The Goncourt Journals by Jules de Goncourt

First published: Three series in 9 volumes, 1887-1896

Critical Evaluation:

The Goncourt Journals were begun on December 2, 1851, the day on which Louis-Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly and made himself dictator, as a first step toward becoming Emperor of the French. The journals span the years of the Second Empire in France.

It was the intention of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt to capture and record “momentary reality” in their journals. They carefully noted their impressions and the actual words of men of their time. As in their realistic novels they tried to be objective, so in their journals they claim as their own an attempt at complete impartiality. Though Edmond was eight years older than Jules, they thought as one, and there is nothing to suggest any difference in opinion concerning the correct interpretation of any event or circumstance. The journals are in fact far from being objective or impartial. Part of their interest lies in the light these records of people and the age cast upon the personal preferences and prejudices of the Goncourts.

In the net they cast, the Goncourts catch not only the most outstanding men of letters of the period, but in addition acquaintances of the latter. Though Victor Hugo, for example, could not possibly be present in Paris at that time, since he was in exile in the Channel Islands, his literary or spiritual presence is very much felt; for both Gautier and Sainte-Beuve—friends of the Goncourts—had been very close to Hugo, and frequently reminisced about him.

The brothers were masters of the word portrait in miniature. To the initial portrait, new touches and shadings were added over the years, until eventually the person represented in it seems to acquire a life of his own within the journals. Moreover, so great is the Goncourts’ success in revealing to the reader the antipathies and enthusiasms of the persons they describe, that even writers of previous centuries—Voltaire, Diderot, Moliere, Corneille—seem to be given a breath of new life in these pages.

The Goncourt brothers did not depend fully upon their writing for an income. However, they were members of a relatively new breed of men in France; that is, they were professional men of letters, imaginative writers in the hire of a society with whose ideals they did not necessarily agree. The brothers share with other artists of the period characteristic preoccupations and dislikes. Thus, as a document giving information about the current of ideas during the Second Empire, the journals are precious.

The exasperation caused by the severity of censorship under Napoleon the Third is shown as not being by any means peculiar to Baudelaire and Flaubert. In the journals, it emerges as a pattern of frustration. Similarly, Baudelaire’s preference for the town over the country and his very fear of nature are shown to be sentiments that the Goncourts understand and feel also; by a process of extension that the reader will readily operate, this aversion will be viewed as rather characteristic of the age. The Goncourts, with their extremely refined sensibility, their artistic tastes, and their Parisian life, voice their hostility to Nature in several places. In one they ask whether a thinking man does not feel ill at ease in the country, as if in the presence of an enemy.

While it is true that the Goncourts did seem to prefer the city to the country, this fact should not be interpreted as a stamp of approval for the industrialization and mercantilism spreading throughout France in the 1850’s and 1860’s. In places, there are references to the “American Babylon” that the Goncourts feared France was becoming. Their distaste for the “Exposition Universelle” of 1867 is made very plain. For them, it was a symbol and a summing up of the “Americanization” and industrialization which they resented. In another interesting entry, the brothers lay bare what was for them a symptom of creeping commercialism in France: they point out that in the bookshops of Paris the bookseller has given up the practice of leaving out a chair for his customers. The new emphasis, the Goncourts claim, is upon buying, not browsing. Their distaste, incidentally, was common to many writers of the time.

Unlike the creations of Balzac’s vast imagination, the real literary figures who appear and reappear in the journals do not come with their price tag, their holdings of property and money, attached. Nonetheless, there is, throughout the journals, a keen awareness of the new importance of money in the nineteenth century, a sense both of the servitude it can impose and the liberty it can permit. Even the disinterested Sainte-Beuve is seen to reflect ruefully upon the meager income which will be his for three whole years of hard work as a critic.

At times, the Goncourts let fall a remark which seems at first rather insignificant, yet makes the reader pause to reflect. Thus, after mentioning that they have no ear for music, the Goncourts indicate that this weakness is shared by Gautier, while they even claim that Lamartine, Balzac, and Hugo actively disliked music.

In places, the Goncourts reveal a truly poetic talent. They show the poet’s partiality for the metaphor, and they have the ability to express almost any idea in the form of an image. Thus they will compare a house and its occupants to a living body. The artists the head, the Goncourts eloquently claim always seem to live on the top floor; on the ground floor are to be found the shopkeepers, the legs; in between, of course, are the bourgeois—a great digestive tract.

Needless to say, the journals are filled with entries giving an insight into the life and works of the Goncourts themselves. One can find, for example, the chronicle of the last sickness of their devoted servant Rose. One discovers with them, as it were, her carefully hidden vice, her licentiousness, and the pangs of conscience to which it made her subject. There is more than a suggestion here of the theme of their novel GERMINIE LACERTEUX. Staring from every page is their oldmaidish meticulosity, their highly individual tastes and fancies. Their cure for boredom at one stage is the purchase of two old, silver-gilt embossed Saint-Cloud teapots in a box with a fleur-de-lis lock. It is fascinating to remark that as far as the eighteenth century was concerned, the Goncourts were interested far less in the “philosophies” than in the handcrafts of that century. Their satisfaction with their collection of objects of art and their pride at introducing the French public to the arts of the Orient are made obvious.

In observing themselves pass through successive moods, the Goncourts frequently translate for the reader the torments of a hypersensitive nature struggling to find expression in a play or a novel. Their frustrations, as well as the joy of creation, are often recorded in significant detail; the register of the stages of the creative process make for most interesting reading.

The name of the Goncourts will always be associated with the Magny dinners. It was at these dinners, arranged to be held every two weeks at the instigation of Sainte-Beuve, that the brothers were best able to observe under one roof some of the leading figures of the intellectual world of the Second Empire. To be sure, they complained, in an entry dated June 6, 1865, after they had been attending the dinners for over two years, that these affairs were characterized mainly by the lack of daring and the paucity of original talent shown by the guests attending them. Be this as it may, the Goncourts’ impressions of dinners and guests constitute a most important part of the journals.

Among the names which are mentioned most frequently in connection with the dinners is that of Sainte-Beuve. However, Gautier, Flaubert, Taine, Renan, Claude Bernard, and others come and go.

In spite of a footnote suggesting that their remarks about Sainte-Beuve were dictated by unbiased, scrupulous observation, the reader comes away with the impression that the masterly writer of PORT-ROYAL has been treated with singular harshness by the writers of the journals. Here, as in all their portraits, the Goncourts introduce Sainte-Beuve to the reader by first offering a description of his appearance, comparing his pale forehead and ruddy cheeks to the impressions of a provincial librarian whose book-filled cloister is over a cellar filled with rich red wines. The method used to describe Sainte-Beuve is, ironically, the one that the critic himself advocated. After watching him closely and recording his words and thoughts and even handshake, the brothers later attempt to record Sainte-Beuve’s patterns of thinking, while never losing sight of his appearance, filling in the picture as they see it. The completed portrait is scarcely appealing, being suggestive of ugliness and pettiness, while barely indicating the greatness of the subject.

Occasionally, a note of succinct smugness pierces in an entry such as that of December 14, 1868, which records that Zola, whom they called their admirer, lunched with them that day.

The vagaries of Gustave Flaubert’s vast imagination and his extravagance, recorded in detail by the Goncourts, provide some intriguing information about that great novelist. In any century but the nineteenth, Flaubert, as seen through the eyes of the Goncourts, would have seemed unique in his immensity. The Goncourts also record in their journals the massive enthusiasms, aversions, and extravagances of Theophile Gautier, with whom they were very friendly, as well as memories and impressions retained by others of Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Hugo, living in exile, could not be present at the Magny dinners. Absent, his literary presence was nonetheless felt. His immense stature does on occasion cast a large shadow on the group around the table at the Magny dinners.

With Jules’ last, long illness, Edmond was to take up the pen which his brother had been forced to let drop. Edmond’s courage in continuing to note down his impressions in spite of his great feeling of discouragement lends a new grandeur to the journals and allows the reader to forget the brothers’ occasional pettiness, their harshness toward some associates, their biased indulgence toward others.

The Goncourt Journals have been rather neglected in recent years by the casual reader, if not by the critic. Diffuse they are, and sometimes petty, yet they are most readable as well as a rich source of information about the temper of the Second Empire period. They flatter the reader by letting him view from close up some of the outstanding men of letters of the nineteenth century. Though not always entirely reliable in their judgments, the Goncourts have the supreme merit of making the reader wish to go on exploring the writings of the novelists and playwrights and poets to whom he has been introduced informally.