This state of affairs was doubly paradoxical in view of
Manet's mild-mannered, self-effacing character. Yet as early as
February 1863, only a few weeks after his thirty-first birthday,
with the showing of his Concert at the Tuileries at the Galerie
Martinet, Manet got his first taste of notoriety; then in May,
at the Salon des Refusés, he touched off a scandal that reached
its peak in the uproar over Olympia at the 1865 Salon and indeed
threatened to get out of hand. Degas, only two years his junior,
had yet to show anything like the same originality, and at the
1865 Salon exhibited a hopelessly dull, hopelessly conventional
historical painting entitled The Evils befalling the City of Orléans.
The fact remains that there is a richness in Degas' personality
that Manet's lacks. A gentleman painter, a man about town,
Manet only skimmed the surface of some of the more vital
things of life. The portraits and photographs we have of him
fail to excite our interest. The things he had to say--as recorded
by Antonin Proust and by Baudelaire in La Corde--amount to
little more than small talk, lit up now and then by a flash of
wit or plain common sense.

Manet was much amused at the efforts being made to bring
historical figures back to life in painting. "Do you suppose you
can paint a man with only his hunting licence to go on?" he
said to Proust, adding: "There's only one way of going about it.
Take a look and then put down what you see, straightaway.
If you've got it, good. If you haven't, start again. All the rest
is nonsense." And again in Baudelaire prose-poem La Corde
( Manet is not named but there can be no doubt that he is the
speaker): "As a painter I am called upon to look hard at the
faces that cross my path, and you know the delight we take in
this faculty of ours which, in our eyes, makes life more alive
and more meaningful than it is for other men."

It is in his friendships--and in his paintings--rather than
in his conversation that we detect a yearning for poetry behind

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