with the marbles of the fourth century B.C. Cabanel's Venus is a
beautiful design, but its destruction would create no appreciable gap
in the history of nineteenth century art. The destruction of "Olympe"
would.

The picture is remarkable not only for the excellence of the
execution, but for a symbolic intention nowhere else to be found in
Manet's works. The angels on either side of his dead Christ
necessitated merely the addition of two pairs of wings--a convention
which troubled him no more than the convention of taking off his hat
on entering a church. But in "Olympe" we find Manet departing from the
individual to the universal. The red-headed woman who used to dine at
the _Ratmort_ does not lie on a modern bed but on the couch of all
time; and she raises herself from amongst her cushions, setting forth
her somewhat meagre nudity as arrogantly and with the same calm
certitude of her sovereignty as the eternal Venus for whose prey is
the flesh of all men born. The introduction of a bouquet bound up in
large white paper does not prejudice the symbolic intention, and the
picture would do well for an illustration to some poem to be found in
_"Les fleurs du Mal"_. It may be worth while to note here that
Baudelaire printed in his volume a quatrain inspired by one of Manet's
Spanish pictures.

But after this slight adventure into symbolism, Manet's eyes were
closed to all but the visible world. The visible world of Paris he saw
henceforth--truly, frankly, and fearlessly, and more beautifully than
any of his contemporaries. Never before was a great man's mind so
strictly limited to the range of what his eyes saw. Nature wished it
so, and, having discovered nature's wish, Manet joined his desire with
Nature's. I remember his saying as he showed me some illustrations he