town. This small
picture was curiously clear: it would be impossible to paint better and
with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting. But it was
the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured
photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left
the beholder cold. This work, which is very old (it dates back to about
1860), gave no idea of what Degas has grown into. It was the work of an
unemotional master of technique; only just the infinitely delicate value
of the greys and blacks revealed the future master of harmony. One
almost might have wished to find a fault in this aggravating perfection.
But Degas was not to remain there, and already, about that time, certain
portraits of his are elevated by an expression of ardent melancholy, by
warm, ivory-like, grave colouring which attracts one's eye. Before this
series one feels the firm will of a very logical, serious, classic
spirit who wants to know thoroughly the intimate resources of design,
before risking to choose from among them the elements which respond best
to his individual nature. If Degas was destined to invent, later on, so
personal a style of design that he could be accused of "drawing badly,"
this first period of his life is before us, to show the slow maturing of
his boldness and how carefully he first proved to himself his knowledge,
before venturing upon new things. In art the difficulty is, when one has
learnt everything, to forget,--that is, to appear to forget, so as to
create one's own style, and this apparent forgetting cloaks an
amalgamation of science with mind. And Degas is one of those patient and
reticent men who spend years in arriving at this; he has much in common
with Hokusai, the old man "mad with painting," who at the close of his
prodigious life invented arbitrary forms, after having given immortal
examples of his interpretation of the real.

[Illustration: DEGAS

THE LESSON IN THE FOYER]

Degas is also clearly related to Corot, not only in the silvery
harmonies of his suave landscapes, but also, and particularly, in his
admirable faces whose inestimable power and moving sincerity we have
hardly commenced to understand. Degas passed slowly from classicism to
modernity. He never liked outbursts of colour; he is by no means an
Impressionist from this point of view. As a draughtsman of genius he
expresses all by the precision of the planes and values; a grey, a black
and some notes of colo