h found its explanation in
the intolerable tediousness or emphasis at which the official painters
had arrived. Courbet was a magnificent worker, with rudimentary ideas,
and he endeavoured to exclude even those which he possessed. This
exaggeration which diminishes our admiration for his work and prevents
us from finding in it any emotion but that which results from technical
mastery, was salutary for the development of the art of his successors.
It caused the young painters to turn resolutely towards the aspects of
contemporary life, and to draw style and emotion from their own epoch;
and this intention was right. An artistic tradition is not continued by
imitating the style of the past, but by extracting the immediate
impression of each epoch. That is what the really great masters have
done, and it is the succession of their sincere and profound
observations which constitutes the style of the races.

[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET

THE PINES]

Manet and his friends drew all their strength from this idea. Much finer
and more learned than a man like Courbet, they saw an aspect of
modernity far more complex, and less limited to immediate and grossly
superficial realism. Nor must it be forgotten that they were
contemporaries of the realistic, anti-romantic literary movement, a
movement which gave them nothing but friends. Flaubert and the Goncourts
proved that Realism is not the enemy of refined form and of delicate
psychology. The influence of these ideas created first of all Manet and
his friends: the technical evolution (of which we have traced the chief
traits) came only much later to oppose itself to their conceptions.
Impressionism can therefore be defined as a _revolution of pictorial
technique together with an attempt at expressing modernity_. The
reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the
reaction against muddy technique.

The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the
palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst
also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object
to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of _beauty_,
such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to
them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same
ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing
f