Part 30

"No! they are dunning you; they won't give any longer credit. To-morrow's the first of the month."

"Akh!" cried Oblomof in vexation, "new bother! Well, why are you standing there? Put them on the table. I will get up immediately, take my bath, and look them over," said Ilya Ilyitch. "Is it all ready for my bath?"

"What do you mean--'ready'?" said Zakhar.

"Well, now--"

With a groan he started to make the preliminary movement of getting up.

"I forgot to tell you," began Zakhar, "while you were still asleep the manager sent word by the dvornik that it was imperatively necessary that you vacate the apartment: it is wanted."

"Well, what of that? If the apartment is wanted of course we will move out. Why do you bother me with it? This is the third time you have spoken to me about it."

"They bother me about it also."

"Tell them that we will move out."

"He says, 'For a month you have been promising,' says he, 'and still you don't move out,' says he: 'we'll report the matter to the police.'"

"Let him report," cried Oblomof resolutely: "we will move out as soon as it is a little warmer, in the course of three weeks."

"Three weeks, indeed! The manager says that the workmen are coming in a fortnight: everything is to be torn out. 'Move,' says he, 'either to-morrow or day after to-morrow.'"

"Eh--eh--eh--that's too short notice: to-morrow? See here, what next? How would this minute suit? But don't you dare speak a word to me about apartments. I have already told you that once, and here you are again. Do you hear?"

"But what shall I do?" demanded Zakhar.

"What shall you do? Now how is he going to get rid of me?" replied Ilya Ilyitch. "He makes me responsible! How does it concern me? Don't you trouble me any further, but make any arrangements you please, only so that we don't have to move yet. Can't you do your best for your master?"

"But Ilya Ilyitch, little father [batiushka], what arrangements shall I make?" began Zakhar in a hoarse whisper. "The house is not mine; how can we help being driven out of the place if they resort to force? If only the house were mine, then I would with the greatest pleasure--"

"There must be some way of bringing him around: tell him we have lived here so long; tell him we'll surely pay him."

"I have," said Zakhar.

"Well, what did he say?"

"What did he say? He repeated his everlasting 'Move out,' says he; 'we want to make repairs on the apartment.' He wants to do over this large apartment and the doctor's for the wedding of the owner's son."

"Oh, my good Lord!" exclaimed Oblomof in despair; "what asses they are to get married!"

He turned over on his back.

"You had better write to the owner, sir," said Zakhar. "Then perhaps he would not drive us out, but would give us a renewal of the lease."

Zakhar as he said this made a gesture with his right hand.

"Very well, then; as soon as I get up I will write him. You go to your room and I will think it over. You need not do anything about this," he added; "I myself shall have to work at all this miserable business myself."

Zakhar left the room, and Oblomof began to ponder.

But he was in a quandary which to think about,--his starosta's letter, or the removal to new lodgings, or should he undertake to make out his accounts? He was soon swallowed up in the flood of material cares and troubles, and there he still lay turning from side to side. Every once in a while would be heard his broken exclamation, "Akh, my God! life touches everything, reaches everywhere!"

No one knows how long he would have lain there a prey to this uncertainty, had not the bell rung in the ante-room.

"There is some one come already!" exclaimed Oblomof, wrapping himself up in his khalat, "and here I am not up yet; what a shame! Who can it be so early?"

And still lying on his bed, he gazed curiously at the door.

THE BROTHERS DE GONCOURT

EDMOND (1822-1896) JULES (1830-1870)

[Illustration: EDMOND DE GONCOURT]

Edmond and Jules Huot De Goncourt, French writers who became famous alike for the perfectness of their collaboration, the originality of their methods, and the finish of their style, were born, the first in Nancy in 1822, the other in Paris in 1830. Until the death of Jules in 1870 they wrote nothing for the public that did not bear both their names; and so entirely identical were their tastes and judgment that it is impossible to say of a single sentence they composed that it was the sole product of one or the other. "Charming writers," Victor Hugo called them; "in unison a powerful writer, two minds from which springs a single jet of talent." Born of a noble family of moderate wealth, they were educated as became their station in life. Both had an early leaning toward the arts; but Edmond, in deference to the wishes of his family, took a government appointment and held the office till the death of his mother, when he was twenty-six years of age. Their father had died while they were boys.

Drawn together by their common bereavement and the death-bed injunction of their parent that Edmond should be the careful guardian of his younger brother, whose health had always been delicate, the young men then began a companionship which was broken only by death. They set out to make themselves acquainted with southern Europe, and at the same time to escape the political turmoils of Paris; and extended their travels into Africa, which country they found so congenial that in the first ardor of their enthusiasm they determined to settle there. Business arrangements, however, soon recalled them to Paris, where ties of friendship and other agreeable associations bound them fast to their native soil. They took up their residence in the metropolis, where they lived until a short time before the death of Jules, when, to be free from the roar of the city, they purchased a house in one of the suburbs. Their intellectual development may be traced through their Journal and letters to intimate friends, published by the surviving brother. From these it appears that most of their leisure hours during their travels were taken up with painting and drawing. Jules had attempted some dramatic compositions while at college, and Edmond had been strongly drawn to literature by the conversation of an aunt, of whom he saw much before his mother's death. It was while engaged with their brushes in 1850 that it occurred to the brothers to take up writing as a regular vocation; and thus was begun their remarkable literary partnership.

Their first essay was a drama. It was rejected; whereupon, nothing daunted, they wrote a novel. It was entitled '18--,' and it is interesting to observe that here, at the very outset of their career, they seem to have had in mind the keynote of the chord on which they ever afterwards played: the eighteenth century was the chief source of their inspiration, and it was their life's endeavor to explore it and reproduce it for their contemporaries with painstaking fidelity. The novel engaged their serious and earnest attention, and when it was given to the publisher they watched for its appearance with painful anxiety. Unfortunately it was announced for the very day on which occurred the _Coup d'Etat_. The book came out when Paris was in an uproar; and though Jules Janin, one of the most influential critics of the day, unexpectedly exploited it at great length in the Journal des Debats, its circulation in that first edition was not more than sixty copies, most of which were distributed gratuitously.

The blow was a hard one, but the brothers were not thus to be silenced, nor by the subsequent failure of other dramatic ventures and an effort to found a newspaper. They had been little more than imitators. They now entered the field they soon made their own. The writers of their day were for the most part classicists; a few before Victor Hugo were romanticists. The De Goncourts stood for the modern, what they could see and touch. In this way they became realists. What their own senses could not apprehend they at once rejected; all they saw they deemed worthy to be reproduced. They lived in a period of reconstruction after the devastation of the revolution. The refinement and elegance of the society of the later Bourbon monarchy, still within view, they yearned for and sought to restore. A series of monographs dealing with the art and the stage of these days, which appeared in 1851-2, won for them the first real recognition they enjoyed. These were followed by various critical essays on the same subjects, contributed to newspapers and periodicals, and a novel, 'La Lorette,' which had a large sale and marked the beginning of their success from a financial point of view. "This makes us realize," they wrote in their Journal, "that one can actually sell a book."

Their reputation as men of letters was established by the publication in 1854-5 of 'Histoire de la Societe Pendant la Revolution' and the same 'Pendant le Directoire' the aim of which, they said, was "to paint in vivid, simple colors the France of 1789 to 1800." This object they accomplished, so far as it concerned the society of which they themselves were descendants; but the reactionary spirit in them was too strong for an impartial view of the struggle, and their lack of true philosophic spirit and broad human sympathy led them to make a picture that, interesting as it is, is sadly distorted. Their vivid colors are lavished mainly on the outrages of the rioters and the sufferings of the aristocrats. But for wealth of detail, the result of tireless research, the history is of value as a record of the manners and customs of the fashionable set of the period. Of the same sort were their other semi-historical works: 'Portraits Intimes du XVIIIieme Siecle,' separate sketches of about a hundred more or less well-known figures of the age; 'L'Histoire de Marie Antoinette,' and 'La Femme au XVIIIieme Siecle,' in which the gossip and anecdote of former generations are told again almost as graphically as are those which the authors relate of their own circle in their memoirs. Their most important contribution to literature was their 'L'Art au XVIIIieme Siecle,' monographs gathered and published in seventeen volumes, and representing a dozen years' labor. This was indeed a labor of love, and it was not in vain; for it was these appreciative studies more than anything else that turned public attention to the almost forgotten delicacy of the school of painters headed by Watteau, Fragonard, Latour, Boucher, Debricourt, and Greuze, whose influence has ever since been manifested on the side of sound taste and sanity in French art.

A volume entitled 'Idees et Sensations,' and their Journal and letters, complete the list of the more important of their works outside the field of fiction. The Journal will always be valuable as an almost complete document of the literary history of France in their time, made up as it is of impressions of and from the most important writers of the day, with whom they were on terms of intimate friendship, including Flaubert, Gautier, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Hugo, Saint-Victor, Michelet, Zola, and George Sand. In fiction the De Goncourts were less prolific, but it is to their novels mainly that they owe their reputation for individuality, and as true "path-breakers" in literature. They have been called the initiators of modern French realism. Their friend Flaubert perhaps better deserves the title. Their determination to see for themselves all that could be seen, the result of which gave real worth to their historical work, even where their prejudice robbed it of weight, was what put the stamp of character upon their novels. How much importance they attached to correct and comprehensive observation may be gathered from their remark, "The art of learning how to see demands the longest apprenticeship of all the arts." They took life as they found it, examined it on every side,--rarely going far under the surface,--and then sought to reproduce it on their pages as the artist would put it on canvas. Capable of terseness, of suggestiveness, quick to note and communicate the vital spark, they were yet rarely content with it alone. Every minute particle of the body it vivified, they insisted on adding to their picture. Nothing was to be taken for granted; as nothing was accepted by them at second hand, so nothing was left to the imagination of the reader until their comprehensive view was his. It was in this way that they were realists. They did not seek out and expose to public view the grossness and unpleasantness of life. Their own preference was for the beautiful, and in their own lives they indulged their refined tastes. But they looked squarely at the world about them, the ugly with the beautiful, the impure with the pure, and they did not hesitate to describe one almost as faithfully as the other.

Curiously, the discrimination against the masses and the bias that mar their history do not appear in their fiction. "They began writing history which was nothing but romance," says one of their critics, "and later wrote romance which in reality is history." Indeed, their novels are little more than sketches of what occurred around them. 'Madame Gervaisais' is a character study of the aunt of strong literary predilections who influenced Edmond; 'Germinie Lacerteux' is the biography of their servant, at whose death, after long and faithful service, they discovered that she had led a life of singular duplicity; 'Soeur Philomene' is a terribly true glimpse of hospital life, and 'Manette Salomon,' with its half-human monkey drawn from the life, is transferred without change from the Parisian studios under the Empire. 'Renee Mauperin' comes nearest to the model of an ordinary novel; but no one can read of the innocent tomboy girl struck down with fatal remorse at the consequences of her own natural action, on learning of her brother's dishonor, without feeling that this picture too was drawn from the life. Several of their stories were dramatized, but with scant success; and a play which they wrote, 'Henriette Marechal' and had produced at the Comedie Francaise through the influence of Princess Mathilde, their constant friend and patroness, was almost howled down,--chiefly however for political reasons.

After the death of Jules de Goncourt, his brother wrote several books of the same character as those which they produced in union, the best known of which are 'La Fille Elisa,' and 'Cherie,' a study of a girl, said to have been inspired by the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. The best critics in France, notably Sainte-Beuve, have given the brothers Goncourt a very high place in literature and conceded their originality. English reviewers have been less ready to exalt them, mainly on account of the offensive part of their realism. They have objected also to their superficiality as historians, and to their sympathy with the sentimental admirers of such types as Marie Antoinette; but they too have been ready to praise the brothers as leaders of a new fashion, and especially for their devotion to style. In this respect the Goncourts have few rivals in French literature. Balzac himself was not more finical in the choice of words, or more unsparing of his time and energy in writing and re-writing until his exact meaning, no more or less, had been expressed; and they covered up the marks of their toil better than he. In a letter to Zola, Edmond de Goncourt said:--"My own idea is that my brother died of work, and above all from the desire to elaborate the artistic form, the chiseled phrase, the workmanship of style." He himself spent a long life at this fine artistry, and died in Paris in July, 1896.

TWO FAMOUS MEN

From the Journal of the De Goncourts

March 3D [1862].--We took a walk and went off to find Theophile Gautier.... The street in which he lives is composed of the most squalid countrified buildings, of court-yards swarming with poultry, fruit shops whose doors are ornamented with little brooms of black feathers: just such a suburban street as Hervier might have painted.... We pushed open the door of a house, and found ourselves in the presence of the lord of epithet. The furniture was of gilded wood, covered with red damask, after the heavy Venetian style; there were fine old pictures of the Italian school; above the chimney a mirror innocent of quicksilver, on which were scraped colored arabesques and various Persian characters,--such a picture of meagre sumptuousness and faded splendor as one would find in the rooms of a retired actress, who had come in for some pictures through the bankruptcy of an Italian manager.

When we asked him if we were disturbing him, he answered: "Not at all. I never work at home. I get through my 'copy' at the printing-office. They set up the type as I write. The smell of the printers' ink is a sure stimulant to work, for one feels the 'copy' must be handed in. I could write only a novel in this way now; unless I saw ten lines printed I could not get on to the next ten. The proof-sheet serves as a test to one's work. That which is already done becomes impersonal, but the actual 'copy' is part of yourself; it hangs like filaments from the root of your literary life, and has not yet been torn away. I have always been preparing corners where I should do my work, but when installed there I found I could do nothing. I must be in the midst of things, and can work only when a racket is going on about me; whereas, when I shut myself up for work the solitude tells upon me and makes me sad."

From there Gautier got on the subject of the 'Queen of Sheba.' We admitted our infirmity, our physical incapacity of taking in musical sound; and indeed, a military band is the highest musical enjoyment of which we are capable. Whereupon Gautier said, "Well, I'm delighted to hear that: I am just like you; I prefer silence to music. I do know bad music from good, because part of my life was spent with a singer, but both are quite indifferent to me. Still it is curious that all the literary men of our day feel the same about music. Balzac abhorred it, Hugo cannot endure it, Lamartine has a horror of it. There are only a few painters who have a taste for it."

Then Gautier fell to complaining of the times. "Perhaps I am getting an old man, but I begin to feel as if there were no more air to breathe. What is the use of wings if there is no air in which one can soar? I no longer feel as if I belonged to the present generation. Yes, 1830 was a glorious epoch, but I was too young by two or three years; I was not carried away by the current; I was not ready for it. I ought to have produced a very different sort of work."

There was then some talk of Flaubert, of his literary methods, of his indefatigable patience, and of the seven years he devoted to a work of four hundred pages. "Just listen," observed Gautier, "to what Flaubert said to me the other day: 'It is finished. I have only ten more pages to write; but the ends of my sentences are all in my head.' So that he already hears in anticipation the music of the last words of his sentences before the sentences themselves have been written. Was it not a quaint expression to use? I believe he has devised a sort of literary rhythm. For instance, a phrase which begins in slow measure must not finish with a quick pace, unless some special effect is to be produced. Sometimes the rhythm is only apparent to himself, and escapes our notice. A story is not written for the purpose of being read aloud: yet he shouts his to himself as he writes them. These shouts present to his own ears harmonies, but his readers seem unaware of them."

Gautier's daughters have a charm of their own, a species of Oriental languor, deep dreamy eyes, veiled by heavy eyelids, and a regularity in their gestures and movements which they inherit from their father; but this regularity is tempered in them by womanly grace. There is a charm about them which is not all French; nevertheless there is a French element about it, their little tomboyish tricks and expressions, their habit of pouting, the shrugging of their shoulders, the irony which escapes through the thin veil of childishness intended to conceal it. All these points distinguish them from ordinary society girls, and make clear a strong individuality of character which renders them fearless in expressing their likings and antipathies. They display liberty of speech, and have often the manner of a woman whose face is hidden by a mask; and yet one finds here simplicity, candor, and a charming absence of reserve, utterly unknown to the ordinary young girl.

* * * * *

November 23D [1863].--We have been to thank Michelet for the flattering lines he wrote about us.

He lives in the Rue de l'Ouest, at the end of the Jardin du Luxembourg, in a large house which might almost be workmen's dwellings. His flat is on the third floor. A maid opened the door and announced us. We penetrated into a small study.

The wife of the historian has a young, serious face; she was seated on a chair beside the desk on which the lamp was placed, with her back to the window. Michelet sat on a couch of green velvet, and was banked up by cushions.

His attitude reminded us of his historical work: the lower portions of his body were in full sight, whilst the upper were half concealed; the face was a mere shadow surrounded with snowy white locks; from this shadowy mass emerged a professorial, sonorous, singsong voice, consciously important, and in which the ascending and descending scale produced a continuous cooing sound.

He spoke to us in a most appreciative manner of our study of Watteau, and then passed on to the interesting study which might be written on French furniture.

"You gentlemen, who are observers of human nature," he cried suddenly, "there is a history you should write,--the history of the lady's-maid. I do not speak of Madame de Maintenon; but you have Mademoiselle de Launai, the Duchesse de Grammont's Julie, who exercised on her mistress so great an influence, especially in the Corsican affair. Madame Du Deffand said sometimes that there were only two people sincerely attached to her, D'Alembert and her maid. Oh! domesticity has played a great part in history, though men-servants have been of comparative unimportance....

"I was once going through England, traveling from York to Halifax. There were pavements in the country lanes, with the grass growing on each side as carefully kept as the pavements themselves; close by, sheep were grazing, and the whole scene was lit up by gas. A singular sight!"