t early snared the affections of Degas, who has
with a passionate calm pursued the evanescent appearances of things
his entire life. No doubt death will find him pencil in hand. You
think of Hokusai, the old man mad with paint, when the name of Degas
is mentioned. He was born in Paris July 19, 1834--his full name is
Hilaire Germain Edgard (or Edgar)--and there is one phrase that will
best describe his career: He painted. Like Flaubert, he never married,
but lived in companionship with his art. Such a mania could have been
described by Balzac. Yet no saner art ever issued from a Parisian
atelier; sane, clear, and beautiful.

Degas is a painter's painter. For him the subject is a peg upon which
to hang superb workmanship. In amazement the public asked: How could a
man in the possession of his powers shut himself up in a studio to
paint ballet girls, washerwomen, jockeys, drabs of Montmartre,
shopgirls, and horses? Even Zola, who should have known better, would
not admit that Degas was an artist fit to be compared with such men as
Flaubert and Goncourt; but Zola was never the realist that is Degas.
Now it is difficult to keep asunder the names of Goncourt and Degas.
To us they are too often unwisely bracketed. The style of the painter
has been judged as analogous to the novelist's; yet, apart from a
preference for the same subjects for the "modernity" of Paris, there
is not much in Degas that recalls Goncourt's staccato, febrile,
sparkling, "decomposed", impressionistic prose. Both men are
brilliant, though not in the same way. Pyrotechnics are abhorrent to
Degas. He has the serenity, sobriety, and impersonality of the great
classic painters. He is himself a classic.

His legend is slender. Possessing a private income, he never was
preoccupied with the anxieties of selling his work. He first entered
the atelier of Lamotte, but his stay was brief. In the studio of
Ingres he was, so George Moore declares, the student who carried out
the lifeless body of the painter when Ingres fell in his fatal fit.
There is something peculiarly interesting about this anecdote for the
tradition of Ingres has been carried on by Degas. The greatest master
of pure line, in his portraits and nudes--we have forgotten his chilly
_pastiches_ of Raphael--of the past century, Ingres has been and still
is for Degas a god on the peaks of Parnassus. Degas is an Ingres who
has studied the Japanese. Only such men as Pollajuolo and Botticelli
rank with D