536
PARTISAN REVIEW
dialogue from the Goncourts, the kind of entry which gives a
frightening life to their record:
Taine: "... In the town of Angers, they keep such a close watch on
women there is no breath of scandal about a single one of them."
Saint-Victor: "Angers? But they are all pederasts...."
Harris would almost certainly have followed this mad moment with:
"Permit me, but I have made a special trip to Angers and both of you
are stupidly wrong."
Should anyone in English wish to rival the Goncourts? Far
from laboring to add more to this kind of "history," perhaps even
the enjoyment of the Goncourt classic is a guilty passion. Henry
James was deeply shocked by the appearance of this work.
It
seemed
to him an appalling occupation, every instance of it, from the
brothers' account of their contemporaries to Edmond's notes on the
death of Jules. Their carrying on the journal is "a very interesting
and remarkable fact," but "it has almost a vulgarly usual air
in
comparison with the circumstance that one of them has judged best
to give the document to the light." James cannot abide these "de–
moralized investigators," he is horrified by their picture of a grumpy
and petty Saint-Beuve and points out with a cry that the thirty
volumes of Saint-Beuve's
Causeries du Lundi
"contain a sufficiently
substantial answer to their account of the figure he cut when they
dined with him as his invited guests or as fellow-members of a
brilliant club." James is not only solicitous for the artists, but for
the Goncourts' maid whose bitter adventures are related, and for
certain women of the world:
"If
Madame de Paiva was good enough
to dine, or anything else, with, she was good enough either to speak
of without brutality or to speak of not at all." And the Princess
Mathilde: "He stays in her house for days, for weeks together, and
then portrays for our entertainment her person, her clothes, her
gestures . . . relating anecdotes at her expense . . . the racy ex–
pressions that passed her own lips." James has, from my reading of
the charming entries on the Princess Mathilde, a really cloistered
notion of "racy expressions," but his objections are not trifling. They
are painfully serious and worthy, as one must recognize even when
he has just closed his copy of the ]
ournais
and pronounced them
