After Courbet there arose an even more outstanding personality, that of Manet (1832-83). Then commenced violent press cam paigns which little by little inspired the public with horror, disgust and even a kind of incredible hatred for the young artists whom they considered as revolutionaries. Those young artists were first Manet, then the whole group of comrades of whom he was the eldest, and who used to meet in the Cafe Guerbois: Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, Monet, and the others. Even Edouard Manet's person was scandalously misinterpreted; most Frenchmen thought that the author of the Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, not only ignored the first rudiments of the art of painting and that his pictures were ridiculous, but that he himself was a kind of coarse, extravagant, unconventional Bohemian. Till his premature death, the charming, witty and elegant, but also nervous and irritable Manet, could not get reconciled to this injustice. He knew the fascination that he exercised on his friends, and he would have liked to please everyone: conscious of his exceptional gifts, he felt he was destined for the acclamations bestowed on Rubens or Velazquez. With his lively and flowing intelligence and that natural elegance which passes without effort from his personality to his work, Manet is perfectly normal and differs from other civil and charming men only by that rare "je ne sail quoi" that he puts into the most simple things that he does and says; a charming, honest man who has genius; a modern and French Velazquez. Degas, who is almost exactly contemporary 1917), and also a man of the world, was perhaps the only 19th century painter who nearly deserved to be put in the category of Delacroix adding, like him, to a creative imagination the gift of critical analysis. In spite of the evident vocation of which Manet and Degas bear the signs, there is in them little of that universality which characterizes the great artists of the Renais sance, who give the impression that if their destiny had turned them from painting, they would have been known as supermen anywhere and in any circumstances. A fact worthy of note con cerning the group called Impressionists is that it included a woman, Berthe Morisot (184o-95), who possessed the most original talent ever evinced by one of her sex.
What the contemporaries particularly saw in Manet and his companions was a School, and the name of a School, a name that the painters had not chosen, a chance name given in derision, but soon accepted as a rather well found rallying cry. The name was quickly notorious, until a philosophic meaning which went beyond the field of painting was superimposed on it ; it was the source of much debate during more than 25 years. Critics did not distinguish, or even wish to distinguish, these painters one from the other, as they were believed to agree on three dogmas about which nothing had been heard till then : open air, clear painting and division of tone. What strikes us, on the contrary, and what we love in them, is their value as individuals, all that makes them different and isolates them, in spite of the common bond. Im pressionism, as the doctrine of a School, is what interests us least in them. Rather than a school we see in them a group of com rades struggling together against the academic routine for the liberty of art. We take pleasure in gathering evidence of their detachment with regard to the alleged doctrine of which they are supposed to be the faithful adherents.
Renoir (1841-1919) is an impressionist in the same proportion as Delacroix was romantic. Once past the effervescence of youth.
he lost no opportunity of protesting, like Delacroix, against being labelled. Claude Monet (184o-1926) is the true originator and only professor of this alleged School. By the strength and decision of his character, by a kind of magisterial authority which em anated from him, he exercised an extraordinary influence on his comrades who were still wavering between the contradictory impulses of youth. Renoir never forgot that in his years of poverty, of doubt, of struggle, Monet was the chief who pointed to the goal and gave encouragement. But what we to-day love most in him, what makes him a great and delightful painter, is his sparkling genius as a colourist, his ingenuous sentiment with a feminine grace, slightly animal-like, but so youthful and sound, his desire for fullness in composition, all of which was foreign enough and even contrary to the principles of impressionism. Renoir had no need of Monet to paint the Loge and the Portrait de Madame Charpentier.
Degas is still less impressionist, if it is possible, than Renoir. To be called impressionist, it is not enough to have a sharp sense of modern life and of all the new visions that it offers to those who know how to see. An incisive designer and prodigiously accurate, he is of the race of Holbein and of Durer. The public calls him the "painter of dancing women." It is strange so to limit the scope of his mind. Degas is no more a specialist of danseuses than he is of blanchisseuses, modistes, or jockeys. What attracts him successively or simultaneously to these sub jects of study, is the desire to grasp in an extraordinarily precise and expressive stroke gestures and movements which the eyes of painters until then had ignored. It is with the same preoccupa tions that, during ten or 15 years, he made himself a portrait painter (and what a portraitist !). The impression of truth con veyed is secured by the drawing no less than by the composition. Finding entirely new types of composition takes a great part of his research ; his inventions in this field are most original and bold, and have had capital consequences for modern painting. Finally, the disdain he has for the open air is a final trait not less contrary than others to the process and convictions of the ortho dox impressionist.
As for Cezanne, if, like Renoir, he tarried awhile in Impres sionism, he left it even quicker and went further away. When he declared that "one must return to the old masters through nature" and "make of Impressionism a solid and lasting art like that of the museums," Cezanne clearly marks both his point of departure and the road into which his solitary meditations were to lead him after he had left the companions of his youth to withdraw to Aix. In a word, he also, like Delacroix, made a free and conscious return to the intellectual principles of classic art. The excess of analysis, the passion for fluidity and the inexpres sible, the obsession for atmospheric phenomena in which forms evaporate, and, finally the more or less formal proscription of the composed picture, announced perils not less serious perhaps than those of the pseudo-classicism imposed in other times by David. Cezanne reacted powerfully. Wrapt in himself, in his provincial solitude, he evolved a learned technique, firm and subtle, he invented a conception of painting whence dates, one may say, a new era. From him rather than from Impressionism will hence forth be derived, more or less directly, the most fruitful initiatives of succeeding generations.