[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET

THE PINES]

Manet and his friends drew all their strength from this idea. Much finer
and more learned than a man like Courbet, they saw an aspect of
modernity far more complex, and less limited to immediate and grossly
superficial realism. Nor must it be forgotten that they were
contemporaries of the realistic, anti-romantic literary movement, a
movement which gave them nothing but friends. Flaubert and the Goncourts
proved that Realism is not the enemy of refined form and of delicate
psychology. The influence of these ideas created first of all Manet and
his friends: the technical evolution (of which we have traced the chief
traits) came only much later to oppose itself to their conceptions.
Impressionism can therefore be defined as a _revolution of pictorial
technique together with an attempt at expressing modernity_. The
reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the
reaction against muddy technique.

The Impressionists, whilst occupying themselves with cleansing the
palette of the bitumen of which the Academy made exaggerated use, whilst
also observing nature with a greater love of light, made it their object
to escape in the representation of human beings the laws of _beauty_,
such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to
them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same
ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing
for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed
the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists to
substitute for _beauty_ a novel notion, that of _character_. To search