close of our century. They
have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses and
the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselves
certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions of
literary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become at
all actual, and some of which owe to them their very origin. To be not
merely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; not
merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of
what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating,
indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the
eighteenth century, in France and in Japan; to collect pictures and
_bibelots_, beautiful things, always of the French and Japanese
eighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with their
audacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and their
scrupulous exactitude in detail, are characteristic of what is the
finest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art.
Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les
civilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire est
drame ou geste.... Les siecles qui ont precede notre siecle ne
demandaient a l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portrait
de son genie.... Le XIX^e siecle demande l'homme qui etait cet homme
d'Etat, cet homme de guerre, ce poete, ce peintre, ce grand homme de
science ou de metier. L'ame qui etait en cet acteur, le coeur qui a
vecu derriere cet esprit, il les exige et les reclame; et s'il ne peut
recueillir tout cet etre moral, toute la vie interieure, il commande du
moins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._
From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series of
studies in the eighteenth century in France (_La Femme au XVIII^e
Siecle_, _Portraits intimes du XVIII^e Siecle_, _La du Barry_, and the
others), made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of
costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the
time, forming, as they justly say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman
vrai que la posterite appellera peut-etre un jour l'histoire humaine_.
To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual documents, but
not to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in
documents, to make them more living and more charming than the charm of