intimate friendship, including Flaubert,
Gautier, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Hugo, Saint-Victor, Michelet, Zola, and
George Sand. In fiction the De Goncourts were less prolific, but it is
to their novels mainly that they owe their reputation for individuality,
and as true "path-breakers" in literature. They have been called the
initiators of modern French realism. Their friend Flaubert perhaps
better deserves the title. Their determination to see for themselves all
that could be seen, the result of which gave real worth to their
historical work, even where their prejudice robbed it of weight, was
what put the stamp of character upon their novels. How much importance
they attached to correct and comprehensive observation may be gathered
from their remark, "The art of learning how to see demands the longest
apprenticeship of all the arts." They took life as they found it,
examined it on every side,--rarely going far under the surface,--and
then sought to reproduce it on their pages as the artist would put it on
canvas. Capable of terseness, of suggestiveness, quick to note and
communicate the vital spark, they were yet rarely content with it alone.
Every minute particle of the body it vivified, they insisted on adding
to their picture. Nothing was to be taken for granted; as nothing was
accepted by them at second hand, so nothing was left to the imagination
of the reader until their comprehensive view was his. It was in this way
that they were realists. They did not seek out and expose to public view
the grossness and unpleasantness of life. Their own preference was for
the beautiful, and in their own lives they indulged their refined
tastes. But they looked squarely at the world about them, the ugly with
the beautiful, the impure with the pure, and they did not hesitate to
describe one almost as faithfully as the other.

Curiously, the discrimination against the masses and the bias that mar
their history do not appear in their fiction. "They began writing
history which was nothing but romance," says one of their critics, "and
later wrote romance which in reality is history." Indeed, their novels
are little more than sketches of what occurred around them. 'Madame
Gervaisais' is a character study of the aunt of strong literary
predilections who influenced Edmond; 'Germinie Lacerteux' is the
biography of their servant, at whose death, after long and faithful
service, they discovered t