and, beyond all, as man who, in spite of the limitations of his mind, preserved the clear vision of the mission of his art at a time when art was used for the expression of literary conceptions.  Who would have believed it?  Yet it is true, and Manet, too, held the same view of Ingres, little as our present academicians may think it!  It happens that to-day Impressionism is more akin to Ingres than to Delacroix, just as the young poets are more akin to Racine than to Hugo.  They reject the foreign elements, and search, before anything else, for the strict national tradition.  Degas follows Ingres and resembles him.  He is also reminiscent of the Primitives and of Holbein.  There is, in his first period, the somewhat dry and geometrical perfection, the somewhat heavy colour which only serves to strengthen the correctness of the planes.  At the Exposition of 1900, there was a Degas which surprised everybody.  It was an Interior of a cotton factory in an American town.  This small picture was curiously clear:  it would be impossible to paint better and with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting.  But it was the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left the beholder cold.  This work, which is very old (it dates back to about 1860), gave no idea of what Degas has grown into.  It was the work of an unemotional master of technique; only just the infinitely delicate value of the greys and blacks revealed the future master of harmony.  One almost might have wished to find a fault in this aggravating perfection.  But Degas was not to remain there, and already, about that time, certain portraits of his are elevated by an expression of ardent melancholy, by warm, ivory-like, grave colouring which attracts one’s eye.  Before this series one feels the firm will of a very logical, serious, classic spirit who wants to know thoroughly the intimate resources of design, before risking to choose from among them the elements which respond best to his individual nature.  If Degas was destined to invent, later on, so personal a style of design that he could be accused of “drawing badly,” this first period of his life is before us, to show the slow maturing of his boldness and how carefully he first proved to himself his knowledge, before venturing upon new things.  In art the difficulty is, when one has learnt everything, to forget,—­that is, to appear to forget, so as to create one’s own style, and this apparent forgetting cloaks an amalgamation of science with mind.  And Degas is one of those patient and reticent men who spend years in arriving at this; he has much in common with Hokusai, the old man “mad with painting,” who at the close of his prodigious life invented arbitrary forms, after having given immortal examples of his interpretation of the real.

[Illustration:  DEGAS

THE LESSON IN THE FOYER]