eiled sympathy in the ballet-girl series. Behind the scenes, in the
waiting-rooms, at rehearsal, going home with the hawk-eyed mother, his
girls are all painfully real. No "glamour of the foot-lights,"
generally the prosaic side of their life. He has, however, painted the
glorification of the danseuse, of that lady grandiloquently described
as _prima donna assoluta_. What magic he evokes as he pictures her
floating down stage! The pastel in the Luxembourg, L'Etoile, is the
reincarnation of the precise moment when the aerial creature on one
foot lifts graceful arms and is transfigured in the glow of the
lights, while about her beats--you are sure--the noisy, insistent
music. It is in the pinning down of such climaxes of movement that
Degas stirs our admiration. He draws movement. He can paint rhythms.
His canvases are ever in modulation. His sense of tactile values is
profound. His is true atmospheric colour. A feeling of exhilaration
comes while contemplating one of his open-air scenes with jockeys,
race-horses, and the incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse.
Unexcelled as a painter of horses, as a delineator of witching
horsemanship, of vivid landscapes--true integral decorations--and of
the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a
psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of
daily life, of its unheroic aspects, its comical snobberies and
shocking hypocrisies; and all expressed without a melodramatic
elevation of the voice, without the false sentimentalism of Zola or
the morbidities of Toulouse-Lautrec. There is much Baudelaire in
Degas, as there is also in Rodin. All three men despised academic
rhetoric; all three dealt with new material in a new manner.

It is the fashion to admire Degas, but it is doubtful if he will ever
gain the suffrage of the general. He does not retail anecdotes, though
to the imaginative every line of his nudes relates their history. His
irony is unremitting. It suffuses the ballet-girl series and the nude
sets. Irony is an illuminating mode, but it is seldom pleasant; the
public is always suspicious of an ironist, particularly of the Degas
variety. Careless of reputation, laughing at the vanity of his
contemporaries who were eager to arrive, contemptuous of critics and
criticism, of collectors who buy low to sell high (in the heart of
every picture collector there is a bargain counter), Degas has defied
the artistic world for a half-centur