Manet is a classic.  His genuine power—­technically speaking—­lies in the broad, sabre-like strokes of his brush and not in the niggling taches of the impressionists—­of which the reuctio ad absurdum is pointillisme.  He lays on his pigments in sweeping slashes and his divisions are large.  His significance for us does not alone reside in his consummate mastery of form and colour, but in his forthright expression of the life that hummed about him.  He is as actual as Hals.  Study that Boy With the Sword at the Metropolitan Museum—­is there anything superficial about it?  It is Spanish, the Spain of Velasquez, in its beautiful thin, clear, flat painting, its sober handling of values.  The truth is that Manet dearly loved a fight, and being chef d’ecole, he naturally drifted to the impressionists’ camp.  And it is significant that Duret did not give this virile spirit a place in his new volume, confining the estimate of his genius to the preface.  Mauclair, on the contrary, includes Manet’s name in his more comprehensive and more scientific study, as he also includes the name of Edgar Degas—­Degas, who is a latter-day Ingres, plus colour and a new psychology.

The title of impressionism has been a misleading one.  If Degas is an impressionist, pray what then is Monet?  Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne are impressionists, and in America there is no impropriety in attaching this handle to the works of Twachtmann, J. Alden Weir, W.L.  Metcalf, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Paul Cornoyer, Colin Campbell Cooper, Prendergast, Luks, and Glackens.  But Manet, Degas!  It would have been a happier invention to have called the 1877 group independents; independent they were, each man pursuing his own rainbow.  We may note an identical confusion in the mind of the public regarding the Barbizon school.  Never was a group composed of such dissimilar spirits.  Yet people talk about Millet and Breton, Corot and Daubigny, Rousseau and Dupre.  They still say Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Mozart, Byron and Shelley.  It is the result of mental inertia, this coupling of such widely disparate temperaments.

Nevertheless, divided tones and “screaming” palette do not always a picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations.  For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation—­an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as factitious.  Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet.  His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking Bonnat.  Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime experience in each stroke of the brush.  Whistler was a swift worker, and while he claimed the honour of being the originator of impressionism—­didn’t he “originate” Velasquez?—­he really belongs to the preceding generation.  He was impressionistic, if you will, yet not an impressionist.  He was Japanese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet.