went insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed
with all the jargon of the school. "_Cette jambe ne porte pas"; "la
nature ne se fait pas comme ça"; "on dessine par les masses; combien de
têtes?" "Sept et demi." "Si j'avais un morceau de craie je mettrais
celle-là dans un; bocal c'est un fœtus_"; in a word, all that the
journals of culture are pleased to term an artistic education. We
indulged in boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as
much pain as possible, and deep down in our souls we knew that we were
lying--at least I did.

In the beginning of this century the tradition of French art--the
tradition of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau--had been completely lost;
having produced genius, their art died. Ingres is the sublime flower of
the classic art which succeeded the art of the palace and the boudoir:
further than Ingres it was impossible to go, and his art died. Then the
Turners and Constables came to France, and they begot Troyon, and
Troyon begot Millet, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn
begot Degas, Pissarro, Madame Morizot and Guillaumin. Degas is a pupil
of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acuteness of drawing he learned
from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of modern life.
Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character;--his subjects are
shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities that endow
them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the virgins
and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the fat,
vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the
pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and
rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is; you
know what the furniture of her rooms is like; you know what she would
say to you if she were to speak. She is as typical of the nineteenth
century as Fragonard's ladies are of the Court of Louis XV. To the right