langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est
signee, pour le lecteur lettre, comme si son nom etait au bas de cette
page, de cette ligne_: and this style, in both, was accused, by the
'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial,
and therefore reprehensible.

It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributing
to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his name
alone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned.
_Mon frere et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in his
journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; for
the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in even
that excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yet
more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt,
was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for the
qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. It
has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details of
human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the document,
the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to the
curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have
been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberate
eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the
handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style.
Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant
stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight
novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, very
distinguished writing.

It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, but
are perhaps the typical men of letters of the