_Aujourd'hui,_ they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie Lacerteux, que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et de l'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman s'est imposé les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertés et les franchises. Te public aime les romans faux,_ is another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est un roman vrai._ But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood by _un roman vrai?_ The old notion of the novel was that it should be an entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake; a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce as nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having been omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, it is the same as the old notion of history, _drame ou geste._ That is not how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should be rendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly the _inédit,_ caring only to record that, so it is the _inédit_ of life that they conceive to be the main concern, the real "inner history." And for them the _inédit_ of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of the sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not of action, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but of an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses. It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina. Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually; the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in his patient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omits everything which is not an essential part of the _ensemble_ which he sees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consist in has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a breaking up of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are generally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page in length. A very apt image of this new, curious manner of narrative has been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaître. _Un homme qui marche à l'intérieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparaît successivement à chaque fenêtre, et dans les intervalles nous échappe. Ces fenêtres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore,_ he adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenêtres où l'homme que nous attendions ne passe point._ That, certainly, is the danger of the method.