reproach, the one least deserved is that levelled upon it by the
official painters: disobedience to the national spirit. Impressionism is
an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose
followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting
philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the
consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation,
and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We
shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters,
that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French
blood.

Impressionism has, then, hitherto been very badly judged. It is
contained in two chief points: search after a new technique, and
expression of modern reality. Its birth has not been a spontaneous
phenomenon. Manet, who, by his spirit and by the chance of his
friendships, grouped around him the principal members, commenced by
being classed in the ranks of the Realists of the second Romanticism by
the side of Courbet; and during the whole first period of his work he
only endeavoured to describe contemporary scenes, at a time when the
laws of the new technique were already dawning upon Claude Monet.
Gradually the grouping of the Impressionists took place. Claude Monet is
really the first initiator: in a parallel line with his ideas and his
works Manet passed into the second period of his artistic life, and with
him Renoir, Degas and Pissarro. But Manet had already during his first
period been the topic of far-echoing polemics, caused by his realism and
by the marked influence of the Spaniards and of Hals upon his style; his
temperament, too, was that of the head of a school; and for these
reasons legend has attached to his name the title of head of the
Impressionist school, but this legend is incorrect.