It would seem that we are now in a position to judge the Goncourts by their own standard. _Le dosage juste de la litterature et de la vie_--this formula recurs in one shape or another as a leading principle, and it is supplemented by other still more emphatic indications which should serve to supply a test. Unhappily, with the Goncourts these indications are unsystematic and even contradictory. The elder brother has naturally no hesitation in saying that the highest gift of any writer is his power of creating on paper real beings--_comme des etres crees par Dieu, et comme ayant eu une vraie vie sur la terre_--and he is bold enough to add that Shakespeare himself has failed to create more than two or three personages. He protests energetically against the academic virtues, and insists on the importance of forming a personal style which shall reproduce the vivacity, brio, and feverish activity of the best talk. It is, then, all the more disconcerting to learn from another passage in the _Journal_ that the creation of characters and the discovery of an original form of expression are matters of secondary moment. The truth is that if the Goncourts had, as they believed, something new to say, it was inevitable that they should seek to invent a new manner of utterance. Renan was doubtless right in thinking that they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects; but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against them in the matter of verbal audacities by every prominent critic, from Sainte-Beuve in one camp to Pontmartin in the other, are so many testimonies to the fact that they were innovators--_apporteurs du neuf_--and that their intrepidity cost them dear. Still their boldness in this respect has been generally exaggerated. Setting out as imitators of two such different models as Gautier and Jules Janin, they slowly acquired an individual manner--the manner, say, of _Germinie Lacerteux_ or _Manette Salomon_--but they never attained the formula which they had conceived as final. It was not given to them to realize their ambition--to write novels which should not contain a single bookish expression, plays which should reveal that hitherto undiscoverable quantity--colloquial speech, raised to the level of consummate art. The famous _ecriture artiste_ remained an unfulfilled ideal. The expression, first used in the preface to _Les Freres Zemganno_, merely foreshadows a possible development of style which shall come into being when realism or naturalism, ceasing to describe the ignoble, shall occupy itself with the attempt to render refinements, reticences, subtleties, and half-tones of a more elusive order. It is an aspiration, a counsel of perfection offered to a younger school by an artist in experiment, who