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-century. 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 coryphées 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.