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 Degas in the mastery of rhythmic line. He is not academic,
yet he stems from purest academic traditions. He is not of the
impressionists, at least not in his technical processes, but he
associated with them, exhibited with them (though rarely), and is as a
rule confused with them. He never exhibited in the Salons, he has no
disciples, yet it is doubtful if any painter's fashion of seeing