you how he feels, except by betraying a fondness for violets and diffused light, and by exhibiting the temper of the radical and the rioter.  The order of a blithe, idyllic landscape by Corot, of one of Delacroix’s pieces of concentric coloration, of an example of Ingres’s purity of outline, shows not only temperament, but the position of the painter in regard to the whole intellectual world so far as he touches it at all.  What does a canvas of Claude Monet show in this respect?  It is more truthful but not less impersonal than a photograph.

Degas is the only other painter usually classed with the impressionists, of whom this may not be said.  But Degas is hardly an impressionist at all.  He is one of the most personal painters, if not the most personal painter, of the day.  He is as original as Puvis de Chavannes.  What allies him with the impressionists is his fondness for fleeting aspects, his caring for nothing beyond aspect—­for the look of things and their transitory look.  He is an enthusiastic admirer of Ingres—­who, one would say, is the antithesis of impressionism.  He never paints from nature.  His studies are made with the utmost care, but they are arranged, composed, combined by his own sense of what is pictorial—­by, at any rate, his own idea of the effects he wishes to create.  He cares absolutely nothing for what ordinarily we understand by the real, the actual, so far as its reality is concerned; he sees nothing else, to be sure, and is probably very sceptical about anything but colors and shapes and their decorative arrangement; but he sees what he likes in reality and follows this out with an inerrancy so scrupulous, and even affectionate, as to convey the idea that in his result he himself counts for almost nothing.  This at least may be said of him, that he shows what, given genius, can be got out of the impressionist method artistically and practically employed to the end of illustrating a personal point of view.  A mere amateur can hardly distinguish between a Caillebotte and a Sisley, for example, but everyone identifies a Degas as immediately and as certainly as he does a Whistler.  His work is perfectly sincere and admirably intelligent.  It has neither the pose nor the irresponsibility of the impressionists.  His artistic apotheosis of the ballet-girl is merely the result of his happy discovery of something delightfully, and in a very true sense naturally, decorative in material that is in the highest degree artificial.  His impulse is as genuine and spontaneous as if the substance upon which it is exercised were not the acme of the exotic, and already arranged with the most elaborate conventionality.  Nothing indeed could be more opposed to the elementary crudity of impressionism than his distinction and refinement, which may be said to be carried to a really fin de siecle degree.

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