GONCOURT, gON'kiiTrf, EDMOND DE (1822 96), and JULES DE (1830-70). Brothers, impor tant in the development of French fiction. They fostered naturalism by the minuteness of their observation, and so continued the naturalistic method of Flaubert, and regarded themselves as masters of a school in which Zola was the most brilliant pupil; while on the other hand in the tortured artificiality of their style they presage the painful striving of the symbolists (q.v.) to express feeling and emotion by sound. Their intensely modern style, often bizarre, sometimes intentionally faulty, always supple, clear, rapid, made all their contemporary novelists in some degree their debtors, while it estranged the gen eral public. Their work consists of unimportant dramas, of minute and valuable studies in the social life of the French eighteenth century: Histoire de la societe francaise pendant la revolu tion (1854) ; Histoire de la societe francaise pendant le Directoire (1855) ; La revolution dans les maws (1854) ; Portraits intimes du XVIIIeme siecle (1856-58) ; Marie Antoinette (1858) ; Les mattresses de Louis XV. (1860-79) ; La femme au XV1IIeme siecle (1862) ; L'art as XVIIIeme siècle (1874) ; L'amour au XVIIIeme siecle (1877) ; to which Edmond added historical studies of - (1876), Prud'hon (1877), and Les actrices au XVIlleme siecle (1885-90) : of articles that first directed French attention to Japanese art; and, finally, of novels: Charles Demailly (1860) ; Soeur Philomene (1861) ; Renee Mauperin (1864) ; Germinie Lacerteux (1865) ; Manette Salomon (1867) ; Madame Ger vaisais (1869) to which Edmond added: La fine •lisa (1878) ; Les freres Zemganno (1879); La Faustin (1882) ; Cherie (1884). All these
are minutely realistic. They seek to present nature unadorned and imarranged. discarding all conventions of structure and artistic unity, thus "sterilizing their human documents" (Zola). Their observation, however, is apt to be super ficial, external, and, by preference, morbid. minie Lacerteux is to be `the clinic of love,' and fille Elisa pushes to its utmost paradox the divorce between fiction and conventionality. It is not as story-tellers that the Goncourts interest us, but as stylists. Their ability to reproduce a series of sensations by a series of images, their `notation of indescribable sensations,' their skill in startling with the aptness of their epithets, in `pinning their adjectives,' is what most attracts. They chose to live for their art alone and for the choice spirits that could comprehend them, for whose permanent association and fostering Ed mond left the larger part of his fortune to endow an Academy of the Goncourts. Consult: Del zant, Les Goncourts (Paris, 1889) ; Zola, Les romanciers naturalistes (ib., 1881) ; Bourget, Nouveaux essais (ib., 1885) ; Brunetibre, Le ro man naturaliste (ib., 1896) ; Wells, A Century of French Fiction (New York, 1898).