n hard outline, like Flaubert,
like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of the
Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks at
Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors.
It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, there
is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.

Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
Goncourts, with those of Theophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as
an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see
them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate
attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in
which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture.
In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from
no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous
epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a
sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should
palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in
expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their
relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate
and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately
depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French
critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the
language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of
the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderful
of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new vision
of things, they have invented a new language.

1894, 1896.

COVENTRY PATMORE

There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in the
National Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: the
straggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the lar