wherein, if anywhere, one may say, realism reigns legitimately, but wherein also the conventional is especially to be expected.  One cannot indeed be quite sure that the temptations of the conventional are resisted by the ultra-realistic illustrators of our own time, Rossi, Beaumont, Albert Lynch, Myrbach.  They have certainly a very handy way of expressing themselves; one would be justified in suspecting the labor-saving, the art-sparing kodak, behind many of their most unimpeachable successes.  But the attitude taken is quite other than it used to be, and the change that has come over French aesthetic activity in general can be noted in very sharp definition by comparing a book illustrated twenty years ago by Albert Lynch, with, for example, Maupassant’s “Pierre et Jean,” the distinguished realism of whose text is adequately paralleled—­and the implied eulogy is by no means trivial—­by the pictorical commentary, so to speak, which this first of modern illustrators has supplied.  And an even more striking illustration of the evolution of realistic thought and feeling, as well as of rendering, is furnished by the succession of Forain to Grevin, as an illustrator of the follies of the day, the characteristic traits of the Parisian seamy side, morally speaking.  Grevin is as conventional as Murger, in philosophy, and—­though infinitely cleverer—­as “Mars” in drawing.  Forain, with the pencil of a realism truly Japanese, illustrates with sympathetic incisiveness the pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Goncourt, and Maupassant as well.

VI

But to go back a little and consider the puissant individualities, the great men who have really given its direction to and, as it were, set the pace of, the realistic movement, and for whom, in order more conveniently to consider impressionism pure and simple by itself, I have ventured to disturb the chronological sequence of evolution in French painting—­a sequence that, even if one care more for ideas than for chronology, it is more temerarious to vary from in things French than in any others.  To go back in a word to Manet; the painter of whom M. Henri Houssaye has remarked:  “Manet sowed, M. Bastien-Lepage has reaped.”

Manet was certainly one of the most noteworthy painters that France or any other country has produced.  His is the great, the very rare, merit of having conceived a new point of view.  That he did not illustrate this in its completeness, that he was a sign-post, as Albert Wolff very aptly said, rather an exemplar, is nothing.  He was totally unheralded, and he was in his way superb.  No one before him had essayed—­no one before him had ever thought of—­the immense project of breaking, not relatively but absolutely, with the conventional.  Looking for the first time at one of his pictures, one says that customary notions, ordinary brushes, traditional processes of even the highest authenticity, have been thrown to the winds.