Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

out of his path. Insults served him as coronations. To many he seemed
monstrous and gross. He was in reality accomplished and audacious. He
was of a robust and lusty nature, astoundingly frank and sincere, and above
all a natural man who could paint, paint better than Courbet, better than the
majority of his contemporaries, with the exception of three or four who were
perhaps his equal. Genius is generally aware of its strength. Manet at any
rate was. If he had remained silent he might have been forgotten; the success
of the whole school of impressionists would have been retarded for a score of
years; the mob would have swept over them, pushed them to the wall, and
trampled them in the gravel.
For years his life was a turmoil. One year they admitted his canvases
under loud protests, another year they flatly refused them. To throw stones
at him was law among men of wit who had no genius. They scorned and
ridiculed his “Christ.” His “Olympia” never would have been bought
except by subscription. His “Nana” was rejected. The exhibition of his
“Execution of Emperor Maximilian” was prohibited by the government.
The “Garden” and “Bon Bock,” masterpieces that created a furore among
painters, were disposed of as “coarse images.” So 1875 was a repetition of
1869.
Manet did not mind opposition, he simply continued. He thirsted for
the expression of life and performed the hard labor of the grand and beautiful,
eating his bread dry, smiling at want, rather than to make the slightest con-
cession to popularity. His ambition was to mature, to develop a style of his
own. He painted like an Old Master when he was thirty. He rediscovered
the magnificent technique, the direct virile paint of Goya, Hals, Velasquez,
in twenty years of incessant study and application, and the next thirteen years
he struggled to gain absolute artistic independence, to become thoroughly
modern in subject and treatment and to conquer light. Thirty-three years,
to his very death in 1883, he strove for nothing but to perfect his mode of utter-
ance. There is something glorious and infinitly noble in fighting like that—
to die, so to speak, in uniform, fully armed, on the battlefield.
. What a great flamboyant energy there was in this man! He was one of
the “hard riders of the winged steeds overleaping all boundaries, having their
own goal;” one of the eternal fighting men who let their blood riot and their
passions blaze unchecked, who keep up resistance, who never bow or cringe
to any accepted authority, who at the age of fifty have the same spirit of revolt,
the same fire and enthusiasm as in their youthful dreams.
And now, Manet is enthroned in classic glory. How absurd, and incon-
sistent! The comedy played through the centuries, which has for its hero
the man of ideas, seems to repeat itself again and again. Twice or thrice in
his career he received the praises of his contemporaries, splendid public recog-
nitions; fame came only after death. It has ever been thus. The men who
slaughter other human beings, wholesale, in order to suppress another portion
of humanity, with a pretense of liberating them from despotism, are honored
with triumphal arches, dinners, parades and diamond badges—perhaps rightly,
I surely have nothing against it, but why is a man who fights for an ideal of

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