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And when he received the reply, that I did not consider Degas to be an agreeable topic for him, the illustrious official answered vivaciously, "But do you think I am a fool, and that I do not know that Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever lived?" "Why, then, my dear sir, has he never been received at the Salons, and not even been decorated at the age of sixty-five?"
Degas can speak English, and knows the use of my 28-gauge double barrel well enough to bring us a constant supply of delicious bushmeat peccary, deer, monkey, bush turkeys and agoutis. But Grandmother has no language but her native Akawai. She is a good friend of mine, and we hold long conversations, neither of us bothering with the letter, but only the spirit of communication.
Gradually the grouping of the Impressionists took place. Claude Monet is really the first initiator: in a parallel line with his ideas and his works Manet passed into the second period of his artistic life, and with him Renoir, Degas and Pissarro.
With his needle he has etched Montmartre, its cabarets, its angels in very earthly disguise its orators, poets, and castaways, and its visiting tourists "God's silly sheep." He has illustrated a volume of Edgar Poe's tales that displays a macabre imagination. His dancers are only second to those of Edgar Degas, and seen from an opposite side.
There's no ambition nowadays Degas, Whistler, yes. But for the rest dwarfs. Modern improvements indeed! Science may improve, but not art. Art, like religion, is an absolute in life nobody will ever paint better than Velasquez, write better than Shakespeare, or pray better than the Psalmist.
The physical and moral atmosphere of these surroundings is called forth by a master. Such and such a figure or attitude tells us more about Parisian life than a whole novel, and Degas has been lavish of his intellect and his philosophy of bitter scepticism.
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 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.
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.
Degas in particular has given many examples of this novelty in composition. One of his pastels has remained typical, owing to the scandal caused by it: he represents a dance-scene at the Opera, seen from the orchestra. The neck of a double bass rises in the middle of the picture and cuts into it, a large black silhouette, behind which sparkle the gauze-dresses and the lights.
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