absorbed by it, so oblivious to all other joys but those that it
brings him. Hals never placed any one more clearly in his favourite
hour of the day, the well-desired hour, looked forward to perhaps
since the beginning of the afternoon. In this marvellous portrait we
read the age, the rank, the habits, the limitations, physical and
mental, of the broad-faced man who sits so stolidly, his fat hand
clasping his glass of foaming ale. Nothing has been omitted. We look
at the picture, and the man and his environment become part of our
perception of life. That stout, middle-aged man of fifty, who works
all day in some small business, and goes every evening to his cafe to
drink beer, will abide with us for ever. His appearance, and his mode
of life, which his appearance so admirably expresses, can never become
completely dissociated from our understanding of life. For Manet's
"Bon Bock" is one of the eternal types, a permanent national
conception, as inherent in French life as Polichinelle, Pierrot,
Monsieur Prud'homme, or the Baron Hulot. I have not seen the portrait
for fifteen or eighteen years, and yet I see it as well as if it were
hung on the wall opposite the table on which I am writing this page. I
can see that round, flat face, a little swollen with beer, the small
eyes, the spare beard and moustaches. His feet are not in the picture,
but I know how much he pays for his boots, and how they fit him. Nor
did Hals ever paint better; I mean that nowhere in Hals will you find
finer handling, or a more direct luminous or simple expression of what
the eye saw. It has all the qualities I have enumerated, and yet it
falls short of Hals. It has not the breadth and scope of the great
Dutchman. There is a sense of effort, _on sent le souffle_, and in
Hals one never does. It is more bound together, it does not flow with
the mighty and luminous ease of the _chefs d'oeuvre_ at Haarlem.

But is this Manet's final achievement, the last word he has to say? I