The brothers introduced Japanese art into France. They were amateurs of the exquisite. Their house at Auteuil was truly "la maison d'un artiste au XIX siècle." And consider the labour, acute, agonizing, and enormous, involved in the writing and production of their novels: Germinie, Madame Gervaisais, Renée Mauperin, Manette Salomon (which was the first novel of studio life, excepting Fromentin's Domenique, in France, and one that influenced Zola greatly in his L'œuvre and De Maupassant in his Strong as Death), Charles Demailly--a wonderful study of journalism in Paris, a true continuation of Balzac's Lucien Rubempré; Sœur Philomène; and, written by Edmond after the death of Jules, La Fille Elisa, Les Frères Zemganno, La Faustin, and Chérie. In addition, there are the nine volumes of the journal, a study of Gavarni, the master caricaturist; vaudevilles, pantomimes, letters, portraits, several plays, histories, études, an early novel En 18--, and miscellany amounting in all to over forty volumes. Yet this fraternal pair, because of their wealth and birth, are still contemptuously alluded to as "amateurs." Yes, amateurs, indeed, in the fullest sense of a misinterpreted word, amateurs of beautiful sensations, amateurs in their devotion to an ideal hopeless of attainment, amateurs who might well be patterned after in this age of hasty production, vulgar appeal to the sentimental, to the cheap and obvious. Aristocrats were the De Goncourts, yet their white fingers never faltered when they held the burin and engraved in indelible letters that first great naturalistic novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the tale of an unhappy servant. Even their friend De Monselet pronounced it "sculptured slime," and, to the curiously inclined, interesting are the _critiques_ of Brunetière; of Barbey D'Aurevilly?--who hacked away at everybody on general principles; of Renée Doumic, who always follows the lead of Brunetière; of Maurice Spronck, who declared that the brothers were victims of a malady known to psycho-physiologists as _Audition colorée_. But there were fairer critics. The studies of Zola, Daudet, Henri Ceard, Paul Bourget, Henry James, Emile Hennequin, the friendly words of Turgenev, that gentle Russian giant, the valuable suggestions of Flaubert--these were balm to the sensitive nature of Edmond de Goncourt. He lived to head a school--hitherto rather sterile, it must be confessed--and before his death he dowered an academy. (Ah, if all French literary men had but a moiety of Daudet's humour in the matter of academies!)