In 1860 or thereabout he visited America, and in New Orleans he saw the subject of his Interior of a Cotton Factory, which was shown as an historical curiosity at the Paris exposition in 1900.  While it is implacably realistic there is little hint of the future Degas.  The name of the painter was in every French painter’s mouth, and the brilliant article of Huysmans concentrated his fame.  Huysmans it was who first saw that Degas had treated the nude as Rembrandt would if he had been alive—­making allowances for temperamental variations.  Degas knew that to grasp the true meaning of the nude it must be represented in postures, movements which are natural, not studio attitudes.  As Monet exposed the fallacy of studio lighting, so Degas revealed the inanity of its poses.  Ibsen said the stage should be a room with the fourth wall removed; Degas preferred the key-hole through which we seem to peep upon the privacy of his ugly females bathing or combing their hair or sleeping, lounging, yawning, quarrelling, and walking.  The simian and frog-like gestures and sprawling attitudes are far from arousing amiable sensations.  These poor, tired women, hard-working laundresses, shopgirls, are not alluring, though they are not as hideous as the women of Cezanne or Edvard Muench; but the veracity of the “human document” (overworked phrase!) is there.  Charles Morice has said that to Cezanne a potato was as significant as a human countenance.  The pattern interested him in both.  For Degas the beauty of life lies in the moving line.  He captures with ease the swift, unconscious gesture.  His models are never posed.  They are nature caught in the act.  There is said to be a difference between the epidermis of the professional model and the human who undresses only to go to bed.  Degas has recorded this difference.  What an arraignment of the corset are the creased backs and gooseflesh of his nudes!  What lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! Voila l’animale! he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some girl.  How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine “truths” of Degas!  Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant.  He is a douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayaderes and of drawing-room portraiture.

Pity is deeply rooted in his nature.  He is never tender, yet there is veiled sympathy in the ballet-girl series.  Behind the scenes, in the waiting-rooms, at rehearsal, going home with the hawk-eyed mother, his girls are all painfully real.  No “glamour of the foot-lights,” generally the prosaic side of their life.  He has, however, painted the glorification of the danseuse, of that lady grandiloquently described as prima donna assoluta.  What magic he evokes as he pictures her floating down stage!  The pastel in the Luxembourg, L’Etoile, is the reincarnation of the precise moment when the aerial creature on one foot lifts graceful arms and is transfigured in the glow of the lights, while about her beats—­you