III

EDOUARD MANET:  HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE

As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of the Impressionist technique.  It is the work of Claude Monet which presents the most complete example of it, and which also came first as regards date.  But it is very difficult to determine such cases of priority, and it is, after all, rather useless.  A technique cannot be invented in a day.  In this case it was the result of long investigations, in which Manet and Renoir participated, and it is necessary to unite under the collective name of Impressionists a group of men, tied by friendship, who made a simultaneous effort towards originality, all in about the same spirit, though frequently in very different ways.  As in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, it was first of all friendship, then unjust derision, which created the solidarity of the Impressionists.  But the Pre-Raphaelites, in aiming at an idealistic and symbolic art, were better agreed upon the intellectual principles which permitted them at once to define a programme.  The Impressionists who were only united by their temperaments, and had made it their first aim to break away from all school programmes, tried simply to do something new, with frankness and freedom.

Manet was, in their midst, the personality marked out at the same time by their admiration, and by the attacks of the critics for the post of standard-bearer.  A little older than his friends, he had already, quite alone, raised heated discussions by the works in his first manner.  He was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, the young painter Bazille, who met his premature death in 1870, and by the writers Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire (who was a passionate admirer of Manet’s); then later by Zola, the Goncourts, and Stephane Mallarme.  This was the first nucleus of a public which was to increase year by year.  Manet had the personal qualities of a chief; he was a man of spirit, an ardent worker, and an enthusiastic and generous character.

[Illustration:  MANET

THE DEAD TOREADOR]

Manet commenced his first studies with Couture.  After having travelled a good deal at sea to obey his parents, his vocation took hold of him irresistibly.  About 1850 the young man entered the studio of the severe author of the Romains de la Decadence.  His stay was short.  He displeased the professor by his uncompromising energy.  Couture said of him angrily:  “He will become the Daumier of 1860.”  It is known that Daumier, lithographer, and painter of genius, was held in meagre esteem by the academicians.  Manet travelled in Germany after the coup d’etat, copied Rembrandt in Munich, then went to Italy, copied Tintoretto in Venice,