Manet will occupy an important position in the French School.  He is the most original painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, the one who has really created a great movement.  His work, the fecundity of which is astonishing, is unequal.  One has to remember that, besides the incessant strife which he kept up—­a strife which would have killed many artists—­he had to find strength for two grave crises in himself.  He joined one movement, then freed himself of it, then invented another and recommenced to learn painting at a point where anybody else would have continued in his previous manner.  “Each time I paint,” he said to Mallarme, “I throw myself into the water to learn swimming.”  It is not surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the weight no longer.  But it would be unjust to say that Manet has only had the merit of opening up new roads; that has been said to belittle him, after it had first been said that these roads led into absurdity.  Works like the Toreador, Rouviere, Mme. Manet, the Dejeuner, the Musique aux Tuileries, the Bon Bock, Argenteuil, Le Linge, En Bateau and the Bar, will always remain admirable masterpieces which will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living, clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product.

There remains, then, a great personality who knew how to dominate the rather coarse conceptions of Realism, who influenced by his modernity all contemporary illustration, who re-established a sound and strong tradition in the face of the Academy, and who not only created a new transition, but marked his place on the new road which he had opened.  To him Impressionism owes its existence; his tenacity enabled it to take root and to vanquish the opposition of the School; his work has enriched the world by some beautiful examples which demonstrate the union of the two principles of Realism and of that technical Impressionism which was to supply Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley with an object for their efforts.  For the sum total of all that is evoked by his name, Edouard Manet certainly deserves the name of a man of genius—­an incomplete genius, though, since the thought with him was not on the level of his technique, since he could never affect the emotions like a Leonardo or a Rembrandt, but genius all the same through the magnificent power of his gifts, the continuity of his style, and the importance of his part which infused blood into a school dying of the anaemia of conventional art.  Whoever beholds a work of Manet’s, even without knowing the conditions of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion’s claw which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined with disgust the Guitarero.