Manet’s actual innovations are small, smaller even than Courbet’s. However, many critics credit him with grotesque novelties. There are very few books dealing with modern painting which do not assert that he was the first to note that flesh in the light is dazzlingly bright and of a cream-and-rose colour. But in this particular there is no improvement in Manet on the pictures of Rubens. He may have unearthed this illustrative point; certain it is he did not originate it. Yet no matter how slight his departures, we enjoy his pictures for their inherent æsthetic qualities, and not for their approximation to nature. Manet made many mistakes, but this was natural when we remember that in the whirlpool of new ambitions one is prone to forget the lessons of the past. Only by profiting by them can one go on toward the ever advancing goal of achievement. We must not forget that this new spirit of endeavour is only an impulse towards something greater, a rebellion against arbitrarily imposed obstacles. If men like Manet lost track of the fundamentals of the great art which had preceded them, it was only that their vision was clouded by new experiments.
The actual achievements of Manet epitomise the secondary in art. His attempt to combine artistic worth with popularity restricted him. That he was misunderstood at first was his own fault in continually changing his style. But acceptance or rejection by popular opinion does not indicate the measure of a painter’s significance. And Manet is to be judged by his contributions to the new idea. His importance lay in that he took the second step of the three which were to exhaust the possibilities of realism. In art every genuine method is consummated before a new one can take its place. Michelangelo brought architecture to its highest point of development; Rubens, linear painting; the Impressionists, the study of light; Beethoven, the classic ideal in music; Swinburne, the rhymed lyric. In fact, only after the épuisement of a certain line of endeavour, is felt the necessity to seek for a new and more adequate means of expression. Manet helped bring to a close a certain phase of art, thus hastening the advent of other and greater men. His accomplishments now stand for all that is academic and student-like; and although his interest as an innovator passed out with the appearance of Pissarro and Monet, men go on imitating his externals and using his brushing. In the same sense that Velazquez is a great painter, so is Manet. His influence has served the purpose of helping turn aside the academicians from their emulation of Italian painting.
IV
THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS
COURBET was the first painter to turn his attention to naturalism. Manet carried forward Courbet’s standard. Impressionism took the last step, and brought to a close the objectively realistic conception in painting. By this final development of naturalistic means unlimited opportunities for achievement were offered. Impressionistic methods are now employed by a vast army of painters in all parts of the world, and the number of canvases which owe their existence to these discoveries is countless. Specifically Impressionism is ocular realism. It represents that side of actuality which has to do with light expressed by colour; and deals with a manner of approaching natural valuations whereby the painter is permitted to transfer a scene or subject to his canvas in such a way that it will give the spectator the sensation of dazzling light, broad atmosphere and truthful colours. To accomplish this Impressionism confines itself to the play of a light from a given source—its reflections and distributions on an object or a landscape. Therefore, it is the restricted study of the disappearance of the local colour in a model, and of the luminosity and divergencies of tones to be found in shadow. It approximates to a nature which becomes, for the moment, a theatre of chromatic light sensations. Subject-matter gave the Impressionists no concern. They advanced materially on the spirit in Manet which led him to paint any object at hand because of its susceptibility to artistic treatment. The Impressionists painted anything, not alone for æsthetic reasons, but because all objects make themselves visible by means of light and shadow. This manner of painting was the ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of arrangement, of drawing or of a fixed palette. Herein it was an elastic process par excellence, with no defined limitations.
Impressionism, though analytic and self-conscious, was not based on science. One may look in vain for parallels between its theories and those of Dove, Thomas Young and Chevreul. It was the imitation, pure and simple, of the disintegrations of colour in nature’s broad planes. And this achievement of diversity in simplicity was brought about by the only method possible:—the juxtaposition of myriad tints. In other words, Impressionism was a statement that vision is the result of colour forces coming into contact with the retina. However, the men of the movement did not see nature as an agglomeration of coloured spots, but as a series of planes made vibrant by light. To reproduce this vibration they were necessitated to use nature’s methods: they broke up surfaces into sensitive parts, each one of which was a separate tint. There are no broad planes of unified colour in nature. In each natural atom are absorption and reflection; and the preponderance of either of these two attributes results in a specific colour. Before the advent of this new school painters had made warm or cold green by combining green with yellow ochre or raw sienna, or by the admixture of blues and purples. But the Impressionists laid on these colours, pure or modified, side by side, and let the eye do the work of blending. They discovered not only that in green the shadow is tinged with blue, but that blue is the direct result of the yellow-orange of light. Every one nowadays has noticed that, in looking fixedly at a green, it appears now bluish, now yellowish; just as in listening to an orchestra we can, by focusing our attention, hear predominantly the bass or the treble. So the Impressionists observed that in the most luminous colour there is a proportion of absorption, and that in the darkest shadow there exists some reflection. The association of these molecular properties is what produces vibration in nature. By the application of these observations the Impressionists generated a feeling of grouillement;—the movement by contrast in the smallest parts.
In attempting to explain their canvases many commentators have credited them with systems of complementaries which resulted in grey, and with other exorbitant theories of oppositions. But one may look in vain in their work for any synthesis of scientific discoveries. Colour, not neutrality, was their aim; and, as they themselves admitted, they painted comme l’oiseau chante. Birds are not conscious of the metallic dissonance of diminished fifths; and the Impressionists were equally unaware of the harshness of red with green, blue with orange, yellow with violet. They only substituted a balance of cold and warm colours for the balance of lines which the older painters had used. They copied the tints they found in nature after analysing nature’s processes, in order to arrive closer to its visual effect. In one way they almost achieved colour photography, for their study, in its narrow character, was deep, and their vision was highly realistic. But whereas they depicted nature, they could call it up only in its instantaneous aspects. In this ephemerality alone were they impressionists; indeed, their methods were the most exact and probing of any painters of that time. Each hour of the day raises or lowers the colour values in nature; and he who would copy nature’s form as a permanent interpretation must ignore the exactitude of its reflections and approximate only to its local colours. This latter method is more truly impressionism than the theories of the Impressionists. They repudiated local colours as being too illusory, holding that the most highly coloured object modifies its tint under the influence of the least variation of light. The point is technically true, but it is an observation in objective research, and the word Impressionism must not be accepted as explanatory of the methods of the school it designates.
By decomposing the parts of a surface, in order to represent objects in their atmospheric materiality, the Impressionists were impelled by a force stronger than a mere desire for superficial accuracy: they felt the need for complete and minute organisation in a work of art. In landscape, where the many accidentals appeared to lack cohesion, the Impressionists achieved co-ordination by a unity of light which welded all the objects into an interdependent group. Plasticity of form had resulted from the efforts of preceding painters, but here for the first time was a plasticity of method which moulded itself like putty with the slightest change of illumination. Preoccupation in this new compositional element made its users forget, for the time being, the older precepts for obtaining composition. This forgetfulness however was not due entirely to exuberance over a novel procedure. The painters antecedent to Delacroix had used landscape as unimportant backgrounds for figures, and there was no precedent for its adaptation to organisation. Courbet had composed landscape by the linear balance of black and white volumes. The Barbizon artists had brought out-of-door painting into more general notice; but their greys were insufficient to give it more than a factitious and purely conventional unity. The Impressionists, feeling the urgency for a more virile expression in landscape work, saw a solution to their problem in the depiction of light through colour. Thus their conceptions took birth.