The first to gather with fury and wild gesticulation around the daring preachers of the new gospel were literary men and journalists. They did not understand anything about painting, and would not have been capable of distinguishing a varnished oleograph for a cab-drivers’ public house from a real Leonardo; whether a picture was blackened or saturated by sunlight, whether a human figure was clumsily conventional or felt and understood with truth to nature, that was to them quite as indifferent as the colour of the Empress of China’s dressing-gown. They had, however, the feeling that this movement in art was, in some way or other, connected with thought of general subversion, and attacked the government. They thought they heard the naked women in Eduard Manet’s “Down with Napoleon” shriek. The gleaming, noonday lights of Claude Monet seemed to them a cry for vengeance for the _coup d’état_. They understood Pissarro’s landscapes as illustrating Victor Hugo’s _Châtiments_, and Renoir’s dancing _grisettes_ clearly pronounced a crushing verdict on the Mexican Expedition. All the enemies of the Empire regarded open air as an item of their political programme. To be a true republican one must swear allegiance to realism. Thus Gambetta and Zola became fanatics of the new movement, not on æsthetic principles—such did not exist for either—but from a tendency to opposition. We should be wrong to laugh at a Radical mob orator and an anarchist novelist being fervent advocates of a school of painting from party interests. It arises out of a quite correct feeling. “All is in all.” A close relationship unites all the phenomena of one time, and the most opposed forms may express a single fundamental mood. About 1868 realism meant quite as much a revolt against a bit of authority as republicanism did. Were not a luxuriant beard and a soft hat in 1848 proof positive of revolutionary sentiments? And about 1895 were not a tail-coat and a flowing neck-tie the acknowledgment of belief in blank verse and Maeterlinck?