An opera-glass--a special, unique way of seeing things--that is what the Goncourts have brought to bear upon the common things about us; and it is here that they have done the "something new," here more than anywhere. They have never sought "to see life steadily, and see it whole:" their vision has always been somewhat feverish, with the diseased sharpness of over-excited nerves. "We do not hide from ourselves that we have been passionate, nervous creatures, unhealthily impressionable," confesses the _Journal._ But it is this morbid intensity in seeing and seizing things that has helped to form that marvelous style--"a style perhaps too ambitious of impossibilities," as they admit--a style which inherits some of its color from Gautier, some of its fine outline from Flaubert, but which has brought light and shadow into the color, which has softened outline in the magic of atmosphere. With them words are not merely color and sound, they live. That search after _l'image peinte, l'épithète rare_, is not (as with Flaubert) a search after harmony of phrase for its own sake; it is a desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life. And so, in analysis as in description, they have found a way of noting the fine shades; they have broken the outline of the conventional novel in chapters, with its continuous story, in order to indicate--sometimes in a chapter of half a page--this and that revealing moment, this or that significant attitude or accident or sensation. For the placid traditions of French prose they have had but little respect; their aim has been but one, that of having (as M. Edmond de Goncourt tells us in the preface to _Chérie_) "une langue rendant nos idées, nos sensations, nos figurations des hommes et des choses, d'une façon distincte de celui-ci ou de celui-là, une langue personnelle, une langue portant notre signature." What Goncourt has done in prose--inventing absolutely a new way of saying things, to correspond with that new way of seeing things which he has found--Verlaine has done in verse. In a famous poem, _Art Poétique_, he has himself defined his own ideal of the poetic art: _Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance! Oh! la Nuance seule fiance Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!_