y. His genius compelled the
Mountain to come to Mahomet. The rhythmic articulations, the volume,
contours, and bounding supple line of Degas are the despair of
artists. Like the Japanese, he indulges in abridgments, deformations,
falsifications. His enormous faculty of attention has counted heavily
in his synthetical canvases. He joys in the representation of
artificial light; his theatres are flooded with it, and he is equally
successful in creating the illusion of cold, cheerless daylight in a
salle where rehearse the little "rats" and the older coryphees on
their wiry, muscular, ugly legs. His vast production is dominated by
his nervous, resilient vital line and by supremacy in the handling of
values.

The Degas palette is never gorgeous, consisting as it does of cool
grays, discreet blues and greens, Chardin-like whites and
Manet-blacks. His procedure is all his own. His second manner is a
combination of drawing, painting, and pastel. "He has invented a kind
of engraving mixed with wash drawing, pastel crayon crushed with
brushes of special pattern."

VII. BOTTICELLI

The common identity of the arts was a master theory of Richard Wagner,
which he attempted to put into practice. Walter Pater in his essay on
The School of Giorgione has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music
the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative John Addington
Symonds said some pertinent things on this subject. Camille Mauclair
in his Idees Vivantes proposes in all seriousness a scheme for the
fusion of the seven arts, though he deplored Wagner's efforts to reach
a solution. Mauclair's theory is that the fusion can only be a
cerebral one, that actually mingling sculpture, architecture, music,
drama, acting, colour, dancing can never evoke the sensation of unity.
Synthesis is not thus to be attained. It must be in the _idea_ of the
arts rather than their material realisation. A pretty chimera! Yet one
that has piqued the world of art in almost every century. It was the
half-crazy E.T.W. Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet, stage
manager, and a dozen other professions, including that of genius and
drunkard, who set off a train of ideas which buzzed in the brains of
Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see
music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are
now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though
such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de