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    "source_title": "Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911)",
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    "chunk_id": "1911:goncourt:3cde8b63650b",
    "title": "GONCOURT",
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    "verified_text": "goncourt, his brother, was born in paris on the 17th of december 1830, and died in paris on the 20th of june 1870. writing always in collaboration, until the death of the younger, it was their ambition 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 18th century, in france and japan; and also to collect pictures and bibelots, always of the french and japanese 18th century. their histories (_portraits intimes du xviii^e siecle_ (1857), _la femme au xviii^{e} siecle_ (1862), _la du barry_ (1878), &c.) are made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the time; their three volumes on _l'art du xviii^e siecle_ (1859-1875) deal with watteau and his followers in the same scrupulous, minutely enlightening way, with all the detail of unpublished documents; and when they came to write novels, it was with a similar attempt to give the inner, undiscovered, minute truths of contemporary existence, the _inedit_ of life. the same morbidly sensitive noting of the _inedit_, of whatever came to them from their own sensations of things and people around them, gives its curious quality to the nine volumes of the _journal_, 1887-1896, which will remain, perhaps, the truest and most poignant chapter of human history that they have written. their novels, _soeur philomene_ (1861), _renee mauperin_ (1864), _germinie lacerteux_ (1865), _manette salomon_ (1865), _madame gervaisais_ (1869), and, by edmond alone, _la fille elisa_ (1878), _les freres zemganno_ (1879), _la faustin_ (1882), _cherie_ (1884), are, however, the work by which they will live as artists. learning something from flaubert, and teaching almost everything to zola, they invented a new kind of novel, and their novels are the result of a new vision of the world, in which the very element of sight is decomposed, as in a picture of monet. seen through the nerves, in this conscious abandonment to the tricks of the eyesight, the world becomes a thing of broken patterns and conflicting colours, and uneasy movement. a novel of the goncourts is made up of an infinite number of details, set side by side, every detail equally prominent. while a novel of flaubert, for all its detail, gives above all things an impression of unity, a novel of the goncourts deliberately dispenses with unity in order to give the sense of the passing of life, the heat and form of its moments as they pass. it is written in little chapters, sometimes no longer than a page, and each chapter is a separate notation of some significant event, some emotion or sensation which seems to throw sudden light on the picture of a soul. to the goncourts humanity is as pictorial a thing as the world it moves in; they do not search further than \"the physical basis of life,\" and they find everything that can be known of that unknown force written visibly upon the sudden faces of little incidents, little expressive moments. the soul, to them, is a series of moods, which succeed one another, certainly without any of the too arbitrary logic of the novelist who has conceived of character as a solid or consistent thing. their novels are hardly stories at all, but picture-galleries, hung with pictures of the momentary aspects of the world. french critics have complained that the language of the goncourts is no longer french, no longer the french of the past; and this is true. it is their distinction--the finest of their inventions--that, in order to render new sensations, a new vision of things, they invented a new language. (a. sy.) in his will edmond de goncourt left his estate for the endowment of an academy, the formation of which was entrusted to mm. alphonse daudet and leon hennique. the society was to consist of ten members, each of whom was to receive an annuity of 6000 francs, and a yearly prize of 5000 francs was to be awarded to the author of some work of fiction. eight of the members of the new academy were nominated in the will. they were: alphonse daudet, j. k. huysmans, leon hennique, octave mirbeau, the two brothers j. h. rosny, gustave geffroy and paul margueritte. on the 19th of january 1903, after much litigation, the academy was constituted, with elemir bourges, lucien descaves and leon daudet as members in addition to those mentioned in de goncourt's will, the place of alphonse daudet having been left vacant by his death in 1897. on the brothers de goncourt see the _journal des goncourt_ already cited; also m. a. belloc (afterwards lowndes) and m. l. shedlock, _edmond and jules de goncourt, with letters and leaves from their journals_ (1895); alidor delzant, _les goncourt_ (1889) which contains a valuable bibliography; _lettres de jules de goncourt_ (1888), with preface by h. ceard; r. doumic, _portraits d'ecrivains_ (1892); paul bourget, _nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine_ (1886); emile zola, _les romanciers naturalistes_ (1881). &c.",
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