Chapter LXXXVII: Headaches and Dyspepsia

We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school known as “naturalism.” They were contemporaries of Flaubert, but their influence counted later, for the reason that recognition was so long delayed.

Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were brothers, who collaborated in writing to such an extent that they became as one mind and one pen. Jules, the younger, died at the age of forty; his brother lived to old age. They came of an aristocratic family, and inherited a competence; they were bachelors and semi-invalids, and devoted themselves to the cause of art with a kind of ascetic frenzy. They believed that true art could be understood only by artists; but they achieved greatness in spite of that theory, because of the intensity of their sensibility, and the vitality they gave to the creatures of their brain.

It was the Goncourts who first used the term “naturalism.” It was their idea that characters are built up and a story made real by infinite attention to detail. No attempt must be made to generalize, you must deal with the particular, and you must make that particular known by the massing of external circumstance. Everything must be subordinated to that purpose; the style must be flexible, it must, like the music of the Wagnerian opera, change at every moment, according to the scene it portrays. These writers broke all the rules of French literary elegance, they used barbarous and forbidden words, so the critics ridiculed them, and the academy of Richelieu spurned them, and they had to start an academy of their own.

Their first work of significance was “Germinie Lacerteux,” which tells the life history of a French serving-maid. Why should the genteel art of fiction stoop to such a heroine? The authors answer this question in a preface:

Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage,
and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are
called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the
people--this world beneath a world--were to remain under the
literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained
silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We
asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still
for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too
low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their
terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that
conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society,
was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal
aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to
interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the
great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below
could provoke weeping like those that are wept above.

Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station. But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand, take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spare you no most hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to know about sexual pathology.

Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have acquired this knowledge--when we have visited the hospitals and the jails and the brothels and the morgues--our minds are automatically led to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased.

And that is where we part company with the Goncourt brothers and their theory of art. We learn from them all about the experiences of a Paris prostitute; we learn the details of the life of a young society girl, brought up in a hot-house environment, a prey to abnormal cravings; we learn the symptoms of religious pathology, the half-sensuous hysteria of a woman in the toils of Catholic priestcraft. There are eight or ten such novels, each dealing with a different assortment of abnormalities; but nowhere in these books is there a hint of anything to be done, whether by individual conversion, the renewal of the moral forces, or by political and economic readjustments.

All such things are rigidly excluded by the “naturalist” formula; and it is essential to get clear that the Goncourt brothers, who made the formula, made it because they were sick and impotent men, the victims of a decadent stage of civilization. They thought they were giving us scientific reports upon human life, when as a matter of fact what they were giving us were the by-products of their own headaches and dyspepsias. They toiled with the devotion of martyrs to report every quiver of their nervous sensibility; Edmond watched Jules while Jules was dying--Jules even watched himself--in order to report the details of this experience. Neither of them realized that, much as the world may need information about the sensations of dying, it has even more need of information about how to live. As for the Goncourt brothers, what they needed was fresh air and exercise.

Fiction, according to this “naturalist” formula, was to become “exact science.” But then, there are many kinds of science. It is science to put a beetle under the microscope, and diagram the epidermal cells in its carapace. But science does not stop with such observation; it goes on to experiment. Supposing this beetle be dyed pink; will there be any trace of pink in its offspring, and does that prove the transmission of acquired characteristics?

We have here in California a plant wizard who raises fields of flowers and fruits and vegetables. He is not content to accumulate facts about them, but proceeds to alter them--to make cactus without spines, and blackberries as big as your thumb, and wheat that is rust-proof and peaches that are scale-proof. Will some member of the Goncourt Academy explain why the “exact science” of fiction writing might not include an effort to free human beings from alcoholism and syphilis? As it happened, the greatest disciple of the Goncourt brothers, the man who took up their formula and used it to make himself the most widely read of all French novelists, came in the end to this very conclusion, and evolved into a moralist as intense and determined as Tolstoi.