y? It would be uncritical to believe
merely in a general mystification which makes its authors the worst
sufferers. Simple common sense will find in these men a conviction, a
sincerity, a sustained effort, and this alone should, in the name of the
sacred solidarity of those who by various means try to express their
love of the beautiful, suppress the annoying accusations hurled too
light-heartedly against Manet and his friends.

[Illustration: MANET

IN THE SQUARE]

I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique,
composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to
indicate their principal precursors.

Their movement may be styled thus: a reaction against the Greco-Latin
spirit and the scholastic organisation of painting after the second
Renaissance and the Italo-French school of Fontainebleau, by the century
of Louis XIV., the school of Rome, and the consular and imperial taste.
In this sense Impressionism is a protest analogous to that of
Romanticism, exclaiming, to quote the old verse: "_Qui nous delivrera
des Grecs et des Romains?_"[1] From this point of view Impressionism has
also great affinities with the ideas of the English Pre-Raphaelites,
who stepped across the second and even the first Renaissance back to the
Primitives.

[Footnote 1: Who will deliver us from the Greeks and the Romans.]

This reaction is superimposed by another: the reaction of Impressionism,
not only against classic subjects, but against the black painting of the
degenerate Romanticists. And these two reactions are counterbalanced by
a return to the French ideal, to the realistic and characteristic
tradition which commences with Jean Foucquet and Clouet, and is
continued by Chardin, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, Watteau, La Tour,
Fragonard, and the admirable engravers of the eighteenth century down to
the final triumph of the allegorical taste of the Roman revolution. Here
can be found a whole chain of truly national artists who have either
been misjudged, like Chardin, or considered as "small masters" and
excluded from the first rank for the benefit of the pompous Allegorists
descended from the Italian school.

Impressionism being beyond all a technical reaction, its predecessors
should first be looked for from this material point of view. Watteau is
the most striking of all. _L'Embarquement pour Cythere_ is, in its
technique, an Impressionist canvas. It embodies the most significant
of all the prin