French Writers and Artists, Edouard Manet, Part II [pp. 277-279]

7APPPLETONS' JO URNAL.
not strictly necessary to sensation pictures. There s
is no reason to suppose that the vein is worked out; t
and if any one, in despair of surpassing Manet,
should simply reverse his idea, and exhibit two well-
dressed young ladies breakfasting in a meadow with
two young men in a state of nudity, with the advan-
tage of such a subject, how much artistic detail
might he pass over!
The faults of Manet are so plain and palpable,
every dabbler in art-criticism can enumerate them,
and give excellent reasons why this, that, and the i
other thing, should not be. But to hit upon a toler-'
ably near definition of the specific power by which i
Manet has won for himself-as unquestionably he i
has done-a foremost place among modern French
painters, and to show that such definition is a fair i
approximation to the truth, this is an undertaking
of more difficulty. The commonplaces of art-litera-
ture have no tolerably direct application to him;
"The Correggiecity of Correggio" will not do here.
He must be judged of on other principles.
Weird emotionalism is, I think, the true characteristic of his genius in its best mood; witness those
wonderful eauxfortes illustrations of the one immortal work," Unum sed Corvum," of Edgar Allan Poe.
Shadowings rather than illustrations would be the
appropriate name for these mystical pictures. They
resemble nothing so much as the shadows cast on a
lamplit wall by a cut card. They are not representations of anything known and tangible, but of such
as are begotten of nightmare, or flit before the waking eye of distempered fancy. The drawing is true,
not to Nature, but to a distortion of it in a refracting medium. The outlines are blurred, the lights
confused; there is a massive unreality, a black semblance of something, "bird or devil;" abstraction
taking shape, form vanishing to abstraction, shadow
begetting shadow, light born of darkness and rushing into it. There is neither whole nor detail; we
see only irregular masses, the hobgoblin forms that
we trace in the glowing embers on the hearth, or in
a thunder-cloud shot through by the sun. Foreground and background are crowded on the eye, or
disappear altogether. What seems at first a huge
stain of ink develops into a grotesque likeness of
something which, even as we gaze, becomes an inkstain again. Contemplating these strange adumbrations, these wildly-broken lights - illustrative, indeed, of the poem, but absolutely typical of the brain
that conceived it-we are more apt to think of a
magician than of an artist; what are art and criticismt to Erebus and madness, and the end of all?
Never had a poet such a commentator, and never,
perhaps, was there a poem worthy to be so translated. So perfect, indeed, is the translation from
the language of the ear to the language of the eye,
that Manet may be thought to have discovered a
curious metaphysical correlation-to have demonstrated practically that the poetry of words is transmutable into exact equivalents of the poetry of art.
It is true that art has no past or future tense; but
words, mere sounds, have no other graphic power
than that which they obtain from the laws of as
ociated ideas; and if art cannot coordinate things
)ast, present, and to come, it can at least present
ne of the categories in a way most marvelously suggestive of the other two. But it may be objected,
"If we had not read the poem, what should we understand of the illustration?" The objection hardly
amounts to saying that, if the poem were written in
cipher, it would be unintelligible to all who had not
the key.
In all this it is plain there is nothing realistic; all
is essentially, preeminently emotional and idealistic.
Yet it is easy to show that realism of a certain kind
is at once the strength and the bane of Manet's geniuS.
They who undertake the agreeable task of deciding annually whether an artist's labor for the year
shall be productive or comparatively useless, had
now become more tolerant of originality, and in
I864-'65 Manet exhibited several pictures: "Le
Christ et les Anges," "Un Combat de Taureaux,"
"Le Christ insults par les Soldats." Together
with the last of these, he exhibited a picture called
"Olympia," representing a nude female figure caressing a hideous black cat; a negress is introduced
for more contrast. The principal figure is a portrait
of a dramatic celebrity.
What object there can be in representing nude
figures, not intended for nor considered as types of
ideal perfection but as portraits, it would be hard to
say. If this be realism, and if all is good that is
realistic, there can be no reason why the principle
should not be carried further. The inside of the
body is far more curious than the outside. A realistic representation of the processes of digestion, and
of many other interesting things in connection with
the internal structure, is quite within the scope of
M. Manet's genius. But this, he would tell us, belongs not to art but to science. And we tell him
that his nudities have nothing in common with the
primary and ultimate objects of all art worthy of the
name: they do not enlarge our conception of the
beautiful; they degrade it - who cares to know
whether an actress has corns on her feet or notwhether her limbs fall away too much, or have the
articulations too large or too small? His realism,
totally misplaced, gives no impulse to the imagination other than that which is communicated by all
erotic pictures; it tells us nothing that we did not
know, suggests nothing that we would give a cent
to think about; it gives a kind of shock similar to
but ineffably weaker than that which would be
caused by the reality, and that is all. But the true,
alike in painting, in sculpture, and in literature, is
the direct opposite of all this.
Manet's audacious innovations -or, rather, the
astonishing suczess of these-was the causa causans
of the realistic-absurd school, of which Manet cannot properly be considered the head; he has been
far surpassed by others. I was particularly struck
by one example of the style of the new school: it
was the picture of a lady fresh from her tub and
dumb-bells, and in a state of perfect nudity, walking
on her hands with her heels in the air, as her cus
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