Degas despises glory.  It is believed that he has by him a number of canvases which will have to be burnt after his death in accordance with his will.  He is a man who has loved his art like a mistress, with jealous passion, and has sacrificed to it all that other artists—­enthusiasts even—­are accustomed to reserve for their personal interest.  Degas, the incomparable pastellist, the faultless draughtsman, the bitter, satirical, pessimistic genius, is an isolated phenomenon in his period, a grand creator, unattached to his time.  The painters and the select few among art-lovers know what considerable force there is in him.  Though almost latent as yet, it will reveal itself brilliantly, when an opportunity arises for bringing together the vast quantity of his work.  As is the case with Manet, though in a different sense, his powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal, and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities.  To Degas is due a new method of observation in drawing.  He will have been the first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the principles hitherto reserved for sculpture.  Finally, he will be counted among the great analysts.  His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre, stimulates thought:  across what appears to be the most immediate and even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human soul:  and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism.  Without noise, and through the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as Manet has undermined them before the public.

[Illustration:  CLAUDE MONET

AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER]

V

CLAUDE MONET:  HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE

With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant technical expression, and touch upon the principal points referred to in the second chapter of this book.

Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study of the laws of light.  His work is a magnificent verification of the optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul.  It is born spontaneously from the artist’s vision, and happens to be a rigorous demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared to know.  Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to join hands with the scientist.  His work supplies not only the very basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws.  It will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are manyfold and splendid.