ude taken is quite other than it used to be, and the change
that has come over French aesthetic activity in general can be noted in
very sharp definition by comparing a book illustrated twenty years ago
by Albert Lynch, with, for example, Maupassant's "Pierre et Jean," the
distinguished realism of whose text is adequately paralleled--and the
implied eulogy is by no means trivial--by the pictorical commentary, so
to speak, which this first of modern illustrators has supplied. And an
even more striking illustration of the evolution of realistic thought
and feeling, as well as of rendering, is furnished by the succession of
Forain to Grevin, as an illustrator of the follies of the day, the
characteristic traits of the Parisian seamy side, morally speaking.
Grevin is as conventional as Murger, in philosophy, and--though
infinitely cleverer--as "Mars" in drawing. Forain, with the pencil of a
realism truly Japanese, illustrates with sympathetic incisiveness the
pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Goncourt, and Maupassant as well.

VI

But to go back a little and consider the puissant individualities, the
great men who have really given its direction to and, as it were, set
the pace of, the realistic movement, and for whom, in order more
conveniently to consider impressionism pure and simple by itself, I have
ventured to disturb the chronological sequence of evolution in French
painting--a sequence that, even if one care more for ideas than for
chronology, it is more temerarious to vary from in things French than in
any others. To go back in a word to Manet; the painter of whom M. Henri
Houssaye has remarked: "Manet sowed, M. Bastien-Lepage has reaped."

Manet was certainly one of the most noteworthy painters that France or
any other country has produced. His is the great, the very rare, merit
of having conceived a new point of view. That he did not illustrate this
in its completeness, that he was a sign-post, as Albert Wolff very aptly
said, rather an exemplar, is nothing. He was totally unheralded, and he
was in his way superb. No one before him had essayed--no one before him
had ever thought of--the immense project of breaking, not relatively but
absolutely, with the conventional. Looking for the first time at one of
his pictures, one says that customary notions, ordinary brushes,
traditional processes of even the highest authenticity, have been thrown
to the winds. Hence, indeed, the scandal which he caused from the first