Apart from sources of inspiration Manet was personally gifted. He possessed (as M. Duret so well points out) the faculty of sight, a gift from Nature which cannot be acquired by will or work. Technique he had obtained after six years’ hard study in the most severe atelier in Paris. But technique is a subsidiary equipment, for a complete command over one’s materials does not always imply the possession of genius.
“The fools!” said Manet with bitterness to Proust. “They were for ever telling me my work was unequal. That was the highest praise they could bestow. Yet it was always my ambition to rise—not to remain on a certain level, not to remake one day what I had made the day before, but to be inspired again and again by a new aspect of things, to strike frequently a fresh note.”
“Ah! I’m before my time. A hundred years hence people will be happier, for their sight will be clearer than ours to-day.”
Ambition to rise, never to remain on the same level! That is the whole doctrine of art, and the supreme epitaph for Edouard Manet, pioneer and master.
GEORGES D’ESPAGNAT
CHAPTER IV · THE IMPRESSIONIST GROUP, 1870-1886
“L’ADMIRATION DE LA FOULE EST TOUJOURS EN RAISON INDIRECTE DU GÉNIE INDIVIDUEL. VOUS ÊTES D’AUTANT PLUS ADMIRÉ ET COMPRIS, QUE VOUS ÊTES PLUS ORDINAIRE”