are sure—­the noisy, insistent music.  It is in the pinning down of such climaxes of movement that Degas stirs our admiration.  He draws movement.  He can paint rhythms.  His canvases are ever in modulation.  His sense of tactile values is profound.  His is true atmospheric colour.  A feeling of exhilaration comes while contemplating one of his open-air scenes with jockeys, race-horses, and the incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse.  Unexcelled as a painter of horses, as a delineator of witching horsemanship, of vivid landscapes—­true integral decorations—­and of the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of 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 coryphees 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.

The Degas palette is never gorgeous, consisting as it does of cool grays, discreet blues and greens, Chardin-like whites and Manet-blacks.  His procedure is all his own.  His second manner is a combination of drawing, painting, and pastel.  “He has invented a kind of engraving mixed with wash drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of special pattern.”

VII.  BOTTICELLI