His legend is slender.  Possessing a private income, he never was preoccupied with the anxieties of selling his work.  He first entered the atelier of Lamotte, but his stay was brief.  In the studio of Ingres he was, so George Moore declares, the student who carried out the lifeless body of the painter when Ingres fell in his fatal fit.  There is something peculiarly interesting about this anecdote for the tradition of Ingres has been carried on by Degas.  The greatest master of pure line, in his portraits and nudes—­we have forgotten his chilly pastiches of Raphael—­of the past century, Ingres has been and still is for Degas a god on the peaks of Parnassus.  Degas is an Ingres who has studied the Japanese.  Only such men as Pollajuolo and Botticelli rank with Degas in the mastery of rhythmic line.  He is not academic, yet he stems from purest academic traditions.  He is not of the impressionists, at least not in his technical processes, but he associated with them, exhibited with them (though rarely), and is as a rule confused with them.  He never exhibited in the Salons, he has no disciples, yet it is doubtful if any painter’s fashion of seeing things has had such an influence on the generation following him.  The name of Degas, the pastels of Degas, the miraculous draughtsmanship of Degas created an imponderable fluid which still permeates Paris.  Naturally, after the egg trick was discovered we encounter scores of young Columbuses, who paint ballet girls’ legs and the heads of orchestral musicians and scenes from the racing paddock.

Degas had three painters who, if any, might truthfully call themselves his pupils.  These are Mary Cassatt, Alexis Rouart, and Forain.  The first has achieved solid fame.  The last is a remarkable illustrator, who “vulgarised” the austere methods of his master for popular Parisian consumption.  That Renoir, Raffaelli, and Toulouse-Lautrec owe much to Degas is the secret of Polichinello.  This patient student of the Tuscan Primitives, of Holbein, Chardin, Delacroix, Ingres, and Manet—­the precepts of Manet taught him to sweeten the wiriness of his modelling and modify his tendency to a certain hardness—­was willing to trust to time for the verdict of his rare art.  He associated daily with Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Duranty, Fantin-Latour, and the crowd that first went to the Cafe Guerbois in the Batignolles—­hence the derisive nickname, “The Batignolles School”; later to the Nouvelle Athenes, finally to the Cafe de la Rochefoucauld.  A hermit he was during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man, nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that was feared as much as is the Russian knout.  Mr. Moore has printed many specimens of his caustic wit.  Whistler actually kept silent in his presence—­possibly expecting a repetition of the mot:  “My dear friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at all.”  Manet good-naturedly took a browbeating, but the Academic set were outraged by the irreverence of Degas.  What hard sayings were his!  Poor Bastien-Lepage, too, came in for a scoring.  Barricaded in his studio, it was a brave man who attempted to force an entrance.  The little, round-shouldered artist, generally good-tempered, would pour a stream of verbal vitriol over the head of the unlucky impertinent.