The truth is that Manet himself had no precise idea of what he really wished to accomplish. Up to the last year of his life he groped tentatively toward a goal, the outlines of which were never quite distinct. We today, looking back upon his efforts, can judge his motivating influences with some degree of surety. In bringing about the paradox of staticising Courbet, Manet feminised him. He turned Courbet’s blacks and greys into pretty colours, and thereby turned his modelling into silhouette and flattened his volumes. Thus was Courbet not only made effeminate but popularised. Compare the superficially similar pictures, Le Hamac of Courbet and Manet’s Le Repos. In the former the movement in composition accords with the landscape and is carried out in the pose of the woman’s arms and in the disposition of the legs. The figure in the latter picture is little more than an ornament—a symmetrical articulation. Manet has here translated the rhythm of depth into linear balance. In this levelling process all those qualities which raise painting above simple mosaics are lost. A picture thus treated becomes a pattern, incapable of embodying any emotional significance. Manet’s paintings are remembered because they are so instantaneous a vision of their subjects. For this same reason Goya is remembered; but beneath the Spaniard’s broad oppositions of tone is a limpid depth in which the intelligence darts like a fish in an aquarium. In Manet the impassable barrier of externals shuts out that world which exists on the further side of a picture’s surface.
In Manet we have the summing up of the pictorial expression of all time. His love for decoration never left him long enough for him to experiment with the profounder phases of painting. In many of his canvases he was little more than an exalted poster-maker. His Rendez-vous de Chats was frankly a primitive arrangement of flat drawing, as flat as a print by Mitsuoki. Even details and texture were eliminated from it. It was a statement of his theories reduced to their bare elements. Yet, though exaggerated, the picture was representative of his aims. A pattern to him was form. Courbet’s ability to model an eye was the cause of Manet’s repudiating the painter of L’Enterrement à Ornans. The two men were antithetical; and in that antithesis we have Manet’s aspirations fully elucidated. Even later in life when he took the figure out of doors he was unable to shake off the influence of the silhouette. But the silhouette cannot exist en plain air. Light volatilises design. This knowledge accounts for Renoir’s early sunlight effects. Manet never advanced so far.
The limitations and achievements of Manet are summed up in his painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. This picture is undoubtedly interesting in its black-and-white values and in its freedom from the conventions of traditional composition. At first view its theme may impress one as an attempt at piquancy, but on closer inspection the actual subject diminishes so much in importance that it might have been with equal effect a simple landscape or a still-life. There is no attempt at composition in the classic sense. Even surface rhythm is entirely missing: the tonal masses decidedly overweigh on the left. But the picture nevertheless embodies the distinguishing features of all Manet’s arrangements. It is built on the rigid pyramidal plan. From the lower left-hand corner a line, now light, now dark, reaches almost to the upper frame at a point directly above the smaller nude; and another line, which begins in the lower right-hand corner at the reclining man’s elbow, runs upward to his cap, and is then carried out in the shadow and light of the foliage so that it meets the line ascending from the other side. The base of these two converging lines is formed by another line which runs from the man’s elbow along his extended leg. This is the picture’s important triangle. But a secondary one is formed by a line which begins at the juncture of the tree and shadow in the lower right-hand corner, extends along the cane and the second man’s sleeve to his head, and then drops, by way of the large nude’s head and shoulder, to the basket of fruit at the bottom. This angularity of design is seen in the work of all primitive-minded peoples, and is notably conspicuous in the early Egyptians, the archaic Greeks and the Assyrians of the eighth century B.C. It is invariably the product of the static intelligence into which the comprehension of æsthetic movement has never entered. It is the result of a desire to plant objects solidly and immovably in the ground. Those artists who express themselves through it are men whose minds are incapable of grasping the rhythmic attributes of profound composition. Manet repeats this triangular design in the Olympia where the two adjoining pyramids of contour are so obvious that it is unnecessary to describe them. The figures in canvases such as La Chanteuse des Rues, La Femme au Perroquet, Eva Gonzalès and Émile Zola are constructed similarly; and in groups like En Bateau and Les Anges au Tombeau (the latter of which recalls, by its arrangement and lighting, the Thétis et Jupiter of Ingres) is expressed the mental immobility which characterised Conegliano, Rondinelli, Robusti and their seventeenth-century exemplars, de La Fosse, Le Moyne and Rigaud.
LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE MANET
If, however, Manet failed in the larger tests, he excelled in his ability to beautify the surfaces of his models. His painting of texture is perhaps the most competent that has ever been achieved. In his flesh, fruits and stuffs, the sensation of hard, soft, rough or velvety exteriors reaches its highest degree of pictorial attainment. These many and varied textures are reunited in his Le Déjeuner—a canvas which must not be confused with Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Here we have a plant, a vase, four different materials in the boy’s clothing, a straw hat, a brass jug with all its reflections, a table cloth, a wall, an old sword, glassware, fruit and liquid. It is an orgy of textures, and Manet must have gloried in it. One critic of the day wondered why oysters and a cut lemon lay on the breakfast table. But we wonder why a cat with fluffy fur is not there also. Castagnary suggested that Manet, feeling himself to be the master of still-life, brought every possible texture into a single canvas for purposes of contrast and because he delighted in the material quality of objects. But the reason goes deeper. Manet was a superlatively conscious technician, and that sacrée commodité de la brosse, so displeasing to Delacroix, was his greatest intoxication. Hals also was seduced by it. Later, when the new vision of light was communicated to Manet by the Impressionists, his obsession for the purely technical diminished in intensity. In that topical bid for popularity, the Combat du Kerseage et de l’Alabama, we detect his interest in a new economy of means which would facilitate his search for broader illumination. This method took a step forward in Le Port de Bordeaux, and later reached maturity in his canvases painted in 1882, of which Le Jardin de Bellevue is a good example. But despite his heroic efforts, these last pictures, painted a year before he died when paralysis had already claimed him and he was devoting his time almost entirely to still-life, were without fulgency, and never approached the richness of even so slight a colourist as Monet.
Repose is a word used overmuch by modern critics to designate the dominant quality of Manet’s painting. From an entirely pictorial point of view the word is applicable, but in the precise æsthetic sense it is a misnomer. The illusion of repose in Manet is accounted for by his even use of greys, as in Le Chemin de Fer, Le Port de Bordeaux, the Exécution de Maximilien and the Course de Taureaux. Even in Les Bulles de Savon, the Rendez-vous de Chats, Le Clair de Lune and Le Bar des Folies-Bergère—canvases in which is exhibited Manet’s greatest opposition of tones—the ensemble is expressive of monotony. Real repose, however, is something much more recondite than uniformity or tedium. It is created by a complete harmonious organisation, not by an avoidance of movement. Giotto’s Death of Saint Francis and El Greco’s Annunciation have a simultaneity of presentation as unique as in Manet; but, because their compositions are so rhythmically co-ordinated,