pictures has been first of all a series of
landscape and figure studies made in the open air, far from the studio,
and afterwards co-ordinated. One may wish pictorial art to have higher
ambitions; and one may find in the Primitives an example of a curious
mysticism, an expression of the abstract and of dreams. But one should
not underrate the power of naive and realistic observation, which the
Primitives carried into the execution of their works, subordinating it,
however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the
Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically
and homogeneously. The criticism which may be levelled against them is
that which Realism itself carries in its train, and we shall see that
esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and
containing the infinite gradations of creative temperaments.

In art, classifications have rarely any value, and are rather damaging.
Realism and Idealism are abstract terms which cannot suffice to
characterise beings who obey their sensibility. It is therefore
necessary to invent as many words as there are remarkable men. If
Leonardo was a great painter, are Turner and Monet not painters at all?
There is no connection between them; their methods of thought and
expression are antithetical. Perhaps it will be most simple, to admire
them all, and to renounce any further definition of the painter,
adopting this word to mark the man who uses the palette as his means of
expression.

Thus preoccupation with contemporary emotions, substitution of character
for classic beauty (or of emotional beauty for formal beauty), admission
of the _genre_-painter into the first rank, composition based upon the
reciprocal reaction of values, subordination of the subject to the
interest of execution, the effort to isolate the art of painting from
the ideas inherent to that of literature, and particularly the
instinctive move towards the "symphonisation" of colours, and
consequently towards music,--these are the principal features of the
aesthetic code of the Realist-Impressionists, if this term may be
applied to a group of men hostile towards esthetics such as they are
generally taught.

III

EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE

As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of
the Impressionist technique. It is the work of Claude Monet which
presents the most complete example of it, and which als