too well lighted passage, and if I did not spend six or ten minutes in
admiration before this picture, I should feel that some familiar
pleasure had drifted out of my yearly visit to Paris. Never did a
white dress play so important or indeed so charming a part in a
picture. The dress is the picture--this common white dress, with black
spots, _une robe a poix, une petite confection de soixante cinq
francs_, as the French would say; and very far it is from all
remembrance of the diaphanous, fairy-like skirts of our eighteenth
century English school, but I swear to you no less charming. It is a
very simple and yet a very beautiful reality. A lady, in white dress
with black spots, sitting on a red sofa, a dark chocolate red, in the
subdued light of her own quiet, prosaic French _appartment, le
deuxieme au dessus l'entre-sol_. The drawing is less angular, less
constipated than that of "Olympe". How well the woman's body is in the
dress! there is the bosom, the waist, the hips, the knees, and the
white stockinged foot in the low shoe, coming from out the dress. The
drawing about the hips and bosom undulates and floats, vague and yet
precise, in a manner that recalls Harlem, and it is not until we turn
to the face that we come upon ominous spaces unaccounted for, forms
unexplained. The head is so charming that it seems a pity to press our
examination further. But to understand Manet's deficiency is to
understand the abyss that separates modern from ancient art, and the
portrait of Madame Morisot explains them as well as another, for the
deficiency I wish to point out exists in Manet's best portraits as
well as in his worst. The face in this picture is like the face in
every picture by Manet. Three or four points are seized, and the
spaces between are left unaccounted for. Whistler has not the strength
of Velasquez; Manet is not as complete as Hals.