Goncourt, EDMOND and JULES DE, a pair of French novelists, born, the former at Nancy, May 26, 1822, the latter at Paris, 17th December 1830. They were not men of letters but artists primarily, and in 1849 they set out knapsack on back to traverse France for drawings and water-colours. Their notebooks made them writers as well as artists, and already in 1852 they had commenced that literary partnership which after twenty years of obscure labours was to conquer the public and stamp its impression upon the modern novel more strongly than any one had done since Balzac. Their earliest serious works were a group of historical studies upon the second half of the 18th century, intended to be an effective resurrection of its habits of life, manners, and costume. With all their elaboration of details these were ineffective and superficial from their lack of the calm and impartial historical sense, to say nothing of the absence of more essential qualities still—breadth of view, and that creative grasp of character by sympathetic insight which is the rarest gift of the historian. The tilting of the 'Castor and Pollux of bric-à-brac' against the gigantic figures of the Revolution was almost too pitiful to be amusing. These books were Histoire de la Société Française pendant la Révolution (1854), La Société Française pendant le Directoire (1855), Portraits intimes du XVIIIe Siècle (1856-58), Histoire de Marie Antoinette (1858), Les Maîtresses de Louis XV. (1860), La Femme au XVIIIe Siècle (1862), and L'Amour au XVIIIe Siècle (1875). Of much more real value is Gavarini (1873), L'Art au XVIIIe Siècle (1874), and the later books devoted to Watteau (1876) and Prudhon (1877).
But the important work of the De Goncourt brothers commenced when they assumed the novel as the mould into which to pour the metal of their prolonged and exact observation. Their conception of the novel was that it should be an imaginative attempt to grasp and summarise the results of this; and the task they put before themselves was to unite by means of a plot such as might have happened a multitude of observed facts, and to cast around these an atmosphere which should illumine them. Their aim was to paint manners by taking the traits in which one man resembles a class, rather than to grasp personal character by the points wherein one man is distinguished from another, in the manner of Balzac or George Eliot. Hence they select as generic types only persons of moderate faculties, and herein they are poorer than nature herself, which not only creates classes and groups but exceptional figures also. Their figures submit to life without subduing it, and are weighed down by that irresoluteness of will and morbid sensitiveness to suffering which is the especial disease of our age. Their subject is not so much the passions as the manners of the 19th century, and their sense of the enormous influence of environment and habit upon man necessitated so close a study of the arts of contemporary life that their work will be valued by future historians as a store-house of materials. Their descriptive part is always especially prominent, and their stories usually commence without explanation and end without denouement.
The novels in which the brothers carried out their theories display a marvellous unity, despite their double origin. The first, Les Hommes de Lettres (1860; new ed. as Charles Demailly), was followed by Sœur Philomène (1861), Renée Mauperin (1864), Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Manette Salomon (1867), and Madame Gervaisais (1869). The last is their greatest novel, the sharp and painful analysis of which was too close a reflex of themselves. Indeed, the weaker of the two did not survive this book, which may be said to have been written with his heart's blood. After the death of Jules, 20th June 1870, Edmond (who lived till 12th July 1896) issued La Fille Élisabeth (1878), La Faustine (1882), and Chérie (1885). The Idées et Sensations (1866) had already revealed to the world their morbid hyper-acuteness of sensation so fatal to nervous health and to that equilibrium of sanity which belonged to Goethe, Victor Hugo, and all the Olympians; and La Maison d'un Artiste (1881) had shown their patient love for bric-à-brac and its reflex influence upon the mind; but the Lettres de Jules Goneourt (1885), and still more the Journal des Goneourt (6 vols. 1888-92), have disclosed their conception of fiction and their method of work so fully, that the latter may be accepted as the formal propaganda of a school which embraces many of the foremost novelists of France. See a fine study by Paul Bourget in his Nouveaux Essais de Psychologie (1885); and Belloc and Shedlock, E. and J. de Goneourt (2 vols. 1892).