With a critical introduction by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly. n may
be as tenable as any other. But it may be well to observe at the
outset that the creative work of the Goncourts is not to be
condemned or praised en bloc, for the simple reason that it is
not a spontaneous, uniform product, but the resultant of diverse
forces varying in direction and intensity from time to time.
They themselves have recorded that there are three distinct
stages in their intellectual evolution. Beginning, under the
influence of Heine and Poe, with purely imaginative conceptions,
they rebounded to the extremest point of realism before
determining on the intermediate method of presenting realistic
pictures in a poetic light. Pure imagination in the domain of
contemporary fiction seemed to them defective, inasmuch as its
processes are austerely logical, while life itself is compact of
contradictions; and their first reaction from it was entirely
natural, on their own principles. It remains to be seen what
sense should be attached to t