[Illustration:  MANET

PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.]

To-day Manet is considered almost as a classic glory; and the progress for which he had given the impulse, has been so rapid, that many are astonished that he should ever have been considered audacious.  Sight is transformed, strife is extinguished, and a large, select public, familiar with Monet and Renoir, judge Manet almost as a long defunct initiator.  One has to know his admirable life, one has to know well the incredible inertia of the Salons where he appeared, to give him his full due.  And when, after the acceptance of Impressionism, the unavoidable reaction will take place, Manet’s qualities of solidity, truth and science will appear such, that he will survive many of those to whom he has opened the road and facilitated the success at the expense of his own.  It will be seen that Degas and he have, more than the others, and with less apparent eclat, united the gifts which produce durable works in the midst of the fluctuations of fashion and the caprices of taste and views.  Manet can, at the Louvre or any other gallery, hold his own in the most crushing surroundings, prove his personal qualities, and worthily represent a period which he loved.

An enormous amount has been written on him, from Zola’s bold and intelligent pamphlet in 1865, to the recent work by M. Theodore Duret.  Few men have provoked more comments.  In an admirable picture, Hommage a Manet, the delicate and perfect painter Fantin-Latour, a friend from the first hour, has grouped around the artist some of his admirers, Monet, Renoir, Duranty, Zola, Bazille, and Braquemond.  The picture has to-day a place of honour at the Luxembourg, where Manet is insufficiently represented by Olympia, a study of a woman, and the Balcony.  A collection is much to be desired of his lithographs, his etchings and his pastels, in which he has proved his diversified mastery, and also of his portraits of famous contemporaries, Zola, Rochefort, Desboutin, Proust, Mallarme, Clemenceau, Guys, Faure, Baudelaire, Moore, and others, an admirable series by a visionary who possessed, in a period of unrest and artificiality, the quality of rude sincerity, and the love of truth of a Primitive.

[Illustration:  MANET

THE HOTHOUSE]

IV

EDGAR DEGAS:  HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE

I have said how vain it is to class artistic temperaments under a title imposed upon them generally by circumstances and dates, rather than by their own free will.  The study of Degas will furnish additional proof for it.  Classed with the Impressionists, this master participates in their ideas in the sphere of composition, rather than in that of colour.  He belongs to them through his modernity and comprehension of character.  Only when we come to his quite recent landscapes (1896), can we link him to Monet and Renoir as colourist, and he has been more their friend than their colleague.